f13.net

Because having just one game go by the acronym HotS didn't feel confusing enough.

Cinematic Trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0ecv0bT9DEo)

Gameplay Trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=f_fAkO3WOSY)

If it's F2P I'll definitely give it a look; that said I do wonder how well they'll be able to peel players from DOTA2 and LoL.

I really like what they're doing with it. It's not just a Dota clone, they have made massive changes to the gameplay to make it more accessible and faster.

I personally cannot get into LoL or Dota2 simply because of the insane learning curve and playtime requirements. There are too many games around to spend that much time on one game, and it didn't give up raiding to replace it with another single game. So what I've heard so far about blizzards game sounds a lot better for noobs like myself!

Looks like a Dota to me. The characters could be a real strength if they focused on their interactions.

edit: here's an RPS article that sheds some light on how it actually is, http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/11/10/impressions-heroes-of-the-storm-steals-blizzcon/

After playing DOTA where I can play all the heroes all the time without spending a dime and don't have to level up my account, a LoL-style model is a big turn off for me.  The gameplay looks decent, but I'm pretty much over the idea of having to unlock heroes and level up before I can get to the "real" game.

The game is a super casual MOBA that looks like a fun every once in a while type of game. You can't buy items, you share xp, and there is no laning phase.

Essentially, as a good player you can't carry your team. Bad players bring down teams instead of good players balancing out bad players. It's a giant meh to me. Everything is normalized.

I think Blizzard is about to learn the WoW lesson, LoL was at the right place at the right time with a really good game and even if you match the good game part you are not going to duplicate their success.

The shit's I don't give about Blizzard's fake dota. I might've given a shit about the characters before Metzen went full Metzen on everything.

Air guitar to generic metal!

Does anyone care about Blizzard..

Anymore?!

I was going to say that once upon a time I would have been excited about this because blizzard had a solid rep for innovating, but that has recently had its spine broken real hard, and that at this point I expected that there were three possible outcomes: it would either be a really good innovation added to the MOBA genre, or it would be passable, or it would be really bad.

Then I thought about that and I realized that I had just crafted the world's stupidest post ever. "this game might be good! or average. or bad."

so i never made this post.

:headscratch:

Personally, I don't think this will be that much of a success, nor will it really compete with LoL or dota2.

But I have to say a lot of the comments I'm reading on the web really remind me of what MMO players were saying about WoW before it was released...

Clearly you cared enough to post.  :oh_i_see:

yeah it was a close one.

while i've had my blizzard fanboy spine broken severely in recent years, I think people in here are underestimating the blind fervor people will have for a blizzard dota.  i hope its good, but i'm worried.

there will be alot of people playing at launch because blizzard; but the stickiness will depend on it not being shit.

All you had to do was watch a few of the Q&A sessions of Blizzcon to know there's enough fanboys to keep this running for a few years at least good game or not.

The possibility of a good game on its own merit is equal to the possibility of Hearthstone being the next big CCG.  Pretty low.

Funny, I had the exact opposite opinion.  Blizzard has always had really visually strong character concepts (the Space Marine, the Orc Warrior, the D2 Barbarian, etc.) even if they were somewhat "inspired by" Warhammer, but their actual specific CHARACTER characters are generally shit.  I mean, their villains are kind of cool, but never really progressed beyond "RAR I AM EVIL AND POWERFUL AND I WILL FUCK SHIT UP BECAUSE I'M A BADASS AND DATS HOW I ROLL BITCHES" and their heroes are pretty much the worst written shit characters ever in the history of the written word.  I mean, Jim Raynor?  I'm supposed to give a shit about Jim Raynor?   Jim "mah dog has fleas, mah truck dun broke down, mah girlfriend's a zerg queen" Raynor?  REALLY?  

If they were letting us "roll our own" or something (play as "Generic Blood Elf" rather than, say, Kael'Thas) I'd be all over this, I could put some stamp of ownership on my character or something, but I have no real interest in watching green Jesus punching totally-not-Tyranids on a mountain in outer space or whatever.

I'm not going to hold my breath, but on the other hand I like the moba concept in some ways but find the current model in LoL, etc, rather overwhelming in some ways.  The controls are frustrating (would love to separate movement and action instead of everything being mouse driven), and the item buying side of things is a lot of information to juggle (which of these giant panes of icons is useful for what situations, how to figure out and adapt on the fly, etc).  I suspect they may over-simplify it and remove too much of the interesting bits (definitely my reaction to Hearthstone), but who knows maybe they'll end up with something fun.  I'm not convinced that LoL/DOTA are the only viable model for this sort of game.

EDIT: After looking at the developer interview video and the RPS writeup, it seems that:
- no last hitting (a pretty annoying mechanic)
- shared rewards (with above, less "you killed the wrong thing!")
- no items, instead choices over character skills at levelup
- shorter matches (15-20minutes)
- more variety of maps and objectives

None of that sounds particularly bad to me.  I've dabbled with MOBAs but found them interesting but ultimately frustrating, so I may be an inherently good audience for this thing.

I'm fine with all of that, but no items is as goofy as no trading in Hearthstone.

I don't think a no-items dota clone will have an esports future, but as long as they're just trying to make something polished with wider appeal I don't see how this is at all out of the Blizzard's reach.

If the fools who kept trying to make WoW Arenas into esports still has any pull I expect to see stupid. If the Hearthstone and D3 take 2 people have taken over, I expect this to be a fun diversion.

I'd rather have Blizzard making real games again instead this fan-mod level stuff and a trading cards cash shop.

I mean really, who would want, say Obsidian, invest their time into making Planescape: Fallout mashup Dotas? The Nameless One vs The Courier!   :uhrr:

Well, it might actually make sense if Dota had originally come about using Obsidian's characters in an Obsidian game's engine. The connection is juuuuust a wee bit stronger for Blizzard.

I'd need to go back and watch the panel again, but I believe this is the SCII team.  They said this started as one of the games they developed to demonstrate how moddable SCII was.  Remember the FPS they originally demoed 4years ago? 

I think The D2 pt 2 lead is a guy from WOW and the Hearthstone lead is from D2.

This. A streamlined, dumbed-down LOL-alike doesn't sound fun to me. It sounds like the only real draw is ZOMGBLIZZARDCHARACTERS for whoever still gives a shit about that after D3.

Looks fun though I doubt it'll upset LoL's position at all.  Removing the laning phase, and the more tedious mechanics is a good idea.  Wish there was a way you could import your Diablo or WoW characters as heroes.

I really like LOL but I can't do 45+ minute matches anymore, especially not when you can be fucked in the first 5min due to unskilled players or just plain assholes making the experience completely unfun.  The ARAM map they added in recently gave me a lot of renewed fun but then again aram can get boring after a while.

HOTS may be LOL-lite but I think that may be all I have time for these days.

I'm looking forward to this.  Call me crazy, but having an alternative to LoL (shitty community) and DOTA (very steep learning curve) seems like a nice sweet spot.

You all know that EA is making releasing a LoL/DOTA clone as well, right?  Dawngate is the name.  

I got an email for Dawngate the other day and was perplexed. When I finally saw the EA logo, I deleted the email and haven't looked back.

If it was entirely free to play all the characters, I'd agree with you Nebu.  But if I am going to have to deal with a limited character rotation or purchase them with real money or "gold" (in game money) then it becomes a lot less interesting to me because I need to make some substantial investment in time or money to really be able to fully enjoy it.  That doesn't match up with a fun distraction from LoL or DOTA.

If they were following the DOTA 2 model of entirely free to play everything, and then charge for UI skins, character "gear" or skins, announcer packs, etc, then I would probably be pretty happy.

This has already been tried in Guardians of Middle-earth with pretty terrible results. Not being able to buy items really ruins the formula. You lose that feeling of your character getting noticably stronger, which Blizzard should know by now is one of the biggest hooks in gaming. Matches often feel either like stale-mates or foregone conclusions since everyone is around the same power level and you can't "react" to how you or your opponents are doing with appropriate items. What characters are being played ends up mattering much more than anything else.



WoW is to MMOs as LoL is to MOBAs. The genre has already been simplified by a company that was in the right place at the right time with an accessible offering of a traditionally inaccessible genre.

How would they make money off of that?  Sell the game at box cost?  Blizzard is into making money more than that.

Like he said.  People will pay for customization and fluff.   DOTA2 also does a decent job of monetizing their tournament viewership.   However, that requires some sort of competitive scene, which this game won't have for a while (if ever).

Don't forget Turbine's DC MOBA, Infinite Crisis.  I'm hearing various good/bad things about that...mostly good.

Valve is raking in the dough on DOTA 2 by selling costume pieces, couriers, announcers, and UI skins.  Also, keys to open chests with random items. I'm 100% sure people would be tripping over themselves to throw money at a fancy Lich King skin.  Also, when all the characters are free, skins for them are always available.  In LoL I have no reason to buy a skin for a character I don't own, but in DOTA if a fancy skin comes out that really strikes my fancy I have no barrier to just buying it straight up.

Solid points.  I'm pretty new to this MOBA thing and that may explain my views.  I must confess that I do like the leveling mechanism in LoL, particularly in that it gives me time to build skills before being thrown to the level 30, fully runed wolves.

Well, that issue can still be addressed by having multiple modes and good matchmaking.  Although DOTA 2 does have a steep learning curve, I've found that the match making has generally put me with people of a roughly even skill level and bot games were enough to teach me the basics really early on.  It can be done without a leveling process.

I will say that the leveling stuff is less of a problem for me than the having to unlock heroes part at this point.  If I like a game enough I'll just put my head down and grind through it if I have to.  That being said, I really really appreciate that DOTA 2 gives me a full and complete game immediately. 

It seems more and more rare for a game to just give you a complete experience "out of the box" these days.

Dawngate is a pretty good game.  Infinite Crisis...  Not so much.  However neither of them stray as far away from LoL as this game seems to.

The way I want to describe LoL's scheme — where you have to earn a library of heroes as opposed to being able to play any hero you want from the ground floor up — is "and they were the last to be allowed to get away with it."

Smite does the same thing as LoL in terms of champions, and it seems to be doing OK.

Infinite Crisis is... well, I played the beta about 4 times a few months ago if that tells you anything.

Smite offered (and still offers) the awesome ultimate god pack. 24 moneys and you are set, with all gods present and futures, forever. It doesn't compete with DOTA 2's offer, but as a deal it feels very fair and me and my friends went for it feeling it was also a nice thing to do towards the developers. Basically, it is a full game for 24$. Hard to consider it uncool.

Every time I get back into LoL I play a handful of games, then realise that getting to level 30 is fucking grindy. Whoever implemented that system was a fucking tool. Levelling up in games usually makes your character feel stronger, levelling up in LoL just makes your character feel less shit. It's not fun.

The real tool at Riot is the assgoblin that came up with the league points system. I'd like to skullfuck that bitch with a rusty shiv.

This is the reason I stopped playing LoL and gave my account to my daughter.  Whose friends also said "this is grindy, fuck this" and moved on.   :awesome_for_real:

Millions of people still pay a $15 subscription for wow so it's really short-sighted to call any kind of payment model "dead"  LOL and DOTA do it differently, both are popular.  What does this say? It says that people like games and generally, how they spend money on them is irrelevant as long as those games are fun for them.

Yes and No.  Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I generally still don't feel especially comfortable putting money into games regularly unless it is really my go-to game.  I know it's more and more about impulse buys and people spending little bits here and there on lots of different things, so I guess it's my "problem."  But I'm not going to spend money on a game like Heroes of the Storm if it's just "fun" it is going to have to be the MOST fun of all the similar options for me before I start forking over cash.

Im excited for this. It's Blizzard's take on the genre that I've spent the majority of my gaming time in over the last 5ish years. I hope they knock this one out of that park.

I may pick up this game due to no last hitting. Not so thrilled about no items, plenty of spammy moba's out there with skill shots and no laning phase.

Riot LoL is hella grindy and I'd promptly quit the game if I ever got banned (I should consider selling my account..)


Millions of people pay $15 for WoW. Can't say the same for the rest of the subscription games. Millions of people pay %$! for LoL, Dota, random f2p mmo, etc etc etc etc etc.

It's like you are paid advertisement for the sub based business model.  I don't think there is a single person on this board that doesn't know you pine for the glory days of the paid subscription, so I feel I have to ask this question.  If you aren't being paid to AstroTurf, why do you repeat yourself in so many threads on this topic?  OCD?  One-man crusade to turn back the tide of F2P?  What is it man, why do you do it?  Do you even know?

Now that I've scratched my OCD-impulse to fuck with Lakov about gaming business models, I have to say that I'm interested in this game due to the no last hitting, different game modes and short game times as well.

Don't be a fucking idiot.  If anything I'm saying here that sub based models DON'T work for everyone, it works for some.  Why? Because people like that particular game.  So by the same token, it doesn't matter one flying fuck how HOTS sells their game, if they give out champions or not, if people like it.

Someone please explain the significance of no last hitting please. What made it a PITA, and what is the solution here?

In a MOBA, you do not get gold for a minion kill unless you got the very last hit on it.  This is all while another minion, an ability, someone else, or a tower could be hitting it as well.  

Last hitting introduces a lot of mechanical skill into the game, typically more than any other activity.  The best players were typically the best as timing this window for hitting.  Plus, while timing this hit, you had to worry about your opponent knowing that getting that last hit is something you want.  

As for what it's replaced with here? Dunno, haven't read.  :grin:

I think it's all a philosophy.  In a pvp game, I'd prefer to focus on pvp skill rather than have my pve ability dictate the outcome of the early laning phase.  I think that's why I prefer team fights to the early phase of the game (last hits and lane farming).  I'm looking forward to giving this a try.  It will give me a nice contrast to LoL. 

Last hitting sounds horrible and stupid tbh.

It does add an element to the game that makes things challenging.  Being able to last hit a minion while simultaneously control lane space definitely takes skill.  

It sounds like navigating a bad mechanic rather than a skill, or if it is a skill it only exists because the mechanic is stupid.

So it shooting a basketball, or swinging a golf club, or pitching a baseball, if that's the road you want to go down.

It makes more sense in the context of the whole game.  The idea is to gain advantage by outfarming your opponent early.  If you both just sat back and watched your minions die while collecting equal gold, then it wouldn't be a very exciting process in the early game.  Last hitting introduces a risk-reward system created to add a strategic element when you lack the gear/abilities in the first few levels for proper team fighting.  

I'm sure the people that are into LoL hardcore could justify it better.  

But why last hit instead of most damage on that unit? Why wouldn't that have the same effect without the nonsense?

I believe (or maybe i'm talking out of my ass, both are equally possible) that last hit was in the original DOTA because of the way WC3's hero engine functioned.  Thus it became part of the meta game and all the hardcore pvpers developed strategies around it, which then caused it to be replecated in the dota-clones.

Last hitting does add depth and so do all the various "un-intended" tricks in fighting games.  However I'm not sure it's needed for depth if the game itself has other ways to add depth while removing last hitting.

What I'm saying is last hitting is a bad mechanic that does add to the game but could possibly be removed without detriment if replaced with something else to advance skill levels.

Dude why would you release two titles in a row with the same acronym and nearly the same name.

That seems most likely, because I think if you approached it today with no preconceived notions about it, nobody would actually design the game that way. That's why I think Blizzard is ignoring it.

Now, does that mean they should wrap everything up in teams completely? No, I think there should be some individuality involved.

Last hitting is sort of pointless in a game without items. I've not heard it stated anywhere specifically, but is there even gold in this game? It seems like the only method to improve your character is via skillups which can follow divergent paths. I wonder if its much tougher to snowball in a game without items/gold because I cannot use my gold advantage to get further ahead, or way easier to snowball because the level advantage I assume I get if I kill you 3 times in lane makes my skills way more likely to kill you over and over.

I imagine that if all skills if landed do a significant amount of damage/disable and are not big passive upgrades to a character, games are much less likely to snowball (or if you a pessimist, playing well early is way less meaningful.)

I don't understand why they stick with the RTS style control scheme.  That was a limitation of the original game, not a feature.  It makes no sense to control a single character the way you are meant to control an army.

It also makes the game play for the support really really boring. Not to mention, turning a PvP out-power-your-opponent game into something based of PvE.

If it was just damage dealt, it would change lane presence, or require a lack of it. Like on a Windrunner, I could just drop powershot into a creepwave from max range and collect gold from max distance with no danger to myself.

Because there are allied NPCs beating on the creature too, and they'd almost alwys have the most damage done. You can't spend all your time beating on the NPCs because you have to do a lot of keep away and harrassing with the opposing players in your lane. Basically its a lot more interesting to be darting in and getting the last hit while spending most of your attention on the opposing player than just beating on the mobs so you get enough damage would be. (DOTA 1/2 has an extra wrinkle in which you can deny gold to your opponent by last hitting your OWN guys, that's where most of the debate around this feature actually exists.)

I am still baffled at how popular a knock-off IP can get.  I'm not saying DOTA gameplay isn't original or anything but man it's like a porn called "lord of the cock rings" with dildo shaggins.  

What if it was just player damage done? NPC damage didn't count.

Then you could do what Fordel described, and anyone with a ranged AE would have a completely unbalancing advantage in farming. I'm not going to say that there isn't a possibly better way to do it, but the way it is right now works and is actually pretty fun. I get what you're thinking about it though, I thought it sounded stupid before I tried it as well.

Last hitting is simply a more friendly way of distributing gold/advantage than more PVP oriented ones.

Lets take Dominion a League of Legends mode as an example. The focus of that game is more capture point. Because the game objective is capture point more PVP is had but to encourage even more PVP they trippled the gold gain per minute so "farming creep" is effectively slower than say "killing other players to death". The benefit is that for a while they turned league of legends into more of a team death match style game, but that has some trends.

1. If a player is simple better than you are the chances of you ever getting a kill on him diminishes every-time he gets a kill on you.

Now LoL originally did something brilliant in that game mode , which was to make the rate of gold so high that some champs can hit their "power plateau" very easily regardless of their score. If someone is murdering you repeatedly you can, if your game savy enough, counter their build midway through the game (and even if you weren't that smart you can still reliable get the three items you need if your not afking or your champion isn't ridiculously late game oriented).

This led to what Riot basically hates and that is rubbernecking, i.e it mattered less how leet you were in the early game, adjusting, adapting, and eventually exploiting your opponent tend to win out over simply getting a few kills early and babysitting your lead. So they adjusted the gold gain (and killed the mode honestly) so that the opponents are far less likely to bounce back in a meaningful way.

Personally I think that new gold rate cuddled bad players more than good ones as the old system was still brutally honest about how good you were. If there was a genuine gap in skill your gold rate is going to be twice the size of theirs regardless. With the slower rate you can basically take advantage of any early game matchups and coast your way into victory because being behind is less of an disadvantage you can beat by being smarter or better organized or focusing on certain mechanics.

