Heroes of the Storm

Do you really need to know what all the heroes do when the other 9 people on your map are just as clueless as you are?

DeLLy_sl said:

considering Dota 2 players bitched for a long time (and still do!) about League being no skill with the removal of denials

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You mean all of the two russian players who still play Dota 2?

I'm surprised Russians still play Dota. You'd think they'd be called for military duty by now. No justice in the gaming world.

ZProtoss_sl said:

I'm sorry, but this post couldn't be more full of shit. While it's true that the metagame is always in flux in games like DOTA/League, the idea that a 100% new player can simply hop in and pickup those games is absurd. With both games having 100+ heroes now, the learn time for merely figuring out what each of those 100 heroes does is massive. Now try and calculate how many times you need to see each hero in a game before you can feel comfortable in dealing with that heroes spacing and gameplay flow - countless games. The knowledge and experience gap between a 3 year + veteran and someone new to the game is nothing short of gigantic, and the fact that you'd try to hand wave it off in this post shows how out of touch you are with that fact.

Previous MOBA experience in Heroes doesn't really count for as much as you might think it does. It might give you a small headstart on some of the base framework of the game, but the ebb and flow of teamfights/map rotation is dramatically different than what you'd generally see in DOTA/League. If you doubt that, all you have to do is look at some of the League players streaming who still continually fuck up on even simple parts of the game. It's effectively as close to a reset button as you're going to get, and it's certainly a far superior environment for a new player than current DOTA/League are.

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No, you got it wrong, you don't believe learning something can be fun ? There's no pressure, you play as much as you want to and if you are bored of your hero, go play something completely different. If your newbies are being matched with veterans, then your matchmaking is shit. Dota even has coaching mode, where a player can be in the game and tell you what you can do and both games actively push esports so you even have comparison how pros play right in your face, they even let you observe random pub games and have replay support where friends can tell you how to improve. If you are looking for drop-in fun, FPS are still the better choice

Zaphid_sl said:

No, you got it wrong, you don't believe learning something can be fun ? There's no pressure, you play as much as you want to and if you are bored of your hero, go play something completely different. If your newbies are being matched with veterans, then your matchmaking is shit. Dota even has coaching mode, where a player can be in the game and tell you what you can do and both games actively push esports so you even have comparison how pros play right in your face, they even let you observe random pub games and have replay support where friends can tell you how to improve. If you are looking for drop-in fun, FPS are still the better choice

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I think the main point here is going over your head. Why would someone choose to climb the gigantic ass mountain that's learning DOTA or League, when they can get in on a similar game that's starting on the ground floor? If you're a new player to the genre, going with the newer (but still crazy popular) game makes far more sense. And no, learning dota is not "fun" by any stretch of the imagination. Learning DOTA in its current form means that you get to have a million "oh that killed me?" moments in where a great deal of them will cost your team the game. MOBAs are far, far more enjoyable when you get in on the ground floor and the game is built around you rather than being in an environment where you're stuck playing catch up.

You seem to be projecting pretty hard here. I know tons of people who enjoyed the process of learning Dota 2, starting from zero knowledge and never once feeling this perceived weight on their shoulders. Further the games exponential growth over the last 2 years contradicts your theory that no one wants to learn a complicated game because it's complicated.

People play hard to learn games because the payoff is usually more rewarding. Why do people play EVE when they could just play any other MMO that is guaranteed to be easier to learn?

DeLLy_sl said:

People play hard to learn games because the payoff is usually more rewarding. Why do people play EVE when they could just play any other MMO that is guaranteed to be easier to learn?

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Because the only space ship in WoW crashed 7 years ago and can't fly anymore and all other mmorpgs are terribad.

Not many people play EvE. Less people play DoTA then LoL. WoW had millions more subs then EQ or UO. More people own a Wii then Xbox, etc etc etc etc etc. Hell look at Hearthstone its immensely popular even with the people who play here, and its far less complex then MTG. Creating a game with a low barrier of entry is the only sensible thing to do in this case for Blizzard as DotA and LoL already exist and they have been doing it for 10 years now.

As someone who actually has access to this Alpha, I am having a blast playing this game and previously I had ZERO interest in MOBA's for a variety of reasons, the two biggest ones being barrier of entry and toxic communities. Seriously fuck the LoL community it makes Call of Duty kids look mature, and frankly I don't have time anymore in my 30's to learn 100 heroes, last hitting, denials, etc. This lets me get into the genre from the start of what will be a popular game, and frankly it is ALOT of fun, regardless of what you may believe watching a stream.

Will DoTA and LoL still be popular post release of this game? Yep. I think this game has more of an opportunity to siphon plays from League then anything else, and it probably will, but it will mostly gain an audience from players who never played a game like this and if nothing else it will introduce even more people to the genre.

I can only speak from my personal experience, and perhaps the issue is I played DOTA2 before it had "official" match making, but I'm having more fun in HOTS than I ever had in DOTA. But, again, the games are very different. I also enjoy Starcraft more than HOTS but that doesn't mean I hate HOTS and it is shit.

Just saying the argument was why would someone choose to do shit that is harder to do. HOTS could definitely be my casual game along side Dota depending on how badly they price gouge the shit out of their fanbase.

