Blizzard just doesn't know what they're doing.
BFA is a mess, Diablo Immortal, now this.
The one last team at Blizzard that was able to produce interesting content and that actually seemed to care about their product
Probably precisely because of no constricting publisher oversight. Can't have that though.
The developers seem to be promising it won't just be a skeleton crew left on the HotS Reddit, but I'm still afraid what all of this will result in.
HotS was the only moba I really enjoyed.
All top HotS devs were sold to China to work for NetEase on the Diablo Mobile game.
/s
Shame for HotS but I guess it just wasn't working out really, at least they stuck to it for as long as they did until now.
Out of all the Blizzard games, i think HoTS was the most impacted by their raging hard-on to make everything an eeeespurt. They had half the game trying to be LoL then the other half some real interesting and wildly balanced stuff like Cho'Gall.
"This things that seems to be happening is not really happening"
Always a good sign.
Probably all Activision's doing. It's pretty obvious that they are rapidly taking over every leadership positions, and are completely re-prioritising how the games are made and maintained.
Remember how the new CEO emphasized "cutting costs" at Blizzard's annual gameplan meeting?
That's how that manifests itself. I'm betting that Overwatch League is next, it costs a crazy amount of money. Probably won't be cancelled outright, but severely scaled back.
BFA isn't a mess its just they're spending all of their time on one faction like they did in MOP
Diablo Immortal was massively overblown as well. Blizzard isn't developing it, and they're obviously working on both diablo 4 and wc3 remastered at the same time.
Didn’t the Overwatch league make them a shit ton of money? Sure seemed like it
It's a big earner, but it still costs significantly more than competing esports programs. A lot of the fat will probably be trimmed.
Activision shareholders are so greedy that Black Ops 4's 500 million dollar launch was seen as "disappointing."
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/click/black-ops-4-sales-disappoint-activision-investors/
I think the only thing that went well for Blizz this past two years is Hearthstone. And even then, they're getting competition out of the ass right now.
To be fair HotS seems to have been pretty dead recently.
Me and a friend decided to play again, and we ended up waiting in the quick play queue for 5+ minutes.
And this was on a Saturday night.
It's a shame because I really enjoyed playing it.
A pity. HotS is my favourite moba to actually play. I don't think it's the most well-designed (that crown goes to Dota) but I like some of the gimmicks and the matches aren't soul-crushing with how long they take.
The QP queue went through some changes that enforced certain comps. If you queue with your buddy as a tank and healer, you're guaranteed to find a game in like 10 seconds.
Mostly because "It isn't Fortnite "
Pretty sure that guy in the front is a Fortnite skin
Investors are basically just human leeches sucking out everything good in the gaming industry.
I wouldn't be surprised if the game was still profitable, but just not profitable enough.
And despite wanting to be an esport, they still neglected to do some very important things that you need if you want your game to be an esport, like actually having an API for gathering statistics, for both dota and league of legends you can get pretty much all of the statistics you want from the developer directly.
Heroes of the Storm still has statistics websites, but they rely on people sending in their replays, and thus are really expensive to run (replays have to be processed) and very inaccurate due to poor sample sizes. Overwatch's stats situation isn't ideal either, but they still do it much better for whatever.
Though IMO what hurt HOTS's viability was how they launched the game. The alpha and beta were playable for over a year before the game launch, and the cast at launch was very small, which both severely hurt hype. The game also still had a lot of technical issues at launch, it was still a buggy, stuttery mess and used Starcraft 2's networking, which works great with 2 players as designed, but doesn't work very well with 10+.
That's because they recently tweaked the matchmaking to try and make much more balanced games. People seem pretty split over whether it actually worked.
This is massively uninformed - Don't listen to this, please. Heroes of the storm was mocked by the whole MOBA community since the very beginning, as in the beginning, they did not listen to the
community about various balance change and also the various request to increase hero release schedule (because hero are the lifeblood of MOBA and they serve as counterpick) with a ban system, not only that, but it was also a very, very, VERY casualised & barebones version of its former MOBA (Such as smite, LoL, DotA) but the issue is that they aimed for a community that was already taken by both League of Legends & Smite (As League of Legends is the one who really made the genre more mainstream for people and already had the casuals).
E-sport is one of the best way you can make your game last throughout the years: LoL made it work, DotA made it work, why? Because they did not force anyone to go through them first, they let the
E-sport community build naturally by the players and then took a bit of control and made their own thing while still letting the players do their own little tournament, this is majorly why DotA is still alive,
and why the DotA 2 esport would still live on even without The International: I think this is extremely uninformed to say "You can't have wildly different hero if you wish to be an E-sport game" as DotA
2 blow that theory up with characters such as Arc Warden - Techie - Riki - Beastmaster - Faceless void - Spectre - The good ol' Meepo and finally "9 spell man" Invoker. I'll let you check these out: But they are unlike most characters in most MOBA, and only Heroes of Newerth really "somewhat" rivals with DotA 2 in terms of characters kit variety & crazyness (I like to say HoN is DotA on meth, but it was
dota 2 before dota 2 basically and it failed because the devs were quite stubborn. They had every card on their hand to beat DotA 2 and LoL, but failed. Half of the initial DotA pros came from HoN, for
example.).