2. Gaining early from kills, tends to lead to ridiculous snow balls.

Where being a hyper carry from creep score, while tedious at least "evens out" the gold to be given. Both sides up to a point can pve with some impunity so getting behind a few kills on summoners rift, while game over in one sense due to the sheer gold advantage gained from said kills, isn't entirely a death sentence. At least one felt rightaway. Yeah your team fighting will suck if you feed riven to 3/1, but as long as you have access to creep waves you can farm some of that advantage off (or at least not fall terrible behind). But when all meaningful amount of gold comes from kills? That jax that got fed 3 kills is going to get 4 more kills in the next 2 minutes, than 3 more in 30 seconds, than 5 more a minute from now. Jax is going to 20/1/2 near the end of the game or worse. And the only way to get gold? Kill the 20/1 jax.

3. Champ diversity was limited.

Last hitting and the laning phase in general, allows most champs to ramp up at a similar rate. Range ADC's are giving the time to gain the items they need, support champions can slowly get their necessary items, and so on and so forth. Champs could be strong or weak in the early, mid and late game and still do reasonably well. Dominion? Tanky dps all day every day. The better the early game the higher the chance of snowball and the less likely the enemy team can counter. Some supports can make it, some adc's could cut it but not all.

So yeah last hitting exist for a reason, is it necessary for all games... no but that's a matter of design. If your game distributes advantages and expects players to exploit the mechanism for doing so either by denying or snowball, while at the same time keeping the game competitive for longer than 5 minutes..... you have your work cut out for you.

I see your points, but it just doesn't sound like good design if you haven't already become addicted to it.

I can see why Blizzard would try something else, is what I'm getting at.

I played DOTA 2 for about an hour and wandered off for something else, so I'm obviously not their audience, but I might be for something simpler that the MOBA pros scoff at.

Smite makes last hitting give you MORE gold but as long as you are within a certain range of the deaths of minions, you get both gold and exp. So it's not absolutely necessary as a mechanic.

I can't speak for how LoL works, but in Dota, you can absolutely build a lineup around the idea of farming heroes instead of creeps. Won't even need a carry, just gaming heroes and balls  :why_so_serious:

Um, I'm confus.

Both dota and league give gold to a player per tick of time. Killing creep just gives more gold, as well as xp.

Now, MediumHigh's good explanation notwithstanding, another way to think of it is giving players a simple objective.

All of these sorts of games tend to work on the principle that you want to blow up the other guys' base. To do that you assist your creep in pushing down towers. To do that, you kill their creep so that they don't push yours. Therefore both sides attempt to contest this mechanic (and the game develops from there).

What don't you like about this, Paelos?

I just think last hitting sounds silly. It's like a reverse form of mob-tagging in MMOs.

I'm with Paelos; last hitting is dumb.

You are 100% correct, last hitting is in DOTA because the WC3 engine.  Because people hate change, it's now become just another part of the 'skillz!' required to play MOBAs.  It's tedious and as far as I'm concerned adds little to the genre.  I can do it.  I just don't enjoy doing it.

I thinking some form of it is worth having.  One of the things it allows is lane control, and that is a pretty big part of laning in MOBAs.  If damage on the creep matters, then you have to be auto attacking all the time, and then you're pushing your lane, which you don't always want to do.  On that note, even if it is only player damage, then essentially you're just back to last hitting again if you don't want to push the lane.

If you just get all the gold no matter what, then you might as well do away with creeps altogether aside from the fact that you want them there for pushing down towers to absorb hits.

More to the point, it seems like what Blizzard is REALLY doing here with Heroes of the Storm is nuking the laning phase from orbit altogether.  That is what separates this from other MOBAs more substantially.

Ok, what are the pros and cons to nuking the laning phase?

http://www.bloodlinechampions.com/ (http://www.bloodlinechampions.com/)

You get a different game altogether.

That doesn't answer the question.

Well, it means there is likely to be a lot more roaming around the map from the beginning, more team fights and more reward for keeping your entire team or most of your team together the entire match.   Since you are dealing with team level and more passive gold gain, splitting your team up for purposes of maximizing your XP/gold on certain heroes is no longer relevant. It also means neutral objectives are probably going to play a larger role throughout the game than they do in other MOBAs (even LoL, which has some pretty significant focus on them throughout due to the buffs they give).  This last point is something they mentioned during the panel about the game - neutral objectives seem to have a pretty big role in the game.

It isn't *quite* Bloodline champions, because it isn't just an arena/deathmatch game. But it does seem to be leaning more in that direction.

EDIT: It occurs to me that you might not know what "the laning phase" is to begin with.  It is the part at the beginning of the game where different characters go into different lanes to, usually with the goal of getting maximum gold and levels.  There is some roaming/ganking in this phase, but few full on team fights, as teams try to maximize their gold/exp going into the mid game.  In particular, teams want to get their carries (their late game-centric heroes) off to a good start so that they can do their maximum damage later in the game.  It is possible for some, rare, team compositions to try and be hyper aggressive early and attempt to force team fights and objectives early on, but it is relatively rare across MOBA games in my experience.

Removing last hit doesn't de facto remove the laning phase.  There are all sorts of nobs to twist with the design prior to just killing off the laning phase.  Removing last hit does raise a lot of questions - is there still money/experience tied to the creeps?  If yes, do you have to do creep damage to get the money (currently you don't have to hit to get exp, I'll assume that is staying the same).  How much damage do the creeps do to the towers?

The things I find interesting about the laning phase are zone of control and whether or not your are pushing the lane via creep waves.  If you quick clear an enemy wave and let your creep line hit there tower (after you force the opposition to bluepill), you are safely pushing that lane or causing jungle to pull out of jungle to cover the lane. 

Similar to last-hit, I find the ward battle and the zero-cs (cs is what they call creep kill, I can't remember what cs stands for though) support champ role unappetizing.

Removing last hit definitely reduces the snowball effect on players who have poor farm and makes the game significantly more about player versus player match-ups.  If you are a person who last hits like a pro and is used to having more cash then most of your opponents I can see how you would shy away from games that do not have that mechanism.

wat

Laneing and last hitting are dumb and boring parts of the game.  DoTA is adding objectives to the map because they aren't bound to this silly, silly set of mechanics.  The team vs. team matches I watched looked much more interesting than LoL matches from the get go, AND more fun to play.  Bonus that they took a lot less time to play.  The full set of 3 matches at Blizzcon took only an hour.

So I'd say they're not trying to go after LoL or DoTA so much as find a market that likes the idea but hates some of the mechanics.

ed: Also -it looks like teams level up vs. individual heroes, so you don't wind-up with one guy who's great at laning/ last hitting who is 2 levels beyond your crappy pubbie.  This is a mixed bag in some ways as 2 crappy players will kill your whole team.

I don't have any problem with last hitting personally; I don't think it's a bad mechanic. It's just one of a bunch of mechanisms that allow the game to differentiate between players of different skill. I guess an analogy would be the ability to micro individual units out of a blob in Starcraft 2. It's a skill that better players develop and become progressively better at, and it gives them a competitive edge. If you changed it so you could only control units en-masse, it would even out the skill curve a bit, but it wouldn't make the game better per-se. There will be other differentiators that still persist, and become more important.

Hm, team-wide level ups sound interesting.

Is there some place one can watch the games from Blizzcon?

Laning phase is a chance for the player to exert influence over an area of the game mostly independently from the rest of their team. This is good because it gives players a sense of individual accomplishment outside of the team's success. You can lose a game and still feel good about it if you stomped your opponent in lane phase. It also forces some ad-hoc strategic decisions on the part of the team based on how lane phase shakes out. Maybe your split-pusher gets super fed early so you convert them into a full tank to protect your flagging carries, or something.

Having distinct game phases also allows for heroes to be balanced around those phases in interesting ways, so there's room for champions who are bad at team fights but have a great early game in an aggressive comp.

The downside is that many people find laning phase to be uninteresting, especially from an esport perspective because a caster can only focus on one lane at once.

Without laning you have would have almost 100% team fights, reducing/eliminating the need for gank heroes to take advantage of careless, wandering enemies. Team fights are fun, but I do think the early build up of the heroes during the game is a critical part that must be managed by a skilled team, working semi-independently. Without this meta/chess-like control of the other team's growth (and your own), you simply have team fights with the most coordinated button smashers winning.

If Blizz can come up with an alternative (removing last hitting is probably OK as long as there is something to keep the hereos engaged in the lanes), it'll be interesting to see what it is.

Pro: Game moves faster: See League of Legend's Dominion mode (which is actually a lot of fun if you know what you're doing). Games have no clearly defined temporal structure and so there tends to be a singular design mentality.

This is the twitch channel of the most prominent Dominion tournament: I like dominion(and know one of the best Dominion players in the world), but there is no ranked mode so no one plays it

http://www.twitch.tv/dominategamingtv

Con: Games have a less defined temporal structure; In summoners rift there is a definite early game, mid game, and lategame. Its best to talk about these backwards: The lategame is the point at which team fights happen because clear wins mean multiple objectives fall and one or two people cannot hold objectives against the entire enemy team. The mid game is right before this when skirmishes happen; a few determined defenders can hold objectives against all but the entire enemy team, but making the rotation to put your entire team at a spot can leave a single enemy to gain a significant advantage. The early game is where even if the enemy team grouped up it could not gain more of an advantage than the 5 single people working alone.

This gives a clear position about when certain types of champions can make their mark in the game, and the types of milestones necessary for champions of the varying sorts to carry in the parts of the game they're not strong ing. Champions which are good at skirmishing are very strong in the mid game because they can catch people out and create situations where you have an advantage that cannot be answered. Champions which are good at dueling are good early because they can gain an advantage which cannot be surmounted later. Champions which team fight well are good lategame because splitting up is a recipe for disaster unless you're way ahead

-----

So if you design a summoners rift type game (I.E. objectives are gated by individual and team strength) with no individual power differentiation it strongly tends towards a dominant temporal disposition with regards to team comp. That is the optimal will be to build a team of early game champions who win everything early game and end the game. Or the optimal will be to build a team fight and then win late because of your team fight. Whichever of these that occurs (I.E. lategame team comps or early game team comps will be dominant) the outcome of the match will be determined less by individual skill and more by individual champion or team composition counters.

Because individual advantages can accrue in league teams can "outlast" other teams until their scaling comes in. They can play around single champions who get strong, by focusing them down, and by buying items to reduce their damage type. Etc etc. But I can't do that if your ADC and tank get fed by virtue of your Leblanc getting kills in lane.

The thing that minion kills/last hits primarily does is it provides differentiated values for "winning the lane". I.E. pushing someone out of lane and preventing them from last hitting is different than killing them is different than dominating them slightly. Without this mechanic the only way to get a significant gold advantage is to kill the enemy(or entirely zone him and freeze the lane*). But we both want gold advantage to be accrueable without killing someone and also without totally zoning and freezing the lane (because this is boring).

*this is kind of effective but kind of not. Generally pushing your lane into tower and harassing is considered a stronger play in most lanes except maybe top lane very early.

It would seem to me (certainly no expert) that some more choice in the hero skills (a tree rather than just 4 skills to level up) could provide some of the mechanics that the item store does -- ability to make choices to adjust to or counter your opponents -- but without the somewhat excessive (to a dabbler at least) complexity of the item store choices.

Seems that The Escapist got to repost  the Blizzcon games.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129491-Watch-Blizzard-Devs-Play-Two-Full-Rounds-of-Heroes-of-the-Storm

Also, in my search for that  I found this Gamespot article where the lead dev says they aren't calling this a MOBA,because of the mechanics changes.  It's just called a "hero brawler". Seems a fair point to concede, So the comparisons are now all on the gaming community because the two look similar.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-explains-why-it-doesn-t-call-heroes-of-the-storm-a-moba/1100-6416084/

Hero brawler.

I wonder why Blizz hasn't tried to make Super Smash Bros.

Looks like fun from the videos.  I'm in.

In LOL, one crappy player can fuck up an entire team.

And one skilled player can win the entire game (on the right hero).

In lol, PvE matters more then PvP. ( And the RPG elements, Runes and Mysteries trump all )

Early game. Mid to late game, it matters not at all if the team who is losing can level themselves up to max level and build.

Runes and Masteries barely matter at all in LoL. They are easy to talk about because they are easily quantifiable so they get discussed in far greater proportion to how much they matter - some top players don't even bother with different rune pages because they're too lazy. I'm Gold and my runes / masteries are a joke.

LoL also doesn't really have PvE. In lane your lane opponent should be actively combating you, and even in jungle you need to gank, counter-invade, etc.

Nope. Only you would say something this factually off base.

You guys are wrong it hurts. I know its hard to accept.

I played mostly with my friends who were 30 for many many matches, while not being 30. Now in ranked they may not mater as much, but they sure do matter. Its wow level of power gaps ( Especially depending on the stacking of runes.) If Pve didn't matter, you could not win matches with no kills and only minion farm and tower kills. OBJECTIVES matter more than kills, and they are PvE. The early game farm nearly always determines the match. Its all based on money gained ETC.. I personally find Lol extreamly hard to categorize as a competitive game. But I understand, as a hardcore lol player, that's hard to hear. When numbers trump play in most cases in Lol. In Truth, its the PvE and power progression with no answer that IS the draw for most, if they realize it or not. While it pretends to be a pure PvP game. They are addressing a good deal of this in Season 4 changes. It will still be about who farms best, earliest. This is outside of good teamwork, which can, if the gap is not to big, turn tides of matches, but that's somewhat rare and almost requires your opponents to make some really bad moves. Usually because they have been steamrolling so hard in team fights it goes to the head.

Its analogous to Wow open world PvP, where your opponent has items and weapons that hit for more then you even have health. That's also why they have a "Baron" buff.

First of all, by that definition, Bloodworth, practically any objective based PvP game isn't really PvP because you could hypothetically win without killing people.

Second of all:


You can get ahead in LoL, but you start the match equally. Now, there is some snowball effect with getting ahead due to the way leveling and items work, but that has nothing to do with whether or not the game is mostly PvE, there are plenty of purely PvP games where snowballing happens.

Ill just leave you with this: (http://euw.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/features/preseason-draws-closer)


Riot knows what I have said is true. Its been a root MOBA problem for a long time.


Sure, but that's not hinged on playing against the environment and AI now is it?

I'm glad Blizzard is going this direction, because the more I hear about LoL, the more I wonder why the hell people actually play it.

I enjoy Smite much much more, but my friends play Lol. That's the only reason I boot it up. Many of them wont convert due to investment, and the lack of RTS controls. They are not action players in this regard, even if they think Smite is really really fun.

Yea, adding another camp in the jungle and aiming to make carry style junglers viable really just screams "we know too much PvE is a problem in our game."  

 :oh_i_see:

Not sure you understand the changes and what they address. Anyway, carry on.

Given that you apparently haven't really played MOBAs very much I'm not sure you know what you're talking about to begin with.  But hey, that has never stopped you before.

In any event, Blizzard seems to be creating a system in which objectives matter at least as much, if not more, than they do in LoL or DOTA.  So I'm not sure why we're having this conversation anyway.

I've had a lot of fun with LoL, though haven't really bothered with many of the newer alternates since I'm invested into it (and enjoy it).  LoL is a step up from DotA 1 and 2 in that they cut down on some of the bullshit.  Like in those games, not only do you have to worry about last hitting, you have to worry about last hitting your OWN MINIONS.  So you can deny the other guy the ability to last it yours for cash and experience.  They also kept some other clunky mechanics LoL glossed over.  The whole experience is just tedious.  I'm sure people coming in at a more friendly level than LoL probably say the same thing about it, but at least we aren't in the very bottom circle of tedious game play hell.   :awesome_for_real:

Also, DotA looks like ass.

This new Blizzard take on it looks interesting, I may give it a shot.  Just not sure how I feel about the no items thing.

Sure.

Because when it WORKS, when things click, it is utterly addicting.

Before 30 you lack access to certain summoner spells, that's the big drawback. Summoners are super important. Runes and masteries make an overall maybe 5% or less difference. I pulled that number totally out of my ass, the point is all things being even they do make a difference but a guy with a better rune and mastery setup isn't going to beat someone better than them to any real degree.


In a competitive game (by that I mean any game that isn't full of terrible players) the enemy will try to block you from taking objectives, take those objectives themselves, defend towers, harass you as you try to kill creeps, etc. Farming does not take place independent of the enemy team - only jungle comes anywhere close to this being the case.


If I am playing better than you how are you getting higher numbers (of creep kills) than I am? Answer: you aren't. Maybe you and your friends play super passive - super passive farming is not how the game is played these days. Farming is important but if you are farming better than your opponent it's probably because you are outplaying them. There are also plenty of matchups where you can come out behind on farm and still be ahead, for example Kassadin vs basically anyone.

You really don't know what you're talking about. It sounds like you're talking about a team of level 5 players vs bots honestly. PvE isn't really a thing in LoL, everything you are calling PvE involves the opposing team.

You're fundamentally confused with your comparison between WoW and LoL. In WoW the more time you spend the better items you get and the more powerful you become. In LoL spending time only gets you someplace until you hit 30. At that point playing more has no effect on masteries and only a small effect on runes as only a small percentage of runes are really useful. In a given game there's no such thing as spending more time than the other guy.

The basic idea comes from RTS, let's not forget.  Warcraft 3 has heroes in addition to all the normal RTS elements.  DOTA as a mod takes that Hero, puts it upfront, and automates the other things people often don't like about RTS games (building an economy, having to build units consistently (aka flawless macro) and controlling dozens of units at a time (aka lots of micro).  At it's heart, DOTA is about automating those things and letting the player control the powerful leader of that army and combining it with some in-match RPG-like progression.

It isn't hard to see, from my perspective, why that would be popular.

For sure and yet, when it doesn't work and your team is full of racial slurs and bile you want to gouge your own eyes out with a spoon.

Cheers bro, that's really good to see in action.

Looks like it has potential, but calling it 'alpha' is certainly right, there is a long way to go yet.

I think the most important thing from watching the footage and the discussion you guys are having about last hitting / not last hitting &c - is that if the game has enough other things to manage (in this case it's neutral camp fights, multiple levels to fight on, and so forth) - this creates potential for an interesting dynamic layer, other than just "everybody teamfight all the time"."

Completely agree with this, well said.  This is what I was trying to say with, 'doesn't mean you have to kill laning phase', and 'other game modes'.  It doesn't have to be towers, it doesn't have to be lanes, it just has to be strategic elements in addition to killing each other.  I like LoL's Dominion, I don't know if Blizzard is going that far a field, but I think so/hope so.  Even though I dislike last-hitting, I do like that the champs level up - some champs are early game beasts, some are late game beasts, you have to know what you are playing, and what the other team is playing and work with those strengths/weaknesses.

I have never been a fan of DOTA and don't know much about its derivatives (LoL or HoN) but this actually looks fun. I like all the unique map objectives that create tactical dynamism all over the place, much better pacing than DOTA which looks very bland in comparison.

This is every worthwhile multiplayer game in existence.