FYI Hearthstone is more popular (online anyways) because MTGO is shit in comparison. I would imagine that the majority of MTG players avoid Online because of how bad it is.

And HEX is shaping up nicely, but will never be as big as Hearthstone just due to the name recognition.

I think HOTS will be insanely popular and if they can manage to get some kind of mechanism where players can point to games and say "I was awesome in that game!" instead of "My team was awesome that game!" they'll have something there.

My other question is, does HOTS have an "official" map? It seems like they have a few different maps with different objectives like WOW has different BGs. Will having different games effect it's growth in a negative or positive way? The pros of having different maps is that people have different games to play. The con is that you don't get a "standard" in which you can measure yourself against other people and it kind of fractures your player base.

HotS looks too primitive and casual to be a real counterpart to LoL/DotA. It's more like the game less hardcore people will choose to play instead of the latter. TotalBiscuit came to the same conclusion in his review: it won't compete with the other MOBAs, it would fill the void of a simpler and easier alternative for players who aren't good enough to thrive in LoL/DotA. There's a market for it, it just isn't going to be for League players.

I played LoL back when it was new and nolifed it for about six months, and then I quit for a year. I then came back, played for two months, and quit for another year. Ever since then, it has been impossible for me to get back into it because the time it takes to learn all the new shit is longer than the time it takes for me to get bored of it again. They've just added so many new champions and items that the learning curve has become too long.

The game isn't any more difficult than it was in the beginning, but there's so many fucking things they've just piled on top of the curriculum. No other gaming genre really has this problem, it would be akin to adding a new weapon to CoD every two weeks for years until there's a hundred weapons whose mechanics you need to be familiar with before you can play at your actual skill level. I saw this shit coming a mile off back in the beginning and asked the developers about it, but they said they would tone down the introduction of new champions as soon as they felt there were enough of each archetype. Hah.

Juvarisx_sl said:

Not many people play EvE. Less people play DoTA then LoL. WoW had millions more subs then EQ or UO. More people own a Wii then Xbox, etc etc etc etc etc. Hell look at Hearthstone its immensely popular even with the people who play here, and its far less complex then MTG. Creating a game with a low barrier of entry is the only sensible thing to do in this case for Blizzard as DotA and LoL already exist and they have been doing it for 10 years now.

As someone who actually has access to this Alpha, I am having a blast playing this game and previously I had ZERO interest in MOBA's for a variety of reasons, the two biggest ones being barrier of entry and toxic communities. Seriously fuck the LoL community it makes Call of Duty kids look mature, and frankly I don't have time anymore in my 30's to learn 100 heroes, last hitting, denials, etc. This lets me get into the genre from the start of what will be a popular game, and frankly it is ALOT of fun, regardless of what you may believe watching a stream.

Will DoTA and LoL still be popular post release of this game? Yep. I think this game has more of an opportunity to siphon plays from League then anything else, and it probably will, but it will mostly gain an audience from players who never played a game like this and if nothing else it will introduce even more people to the genre.

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This is a pretty good post. I, too, eventually stopped following DOTA2 because I simply didn't have time to keep up with all the additional heroes and balance changes. It felt like you couldn't have just a passing interest in the game. You had to dedicate a serious amount of time to even play it casually because, to me, jumping into a game and not knowing what the fuck is going on is not my cup of tea. I had already chosen the game for that, for me, is Starcraft and there wasn't room for two. So DOTA was out.

HOTS isn't here trying to appeal to the hardcore DOTA or LOL player or fan. It is going a different direction. Something you can just load up and play a handful of times a week and just relax and enjoy it. Of the large scale e-sport games this isn't really true unless you fully enjoy being incompetent and getting curb stomped.

I think the issue is too many people are saying "I saw this on stream and it looked shit." And that is true. I played five games yesterday but I cannot bring myself to watching streams of HOTS. It is too boring to watch. But to actually play the game is a whole new ballgame. And this is coming from the person who watches Starcraft streams at least at a 3:1 ratio of watching to playing.

Also on another note I played with Tasteless yesterday. He was Zeratul and I was Abathur. We absolutely curb stomped the other team.

Zeratul, Abathur, and Tassadar are by far my top 3 favorite heroes to play. They will not be the most popular to play on masse because they are not the easiest to play but they are the most fun to play once it comes together on playing them correctly. Having a well played Abathur on your team makes life soooo much easier.

I like to fancy myself a pretty decent Abathur player. At least I have a pretty decent win rate on him. Only thing I really need to work on is using his deep tunnel to get to lanes currently not occupied by my team to leech the creep XP. I'm also very good at hitting skillshots with his stab ability on fleeing targets.

Juvarisx_sl said:

Zeratul, Abathur, and Tassadar are by far my top 3 favorite heroes to play. They will not be the most popular to play on masse because they are not the easiest to play but they are the most fun to play once it comes together on playing them correctly. Having a well played Abathur on your team makes life soooo much easier.

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I like Abathur too. Teammates get a little uncomfortable because it feels like 5v4, but having the ability to essentially port around the map on demand is so strong.

Abathur is a pretty decent pusher as well. I haven't gone a locust-centric build in a bit but if you take the +30% locust HP at level 1, set up a toxic nest line for the creep wave then Symbiote on a creep you can push towers very effectively by just being solo.