Blizzard restructures Heroes of the Storm team, cancels 2019 esports calendar - Sensationalist Headlines

You talk a lot of shit for someone who's knowledge of game design is so basic you think a low skill floor means a low skill ceiling.

The effect for the cyst creep on the path you run the balls through on G'huun. The creep recedes as you damage the cysts, but after the patch the creep effect wouldn't change to reflect the shrinking radius of the effect. It got fixed, but it's ridiculous that the patch went live with something like that not being noticed. It's really frustrating to see bugs go through that anyone could notice just by casually going through the fight a single time.

What are you gonna tell me? That HotS has a high skill ceiling because it has a few outliers characters such as Abathus, The lost Viking and Sgt.Hammer? You think that positioning is as important? Come on man, I've played and followed HotS for years since I am myself a pretty big MOBA enthusiasts and keep watch of every single one of them. But of course, HotS is half the effort of a normal MOBA, so I did not expect much of an answers, I just wanted to make things clear. That isn't even what I said, but alright Mingebox, if you wish to see thing that ways as it's convenient to justify your blizzard drone narrative. HotS wasn't as good as you think in the grand scheme of thing. E-sport was heavily mismanaged and game was divided between two philosophy that clashed with each other (the wish to be casual and the wish to be closer to normal moba). And of course just go on and keep doing ad hominem on my persona instead of attacking the argument, but I'm not going to talk much more about the subject as I've hogged enough space in here. I just wanted to put in my grain of salt (literally) against Heroes of the Storm to give food for thought in this thread.

With all due respect, just stop shitting on the game here. Some of us actually do enjoy it.

Of course, of course. I don't mind you guy liking it, I'm just trying to make sense of its failure to reach mass market. Apologies.

It really should have huge mass market appeal, since its level and experience system is more simple (and more fun IMO) than other MOBAs. Less of a learning curve, and some pretty creative heroes.

I wasn't gonna get into a whole thing, but here I go I guess. What's cookie cutter to me is the fact that I played both and as far as I could tell they play more or less the same. Yeah there are differences, but the core tenants are roughly the same. You have a similar art theme, you have one map with 3 lanes and a jungle between, you need to get last hits, you have to buy items, you have a strict meta; duo-lanes for top and bottom, jungler/ganker in the middle. In those games is very easy to fall behind the rest of the players if you can't manage the last-hit mechanic or don't know which items you're supposed to buy. Hero diversity feels better in HotS because it's easier to actually play different characters since you don't have to go pull up tables for what items you're supposed to buy at what stage of the game, if you're doing good you get to choose a boost or new ability. In LoL and DotA I would play one or two characters that looked interesting and I couldn't get the hang of it, I thought my experience in RTS would carry over but it did not at all. It's true that having more maps makes some heroes more or less useful depending on where you are, that is a trade-off I'm willing to accept, though idealy in ranked the game would move away from maps that some players pick aren't good on in order to prevent map bias. Last hits and Items don't feel like depth, last hits feel like carefully timed busywork, and items feel like unnecessary complexity since you can only build a useful character so many ways, so most of the items are useless at any given time. I much prefer being able to just pile on as much damage as possble rather than holding back to try and snipe the last hit, I must prefer being able to pick from a set of skills that look useful to me instead of having to leave my lane to go to a shop so I can look for one or two items that I need to stay relevant among dozens of irrelevant items. In HotS I can just pick a skill that looks useful, rather than having to look up build charts online because manually trying to figure out what I'm supposed to buy would take far too long with the amount of options there are. HotS has an early-mid-and end game for me. It's less distinct but the escalation is certainly there. To me, the major escalations are when players start leaving their lanes after the first few minutes, then unlock of Ultimates, and then reaching the end of the skill tree where you get a powerful modifier. As for long term progression I never felt any sense of progression in LoL or DotA, but maybe being scolded and kicked prevented me from staying around long enough to see it, since they're very hostile games and your attitude toward me for not liking them is pretty much what I expected. In HotS you can just pick a character, check out their abilities, and play poorly and still have a good time. In LoL or DotA if you aren't playing well right off the bat, you'll rapidly fall by the wayside. Items complicate things because you need to know which ones are useful, and when they are useful. When I played LoL or DotA I had to keep a text file with characters and the items you're supposed to buy for them, when you're supposed to buy them, and when you're supposed to sell them to buy better items. Just being able to select a skill from a small list is much more streamlined and the skills are tailored to each character. Maybe it is opinionated and fairly irrelevant to how the games play, but I've never been too interested in fantasy. Sci-Fi is way more my thing, and the fact that HotS has that played a small role in catching my attention. It's alright, I pretty much expected this sort of response too.

Imagine being elitist about other people liking HotS over other MOBAs.

Honestly, if it's true about the shrunk down team continuing developing it I hope they're going to balance the game back to how it was before the esports focus. One of the main things I never enjoyed in games, outside of specific scenarios, was one shot kills which the lack of compared to other mobas back in its early stages was the main reason I started playing hots due to prolonged fights over objectives, mistakes not being completely lethal, allowing for some fun plays. Whether it's the esports focus or just trying to make new heroes/reworks more attractive in 2017 the game started moving towards the same trend of melting the very second you breathed the wrong way after the game started to get going, which is what led me to playing it less until 2018 where how punishing the game became and a performance issue I've had on the 64 bit version (32 bit support was removed) made me quit for good. Though the latter is unlikely to ever be fixed as it's a problem with my hardware, if the team instead of just trying to sustain the game would try to lead it back to the days of prolonged brawls (not the gamemode) I believe it'd have a nice place for itself rather than trying to compete with other mobas.

what's fucked about this is that people asked the devs what they could expect in 2019 at blizzcon, and were told that 2019 would have equal if not more funding to tournaments. teams/organizations were finalized this month in december. the devs were told hots development was ceasing 15 minutes before the announcement was made public. upper management completely fucked over everybody here, including their own devs.

Activision has been sucking out all the life, talent, and passion from Blizzard over the past decade and it's been reflected in their games. Really sad to see one of my favorite studios have fuckup after fuckup.

They aren't who we remember them to be. They aren't even Blizzard anymore. One previous dev said "They're only nice to have on a resume, otherwise, you're going to be making fuck all there." and David Brevik, the dude who literally made D2, said "Blizzard is slowly being replaced by Activision. 3 out of 5 of the most influential people at Blizzard have left in the last two years. LAST TWO YEARS! Somethings up." Mike Morhaime is gone, Chris Metzen left, Blizzard isn't who Blizzard was ten years ago or even five years ago, Blizzard will not be Blizzard three years from now.

I'm surprised wow players even trust blizz enough to get hyped about anything anymore. Blizz fucks up in the exact same way over and over and over again. For the last few years all I've been doing is subbing for one or two months at a time, getting my fix, and then dropping it.

I kinda fell bad that this is most probably the reason Overwatch as a setting/franchise will die in its infancy.

Kinda hard not to die in your infancy if you were never going to leave it anyway.