This genre really is worse though, because when a player does bad they are just hurting your team by not being helpful, they are actively making the opposing team stronger by feeding them gold.  It makes for a very hostile environment where your bad play really does have a disproportionately large impact on the rest of your team when compared to something like Team Fortress or Counter Strike, or whatever else.

Not to mention the fact that games can last upwards of an hour on the long side, and usually ~30 on average.  You're investing a lot of time and effort into any given game of DOTA or LoL when compared to the hop in/hop out multiplayer in a lot of other genres.

In the end, it means that when you have a great team and it all comes together, it is incredibly rewarding and satisfying.  When just one guy on your team is an asshat, you can waste away 30-40 minutes if your time.

It seems this format would limit those terrifying lows and dizzying highs by making it more team oriented.

The problem with that, as I can see it, is that it doesn't follow the addict formula. They want the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Don't know why this is the general consequences in this forum. I've had an account since beta if its ever gone under any circumstance I'd quit the game. Why? Because I can't imagine grinding up the IP to buy runes and champions again. To say runes and masteries don't matter is like saying leaving the base without starting items doesn't affect your laning. It's a rubbish concept. You can't "ramp up" if you can't keep up. And the best way to keep up is to stack as many early games advantages as possible. Hell with the right runes and masteries you can hold the equivalent of an extra doran's item. Or you can save your champ thousands of gold by giving your champion late game stats early. Like crit chance, cooldown, mana per level, etc etc. And that's the tip of the customization, you can end up with an entirely different champ and build order depending on masteries and runes you choose.

The genre (LoL) addiction comes from winning. The genre's crux is that no matter how badly you lose its never really your fault cause "someone else made a mistake". So bad players, which is most of the playerbase, can quietly think their gods after they master some basic aspects of the game and good players continue playing cause winning is simply very gratifying.

^

This is all true, but doesn't speak to the distinction between competitive play and casual play.  The reasons the game is casually popular has essentially nothing to do with what makes  (or doesn't make) the game competitive.   

Ghosts everywhere....

I'm not sure how much of a difference it will make.

If I'm doing well and you're dying a lot and we fall behind the enemy team in gold and XP I'll blame you. And in that case I can't even win my lane individually as your poor play is dragging down the entire team.

A Twitter Q&A was done yesterday.  Copy/pasta from MMO-Champ below:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/3636-Dec-17-Hotfixes-US-Connected-Realms-Blue-Tweets-EU-and-RU-Matching-Heroes-Q-A

I forgot about this thread. Looks like I missed out on a retarded argument.

You could post that to about 90% of the threads on 99% of the message forums out there and still be 100% accurate.

Well, in context of the normal retarded arguments we have.

Apparently the technical Alpha began yesterday and there are a bunch of friends and family type people in (Casters, eSports types, etc). Here's a VOD from Husky (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeQxapo38vE).

I watched a few games on stream, and I'm not sure what I make of the game. There are a bunch of quite major departures from the standard MOBA archetype; my gut feeling is that high-level DOTA and LoL players are going to view this much the same way schild views Hearthstone; as an overly dumbed-down version of the game. I'm not sure I can see this becoming an eSport in the same way that DOTA and LoL are, although it is early days. The general skill cap, and the balance of the sub-objectives seems to throw everything a bit out of whack.

Game looks kinda fun, but it's just two teams bashing at each other. Doesn't seem like there is any room for an individual to snowball or carry or make amazing plays. Not that fun to watch anyway.

I am so fucking sick of the chunky art style they've been using for everything not Diablo.

Yeah, it is getting a little old.

I'm sure you'll be thrilled with the HD remakes of Warcraft and Starcraft  :grin:

Agreed. It's become almost self-parody, and there's a bit of Orwellian "we've always had this art style" thing going on when that really isn't the case historically. I think a lot of Blizzard products these days feel more like Blizzard imitators, which isn't surprising given that Blizzard seems to hire a lot of super-fans. They really need a team there willing to go outside the Blizzard box.

As far as the game itself (based on watching some streams)...in theory I like the focus on objectives, but in reality I find it annoying. In part because of the visuals, sounds, etc. (The pirate shit in particular) The game also exists in a weird spot where it's casual but not really - you get a lot of bonus XP for last hitting, so last-hitting still matters a lot.

To me it feels very much like Hearthstone - remove a lot of depth and add in a lot of achievements, quests, and other addictive but ultimately irrelevant elements. It's cool that there are heros-specific quests and such that unlock skins and colors I guess? But it doesn't mean much of the core game is middling.

I do like being able to choose talents, ults, etc on the fly. It's a more meaningful choice than skill order in other MOBAs. Not sure if that makes up for lack of items though.

I thought they were doing away with last-hitting as part of making it more accessible than traditional MOBAs?

I thought you get extra XP for last-hitting but I can't find anything about that, so maybe not.

The live stream back around Blizzcon said something about last hitting being removed, IIRC. I linked it somewhere up-thread.

As someone who likes, but is terrible at, MOBAs I welcome our dumbed-down overlords.

Yeah, I think I just invented the last-hitting thing.

+1.  I like my TCGs with strategy and all, but MOBAs are a different beast.  Taking the item paradigm out of the equation gives more emphasis on how you're actually playing your champ with your cohorts, as opposed to steroiding out with gear and facerolling.

The best part of this whole thing so far is seeing Stitches on his tiny horse mount, it's so absurdly ridiculous.  Terror of Darkshire indeed.  :awesome_for_real:

It's as if you could read my mind.  I enjoy LoL, but have resigned myself to the fact that I just don't have the twitch necessary to be good at it.  I do well in team fights (ARAM), but when you combine this with last-hitting I'm a lost cause. 

I'm looking forward to this title. 

I can last hit, and I can ward, I just don't wanna!

Also looking forward to this, as long as "this" is the thing I've imagined in my head (haven't really done any research to figure out what they are making).

I like LOL, I like to think I'm generally good at it but the competitive atmosphere breeds a vile user base I cannot stand. This game might be similar but I have a feeling it won't nearly be as bad.

Can you chat in HOTS? If so, it'll be as bad as LoL.

I bet you the people across from you at Hearthstone tables are total shitheels, but you'll never know that.

You do with some. Wife had a guy spam "I will crush you" over and over on her turn. In my last foray I had a guy spam every emote in random order on my turns.  Then there's the guys who sit and let the timer run out every turn.   If there's interaction and competition assholes will find a way to make it unpleasant. 

You can easily squelch the emotes.  Its pretty much the first thing I do when ever I start a match.

Anyone know if this has an NDA?

NDA dropped in the middle of March when the Technical Alpha invites went out.

Cool, thanks. Just got an invite, will post impressions after I've played it a bit. Anyone else in?

This may bomb.

Very little excitement from anyone, streaming numbers are awful and the game is incredibly boring to spectate.

How far along in the process is this?

I played it for a few hours the day I got in and haven't touched it since. It feels like LoL meets Hearthstone:

• Limited pool of free heroes (not sure if they're static or rotating)
• Unlock other heroes with real cash or in game currency
• Daily quests similar to HS
• No gold, no items
• Your whole team levels up together
• Basic skills all unlocked at level 1; choice of 2 Ults per character at higher level
• Limited option of "talents" for customization as you level in game
• Long, unskippable tutorial before you're allowed to play.
• PVP requires several PVE/Coop games to even unlocked

no gold or items?

wut why

Because simplified? Fuck if I know, it's as mind boggling to me as most decisions they made in HS. If they had gone with the Dota model of all heroes unlocked, I might have played longer.

It's pretty far along, and unless they reverse a bunch of major decisions I think they're fucked.

Saying that it's the Hearthstone equivalent of LoL is very valid. The problem is that in the online card game space you had a good game that was not very accessible (Magic online) and a bunch of games that either weren't good or had bad production value, so making a shiny simpler Magic made sense.

In the MOBA space you have a bunch of games that have decent production value and are accessible. LoL is already the Hearthstone to DOTA's Magic. So Heroes of the Storm is like the Hearthstone of a game that's already the Hearthstone of another game.

I really like Magic the Gathering but it has a bunch of obvious problems: awful client, very little support for having fun with the cards you own without paying, lack of any sort of grinding / XP / evolution (this is a "problem" in quotes), gameplay that requires a lot of clicking through and priority passing. Hearthstone represents improvements, or at least changes that make sense on some level.

LOL is much less obviously flawed than Magic so coming up with simple improvements is tough. The ability to choose talents as you level up including alternate ults is cool, and the meta quests are ok if you like pointlessly filling meters. That's pretty much it as far as things that could be considered improvements in HOTS. Then factor in the lack of depth, the annoying maps with obnoxious gimmick events, and the snowballing nature of matches that robs them of any excitement and you have a game that doesn't offer much of anything over existing competitors except shitty Blizzard lore.

They also did a terrible job of promoting the game by giving early keys to people who had no idea how to play MOBAs, to people who only picked Nova in every match, and to people who are incredibly obnoxious. Hearthstone built a lot of early momentum based on early streaming and HOTS is doing exactly the opposite of that - watching HOTS streams is torture.

Agreed with what Margalis is saying; if streaming is a proxy for interest (which seems like a fair assumuption) then this game is looking very weak.

Aside from the usual Blizzard-level high quality production standards, this game fails to innovate in any interesting ways. It's yet another rehash of existing IPs, only in an even less coherent way than Hearthstone. They're also not working with their best assets either really, the first new heroes they added (this week) were two I had never heard of.

The game seems to lack a power curve, there is essentially no evolution in play as a match progresses, and the pace of fights is really slow. All in all it's dull as hell to watch, and I can only imagine that it's marginally less dull to play.

I get that Blizzard has done well by playing it safe for a long time, but this game is too safe and suffers greatly. They really need to develop a new IP too, because they're doing nostalgia to death, and it's getting tiresome.

They should have left this thing a Starcraft 2 mod.  Actually, there is a Starcraft 2 mod Aeon of Storms that is already a better MOBA than this is, I think (and is totally free because the Starcraft 2 arcade is free these days). Even as a stand alone, given that LoL and DOTA 2 can be really frustrating when things go bad, if they can offer a bit less of a frustrating game for a group of friends to play in the MOBA genre, then they do have SOME audience.  But I'm not going to put a lot of money into it either.


The big mistake they are making, as I've said and as others have said, is going with the LoL rather than the DOTA 2 pricing model.  I can imagine having some fun times with this with my friends if I can just pop on and play anything with them. Hell, you might even get me to buy an announcer pack or a funny Diablo in a Santa Hat skin. But I'm not shelling out on a per hero basis, and I'm not interested in only playing what is free this week or saving up enough "Blizzard Bucks" or whatever it will be to buy characters with in-game cash.

Well they tried to do that with Titan, and I think the shocking realization hit home that the people who made up these IPs in the first place are long gone. And all they have left is bootlicker turned fanfic guy Metzen.

This is my biggest complaint too, and one of the reasons I never got into LoL despite playing DOTA pretty heavily. If they offered some kind of $40-60 unlock-all-the-heroes-forever option I might bite too; the fact that we're in ALPHA and they still restricted the available characters to 5 is fucking ridiculous.

So you're claiming that Metzen had nothing to do with Blizzard's older games?

Interesting theory.

He was in the building. They let him write some portions. But he wasn't the creator of these IPs.

He's credited with some of that because he's the remaining employee. Roper and Brevik and the other guys have moved on. Anything we've seen out of Metzen in the last 8 years shows the depths of his crappy storytelling.

Even if that's the case, the stuff from Roper and Brevik haven't been stellar in recent years.

Brevik: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,11644/
Roper: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,1020/

I think it's more a case of the guys running things are simply old men.  They're older than I am and have different priorities and ways of looking at things now. They aren't spending 15 hours a day at home playing games, thinking of how to make them better. 

When I look at HoTS and Hearthstone I see old men's interpretations of how to improve games, focused mainly on streamlining and ripping things out that are confusing or time consuming instead of refining them.  I also see businessmen's ways of "improving" the game to generate revenue over gameplay.

HoTS appeals to me because I don't give a fuck about items, last-hitting or faming gold.  I want to get in and fuck shit up with a hero without dealing with ANY of that nonsense that drove me away from LoL. I just didn't have time to deal with and research any of that crap and my reflexes are shit and I'm not going to amp up on Monster, Red Bull and other shit to keep my alert levels at 120%.

I also like not having to grind for shit. Let me pay to win, I've got money to blow on 'em.

However, I'm 40 this year, I shouldn't be the target market.

I agree, they are all getting old and/or have left and done different things.

The new IP ideas usually come from new blood with good management, or young guys making new companies. Blizzard won't get the new company IP unless they buy one, but they can get new ideas from their younger generation of employees if they have the management in place to allow it. So far, it hasn't worked out.

Meanwhile Activision came out with Skylanders, and that seems to be doing pretty well.

I don't know about that. The kids who grew up on the NES and other early consoles are now around their thirties / forties. While the 18-25 demographic has traditionally been chased as the market with disposable cash, most people I know that age are broke ass college students, or just plain broke. Middle age people have money, and are a more known quantity to market to than fickle kids. I can see HotS being a fine DotA/LoL stand in for the non-Mountain Dew fueled market.

The 18-25 demographic is the one you want to reach to make things "trend." They are not the fuckers with the money, not these days.

Yeah, and that's why you aim at them with new properties; so you can get them in the nostalgia crush of their 30s and 40s when they have cash.

Activision is going to make bank with Skylanders revisited in 20 years.  Nintendo - had they a brain in their head - would be crushed under the nostalgia rush of a decent multiplayer Pokemon game now that those kids are in their mid 20's/ early 30s.

Why did Batman become a thing again in 1989? It was 20 years after 1960s camp version and very much a product of that. Then 20 years after that they hit us with Nolan.  Brands recycle.

Created Starcraft, expanded Warcraft from "Hey, there's some orcs and some humans and they fight" to everything from WC2 onwards, and co-created Diablo.

But sure.

Whatever.

And the more words they let him use, the worse it all gets.

Writing the lore for an IP is not the same as creating the IP.

See, now that I'll agree with. Man is in dire need of an editor with the power to say "No, that's dumb".

I want to find out who took the Butcher's terrifying "Ahhh... fresh meat" in Diablo 1 and turned it into "Oh hai I'm some psychotic fairy-bitch who you will kill in the next act... and now I'd like to introduce the Butcher because you all like to listen to game show hosts right? Now fight" in a fucking cutscene no less.

Seriously, way to kill the whole effect with words.

James Phinney helped create Starcraft. See no matter what happened with those IPs surrounding Metzen, there was always another guy in the big picture. Metzen's been on his own for a while now, and for some reason we've seen shit get worse and worse and worse.

And no new IPs. And a failed one in Titan (so far). You're the fanboi here so you can believe the company line all you want. I think the fact that we've seen what we've seen out of Metzen when he's had full control has been basically lore garbage. And again, the Titan failure to launch so far is a huge blow, even though they won't paint it as such.

I don't think I've ever seen story worse than D3, I don't really care about anything else. Literally worst story in a game that didn't need the story to do anything at all. It was so distressingly bad that I felt stupid for enjoying any part of the game and still do every time Azmodan opens his mouth.

So you're saying Titan was cancelled because the lore was bad?

haha oh wow

What the hell are you guys arguing about?

Metzen writes the lore and the lore is garbage. That's the full story.

The question is if the lore was always garbage, and how much Metzen was or wasn't involved in the lore that might not have been garbage.


But yeah, the lore is now garbage, and he is responsible for that.  So who cares about the past?

Edit: Pointless analysis.

Sorry for double post. I have nothing meaningful to contribute.

there's plenty of worse stories all over the place, d3/hots are just outliers in terms of how annoying and rage inducing they are because, at least in my own mind and probably others, an aggressively bad story sticks out in a game with production values that suggest quality and ganeplay experience  otherwise...

Diablo 3 also followed up Diablo 2, which hit the atmosphere nail on the head and kept the store sort of simultaneously minimal (not in your face), but ubiquitous if you were interested in it.  Diablo 3 just sort slams plot point after plot point at you ever 5 minutes.  If they had the same story line and just cut down the number of in game cut scenes and required dialog I had to spam spacebar through, no one would have said anything about it.

That is the worst story in a game I've played. Hands down not even close. Maybe I don't play as many awful games as you (quite possible) but I've never been hit over the head over and over by how stupid a story is as I was in d3.

It's always been bad, we were just 12 when things like War2/SC1/Diablo were rolling around. SC1/BroodWars story reminds me a lot of Dragonlance, where I have a lot of fond memories that were best left as memories, because these things do not stand the test of time.

Blizzard games suffer similarly to Square games (or Kojima ones) in that increased expressiveness due to technical and budgetary changes have made things worse, and the question becomes if they were ever good was it because the constraints kept them in check?

In a lot of old games the story works because it's told in short broad strokes, but an exploded version of that no longer works.

Core video game average age has been inching up passed the mid-30s for a couple of years. You might still get some 18-25ers, but I very much doubt they're ditching their $130,000 student loans to blow off classes just to play Sonic on the Genesis. More likely they've dumped some dollars into Clash of Clans or whatever while commuting between job and class.

But then, eSports aren't about the competitors. They're about the spectators. That's where the importance of the 18-25 guy is. They're old enough to know they couldn't possibly play as well as the eSports players, but do enjoy playing some of the games themselves and love watching pros go at it. While being served ads.

They are also savvy enough to know they can't compete without compete changes in lifestyles they already know they won't be making. But having grown up on video games instead of flag football, fast forward 10 years and I wouldn't be surprised if eSports is a big deal. Maybe not NFL big deal, and certainly not FIFA big deal. But something anyway.

As to HoTS, it feels like a game for people who heard only the bad things about MOBAs but were curious enough to give it a shot. Nothing wrong with that. It's just not going to monetize anywhere near the same way nor same amount, so therefore should neither be designed to, nor compared against the professional ones.

*noflame*

You mean at 46 I shouldn't have re-read the 2 Dragonlance trilogies? Damn - and I enjoyed revisiting them too. Then again, I caught myself re-reading a ton of old sci-fi including the Amtrak Wars and old Heinlein novels too. I replayed SC1/BW a year or so ago and had fun following the story. To be honest, I felt it held up a lot better than the SC2 storyline. Maybe I just like to hold on to times where innocent storylines were fun to engage with.

WC2 and D2 I agree with. If it wasn't for the cutscenes then I wouldn't have thought there was a story there.

Well, Margalis is kind of right.  Part of what made Starcraft and Diablo (1 and 2) work was their simplicity.  The difference between Diablo 1 and 2, and then Diablo 3 is enormous.  Diablo 1 and 2 had simple stories, you're a hero - go kill the big baddie who is trying to take over the world.  That's all you need in that type of game.  Diablo 3 is a maze of convoluted garbage by comparison.

Starcraft had a little more going on.

It's not just that those stories were simple though; D2 and SC1 both had a couple cool moments in the story that I still remember today. Also, the quality of the cutscenes in those games was really impressive for their time. This latest generation of gaming has raised the bar to the point that none of the cinematics in D3 stand out.