Blizzard is just very, very incompetent at working on their game properly. I feel bad for the Overwatch players, receiving 3 heroes a year, and needing to wait event to even get a skin for them every 4
month, and wait for balance change EVERY 3 month (while it's monthly in League of Legends, reminder) that at best "try" to balance 3 to 4 character minimally (compared to, say, a DotA update, I'll let you check out the 7.20 version recently released. They take time, but are truly worthwhile and make the game better in many way.). They cannot even balance the game with 29 characters, so let me say good luck if they ever wish to balance the game with a MOBA-sized roster. Even having as much characters as Paladins (39) would be crazy.
It took three months for 7.1 to drop. It took five for 8.1.
At this point, you must acknowledge that something's gone wrong behind the scenes. Blizzard themselves have admitted publicly that multiple specs were unfinished at launch.
i mean ffs, the last patch broke one of the visual effects on the last boss of the current raid tier
if this isn't a mess, what is?
You talking about... Genji?
On the other hand, HotS appealed to me because it wasn't a generic cookie-cutter MOBA. It wasn't LoL, it wasn't DOTA, I hate the way those games play and I'm not a fan of their artstyles anyway. Then along comes HotS and it doesn't have the stupid tryhard systems like Items and Last Hits that the other games have, and it lets me play as cool sci-fi shit like a Siege Tank or a Sniper thanks to including the Starcraft universe. There's a lot of maps with various themes and objectives, some better than others. Blizzard could have handled it better for sure, but I am glad the game is smoother than LoL or DOTA, because I cannot stand those games.
What visual effect was supposedly destroyed?
HOTS was simple. It was fluid and easy to understand. Heroes were straight-forward and I would even argue as someone who has played Blizzard games for a long time that the heroes were insanely more attractive as their nostalgic value added to their appeal. Games also would last 10-20 minutes on average and as someone who has little time, this was a game changer for me.
I won't lie, I nearly cried when I heard this news because I've been an active player in HOTS since beta. It's the only MOBA I can stand, I tried LoL for a year and a half, I tried DOTA for half a year, I couldn't stomach them long term. HOTS just.. Fit with me. And I'm going to miss the active development. I woke up today thinking it was all just a bad dream but I went back to Reddit in the morning to find pro players and popular casters crying on stream, developers reaching out to the community with a few last broken words to keep players positive. I really cannot imagine how hard it is for the developers to watch all this happening on the sidelines while remaining powerless.
This wasn't their fault. The HOTS dev team is an unnecessary casualty in the long-con that is Activision. Fuck. I cannot express how angry I am. So many people like to give the devs of HOTS shit but they were seriously amongst some of the most communicative bunch around. They listened to the community, they did all they could. They are, to me, all that remains of my love for Blizzard. And with them goes any hope I have for Blizzard to excel and innovate.
Fuck you Activision.
BFA is indeed a mess. Lots of the raiders I used to do stuff with were quite disappointed and unsubbed (for now). The lack of content for 8.1 alone is pretty telling, and it's pretty clear that there is a lack of communication between players and Blizzard/Activision. And like Scorpio said, why does it take five months for 8.1 to drop when Legion's first patch only took 50 or so days? 8.1 isn't even that big of a patch, and one of the classes (Shaman) is still screwed over, maybe even more than it was before. There's little to say at this point other that they screwed up, big time. And of course, the Azerite system created a lot of distrust/anger for players.
Pff, I did not expect better from the common heroes of the storm player: Always complaining about the actual complexity brought on by LoL and DotA and being completely ignorant about the difference these two game are to go as far as saying they are "cookie cutter" MOBA.
What's a cookie cutter MOBA? Do you know DotA 2 has large scale map destruction with trees, allowing you to smash your way into a lanes? Or a day and night system? Something that LoL doesn't have and it instead have a secondary objective called the dragon and that progression is more based on scaling?
It's always about blaming, hating on other MOBA when you're a heroes of the storm player. "Oh gawd LoL and DotA are like, so boring!" "Oh gawd that item system and last hit system.. I hate depth! It's so
unnecessary", followed by of course a blind ignorance of what goes into balance and the whole objective of "Last hitting" and the "Item system" in general which is to emphasize on farming and getting
ahead of your opponent by playing cleverly instead of just teamfighting on top of teamfighting on top of teamfighting on top of teamfighting. There is a clear early game, mid game, and late game on
most MOBA, players play the so called "cookie cutter" MOBA because they offers depth and actual replayability beyond the first 50 game and actually have a sense of progression (something that HotS
doesn't have) but of course an Heroes of the Storm wouldn't like that and instead lose his time calling out DotA and LoL and their additional complexity. Even dawngate out of every game was more
respectable than Heroes of the Storm, to hell with that game: Its time was counted from the beginning, and anyway, it was never relevant beyond the 2.0.
Excuse my agressivity, but the way you called the item system "unnecessary bloat" and last hitting "tryhard" is incredibly short-sighted and insulting, but of course, this is your so called "Only advantage"
the fact you have no laning phase, a shared experience & levelling system, and a talent system (arguably one of your only good gameplay part, so good that Icefrog copied it for DotA 2 and balanced it in a few month post 7.00 update). What even is "MAKE LEARNING NEW CHARACTERS FAR HARDER THAN NECESSARY"? Define "Necessary"?
And of course I won't even lose my time with that extremely opinionated "Cool sci fi shit like a siege tank or a sniper" because DotA got both of that already. We literally have a character named "Sniper".
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