We're to the point that you're only ever going to see marginal gains in rendering due to the technology advances. Blizzard was known for dedicating all kinds of ridiculous time to weeks worth renders and modeling that can be done in a few days by undergrad students with the tools out there now.  Their cinematics are never going to stand out in todays field for rendering prowess, meaning they have to rely on actual direction and story boarding.

True, those cinematics in Blizzard games were always cutting edge.  But still, think about your average Diablo 2 Act compared to your average Diablo 3 act.  Diablo 2 basically just lets you play, and if you want to stop by for some extra exposition, ok.  Diablo 3 stops the gameplay flat every 10 minutes to tell you something you don't care about to begin with.

When you have a pretty simple story simply told it allows for moments of punctuation that are harder to pull of when you have a much larger volume to begin with.

These modern Blizzard games are like modern Square games, with just too much repetitive stuff none of which matters. I tried playing FFXIII-2 and the "plot" is just a series of random events I don't give a shit about, and the dialogue is just "Lightning Lightning future Lightning paradox Lighting Lighting Snow Lightning" every 5 minutes. I don't like any of the characters so what they say and what happens doesn't matter anyway. The game would be a lot better if they just cut the story by 80%.

By sticking to broad stroke story-telling (I like that assessment), Blizzard keeps people away from just how absurd the whole thing is, and allows their other talents to shine. Unfortunately, by giving the fans more, they have, I presume, significantly reduced the appeal of their properties.

They built fan-beloved worlds on excellent moments, scenes that were dramatic, impactful, and resonated strongly with a large audience because, stylistically, they are presented as such. But their work isn't *about* anything except This Looks / Is Cool. This was a company founded by comic book geeks. Every attempt to make their characters more complex and human, their stories more meaningful has and will fail because that comic book mentality is in the DNA of everything narrative that Blizzard touches.

I don't even need to get into the demands of their brand requiring the preservation of a status quo toxic to progression and evolution of the world, or how the format of video games permanently hamstrings the capabilities of the work to tell a story that is about something other than saving the world.

There's a reason you don't see Jack Bauer taking a dump in 24.

The problem with D3 was the characters took dumps everywhere.

If 13-2 is anything like Final Fantasy XII-1, they'd do better if they cut the gameplay by 80% as well.

I think they also suffer due to their love of putting the story and lore in non-game properties - if you don't read the books and novels that now accompany their games they seem even shitter than they are. The entire nephalem crap from D3 came from a series of truly terrible books, and WoWs lore is now nonsense unless you are reading the side-books.

Ah yes, the novelization of terrible story lines. The worst of all cash grabs.

Yeah I think one of the uniquely hate-inspiring parts of Diablo 3 was that it was designed in a way which repeatedly hammered your head against the bad. Even in HOTS you could just move straight from the campaign to multiplayer and custom games where various synthesized voices weren't constantly hissing and screeching PRIMAL ESSESESNSNNSCESS PRIMAL in your ear every second.

Whereas with D3 when being played as ... uh, essentially intended, you were doing constant nephalem valor reruns of the exact same areas over and over. I went from inferno butcher runs (shut up, maghda. shut up) to inferno act 3 runs, where the game was constantly sandblasting your ears with azmodan's FOOLISH NEPHALIM! ARROGANT NEPHALIM! ARROGANT AND i do not hesitate to add ALSO ARROGANT NEPHALIM!

it was inescapable grinding through grindingly repetitious dullardry, at least until you turned off all ingame voices or something, or just quit playing

I think that was my main issue with the D3 story, that the whole nephalim thing seemed to come out of right field with little to no explanation.  "btw nephalim is a thing and you are one, don't ask"  was the tone of the game.  I don't think the action was slowed down terribly by the dialogues but the content of those dialogues was so meaningless and filler that it made them tedious. 

I played the whole game through and I never figured out what a nephalem was, or why it mattered.

Also, while I'm still seeing a ton of Hearthstone coverage on Youtube, I'm seeing dick in terms of Heroes of the Storm. Interest seems to have died down to nonexistence.

First game where I've used the "auto skip cutscenes" option.   :awesome_for_real:


It's boring as shit to watch.  The real coveted streamers for this title, LoL pros, are contractually prohibited from playing it on stream.  So, you mostly have a bunch of Starcraft 2 streamers and Blizzard friendly internet personalities with access at this point, and they really wont draw viewers.  

I think this game might be too simple to create any sort of professional scene and draw people away from LoL or DOTA2.  Without the pro scene, the streaming community probably will not gather any sort of significant viewership.

That was explained in the optional conservations and the lore scrolls that you can find.

There are lore scrolls about nephalim in actIV yes, I'm not sure where the optional conversations are but for most of the game it's just assumed you know wtf they are talking about.

There's a little bit in act 1 around the time you are going to the temple I think.  I didn't really know or care what it was until I read plot summaries elsewhere.

Leave it to Blizzard to take a setting about going down into hell and fighting a demon into a setting about how humans are the descendants of half demon/half angels.

They could have even had nephalim in the game without it being you but no you gotta be the super special chosen one.

Telling its customers they're special and different from everyone (and, perhaps, everyone else is inferior to them) are core values of Blizzard's business. (Only half-joking)

I sat in the audience of BlizzCon and watched Paul Sams fuel the collective ego of its fanbase. Blizzard knows what its devoted want. Empowerment and praise.

It could've been worse: the nephalem could have been some badass, greenskinned NPC that you had to just follow around, watching him do all the cool shit.

Blizzard didn't make up the Nephilim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nephilim), it's a Judeo Christian thing that they modified to fit in the world of Sanctuary.

Don't get me wrong, the story and the implementation of the story suck.  But I think that particular story element was one of the most well thought out.  It borrows from the traditions that are thematically in keeping with those chosen for Sanctuary (Angels and Demons), and modifies it to fit the cosmology of this world.  There's so much else to be annoyed with in the story, choosing the Nephalem back story as a target for rancor seems... odd.

It's shit because it takes agency away from the player. You didn't beat the daemons because you are a badass human, getting by with skill, luck and determination in the face of overwhelming odds and the forces of heaven and hell arrayed against you - you beat the daemons because you are speshul and the chosen one.

I can deal with the chosen one crap if it's explained in a decent way. Morrowind's Nerevarine story didn't bother me in that regard.

Hello and welcome to 90% of video game plots. Enjoy your stay.

This thread is good cause now I know what a nephalim was.  I gave up trying to figure it out that by the time they probably told me (optional shit I guess?) I had just stopped caring.

I don't think the problem is that they used the concept of nephalim and that you were special, the problem is they were terrible at introducing the concept to you and explaining it.

Well, Typhalem, I don't nephalem that it's the concept of nephalem itself that makes people's nephalem rise, but that it turns up every nephaleming time any non-nephalem open their goddamn mouth. It's like the Fanfic Smurf wrote the script but instead of overusing "nephalem" he overused "nephalem".

This is one of my least favorite story elements and it has come up a ton in games lately.  Can't I just be a badass again?  Why do I have to be an instrument of fate?

Whilst they didn't make it up, it absolutely didn't fit with the world at all in the way they implemented it.

The entire ret-conning of diablo's storyline and background to fit in with a series of unbelievably shitty books that no-one reads really irritated me. It really undermines the entire setting as presented in Diablo 1 and 2, and substantially cheapens it by suddenly having the player character turn out to be superman.

(with absolutely no logic or reasoning presented in game at all).

I haven't read any Diablo books, everything I think I know I got from the games.

• D1 - Diablo is in the basement of the cathedral. I get all my abilities from books that someone left laying around. I ram the soulstone into my head at the end... woah... ok, that was stupid, why would I do that?
• D2 - Angels created soulstones to trap the primes, Diablo was buried under Tristram.  Other two primes are elsewhere in the world.  War in Hell between the primes and second string.  I get my abilities from killing shit.  I destroy all the soulstones and (in the ad-on) Tyrael destroys the world stone... woah... ok, what the fuck is a world stone?  Did we need that?  But the primes are totally ded4ever, so we're good, amirite!?
• D3 - Angels and Demons apparently sometimes do the nasty, and when they do, humans are the result.  Cept they called them 'nephalem' then, and they were all jacked up and powerful.  Then 'the man', aka, 'Angels' used the worldstone to keep us down and we've been mostly pretty limp ever since.  Cool Hand Kulle almost put that to rights by creating the black soulstone, but Tyrael and those boot lickers the Horadrum f'd that up proper.  Adria does some super-hand-wavybullshit-oh christ this story is so fucked are they high? and magically puts Diablo (who's soul was totally destroyed 4ever at the end of D2 but really wasn't his/her/it's soul was just floating around waiting for its chance to) into the black soulstone!  AND NO ONE SAW IT COMING!  Bear with me though, because the ride actually goes even more off the rails here.  Adria also managed to trick the other two PRIME evils into the stone even though it's not their plan and they are totally fucked by having that happen and we would think they'd be laying low but no, Adria is totally bad ass (seriously, what are the writers smoking?).  We then use the black soulstone to trap all the second string (where's Andariel?), whipping the 'grand strategist', who is EONs old, with our crafty, "I'll just go down there and KEEL them all!" plan.  He never fucking saw that coming, that's for sure.  Ok, I'm going to speed up here because it gets HELLISHLY stupid from here on out... you know what, fuck it, you know the rest.

but no, really, I get how the Nephalem angle is the most annoying part of the story.  In fact, now that you mention it, I also am really upset that I wasn't able to single-handedly defeat the combined might of all the lords of hell and one of the baddest asses of the Angels who has transformed himself into an aspect of Death by simply trying harder then everyone else.  Don't take my agency mother-fuckers!

I've never played D3, is there some kind of gameplay advantage to being a Nephalem that makes that less of an issue or something?  Because in other games, a lot of the time when this kind of story is presented and the player is the CHOSEN ONE or some shit, you get some vague mumbling about how only you can defeat the super dragon, but then you just go and hit it with a magic sword, like anyone could have done, and the only reason nobody else did was because Video Game.

There really isn't, and the whole CHOSEN ONE thing is made more absurd by the fact that the game can only be played online and features drop in/drop out coop.

There is no gameplay advantage, it's a story thing only.  In this game world if you take 'Nephalem' to mean, "created by the union of both Angel and Demon", everyone in Sanctuary (except Tyrael) is a Nephalem.  Which, honestly, the story makes pretty clear when Malphael makes it his mission to kill all humans.  Your character is special in that he's A) more powerful than other humans, B) quicker to regain the lost power after the destruction of the world stone, or C) both.

The main glaring thing they never explain is why you are a "nephalem" despite nephalem having deteriorated into humans hundreds/thousands of years ago. Even the 'what is a nephalem' stuff isn't really adequately explained until the RoS lore book thingies, which they clearly pasted in after realizing their story made no goddamn sense.

What's ironic is that of the 90% of anime plots that involve the main character being expceptional from birth due to lineage or being the chosen one, Gurren Lagann is the exception.

Guys. Its Blizzard. Stop.

It's a matter of faith at this point.

NEVER! FULL SPEED AHEAD INTO LOLORE!

Fucking Nephalem, how do they work?

I thought people were mad about the whole Nephalem thing because like everything in dialogue of d3 its done to death. You hear the word overandoverandoverandoverandover^100 until your ears bleed because its the worst fucking story of all time. Caring about the agency of my character? The fuck. The problem is everything is stupid, everyone is even stupider and worst of all nobody will shut the fuck up about it and Azmo and Diablo are the same character:

-bwa ha ha, there is no way you can win
-bwa ha that didn't count as winning that minion was a dick
-ok fine you may think you've won but I'm just toying with you
-you don't even understand how beaten you are yet even though you have now killed everything I've set between us

Its tiresome. Its stupid. It makes the whole experience cheap and YOU CANT SHUT IT OFF. Well you couldn't and the current auto skip feature is pretty shit and doesn't make all the horrible dialogue go away.

All those things too.

Diablo in Diablo 2 was built up by absence.  In this game Diablo just comes off as a B movie villain.

In Diablo originally, the idea that you actually fought your way down into Hell itself was cool. When you get to the hell levels, and your character says, "I must be getting close" as the cool music plays? That moment was cooler than any of the ridiculous dialogue in the entire D3 game.

That reminds me of that idealogical shift which occurred between Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. Blizzard designers thought the villain, who was featured prominently in advertising, should go from a background, end boss element to being more directly involved with the player.

That expansion killed the Lich King in more ways than one. His "cool" was whittled away by mustache-twirling antics like you described -- eventually explained that you were being cultivated as the ultimate Death Knight or successor or blah blah blah. The point was that he gave up all of Northrend to create a super soldier out of you, and the reality of being on the defensive and pushed back to Icecrown didn't seem to sink in.

Glimpses are the way to go.

Going full nerd gets us midichlorians.

The thing is, the players could not beat the Lich King.  It took guy with super sword to do that.  The Lich King toys with you in that final fight until you get him to a certain point, then he instantly kills your entire raid.

People really bitched about that at the time, too.

I come to this thread to read people making fun of HotS, not making fun of D3 shitlore.

I am disapoint.

People would have to actually have feelings towards HotS, either way.

So, I got into the alpha and finally tried this a bit. I think it probably has a shot to be Dota for the Extremely Casual. Typical Blizzard polish is there, even in alpha. The model is very much like Hearthstone with dailies, currency, etc. It's very very simple next to Dota2 for sure. Just laning and team fights, no farm phase at all really.

The sum total of HOTS opinions have been:
1. It's very polished.
2. It's very boring.

:(

I want to believe it's not the latter, but I haven't bothered with it yet.

(http://i.imgur.com/hL1bac5.png) (http://imgur.com/hL1bac5)

In contrast LOL has ~115,000, Hearthstone has ~35,000, and DoTA2 has ~27,000 viewers right now

In contrast, Vampire Killer and SC1 Brood War has more viewers. I have no clue what the first one is, but lol@ the second one.

Clash of Clans has more viewers. I don't know how you pull back from this sort of thing.

You cancel the game. That's how.

Yeah this is Blizzard. Not Zenimax Online. They can afford to not release something stupid.

To be fair, HotS hasn't actually released yet (unless I missed it, in which case never mind).  Most of the big games on Twitch tend to be competitive multiplayer deals, where watching the top players can show you how to play.  That goes away when you can't play the game, and the "competition" is mostly pretty minor.  Game popularity and viewership tend to rise together, so I really expect more people to watch when the game is released "for reals".  Not sure if it will reach anything close to Hearthstone levels, though, which might be a problem for long term support of the game.

Isn't Hearthstone also not not released yet?  

Either way, I don't think that's right.  The problem with HotS is that it isn't interesting on any level.  Not to play, not to watch.  All the stuff they removed from the genre's usual mechanics made it kind of pointless.  As appealing as it sounds to some people to remove last hitting and memorizing item builds, and individual levels, in the end it makes for a pretty bland experience.  I guess you can say, rightly, that a version of a MOBA with 20 minute games, more focus on map objectives and more focus on teamplay from level 1 has some value in theory, but in practice it just isn't very fun to play.

I mean, in the current game mode they have available you can't even pick your characters with your team.  You choose a champion and THEN queue for your match.  So I guess there goes the teamplay their game mechanics supposedly encourage because you can't even make a team composition with the teammates you get matched with.  

I'm not sure the viewer count matters a ton when it's still in early alpha or whatever this is. Hearthstone is in 'anyone can play it' beta which is a big difference.

Hearthstone was also going into a market with a lot less established competition.  Magic Online has some regular streamers, and there are paper Magic tournament streams with some regularity.  But it's not caught fire as an online thing.

Hearthstone is going into a genre that people already have "their" game that they like.  LoL, DOTA, make your pick.  Although a lot of people want something a bit more casual friendly, they've got a LOT more competition in the MOBA genre than they did in the card game genre.

Anyone have a screenshot of the early F&F Streams from Diablo 3? Pretty sure they had 10s of thousands of people watching them.

Earliness of development has nothing to do with popularity, I don't think. In fact, if anything, more people should be watching since the don't have access.

They did.  Hell, even after all the problems D3 had the Reapers of Souls beta got above 10k sometimes.

HotS isn't catching people's attention and the game is plenty far enough into development that it should be by now. 

D3 had much more of a marketing push behind it. I think that if anything might be the most damning thing here; they'd push it harder if they really thought they had something.

Perhaps.  I mean, I'd be interested to hear from someone who has tried it and really liked it. There's probably an audience out there.

My general feeling has been it's bland and uninteresting.  I've played maybe 10 matches against real people.  It just doesn't grab me.  It's slick, it's polished, the gameplay feels decent.  But I feel no compulsion to actually play it as opposed to something else.

Perhaps they're not the best comparison, but in contrast to other Blizzard titles this is pulling fewer viewers than WCIII and Brood War, not to mention a ton of single player games that aren't exactly designed from the ground up to be spectator-friendly e-sport type things. Also, while it is in F+F Alpha, the people who have access are some of the people who have the largest viewer-bases, so that should in theory bloat HoTS twitch numbers to an extent, but none of them are playing it anymore, and nobody's watching.

I don't think twitch is a perfect metric, but it's quite an important one currently. I was certainly surprised how far down the list of games I had to go to find HoTS.

The entire game is just Blizzard looking at LoL, then looking at Dota2, then going "holy shit we missed the boat, the really big boat, full of god damned money".

It's just a fundamentally dull game for variety of deep-seated reasons. I don't think it's fixable without a huge overhaul.

If they had all the heroes available ala DOTA2 instead of a LoL rotation I might have played all of the characters a bit; I would have loved this game had it come out 5 years or so ago when I was still a Blizzard fanboy. Just like HS they've gone too far into simplicity for me, and since you can't play HotS on a tablet it doesn't even have bathroom entertainment value.

I only play MOBAs when a friend hits me up and asks me to join them though, so if this catches on with that crowd I might play it a bit here and there.

I like how HOTS emphasizes doing turn in and monsters killing.  Because not fighting other players is EXACTLY what people who play moba want.

I wonder if Blizzard realise that people aren't watching the HotS streams because... who the fuck wants to watch a game that you can't play yourself?

I like watching the occasional LoL/DotA2 game because I own those games and can play them.

I couldn't give a shit about HotS because I can't access it.

People constantly watch streams of shit they can't play. That really doesn't figure into it.

Most of the times games that aren't LoL or DOTA2 get to 1000+ because of a streamer with a following playing it for whatever reason.

I think twitch is a great metric. Twitch pretty much breathes moba streams. Looking at Twitch right now (9:30 am on a Thursday EST), you have LOL and DOTA2 as the top two games. DOTA2 doubles the viewers of the third game which is Hearthstone. If you round out the top 10, SMITE is #10 with a paultry 3.5k viewers compared to LOL's 75k.

That pretty much mimics MOBA popularity in the marketplace. HOTS? All the way down with 75 viewers sandwhiched between Mafia and fucking SWTOR.

The game is dull as fuck. The only people that think they like it are people who never got into MOBAs because last hitting and item builds. Those people turned off on the genre like that are less likely to play HOTS long term anyway let alone spend money on it. That is the problem. Blizzard thinks there is a market out there of people who don't like those mechanics and that they can make money off of them.

I don't think so.

The game is essentially WOW battlegrounds except you can't twink your character. Meh.

It's a shitty game. It's just like Hearthstone is a shitty game but Blizzard hit a market that had a shit ton of room to grow since there are no decent digital card games out there. (Hearthstone isn't a TCG since you can't actually trade the fucking cards)

Just liked schild said, games that you are interested in and don't have access to are big draws on Twitch. Even if the average person watches for 10 minutes, a lot of streams hold 1000s of viewers just with people being curious.

HOTS has Murky the Baby Murloc, so that automatically makes the game worthwhile. So cute.

Presumably at some point Blizzard will pay some big streamers to try their game out and then we'll see whether it has any legs in that way.

They likely won't get any significant LoL or DOTA2 pros to touch it.  LoL especially, since pros under LCS contracts  are barred from streaming competing games.  Maybe they can throw some cash at the retired or the few that manage a viewership outside of the professional scene. 

They can stream other games, they just can't accept sponsorships to promote other titles.

They already did, they gave out copies to big name SC2 guys and junk, no one gave a shit.

Ahh, didn't see they had reversed that policy. 

They still won't likely play this, because it's boring as hell.   :awesome_for_real:


SC2 guys aren't draws anymore.  Aren't they all playing Hearthstone now?

I know Idra and Incontrol were fucking around on it, I want to say Artosis was too.

And yea, SC2 is in the shitter, game is stagnant and stale and ruled over by Korea. It managed to get to that point like 8 years faster then BroodWar did too.

I'm pretty sure they reversed only the part that said ALL games, but they left in other MOBAs.

http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1sa59j/update_on_the_lcs_streaming_policy/


Don't know if they changed it since they posted that (5 months ago).

Ah, so I guess they can stream HOTS if they randomly want to play one day, but they can't accept payment to do so.

I'm gonna try this tonight because there's nothing else I'm itching to play.

That was... not a great 20 minutes.

So, who all is playing this?  Do we have enough for a 5-man?  Or anything?  Queueing with randoms seems weird in this game.  The comminuty is less  :ye_gods: than Dota, but the gameplay seems like it leans more heavily on teamwork.

Everyone I know (myself included) played it for a week or two then dropped it.

I played one game against bots that you have to do in the intro and quit.

I initially hated the game, but gave it a few different changes and it has slowly grown on me, although I still have moments where I hate it.

The biggest mental hurdle was just realizing it basically isn't a MOBA.  You fight over objectives with the other team, and ultimately it is winning those objectives that wins the game or not.  Maybe 3-5% of games can be won without them, but it basically seems to come down to whether or not you can herd your team to them.  When you get a team really working together the game is pretty fun.  But even more so than the other games in this genre, having people who refuse to play as a team essentially ruins it.

Absolutely this. And there are a lot of people coming in from (I assume) coop games who have no clue how to play properly. It can be a real pain trying to play this game sometimes - at least with DotA, everyone has a basic understanding of what to do. In HotS, I keep seeing people try to farm their lane all game. It's not helped by having level 1 talents that give you permanent boni for killing creeps. Those talents are usually bad - your time is almost always better spent doing something else (farming creeps doesn't even give gold, just exp).

Because of the shared experience and lack of items, a single hero cannot really steamroll in this. Which means you need a good amount of teamwork almost all the time - and it's hard to find. Plenty of frustrating games. The game desperately needs voice chat, but it restricts your communication abilities heavily. You're not even allowed to talk to your opponents after the match (or whisper anyone you haven't played with).

I just got in. It's appealing but agree it needs a good team to work together and really make it enjoyable.  This weekend has seemed pretty good so far, as I've only run into one guy who thought he could win the entire match by himself.

The lack of twitch and last-hit means it's nowhere near as toxic as the other games becuase you're not competing against your team as well as the other team. It incentivizes you to actually support other guys when playing support. He gets the glory of the kill but the team advances as a whole.

I also think Blizzard is on to something in providing the Co-Op for the folks who don't want to bother with competitive matches. I'm having much more fun there than I ever did in LoL, as I just don't care about pwning folks and only want to waste some time. (And again, no hyper-twitch last-hit bullshit means I'm a little more relaxed.)

I think the Ai is a bit dumb, and hopefully it will improve as I level up my account. I expect them to be dumb when I'm starting, but if they continue to do things like ignoring my hero who's at 15% health so they can beat on the Map Mechanic foozle I'll get frustrated. 

This is the Hearthstone of this genre and it's going to do pretty damn well because of it. Folks who are into the "real" scene of DOTA and LOL won't care for it any more than Magic players care for Hearthstone, but it'll work great for the rest of us.

Yeah, I think they just did some massive wave of invites, I've seen more total noobs this week than in the previous two or three months combined.  Playing co-op is pretty much my default state for now.  I agree that the bots could use some better AI, though when you get a lemon of a team it's still pretty rough going.  I've had a few games on Blackheart's Bay where the bots just massed as 5 and pushed down the bottom lane, while we had 3 or 4 top who weren't paying attention until the core started dropping.  It would also be nice to see some of them with cloaks, IMO, because so many new players have no idea how to deal with cloaked heroes.

There's a 25% XP bonus active now for the holidays, though that's not exactly a huge deal.

Closed beta starts in three weeks, so probably there will be another wave of invites then.  Hoping they get the next heroes out, too, Thrall and Lost Vikings supposed to be coming soon.

Hey!  Do YOU want to play Heroes of the Storm, but haven't recieved a beta invite yet?  How do you feel about paying $40 to beta test a game that will be free to play when it launches?  Then Blizzard has the solution for you! (http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/17635805/get-started-in-heroes-of-the-storm-now-with-the-founder%E2%80%99s-pack-1-20-2015)

In other news, they just hit closed beta last week and introduced ranked play on the same day they released Thrall.  Those of you with weak hearts may want to sit down for this shocking news, but he's considered kind of OP.

That's one of the things that's keeping me from playing even though I'm the target audience -- it's way too expensive to acquire all the heroes in the game.

Edit: add quote cause new page

It's pretty easy to obtain the heroes during normal play.  You get gold (the currency to buy heroes) through normal play, achieving level 5 in each hero, and with daily quests.  By the time you open ranked play, you'll easily have 10 or so heroes.  It's really no different than LoL, just a tad slower to encourage you to buy boosters.

Also it sucks compared to LoL unless they made major strides in the feel of the game.

One thing you thought Blizzard was never going to resort to was Early Access, Founder packages and paid betas.

If the Early Access gave you all characters unlocked like SMITE's one time fee option does, it wouldn't be a bad deal.

They did the same with Hearthstone.

Yeah I would totally do that assuming it was a reasonable price for all heroes (not this ~$10 per hero stuff).

No it still totally sucks :awesome_for_real:

But it's great for casuals. I dread playing any of the "serious" MOBAs cause of the inevitable abuse that's going to be heaped on me for being such a n00b.

I enjoy it.  It's all the stuff I liked about LoL without all of the nonsense I didn't (warding, last hitting, item buying).  Could be why I only played ARAM in LoL. 

I'd think an environment where there is more focus on objective team play is going to exacerbate the negativity.  Of course it if never hits critical mass, you may not see it.  

Eh, founders packs.  Fuck this nonsense.

That's very true.  Because the toxic LoL community still believes they are right about it being the other guy's fault when they lost.  

The LoL community was the worst I've experienced in any game that I've played.  Considering the sheer number of online games that I've played, that's noteworthy.

A lot of the mechanics in HotS are supposed to be counters to that.  For example, the entire team is the same level, so if one guy gets shut down early on, he's not going to be a useless load for the entire rest of the game.  There's no last hitting, so no whining about people "stealing" your kills.  There's no cross team chat, just a set of preset emotes.  That kind of thing.  In general, I've found the community to be a lot better than other games in this genre, though that may just be because the population has been pretty small so far.

Oh, I didn't know.

Yeah this is a dumb waste of money.

Whichever asshole started this Founder's Pack nonsense for F2P games really needs to be punched in the dick. Was that Mechwarrior?

It hasn't been as negative as LoL in my experience, but there has been some.  But more to the point, I agree that the focus on objective team play actually does make it worse in some ways for casual play.  If you have one guy who refuses to do the objective, then you. are. fucked.  There is just no way to win 4v5 engagements a lot of the time.  If you've got one guy who just doesn't pay attention to what's going on the map and does whatever he wants, it makes the game incredibly frustrating, and at least in a game like LoL you can say to yourself "If we hold this together long enougha nd I farm enough gold, maybe I can carry us out of this mess."  Nope, in HotS you just lose and basically no amount of individual skill or effort can make up for it.

I was trying to remember that myself, and I came to the same conclusion. MechWarrior is the first one I can remember, at some point in early 2012. But Kickstarter was already a thing, so chances are MechWarrior was just elaborating on the formula somehow.

People say this. But no community is as bad as high school and middle school. And those are nothing but shitty games designed by bureaucrats.

Also, Counterstrike is poisonous in a way LoL can never be. Maybe not anymore, but ugh. Also, DOTA2 and that other shit (HoN) got all the REAL buttheads. LoL is just tryhard morons.

It's safe to blame Korea. I'm sure they're the first. Maple Story or some shit. Who knows.

As bad as LoL was, it took a while for me to see the real assholes. HoN was full of shitheads from the off.

I knew HoN was bad when some youtube video game news guy said that he played HoN but wouldn't play with viewers unless their elo was "above 1350" or some nonsense.  Most LoL pros that came from that scene said BM and trolling were just part of it and the worst of LoL doesn't even approach it.

I may try this if the games are short enough.  One aspect that has kept me from getting back into LoL or even getting serious about DOTA2 are the game lengths. 

Average game length is about 18 to 23 minutes, as a rough estimate.

Star Trek Online in 2010 and Lord of the Rings before that. Lifetime subs were called founders, IIRC.

HOTS is fun for me because of the Co-Op mode. I couldn't stand LOL or DOTA because I couldn't just veg into the game. I had to be up on the strats, the counters, as twitchy and edgy as a kid half my age, amped up on caffeine and with 16-20 more hours in a day to blow on practicing than I have.  Don't play to that level and you get abused.

Fuck that noise.

I'll probably never play a vs. human match in HOTS and continue to have a good time. I dropped cash on the "founder" pack back at Christmas when it was in alpha and half the price that it is now. No regrets.  I'll farm up gold for the characters I want in time, maybe blow some bucks on skins if I feel like it.

As I said before, if this is what Hearthstone players see in that game over M:TG then I get why they play it. This is more fun if you're only casually into the game type.

Agreed - I bought the starter pack in alpha and now have a full set of heroes (the level 5 reward per char is useful), lashed out a bit of cash on a few characters I found myself enjoying from the rotation and purchased Jaina and Thrall. Trying not to spend on skins is hard (bought Pyjamatha" as I love playing him and the skin is too cute) and I'm saving up for the piggy bank mount... no idea why :D

The game is just lighthearted good fun compared to other mobas - I really enjoy this and Smite over LoL Dota2 and Hon

CS isn't that bad anymore unless you are really crap and get ranked with the 12 year olds, or play the casual modes. But why would you do that?

You get the odd crap game but most of mine have been pretty good. I do play with friends half the time, which makes it even better.

The pricing of HotS is stupidly high, both in gold and money. I've gotten almost every hero to level 5 (barring 2) and I only have had enough money to purchase 6 heroes I actually wanted. That's not enough to play ranked, which requires 10.

The game is fun as long as no-one on your team is incompetent. There are some balance issues, but they are gradually getting resolved (last patch removed the Resurgence talent, which was great).

I've learned to only play assassins where-ever possible in pub games, because most bad players play assassins. There are few things more frustrating than your opponents continually escaping on ≤10% HP. A team that doesn't have the aggression to capitalise on their opponents mistakes will have major issues making a comeback if they lose the lead.

Yeah, the pricing is really what is going to turn me away the most.  I was sure that the free hero rotation would count towards your 10 for draft, but since it does not, I found my will to play drop off dramatically.  There is some fun to be had in this game, but it seems like you are going to have to drop cash if you really want to have access to more than the cheapest heroes.

Not true at all.  I own several of the most expensive heroes and haven't spent a penny while playing rather casually.  You just have to be patient and save for those heroes that you really want to play.  By the time you've mastered playing your shiny new hero, you'll have enough to buy another. 

Funny side note: I group with a guy named Malakili in HotS.  I thought it was you until he told me he had never heard of f13.

Hah.  That's funny I don't use that name on battle.net. I think my info is in the Diablo 3 forum if you want to play.

Anyway, part of my problem is that I don't do daily quests, I guess.  My gold income would probably be a lot higher if I actively tried to finish those.

I really like this game, especially the fast pace and short games.  Compared to LoL (where I'm Gold III), there are less games where I feel like we're so far behind that we can't do anything, although it is frustrating to go back to playing with people who won't communicate and don't have any idea what to do. 

The gold income is frustratingly low. If you only do your daily quests and win half the time, you'll earn an average of 250 gold a day.  That gets you the cheapest 2000 gold heroes at a rate of just under one a week, which seems reasonable, but it would take a month to get a 7000 gold hero and even longer for the more expensive tiers.  I understand that games like this are intended to be played for a long time, maybe years, and that it wouldn't be fun to be able to buy everything right away, but a month is  long time to play every single day.  They could double gold income and players would still be tempted to spend money to skip the grind.

Yeah, what could possibly be fun about having access to all the heroes?  :oh_i_see:

I would have preferred a DOTA2 approach.  Cosmetics for cash, all heroes/champs/gods/whatever else available.   Ohh well. 

I don't like the LoL approach.  It makes low level play stagnant and repetitive.  You get to play unimaginative champs with unimaginative kits/visuals repeatedly to unlock something at a glacial pace.

I take your point, but I do think part of the (maybe peverse) fun of f2p games is having a goal, saving up for it, and getting it.   

That's what skins and such are for.

I just can't relate to this.

It's an extra 200-800 gold per day.  If you play every 3rd day, you can do the dailies for the last 3 days and many overlap.  The game really rewards casual play in this way.

The thing is, I don't want those random daily quests to determine how or what I play.  If I want to play Hero X, and the daily quest doesn't reward me for playing Hero X, I'm just not doing the daily.  I've had the same 3 dailies in my log for over a month now.

So spend cash or stop playing?

"Gold is too slow to buy heroes, but I don't want to do the method to obtain gold. Just give me what I want."
 :oh_i_see:

Not the game for you.

No shit.  That's been the point all along.  Despite the fact that the game does a number of things well and the gameplay has gone from bland to kind of fun over the course of 2014, the pricing model makes the game not really for me.

That's why some of us want the DOTA model.  If I could play all the heroes, I'd probably get into the game and buy a skin or two here or there, the way I did in that game.  With this model they pretty much ensure that I will never get invested enough to want to give them money. 

If there's one thing ATVI does well, it's establish cash models to suck in people.

That sounds like a shit way for a company to stay in business if you ask me.

I think it's important to distinguish between "the thing that keeps people playing the game every day" and "fun". They can absolutely be related, but many a Skinner box is really just a Skinner box.

I think there's plenty of people that equate fun with having things to do in the game daily.

But... playing the game is the thing to do.  Having to play 2 Warcraft Heroes to earn 300 gold in the game is a homework assignment.

I see it as an opportunity to try new heroes.  Potato Potah-to.

If you want to try new heroes, just...try new heroes?

I like unlocking things. When I run out of things to unlock I'm going to get bored.

I think playing on the impatience of people is a fine strategy for money, so long as the hill isn't too steep. Where that line falls is debatable.

We don't have to like the same things.

I like the incentive to play heroes I may have set aside.  Sometimes I forget that I liked them.  Other times I realize that my playstyle has changed and they're a better fit.  I also like getting extra gold to buy more heroes.

We don't have to like the same things, I'm just saying that the things you guys like, and the developers are now embracing, are ruining gaming (for me).  :why_so_serious:

So if I play this without friends I get randomly assigned 1 or 2 other folks?  No solo play correct?

You can play practice mode, which gives you AI allies and opponents.

The way SMITE handles it is a nice compromise between DOTA2 and LoL/HotS; you can grind with in-game currency to unlock heroes, pay MTX for individuals, or a one time fee of $30 for all heroes current and future.

There's also co-op, i.e. human allies vs AI opponents.

That seems low to me.  I spent all my gold about a week ago and am already back up to 4k without any level 5 bonus or anything.

See, this I can get behind.  I could even live with paying a bit more than that for something like Heroes if it was a one off.  Then I can just immediately stop caring about the economics of the game and just play.

Right. I don't mind paying for content, but I detest MTX and don't really like grind-to-unlock f2p shit either. Let me pay a box price or the equivalent, and keep the rest for cosmetics.

I'd love that system.  Sadly, Blizzard likes money... A LOT.

Yes but it used to not be this way. Before I felt like Blizzard's attitude towards money was "if we build great games the money will come" -- and it did. However now that the golden egg laying goose is dying (aka WoW) and their replacement goose cancelled, I feel like they are in panic mode, with Storm's store and pricing structure a reflection of that.

As one example of how I feel Blizzard has lost it's way is with this Founder's pack they are promoting, which is just the Battle Bundle they've had in the store for a few months now. At the bottom of the Founder's Pack Web page (https://us.battle.net/shop/en/product/heroes-of-the-storm-founders-pack) they state:
Even though the 3 heroes in the pack have been in many other bundles before this (which often also confusingly overlap with other bundles) and many if not most players already have at least one of these 3 heroes, if you want to get the effectively exclusive Golden cyber wolf mount (which is just a palette swap and not even a new model) you have to essentially rebuy those heroes (and skins if you have those too).

Gazillion does a similar thing with some of the stuff they sell for Marvel Heroes 2015 but they are a small developer and I'm willing to cut them some slack so that sort of thing bothers me less than when a company like Blizzard does this sort of thing.

Now contrast this with Hi-Rez Studios, another small developer and the makers of SMITE. With their above mentioned Ultimate God pack*, if you already own some of the gods when you buy the pack, you get a refund in favor (http://hi-rez.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/476/~/smite%3A-ultimate-god-pack---faq) (the "soft" currency of the game). So they don't try to screw you over like what Blizzard is doing.

* Which in my opinion is actually way too cheap. Not only is the price per god too low at less than $1 per god but it includes all future gods as well. But I understand they are against some stiff competition and are trying to build up a critical base of players so that the game can thrive.

They need to, because their spigots are starting to turn off if they don't come up with ways to keep the recurring income rolling in.

This is pretty much what I have been doing a bunch of. It lets you get a feel for how the maps play pretty well and unlock your extra heroics/talents without a lot of team drama of NOOB why U no max level???!!!!!

It is, esp. if you're already in the alpha/beta/whatever its called.  There's another pack sold in game thats on sale now for the same price and you get way more heroes (8), skins (4) and mounts (2).  I suppose the draw of the founder's pack is the beta access for those who don't have it but if you're already playing its not worth it as there's better options...like not playing. :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, there's three main bundles in the game right now.  One is $40 for like 8 heroes, 4 skins, 2 mounts.  One is like $5 for three heroes and one mount.  One is like $40 for three heroes, three skins, and one mount.  And the one which they chose to staple to their buy in package is obviously the most expensive, worst deal in the game.  And by the way, Raynor is in both of the three hero packs, and you don't get any kind of discount if you buy him twice.

On the up side, they have started giving away keys. (http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/forum/topic/15700617048#1)  If people are interested but haven't gained access, there's a bunch more sites running contests and giveaways for keys and things.  Like half the channels on Twitch are giving away keys now, for example.

Thrall is more than slightly OP... the guy just keeps on swinging and hitting hard.

Ironic that he has 2H windfury - time for a nerf

I don't find this to be the case when I play against Thrall in quick matches.  He really doesn't concern me, especially when I play a hero with a stun.  

He strikes me as kind of similar to Illidan, where in certain situations, as long as he can keep attacking, you just can't deal with him.  Like, if you're 1v1 in the middle of the forest, he's going to kill you and walk away with more HP than he had going in.  But if you can stop him from attacking he's in serious trouble, and with no gap closer or escape his only way to engage in a teamfight is to just walk up.

Agreed - sadly I had a Jaina run up to me to attack, WF -> Wolves -> lightning and chased her down. Too stupid to attack at range which I'm seeing a lot of 1v1. Group it's a run in and out deal because if you stand still you are toast.

I see a lot of complaining about Thrall, but very little complaining about Tychus. Thrall has the issues mentioned above - in particular he has trouble escaping and chasing due to not having a gap closer.

Tychus, on the other hand, is an amazingly well-rounded assassin hero with an excellent toolkit, great talents and fantastic stats (damage/health).

As mentioned above, standing still in this game will toast you. Tychus can deal out excellent single target and moderate AoE damage while remaining fully mobile and having access to all his abilities and talents. Furthermore, he does good single target damage without using Overkill and when utilising his ult can once again deal out significant single target damage at considerable range (and moderate AoE).

In addition, he has access to relentless (50% reduction in disable duration), first aid (33% HoT) and stone skin (33% shield), giving him fantastic survivability - far beyond that of any other assassin except Zeratul.

Furthermore, he has (arguably) the best creep clear in the game, able to wipe out any number of minions in a large AoE with a single, low-cooldown ability. Furthermore, that ability serves as an interrupt when used in teamfights, and is able to cancel all channeled abilities including heroics.

Finally, he has a gap closer / escape ability in the form of a dash, that conveniently also sets his basic attack speed to 4 attacks/second upon use (his damage is much lower though to account for his fast attack speed).

Oh, and his ult gives him a large temporary health boost, has excellent range and extremely high damage (mentioned above).


Tychus is the whole package.  :heart:


Cons? He only has one ult. I've never even chosen the second one.

The three broken heroes that I see are: Tychus, Stitches, and Brightwing.

Stitches is a great tank with decent damage.  Better damage than about any other warrior hero with tank hp.  Hit ult removes a player from a team fight.

Brightwing has great sustain, mobility, and polymorph.  With rewind, she can essentially remove two players from a team fight for a couple seconds. 

Stitches + Brightwing together = win most of the time.

To my mind, the best trait Stiches possess is his ability to change enemy positioning and heavy penalise enemy mistakes via his pudge hook. Brightwing has global presence via her teleport.

I think those two facts are major contributing factors to those hero's top tier status. Global presence is what keeps Falstad viable, as well.

That's in addition to the other points you've mentioned. Still, I rarely here anyone complain about brightwing or tychus - but often about nova, or thrall.

Edit:
Tonight's 11pm B.Net service window reminds me why I quit playing WoW. I work with enterprise services that have tens of millions of users, yet no downtime. Why does battle.net get taken offline so often?

Falstad, in the hands of a good player, is frightening.  Mobility and some of the best dps burst in game.  You just need to pull off his combo when traited properly and he can 100-0 anything but a tank. 

People that complain about Nova haven't figured out the game flow yet.  You don't travel alone on the map unless your a hero with an escape.  I play Tassadar as my main primarily because he's the counter to stealth.  Great visibility and the bubble for protection.   

Yeah, I can't see Nova as anything but fairly weak. She's got to stay hidden because she's so fragile.  Stealth is great for teams that work together but that's no good in a PUG.

I play Sonya primarily since I refuse to compete. She's been great on the PVE side of things, despite starting a bit weaker than other warriors I've played.

I generally see her as the opposite: useful for picking off people who wander off, so super lethal in pubs or versus newbies, but pretty much useless in any kind of coordinated play.

What puzzles me is Brightwing.  I keep hearing about how OP Brightwing-Stitches-Tychus is, and...  Well, Stitches I can kind of see, given how up and down Pudge has been in Dota, and Tychus has been top tier for months, but Brightwing?  The highest winrate of any hero according to HotsLogs, but I always feel so ineffectual on her.  I don't lose more often, as far as I can tell, but when we win it's not like I ever go "thank God I was there or we would surely have lost XYZ fight." She can teleport around the map and when she arives... do pretty much jack all.  Her Q is OK, but hard to aim and unreliable for anything other than sieging.  Her Polymorph is nice when it's talented, but when it's untalented (which it is for like 75% of the game usually) it doesn't slow or damage or anything, I keep wishing for a stun or something.  And I have no idea how effective her E is, I just cast it on cooldown in every fight and I have no idea if it works or how much it helps or anything.  Her passive heal is nice, but it's so slow that outside of laning I'd rather have almost any other healer in the game.  And her ults are really situational at best.  Blink Heal is a short range teleport and a heal so weak I almost always just use the charges for positioning.  Emerald Wind forces you to walk in to the middle of the enemy team if you want to use it offensively, and even then it's just an AoE displace with some mediocre damage.  I guess she must be powerful but I have no idea why, outside of Polymorph being nice.

1. She can appear anywhere on the map to heal someone.
2. Her healing is pretty passive and requires no action but proximity.
3. Flash heal adds to healing AND mobility.
4. She can polymorph one target, hit rewind, and polymorph a second.  That's 2 people out of a teamfight in about 2s.  
5. Her shield is a speed boost as well.  It's a great saver in a pinch.

Her whole kit is solid with no real holes and she's a bitch to catch when escaping.

That's a disgusting kit on a support. It's like a Wisp/Lulu/Zilean/Soraka/Karma baby.  Just give her some sort of hook and call it a day.

What's funny is that she's hardly OP at all compared to Stitches.

Don't underestimate the passive healing. It means even shit players end up contributing, and as an AoE heal it is phenomenal during pushes (as it heals creeps and mercs).

Polymorph may not feel like much, but in a game so heavily reliant on heroes doing things a 2 sec disable is amazing. Kerrigan, Thrall and Illidan, for example, all rely on dealing damage to increase their health or effective health.

Ooh, does it?  I was not aware, tooltip just mentions heroes.  That is pretty vicious, then.


Maybe my issue is just that most of the games I've played with her have been bot matches.  I usually play bots until I feel like I "get" a hero but that doesn't give you much experience with how the hero feels when you're on the defensive.

An interesting article about MOBAs with some reference to HotS (http://www.pcgamer.com/three-lane-highway-why-dota-2-might-not-be-a-moba/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0)

This quote may encapsulate the feelings of many...

My problem, from a gameplay standpoint, is that it kind of splits the difference awkwardly, as I have said.  It clearly wants to be that "shallow end," but in practice the way they've streamlined things like experience points and objectives actually means you are possibly even more reliant on your team for your fun.  So you end up in a similar position with regard to it being fun or dreadful as all the other MOBAs.  The only advantage is that you are only suffering for 15-20 minutes if you get into one of those awful games.

I could get behind the idea of a MOBA aiming at streamlined gameplay and 20 minute games, but if I'm ultimately running into the same frustrations as the others I don't see the point.

The more that I play, the more I understand your point.  Large differences in skill and frequent AFK players are making the "team" aspects a challenge.  If I can find 4 friends to group with regularly, I could see this as being my game of choice for a few months.  Playing solo seems to be a huge crapshoot in terms of team quality.  You can have an amazing team one game and two AFK players the next. 

The rumor mill churns with word that Heroes isn't getting the support it needs to stay afloat. Depending on how the beta goes, they may scrap/drawing-board the thing until they work out some of the issues.

I want to enjoy this as much as I enjoy LoL, but I think it's almost too simple for my taste. While I enjoy not having to worry about last-hitting mobs, I miss being able to purchase items and tune my character in different ways.

Still like it over LoL. Still playing PvE.  Fuck relying on matchmaking to not screw me when going against other players. WoT taught me that and I'm done with it.

This is pretty much me exactly.  If we ever get enough F13 presence to start rolling as 5-mans I'd love to give it a shot, but the matchmaking in this game is ridiculous, and it's gotten worse with the founders pack.  I am constantly getting matched with people playing Lurkablo on the Golden Cyberwolf mount which always means someone who will march up to the enemy towers, right click on them, and then die.  At least in co-op I can still win, "quick match" is just infuriating.  Maybe ranked is better, given the restrictions to enter, I haven't checked, but every night I have a stream on in the background of pro players and it LOOKS like they're going in as premade groups of 5 and still being matched up with random pub newbies, so I'm not super eager to dip my toe in to that pool.

My Battle.net name is Karp#1741

Feel free to add me or send invites if you see me on.  I'm competent, but no 19 year old on crack.

Barring one absolute crushing on the golem map (they pushed core with the first golem, my team had no clue how to play or lane) it hasn't been too bad. I guess I'm out of the quick play retard bracket. I had a very nice high-level game where I got put into a Chinese 4-man and it was all very professional. No text communication but teamwork was strong and the quality of play was excellent. The enemy team was also on the ball and it was a fantastic game despite the (unfortunate) loss.

I've probably played 30-40 games now, winning around 2 out of 3 overall, and I feel like the matchmaker is starting to give me less total idiots.  It can be frustrating even with competent players, because the difficult strategic decisions in this game come very early (how many players to push and how many to go for objectives, etc., which can be different on different maps) but nothing you do is going to work unless everyone is committed.

My greatest frustrations are tanks that won't initiate and dps that run away too soon.  Team fights are an all-in proposition.  If you flinch, it is going to cost you the fight.

Ok, I think I added you.  Apparently I'm Kail#1457

I've been playing this a lot in the last week due to my Brother in Law wanting to wait a while before we start season 5 in LOL. (He has a newborn and needs to practice and can't really play for 40-60m chunks)

It's actually kind of fun. I enjoy it specifically for the quick games. I've been playing Abathur for a few days, kind of fun.  While this game is relatively simple, a few tweaks on how you gain experience could make it a fun game. One tweak I would do is increase/decrease the amount of xp your team gets depending on the amount of people in the area. It would allow for my diversity in your tactics instead of constantly striving to be a 5v5 game.

Got a source for that? It seems to be going ok, I can get into a game within 3 minutes.

Yeah, I haven't seen that any where. Blizzard wouldn't start taking money for something like this and dump it.

There's this "insider":

http://firstadopter.tumblr.com/post/109489028909/exclusive-activision-blizzard-insider-says

Well one of those things would be blatantly obvious because Blizzard would release the numbers about Hearthstone. They have no reason to hide those facts from investors. Quite the opposite.

I also don't believe the art assets thing. Mostly because my friend who moved from Blizzard to another company was an art guy, and that's not the impression I got. If anything they were trying to rejigger the art departments on the game.

I believe the art asset thing. I know WoW had issues creating assets fast enough. Many of the big video game companies have had offices/studios in China making art assets for some time now.

Unapproved and anonymous sources are ALWAYS the best ones!


Which Blizzard? The one Pardo was a part of or the one he "left" and all the DudeBros are running?

Undoubtedly. They were trying to move him from an area he liked to an area he hated, so it's not out of the realm. Still, they took longer than ever to get this out. You'd think they'd have figured out, OH YEAH ART! by now.

I've been playing this a bit more and its starting to grow on me.  I'm only doing co-op right now because I'm fairly new to MOBAs and don't want to go straight into the deep end against other players.  BNet ID is Ginaz1406 if anyone wants to play some games against the AI.

Got into the beta last week and HO LEE FUK this game is exactly as balanced as I thought a blizzard pvp game would be.

Stitches, Thrall, Tychus, and Brightwing are the biggest culprits.  I'm surprised that there aren't hero bans in Ranked.  That would fix a lot.

Odd, I don't find Thrall to be a problem outside his really impactful ults.

People are already freaking out over the requirement that you own ten heroes to play ranked.  If we added two bans per team, they'd have to increase that number to fourteen, and I'm pretty sure that would open a rift in space and time allowing the demon army to enter our world.

I'm not sure exactly how "serious" ranked is anyway right now.  Anecdotal evidence and all that, but from the numbers I've seen quoted you can get rank 1 with a 50% win rate, it just takes a while, so achieving max rank is basically matchmaker RNG.  The idea that they're throwing premades in the same pool as solo queue kind of kills it anyway. I suspect they're planning on making their upcoming "Team League" their SRS BZNS mode.  But who knows at this point.

Lost Vikings supposed to come out tomorrow, looking forward to that.

Ranked is better quality play than Quick matches in general.  The problem is that you always see the same 10-12 heroes every match.  That's what needs to be addressed.  There are obvious play choices in the current meta. 

Although honestly even games like lol with a ton of champions still kinda tends towards a very small subset being used in ranked games I think that is likely a combination of challenges of balancing a lot of heroes leads to outliers and people being sheep if they see something work then it gets hardened into do this or you are not playing correctly which lessens odd ball team comps.

Still, having played LoL and DotA (the first) as well as HotS; I feel that in HotS those good heroes are just so much better - and without items, gankers etc there is no reason to pick substandard heroes.

At least the patch changes look good, haven't tested them all yet.  Arthas loses envenom, Brightwing gets a longer cooldown on her teleport, Tychus' odin got completely revamped (now it's just a damage boost, not a survivability one), Stitches got gorge nerfed by 50% and a minor cooldown increase on his hook.  Stitches might still be a bit iffy, but on paper at least the changes look good without completely gutting the characters.

Chen looks like he got nerfed kind of bad, though, not sure if I agree with that.  Before, he was kind of useless for anything but soaking damage until he got combination attack, at which point he was a beast.  So, they nerfed combination attack but didn't buff his early game.  Pressure point no longer roots (just slows), chug is moved way the hell out to level 16, ugh.  I haven't played him yet but it doesn't look good to me.

Thrall was barely tickled, Tyrael got nerfed slightly looks like, Raynor's remake removed everything I liked about the character, Murky was hit pretty bad (I guess he was secretly OP?  Or something?).

Lost vikings are weird to play as, so far.  They remind me a lot of Meepo from Dota, but they don't have any basic abilities unless you talent them.  Very micro heavy, I think they'll probably be too tricky for me to keep track of in a real game, but still fun for casual play.

Buddy picked this up so of course I had to.   :oh_i_see:

I used my ill gotten gold to get Tychus.  He's now level 5.  I'm getting a little bored with just playing Tychus.  Do I want to focus on one champ or can I play many?  Seems like most of the abilities are unlocked by 5, so it's just more gold for taking him higher (or am I grossly missing something)?

Gold, portraits and more gold. The rewards are on the player info screen where you can see the level of each of your champs.

I like playing a variety, but I don't compete or PVP so my playstyle doesn't demand laser focus and play decisions as a matter of reflex.

I'd encourage you to buy a tank and a support at the very least to learn their play and roles.  I'd also find out which heroes give you the most trouble in battles and learn to play them during the weeks that they're free. Learning the weaknesses/strengths will help you beat them in the future.

I tend to play all of the free weekly heroes to level 5 for the gold and to learn how they play.  It helps me decide who to buy next. 

To those that are new, see above.  I'm happy to help or join you for Coop or Quick matches.  Played a bit with Kail yesterday and it was pretty fun.  I just need to control my frustration sometimes.

My problem as well.

Stay Zen.

In a pvp game?  UNPOSSIBLE!

Frustration is so ingrained in MOBA, I treat it like a feature.

Moderate highs, lows like you'll never believe.  The gaming equivalent of huffing paint or doing krokodil.

I just really can't stand the miserable games you can have in MOBAs at this time.  You feel rotten and tainted for days.

There's nothing I love more than people playing competitive games when they're not skilled enough to truly compete and then getting their shit kicked in and fucking raging.

If you're not good at losing, stop playing competitive games. Even if you like them.

Losing isn't hard.  Losing to shitty players isn't even hard.  You'll eventually get to play with people as crappy as you are.

Dealing with massive stupidity, ignorance, teen/fat/fedora rage, and verbal abuse can get tiring. Much easier just to shoot things.

That's what I'm talking about, you gotta be able to tune that shit out to play in any competitive field. You don't think NFL players are as much a pack of immature shitheels as fat white kids behind their box with a PCMR sticker on it? Comeon now.

No, it really does rise to a particularly "special" level in anonymous random matchmaking kind of settings. I've never seen anything like behavior as bad as it gets in MOBAs in face to face settings. Even the occasional bad egg in MTGO or whatever isn't the same kind of thing as getting some total shitheel on your team.

Football players can retaliate by jacking the shit out of smack talkers. There is no "Bitchslap a Fuckface" button in my MOBAs.

(http://i.stack.imgur.com/a8TpH.png)

I've won games like that. Play super aggressive, roaming hanks, share ward costs. Fucking intense.

Doesn't work if people start throwing tantrums though. (I've seen winning games with 4 carries turn to losses when the fifth player decided to start intentionally feeding to "teach us a lesson").

This.... this I can relate to.

For me, I don't rage at losing but it is supremely frustrating to the point of anger when I'm locked into a 20-45min game where one or more teammates are just fucking around, trying weird builds or blatantly trolling.  Losing is one thing but when your own team is wasting your goddamn time with no way to retaliate without getting yourself penalized is bullshit.

That's the inherent issue with playing competitive games with random people, and why I usually end up back in 1v1 PvP games in the end. 

So I ended up trading gold for The Lost Vikings. A lot of fun even though it takes a lot of effort to not run them as a group. As 3 solos they can be nasty. As a group you can wreck opposing player's paths. The animations and sound effects are great and I have only tried one ult on my way to level 5 because... viking warship brings a smile to my face. Plus it's nasty if the RNG slaps another hero multiple times.

I haven't gone back to LoL in 3 months and HotS and Smite are definitely my go-to Mobas now.

This is also me.  Got stomped?  Ok, bad matchup, shit happens.  Close game, win?  Ideal.  Close game, lose?  Almost ideal.  4v5 or 3v5 due to team mates catching butterflies?  That shits annoying.

People grabbing merc camps or laning when there is a team fight is my #1 rage inducer.  If we lose to a better team/team comp, that's all good.  Losing because the team was doing useless shit, not good.  When I do more hero damage playing ETC than the Valla and Jaina on my team, that will also make me rage. 

Have I mentioned that I hate people?

Had a game where I beat out Valla and Kaina while playing Chen :-)

And then I had a game where one of our players (Zagara) never showed up to teamfights (so every fight was 4v5 or worse). He also never actually managed to push the lane he was camping either.

I keep laughing when people tell me I'm AFKing on Abathur... stats at the end of the game show otherwise.

Sadly, Abathur might as well AFK.  He's a liability in the current meta.  Great lane pusher, but terrible in team fights.

I dread seeing an Abathur on my team.  Maybe some folks can do something with him, but I've yet to see anyone do anything with him.

He USED to be pretty decent, before they nerfed his ult.  It used to give him a slightly weaker version of the character he was cloning (no talents) but they still had their ult and didn't give any XP if you killed them.  If you think Tychus is tough, going up against double Odins was nightmare fuel.  This was slightly balanced out by the fact that your ult wasn't always up and when it was down, your team was always going to be 4v5 with some minor pew-pewing from symbiote.  But all the time he was supporting his team with symbiote, he's ALSO pushing his lane with locusts.

Then they nerfed the clone so it now gives XP when it dies and doesn't have an ult, so you're always better off with a fifth player than an Abathur clone.  He's allegedly got the worst winrate in the game now (with Chen in close second).  He's still fun to play in co-op, but your team needs to know how to play with him, and as Setana points out, lots of people have no idea how he works.

I've been playing Azmodan with a Q farm build. So much fun hitting people for 1200 AOE damagef late game.

Abarthur used to be so much fun until they removed the Ult from his Ult. Now he's just "meh" and a failed concept that was good. Which is a shame as a mate and I would play, him on stitches or Diablo and me running piggyback. The combo was just rude.

I've been playing a bit of Diablo recently, great fun if you catch someone out of position and can knock them back but against experienced players, Stitches is a much better bet which is a shame as I'd talent into fire and health from souls and flame breath for giggles.

Been playing Diablo myself.  I'd have to say that his charge is fantastically designed and implemented - if you are close it knocks further away (synergizes nicely with his sunset flip), if you are further away charges to and stuns, allowing you to sunset flip back to your teammates.

That said, being an initiator in a PUG is relatively pointless.  Valla and Nova behind me, initiate on the healer, flip it over my head, kick back to them.... they run, because I have no fucking idea why, scary healer I guess.  I get mauled and dead, enemy team catches up with both of them and they get mauled and dead.

This. 

I love playing tanks.  Muradin and ETC are my favorites.  It's IMPOSSIBLE to carry poor/timid dps players in this game and it causes me no end of rage.  People don't get the concept that if their assassins are focused on the tank, then they have the unlimited ability to do free damage.  Why is this concept so hard to grasp?

A lack of proper aggression is very frustrating. When your team refuses to eliminate solo enemy pushers and does not chase down fleeing heroes, it's easy for the enemy to quickly gain a large exp lead.

Especially when you fall behind, you have to start taking out enemy heroes to recover the exp lead or you will be at a significant disadvantage in team fights.

Because most people are fucking terrible at games at all levels. I know I suck and yet I'm better than at least 50% of players. 

Remember that after 10 years and countless add-ons that scream at you "don't stand in the fire" kills most of Blizzards players.

Here's something funny I didn't realize about Sgt Hammer until today (cause she's free and I finally played her). First time out with her, I accidentally left it in "Quick Play" instead of switching to co-op to get a feel for her.  Start getting my ass handed to me because these are real people and she is SLOOOOOWWWW and real people don't stay in range of your artillery.  Our team is getting worked pretty hard early on, but them we make a bit of a come back and we last all the way to level 20.  I fire the big gun down the middle lane and hit multiple people on the other team.  Not a huge game-changing moment, but wow, what a game-changing moment.  The trajectory of the bullet happened to go through the outer keep. 

I see this blue line on the minimap and a bullet flying by occasionally.  It finally dawns on me that that is MY bullet, so I read the ult text again and start laughing - the ult upgrade causes it to "orbit" the map every five seconds.  Shortly thereafter the keep falls.  I say the buddy I'm playing with and I say, "watch this" - and fire the bullet clear across the map through their core, when the bullet arrives it does 800ish damage.  They are now on a countdown to losing, but I don't think they ever really understood why (I know I wouldn't have).

Team was clearly better than us, but just didn't push.  So they lost.  Certainly a very edge-case way of winning and no recipe for success, but something to keep in mind if you are playing with/against Sgt Hammer and the game is going very long.

Kinda surprised that worked, honestly.  I've heard that tactic described before and the counterargument is always "it damages the core shields, but won't damage fast enough take down the core itself unless you're also pushing".  And since it means you've somehow got to play Hammer without Napalm, I've never done it myself or even seen it.  Weird, I'll have to give it a shot.

It works later in the game when the damage outpaces the regen.  So it does eventually represent a clock, but right when you get it at level 20 it doesn't get through.

And napalm is amazing. Whenever I play Hammer I barely spend any time in seige mode - it's not worth it in team fights.

I was level 1 and clueless as to what I was doing, so factor that in.  And we did push - they screwed up, we got a merc camp and a few of us made it to the 1/3 health core and took it out.

I'm not saying it's a good strategy, just funny that something like this is in the game.  I liked it because it helped beat an over-confident team that was more focused on getting player kills than finishing the game.

It's actually hella cool and fairly amusing, and good work on the win. One of the things I love about HotS is the permanent ultimates. With Sgt Hammer, you'll find it's fantastic for taking out keeps but it won't break through the Core's shields until much later in the game.

I have a steady group of guys that play Quick matches almost every night.  If you want to join us, we could always use 1 or 2 more people. 

My Battle.net name is Karp#1741

In game: Karp

I have a beta code if anyone was wanting to play without paying $40 or whatever it is.  First one to send me a PM gets it.

Code is gone now.

I added you a couple of days ago. Sophismata #6396

I like how this game already has a competitive scene even though I'm pretty sure its in beta.

Why is this remarkable at all?  See also: DOTA 2.

Any of our Euro folks playing in the evenings?

Is the competitive scene the rough equivalent of these fine young lads?

(http://i.imgur.com/xDNO0a3.jpg)

Just got in the beta and I can say that schild's picture there isn't far off. It's like LOL with training wheels and padded corners.

It is better than it seems at first, IMO.  Where Dota and LoL smack you right off the bat with massive lists of a hundred champions and a thousand items, HotS is the opposite, restricting what you can do and use.  There is complexity there, but they don't let you see it at first.

That said, it's not going to appeal to EVERYONE or anything.  But I'd suggest waiting at least until you have a character to level 4 (when all the talents unlock) before you write it off for good.  A lot of the mechanics just didn't click for me until I played a few games and could see where certain tradeoffs were or how talents in general functioned.

You're wrong.  Very wrong.  

At the highest levels, this game is VERY competitive.  The matches become a frantic race for objectives and teamfighting.  You're always moving all over the map and one small positioning error will quickly snowball a match.  If you're very good at twitch, strategy, and positioning you'll find no shortage of competition in HotS.  The biggest issue the game currently faces is hero balance and a huge skill gap among the playerbase.  The current MM is poorly designed as well and often drops low skill players in with high skill players leading to massive frustration.  Since the game is all about team comp and cooperation, any deviation from team play will kill you.

I currently bounce between gold and platinum in MMR rating and find the level of competition to be quite stiff.  I definitely can't hang with the diamond/master players and realize this because they show up often in my matches when I've had a decent win streak.  

I'm not saying it's bad yet... it's just that the start out, the complexity is miles lower than LOL. It does seem to require being more mobile than LOL, with much less calcified meta/lane play. I must be much better at MOBA than I thought, though, because at the level I was playing last night, I was crushing actual people. Of course, I just hit level 4, so I'm sure there's much n00bness.

You know how WoT seems really simple on the surface but isn't?  That.  

It lacks all of the micromanaging that LoL does, but makes up for it with different maps, constantly changing objectives, and dedication to teamwork and communication.  HotS is more like MMO pvp than it is like a MOBA.

It seems a lot simpler because there are less mechanics to worry about - level, money and items are either not there or seem irrelevant. But as you play you realise all that complexity has been moved to map itself (and also levels end up being very relevant).

Teamwork and communication are key, mostly because the game has a large number of decision points that involve your team and not just your lane. The laning phase, if you even had one, is over in minutes and the game moves to map-wide plays like objectives, pushes and counters.

The problem is, if you are playing with randoms that the strategic depth is mostly or entirely lost and you hope you get a team just barely more with their shit together than the opposing team.  But we've gone over this before in this thread.

Absolutely agreed. I think we segued into this from a comment about competitive play, though.

Shoot me a tell if you see me on.  You get bonus xp for grouping with people on your friends list.

I was wrong on this, by the way. It only heals heroes. Don't know why I thought it used to heal creeps.

People are really really bad at this game. I just played 3 games in a row where the match didn't even really seem competitive. It took me a few games to realize that there is no laning phase as such, it's much more important to go after the camps/objectives (such as the doubloons on the pirate map) than to do anything with minions except defend if they get too close.

Yeah, it's a real issue. The game also heavily favours aggression, and oft times a team being slammed will just let enemy heroes walk all over the map, and consequently lose any real hope of catching up.

When you're on the back foot, wait for your opponents to get cocky and slam them - hit them hard and move on to objectives having turned a 5v5 into a 5v4 or 5v3. The even math in this game means pretty much any lone hero will melt under focus fire from 3-4 others.

The frustration I often feel playing HotS comes from being unable to carry a bad team when they refuse to pull their heads out of their asses. (Particularly now that games are all recorded and win rates are tracked).

I used to get frustrated by those players that sit and farm creeps all game. They seem to operate under the mistaken impression it will make them über, but none of the scaling damage talents are worth it except for (arguably) Azmodan's. Fortunately I don't see that too much anymore.

New post - new complaint.

Matchmaking. When you get given 4 wannabe assassins and are versing a lineup with 2 support you know that it's probably going to be a 2 - 30 game.

I was finally on the reverse side of that and it was hilarious. I was playing Raynor and I could faceroll the enemy team (walk right into their base "orb-walking" them). They'd have to run or die. My "passive" heal went off only once (maybe twice) that whole game.

Even when Diablo would lightning breath I could easily tank it and kill him thanks to Malf and Reghar's support.


I definitely prefer playing assassins and support in pubs because they usually are self-reliant enough to impact the battle and get away under their own power. Whereas playing a warrior half the time I engage, it seems my assassin teammates have decided to turn around and fuck off to fight lane creeps.

I won't play quick match solo for this reason.  The MM will put a 2 tank + 2 support group against a 4 assassin group often.  Team build matters.  A lot.

Keys gone.

I'll take one!

Sent.

I am most thankful.

Still have a key?

You are most welcome :)

Yes, and that's the last of them. Sent and done.

I have 4 keys, PM me for them. Keep in mind that I'm in an Aussie Timezone.

Lately my solo queues have been fairly horrifying. I seem to get matched with 3 idiots + 1 average player against a fairly average team, resulting in a very one-sided battle (where we lose). It didn't help that I had to was playing a warrior for many of those games.

It is still immensely frustrating to have a team that won't co-ordinate, help out other nearby heroes in distress or converge on key objectives. And then they turn into pussies after getting picked apart and the EXP gap becomes almost insurmountable.

I became one of those bad players I mentioned when I changed characters to Malfurion. Totally did not get the hang of support in the two games I played. SUCKED SO HARD. Dampened what scant enthusiasm I had for the game.

Malf is great, but takes some time to really get the hang of.  This is particularly the case in quick matches.  His silence ult can be deadly when coupled to a stun and can shut an entire team down for quite a while.  The fact that Malf can replenish mana with his D gives the team much better sustain in the early laning phase.

I'm really warming up to Malf as support but still prefer Brightwing or Tassadar.

My first Malf game was terrible. I kept mis-clicking my allies due to the confusing jumbles that were our fights and only healed a hero once that game. Kept the creeps alive though.

I didn't have much problem healing guys, it's just that most of what I did seemed to be ineffective at best. Especially when Novas are popping out of stealth to 2-hit fuckers to death.

Support isn't the same as healer.  Matter of fact, most of the supports in HotS are poor healers.  Malf helps with sustain.  His heals are pretty weak at best, but they can be enough to improve sustain.  If you want to make him a reasonable healer, you need to get the healing ult. 

Li li is a better healer, but still lacks spike healing.  Uther has decent spike healing, but can't sustain it.  Etc.

Nova can be a real problem in low tier play and have a huge impact on the game. It's really interesting because at high tiers she is one of the worst assassin heroes, unable to kill most heroes without backup and possessing neither disables nor mobility.

Ever since they nerfed her armour piercing shots I've found her to be even less of a threat, but a lot of bad players will wander around on 1/4 to 3/4 health farming and/or never attack Nova while she's running around cloaked.

Malf's uses sustained healing, so he is weak to burst damage (which Nova provides in spades). You really need your team to have it together for the HoT's to work against heavy burst - this means people trying to stay alive in fights and not blindly relying on you to keep them standing (which they ought to do anyway, but often don't).

This is a good point.  When team play gets better, some heroes become much less of a threat and others much more of a threat.  The game really builds on synergies between heroes rather than the strengths of a single hero.  Playing with a well coordinated team is a very different experience in HotS than playing solo queue quick matches.

3 Keys sent to Azuredream, Tannhauser and Hoth - I think I got the reply message right. Let me know if you didn't.

1 key left :)

They made murky (finally) free to play! He's pretty terrible. Needs a solid team - I've been able to make him work with assault egg, and placing the egg for vision during fights. However, a lot of players don't appreciate or understand it. They think it's better to hide the egg in a far corner if the map as if I'm playing my own mini game (separate from the actual game, boring, and ultimately ineffective).

Double support is seeing a lot of play, and for good reason. It's very strong. Blizzard will hopefully be able to mitigate it a tad.

Also, I'm still getting some of those frustrating solo match ups - warrior/specialist/3xassassin vs warrior/2xsupport/2xassassin, for example. On the flip side, overall matchmaking is a lot better. Sometimes I'll have to wait 6 minutes though and then get slotted into a low level game which is amusing but kinda stompy (and boring). The reason for this is Illidan, who is absolutely fantastic against bad players. They can't deal with him and he can actually carry.

4 more keys available. PM me.

Ditto on the 4 here.

Well, the release date for this thing got announced - June 2.  I've tried going back yet again, managed to save up enough gold to get enough Heroes to play in Hero League, and I would say my experience there has been really significantly better than it was in quick match. 

Can I easlily disable chat and never have to deal with MOBA players?

Yes, actually. A new feature is that at the beginning of every match there is a button that pops up in chat that says "Click here to disable team chat"  And opponent chat has never been enabled.

OK now THAT interests me.  The gameplay doesn't grab me though.

You have to think of this game as a hero brawler rather than a traditional MOBA.  If you enjoyed ARAM in LoL or PvP in WoW, then the playstyle will suit you. HotS is VERY team dependent.  If you play with friends, this is awesome.  In random PUGS, not so much.   

 :uhrr:

Is there something that you don't understand?  I'd be happy to explain.  I've played a lot of DOTA, LoL, SMITE, and HotS.  If you approach HotS in the same way as LoL or DOTA, you're doing it wrong.

I think his point is more along the lines of ARAM is the random solo queue for the lulz mode and combining that with a game that requires tons of teamwork leads to a kind of contradiction, which is pretty much the same contradiction a bunch of us identified in this thread from the beginning.  The game ranges from quite fun to a total trainwreck, and that variance is the main reason I don't play it a ton. But then, that's the same issue I have with other MOBA games, and Blizzard didn't resolve it with this take on the genre.

That makes a lot of sense and I would have agreed with most of that.  It certainly shows more effort than an emoticon. Appreciate the input.

For what it's worth; As you get to higher levels in Hero League, the game gets increasingly more fun.  Playing with people that understand objectives and the current metas helps a ton. I'm guessing that's where I'll spend the majority of my time in this game.

Still only doing PVE when I play. Still haven't had the problems you guys do.  :awesome_for_real:

Open beta phase has begun.  Anyone can play now.

http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/

At some point a patch basically broke the game for me, I went from getting 30fps to literally 8 regardless of settings.

I wasn't particularly jazzed anyway but that's the end of that.

Weird, I'm getting 60-90fps with everything maxxed out.

Is any good? Are there quick sessions available? I can't really get into another one of these mobas that take 45 minutes or longer for a play session.

If you enjoy team fights, it's a fun game.  The typical game lasts 15-20 mins.  You can solo queue quick matches (you pick the hero you want to play) or hero league (each team drafts players).

I am having fun, but the matchmaker is pretty terribad.

After having played some hero league, quick match is literally unplayable for me. I can not fathom why you queue as a certain hero, some of the team compositions just can not win against the other team compositions.  This is somewhat true in other MOBAs when you aren't playing draft modes, but it is FAR worse in this one because you can just end up without one of the important pieces (like a support).  I've never though I'd actually find a mode that made me nostalgic for blind pick.  As Nebu said, the matchmaker is just terrible.

I don't know why I keep trying to like this thing.  Maybe I'm just enough of a Blizzard fan at heart to want this thing to be decent.  Hero league is tolerable, but I find myself drifting back to Counter Strike for my competitive gaming fix lately.

If you have a couple of friends that are similar in skill, the game is fun.  If you queue solo 99% of the time, then CS will probably be a better choice.

Solo play in this game makes me hate humanity even more than I normally do.

Given time, they'll probably implement the same things that LoL has done, like a smarter match-making tool that allows you to play the champ you want in the lane/role you want as well, and then form teams based around your choices.

For now, yeah, it's basically LoL v1.0 again  :why_so_serious:

Never played a moba before because I figured would suck at it. Downloaded HotS and enjoying training and versus AI mode. Have never lost a match. In training with 4 AIs on my side and 5 AIs on the other I generally can dominate the match. In AI mode with 4 real players on my side and 5 AIs on the other it appears to me the AIs play much better. I can't just dive in and get easy kills. Although winning the AI mode matches, they are much closer. Don't think I will play quick match mode because I would just be one of the bad players the good players on team hate.

Anyone here able to play The Lost Vikings? I used the try from the store and figured out playing it for real would be near impossible to me. Twice had another playing on team using them and they did well against the AIs.

TLV are a test for ADD.  If you can play them, you have it.  The rest of us find playing them a nightmare.  :why_so_serious:

Lost Vikings are a lot of fun as you can split them, scout, dive with 1, soak a lane etc. I tend to build based on active rather than passive skills and end up with carpel tunnel syndrome at the end but it's fun. The trick is working out whether you want to split or group.

I really like them, yeah.  They play really differently from the other heroes (a lot of the specialist heroes are unique like that).  They're a lot easier versus AI than humans because the AI doesn't prioritize them as well, each of the three vikings is pretty easy to take down if you focus them and they have pretty lousy escapes... but the AI doesn't pressure them any differently than a regular hero.  So against real people they're a lot trickier.

But if you play them right you can do just about anything.  They do great sustained damage, can solo merc camps and even bosses if you're high enough level, their ability to soak multiple lanes while ALSO capping map objectives is handy at times, and their boat ult is still decent post nerf (though their other one is garbage IMO).

They are the strongest hero in the game by far. This is just based on my play experience, but it's nice to know HotSLogs has them at a 60% win rate.

They completely fuck several underlying game mechanics, most grievously the exp distribution.

On the plus side, Kael is death walking to them once you get past the split lane soaking stage.

He's also instant death to Valla, Jaina, and any other squishy. 

Play the hell out of Kael now, he's crazy OP.  Even the ML players are getting sick of him.

I'm trying to give this a shot again.  Seems like the queue times are way better than last time I played (months and months ago).

Couple thoughts from <10 games:

1 - I really loathe daily quests.  I wish Blizzard would stop cramming them into every game.  Just let me play the heroes I want to play not the ones I just happened to roll quests for.

2 - There's too much progression.  Gating talents behind individual hero levels is just bad.  I don't know if the intention is to ease people into a hero or to get them to try a variety of builds, but I just don't like it.  I don't like feeling like I'm not on an even footing in a MOBA, let me learn what talents are good and bad by trying them.

So far I've been playing around with Valla, Jaina and Brightwing.  Brightwing is surprisingly fun, it's like playing Shen with a 45 second ult cooldown.  I just wait for group fights to start, TP in to unbalance the sides and throw down some healing/shields.  Playing support on low level solo Q though probably isn't the greatest idea ever.

I try to think of them as a way to play/practice heroes that I wouldn't otherwise play.  It has helped me better play against those heroes in hero league.

I do love me some 'Win 3' and 'Play 8' quests though.

They've changed it so that once you reach a certain account level, which I can't remember, you automatically unlock all talents for every hero.

I assume it's to learn the heroes, but I think it would work better in other games (where there's a more defined "standard" build) than in HotS.  Like in Dota 2, you've got pages and pages of items but you probably don't want to be buying, say, Scythe of Vyse on Sniper unless you really, really know what you're doing.  In HotS though the talents are all hero specific so there aren't any that are THAT bad of a choice (in theory, anyway).

If it were some kind of long slog I'd probably hate it, but the fact that it's like three or four matches means it's not a big deal to me.  Plus you get all talents unlocked on all characters once you hit player level 25 anyway.

This is one of the things that REALLY bugs me too.  I think I made a big stink about it some pages ago.  If this came went with the DOTA 2 F2P model, I'd actually probably forgive everything else about it. 

Started playing this a lot more recently. Mostly out of boredom of no WoW content, and I need my MOBA itch scratched. I'm burned out on LoL, and DOTA2 just seems too complicated. But I'm digging this simple = more fun vibe that Bliz has got. Sure, it's another level grind before I can play ranked stuffs, but that's the price one pays I guess.

For those that are playing ranked, you might care that they're removing the ability to do ranked matches in groups of three or four players. Single, duo, or five-man pre-mades can still queue.

If anyone wants to group up sometime, hit me up on Bnet. Luckton#1979

I like the changes to ranked, personally.  As someone who solo queues 99% of the time it's always maddening getting stuck as the fifth player with a four man pre-made.  Maybe now I'll finish my qualifiers someday :P

If you're looking to get in to ranked, you should probably give Nebu a poke, he's still around occasionally I think (unless D3 has eaten him).  I'll be gone next week but probably be back after that if you want someone to look good in comparison to.

Pretty pumped for Rexar next week, too.

Based on the promo vid they put out today, Rexxar seems like it's more "I'm playing Misha with Rexxar as my pet" than the other way around. I assume he'll have some talents that actually affect his own DPS or something, but if you kill his pet, you basically removed two (three he if chose Bestial Wrath) abilites for him to use for a time.

I am VERY excited about the changes to hero league and will be playing HotS a ton when the changes go live.

If anyone has questions or wants to join me for quick matches, I'm neboo in the game (neboo 1240 on battle.net).

As long as Rexxar has decent right click damage himself, it could still work, I think.  Like a less twiggy version of the Vikings.  I'm still not sure how much losing Misha hurts him (what's Misha's respawn time like, does she give XP, that kind of thing) but you can do a lot with two collision boxes and two autoattacks on the field.  A lot of the stuff I liked about Vikings that has been patched out (like being able to solo hard merc camps or boss mobs easily) looks like Rexxar might be able to do, and without having to spend most of the game sitting in a bush split soaking three lanes at once.

Why is the quick match not quick?

Quick to get into and quick to get out... because the teams are often one-sided.

Quick match tries to hook you up with even player-leveled opponents in a balanced way (the matcher tries to avoid putting together an entire team of Assassins). Depending on the time of day and your level, it's about as bad a DPS waiting in LFG, or as good as a tank doing the same. If you want quick, try a specialized or support role.

Hey, remember that old April Fool's joke for World of Warcraft where Blizzard said they'd implement two headed ogres, as two players controlling one body?

Going to be a thing here, apparently. (https://youtu.be/2men9QUBgGk?t=1m32s)

edit: unlock mechanics look... weird
http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/heroes/chogall/ (http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/heroes/chogall/)

They're doing their championship for this right now at Blizzcon. This is like season 1 LoL bad, but with better production values.

I may actually have to play some to get the hang of what I'm watching.  I have no idea what's going on in these maps.

Finally getting caught up on this.  C9 v. DK semi finals is pretty much the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

https://youtu.be/TD9ycq17Z7o?t=58m58s (https://youtu.be/TD9ycq17Z7o?t=58m58s)

The weirdest fucking thing, that is entirely my own damage, is that I've been watching Dota2 for so long now that the Dota2 heroes have defaulted in my mind to the 'originals' and all the HotS heroes look like knockoffs to me  :why_so_serious:


-edit- The above match, so basically DK had no idea how to play a non-standard game? That's the same reason Korea sucks balls at Dota2 for the most part. Glad to see that tradition continues.

That's why I sometimes hate "the meta". Dozens of heroes/avatars/champions to choose from, but the pros for DOTA and LoL always play the same goddamn handful of picks that it gets old too fast. Nice to see some relevant wildcard picks to freshen things up.

Blizzcon was really good in terms of variety. We saw a lot of neat stuff being used and heroes who aren't generally rated come to the fore. Tyrael, for example, had an amazing win rate despite being generally ignored and seen as weak. The murky / abathur comp linked above was another example. Same with Falstead and the repositioning builds that were being taken.

Compared to previous tournaments and patches, the game is definitely in a good state right now with variety.

Most people in HOTS that talk about the 'meta' are nowhere near good enough at the game to effectively play the meta.  There are really only a few heroes that aren't good choices for ranked play.  The key is to understand which heroes are best for the map and matchup and play them with solid mechanics. 

Even with that, the current matchmaker is utter shit and it's near impossible to carry a bad team.  I'm quite frustrated with the state of things with regard to the match maker.

Absolutley - although to be honest, I think that's also true for other MOBAs as well. Being good on a particular character is normally far better than "playing the meta".

And yes, Quick Match is just fucked right now. My group refuses to play it, which means we play a lot less. I also wish their ranking system worked differently, as I think an individual rank number adds a lot of stress into the game which isn't necessery - it would be far better served with leagues like LoL. The matchmaker changes discussed at Blizzcon sound very promising though.

OK. That was the first entertaining HOTS match I've seen.  That showcased a lot of interesting hero mechanics on the side of C9.  Good stuff. 

Was the final worth watching?

I thought so. C9 used some group comps that are a bit out of the ordinary.  I think it threw their opponents off. 

The level of teamwork and communication was what really impressed me.  Such great decision making. 

Looking forward to the fixes. Quick match is a clusterfuck sometimes. My ask is that I get matched with and against people around my MMR. Not with and against scrubs that haven't even learned to watch the minimap yet. Those games are frustrating for me, frustrating for them, and frustrating for the one other player on their team who's actually decent — it's a crap shoot for both of us which team works better and which of our heroes counters the other one. It also means that you can't play many supports in QM (playing Morales or Kharazim is like pulling teeth).

So, as I mentioned, their new hero Cho'Gall is a two player hero but the only way to unlock him right now is to party with someone who has him and win two games as one of the heads.  I've just got him unlocked so if anyone (on the NA server) needs him, let me know (Kail#1457).  I think you can unlock him until some time in the middle of January.

I've just unlocked him, so if anyone playing in the EU region wants him still feel free to add me, Apocrypha#2851.

He's a lot of fun, does insane damage, but fairly easy to counter by any team with a brain.

Unfortunately, today's patch has concluded the special Cho'Gall event, so now he needs to be bought. He is heaps of fun, though.

I wish you could queue Cho and jump into a game.

#Nigel-no-friends-problems

The dryad was fun and then I lost interest in the game. The new Worgen mechanics almost have me interested... but Diablo 3 Season 5 is about to take over my life.

Oh, poop. I won't be getting the 2200 gold for unlocking him for two other people then :(

Upcoming rank/draft mode changes include hero bans for everyone (not just eSports peeps), better UI for matchmaking, and changes to being able to play ranked.

http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/20058190

The matchmaking stuff is essentially copypasta of LoL/other MOBAs, but the ranked play changes may be of interest to peeps here. You no longer need to be player level 30 to play ranked. Instead, they're upping the req. number of heroes you have access to from 10 to 14. You don't necessarily have to own all 14, as heroes on the free to play rotation that week can count, but only if you're level with that hero is 5+.

The ranking system is still garbage as is the matchmaking system.

These are all good changes.  They just don't fix all of what's broken.

The match making for ranked play works fine, unless you are in the top 0.1% of players and play on the NA servers.

Quick match will always be a crap shoot, but that's because of what it is rather than any match making. It's not possible to have a match maker than can create viable teams all the time for quick match, they just need to abandon the entire concept and replace it with something sane like every other MOBa on the planet does.

It's kinda weird, really. Bliz seems to be playing catchup to other games as opposed to being the trend-setter. LoL just redid their entire matchmaking process a couple months ago after years of dealing with what Bliz is just now putting into HotS.

Blizzard usually isn't the trend setter, it's the trend polisher.  Still polishing away here, I think.

What are you basing this statement on? 

The MM favors new players and players with low battle counts, as does their MMR system.  If you're established and on an old account, the amount of games it takes to move up ranks is absurd compared to a new reroll.  I have a smurf account that was easily placed at rank 5 while my main account, which I play with exactly the same level of skill, has recently dropped from rank 11 to 24.  The MM moves people up too quickly and improving, but established people up far too slowly.  It also doesn't account well for experience.  The MMR is similarly problemmatic.

That's the same in any MMR system though - there's a reason smurfing exists in the first place.

In terms of match matching though, in ranked play unless you are the very cream of the crop you will generally be matched with people at your skill level. the only people who suffer are the really high end players on NA, because for some stupid reason NA pros wont plkay hero league because they gtebad games, so when they do play hero league they get bad games etc etc.

Not really.  HOTS is more of a team game than either LOL or DOTA.  With items and individual levels, it's FAR easier to carry a game.  In HOTS, games are often decided at draft, by which team has the worst player, or by the team with the poorest communication.  The ranked ladder in LOL and DOTA is also far better in that people get demoted once players achieve a higher rank.  In this preseason, ranks are entirely meaningless.  If you're not at rank 1, you're stuck with whatever the MM throws you.  Often the disparity is HUGE, particularly at ranks 30-10.  I played at rank 10 for quite some time and saw a large disparity in ability and game understanding.  Blizzard knows this and Browder even comments on these issues often. 

I've been playing this on and off still and.. well..

Someone please explain to me why the fuck people go for bosses at the worst possible time so frequently. The bosses are like idiot magnets or something.

It's not just idiots, I've seen a fair share of professional games that have swung based on a boss pit throw.  The whole idea of camps and mercs and bosses seems hard to really optimize.  In something like LoL or Dota, the bosses (Baron / Dragon / Roshan) are arguably the most strategically important objectives in the game aside from the core itself and the entire late game revolves around getting the buffs.  Basically, the general strategy looks like "Is Baron / Roshan up, if yes, fight around the pit and if one team gets a decisive victory with enough HP left to tank it then take the boss and use that to open up an advantage, if no, farm".  In HotS it's a lot more ambiguous.  The boss provides a lot less advantage and is typically higher risk (with huge AoE stuns and roots) and there are other objectives which are more important.  People know that bosses (and merc camps and stuff) provide an advantage but exactly when to cap them is a lot harder to decide because the game doesn't revolve around them the way it does in LoL or Dota.  At least, that's how it looks to me.

There are two problems with HotS matchmaking.

1) Your rank is cosmetic, it has little to do with how good are and nothing to do with how the system matches you. Blizzard wanted to adopt Hearthstone's ladder system aesthetically but didn't want to use it to actually matchmake games. So it's a clusterfuck.

2) They either won't or don't have the players to be able to match people in the same MMR bracket with each other. Instead they create teams with similar average MMR. Which is also a clusterfuck given how team-orientated the game is.

I've been playing this a lot, and I'm currently at rank 22, so I'm an average player. The matchmaking is great at my level -- I have almost all close games with very few players who seems vastly better or worse than me.  I think the complaints about matchmaking must be coming from either very new or very highly skilled players.

This isn't how matchmaking has worked for a couple of months now.

Rank is now much, much more aligned to MMR. I haven't had a hero league game where someone has been more than 4 ranks way from me since the new matchmaking system going live. Generally everyone is 2 ranks either side of me.

For your second point, see above - they changed how the system makes teams, so it no longer matches potatoes with leet players to create a balanced MMR team. The gap between the highest and lowest skill player is much, much smaller now.

Realistically, the only issue in ranked play right now is at rank 1, ion the NA servers. Not enough of the high level players play, so it can't create enough decent games. In Korea and EU they don't have this issue because the top-end players play hero league every day as part ofd theitr training, but for some reaosn NA doesn't.

Also, worth noting that ranks are going at some point this year when we leave pre-season .It's being replaced with a league system (thank god).

All the heroes are unlocked/free to play this weekend, so if you've been wanting to try something out, now's the time.

On that note, every dumbass in the world is playing something like abathur for the first time, so play at your own risk.

Yeah, also note that there's a "recruit a friend" program going on where players can earn a free unique mount for bringing newbies in.  So if you're one of, like, two people on this forum who might play this for the first time, you might want to grab an invite from a vet so you can both get free stuff (I think the rewards for newbies are two free characters and gold/xp boosters).

Also, this is a 50% bonus XP week, so it's a good time to grind to level 5 to get that 500g reward.

So what's the best way to get back into this? I've come back after doing all the Naxx stuff except heroic, and I have those cards. How do I build decks now given that I don't have all the other expansion stuff people seem to have?

Wrong game/thread, hombre.

Dammit.  :awesome_for_real:

So I was going to vehemently disagree with you — but I've actually been playing nothing but QM games recently after I gave up on Ranked. Trying Ranked play again, and you're absolutely right. It's way better than it used to be.

It's better, but I wouldn't say WAY better.  It really needs to be solo only.  Too many people gaming the system by making duos with a rank 30 and a rank 5.  They're also allowing people to rank absurdly high with little to no experience.  I'm losing far too many games due to people not understanding how to prioritize objectives.

Well, matchmaking has decided to start crippling me again with rank 30 players and above. So I take back what I said before, it's just as crap as QM.

edit: wrong thread, ugh, sorry

Looks like a big update is in the pipe.  "Heroes of the Storm 2.0" apparently.

http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/heroes20/ (http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/heroes20/)

In general I'm not a fan of huge sweeping changes on live games, but this one seems to be mostly centered around the loot/level system so far so maybe it won't mess everything up too badly.  A few new unannounced heroes (plus the Diablo 2 Amazon) and a new battleground coming too.

The new loot system sounds like a rip of Overwatch, with players leveling up more frequently and getting random drops from a loot pool that's getting massively diluted with a titanic influx of garbage items that nobody wants (characters are getting sprays and taunts and crap like that).  Kind of vague on if you'll still be able to buy stuff the old way, it sounds like skins are going to rotate in and out of the store or something like that.

Opt-in open beta is live now, if you want to check it out.

2.0 is now live. Log in and get a "mega-bundle" of your choice.

http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/heroes20/megabundles/

Heroes of the Storm 2.0: Overwatch Boogaloo.

Logged in, picked bundle, logged out.

It's fun.  But I'm in a similar fashion, I feel no pull to play beyond maybe the loot rewards, which I guess is why they added loot rewards to it.

Also, is Blizzard homogenizing their games to all have similar meta games?  It seems that they are trying to put in dailies and loot boxes into every property.

Yes, because they've homogenized their model since they launched WoW. Figure out something popular in gaming, polish it, release it in stable beta fashion, get a base, put in dailies and loot boxes.

After playing some post-2.0 launch, not having played since Beta/Launch, and watching a bunch of HGC (pro league) games I have to say that Dota 2 and LoL games are now quite boring to watch. There's so much dead time in those games compared to HotS games. I was watching the LoL Team SoloMid vs Flash Wolves Mid-Season Invitational match today and on top of it being a 53 minute match, which is like >3x the length of a normal HotS match, it felt like at least 1/3rd of the match was both teams just running around placing and removing wards.

In LoL there's (usually) no point in watching the first 10-15 minutes. I wouldn't say the same is true of watching pro Dota 2 though.

From a viewer's perspective, competitive League is rubbish.

League would be better if they adopted HotS's approach on a couple things.

- Get rid of "last hitting" for gold. Just give gold based on the amount of damage done to the mob.
- Link everyone's XP in a team pool

I would come back for those changes. But for now? Nah.

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1m97yUn7jKc/ULo2kLNPUHI/AAAAAAAADlw/trPGRA9bFQg/s1600/Marty-McFly.gif)

Just... no.

What the others said, no. DOTA and LOL's problems are their own and far removed from the design direction of HOTS.

LoL's competitive problems mostly stem from it's meta issues (half of the champion roster can be garbage tier at any time), map design, FLASH, and Korean dominance. This season has been a bit more viewer friendly, but not much. FW/TSM game was a bad one to pick since you've got two conservative teams fighting to not get kicked out of the tournament.

I'm about as newb as possible when it comes to MOBAs and have barely played any but I enjoy watching HoTS pro league broadcasts. They are very entertaining.

DOTA is really an unwatchable snoozefest in comparison.

The reason I've noticed that the Koreans are so good at LOL is that they don't fuck about with team fights early that they don't need. They get their farm early and they are precise about that shit. Both sides get their gold up and don't start fighting until they have a good item base unless it's punishing some dumbass that gets himself in a 1v4 situation. It's incredibly effective. It's also boring as shit to watch.

I always liked watching 1v1 in lanes. The trading and solo strats early were always interesting.

I really enjoy this game, but the queue times can be so bad sometimes.

It's currently at 200s for a low level ranked game.