Heroes of the Storm

joz123_sl said:

Cant wait to try out the vikings. Not gonna pay 10k gold for them though.

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I spent my first 10k gold on them. I love the playstyle. The nerf to their boat probably hurt a ton though. I haven't played since it happened.

I changed up some key bindings to be able to play TLV better and am actually enjoying them, will see how I feel after I push to 5.

I don't think the boat nerf did much to be honest, they can just jump and save their asses right away anyway lol

The amount of griefers i've encountered over the past week is insane, they need to up their report game so you can report people for toxic bad manners. Purposely sitting in base to throw games, and feeding?

If i report somebody and they get suspended, i want the satisfaction of knowing that dipshit got suspended.

In fairness, I think a lot of that behavior would go away if they added a "surrender" option like League. It's not as bad as League since the games are shorter, but when you know you're going to lose but your solo-queue team is just not-terrible enough to drag it out another 15 minutes, there's a definite temptation to zone out or to speed up the inevitable.

But yeah on the whole, I'm enjoying this a hell of a lot more than I did League/DOTA. Blizzard have worked their magic, taken a preexisting formula and smoothed off the rough edges to make it a fun and addictive experience.

Wow, murky and lost vikings on the same team is so bad. My team just insta blew up every time.

Azrayne_sl said:

In fairness, I think a lot of that behavior would go away if they added a "surrender" option like League. It's not as bad as League since the games are shorter, but when you know you're going to lose but your solo-queue team is just not-terrible enough to drag it out another 15 minutes, there's a definite temptation to zone out or to speed up the inevitable.

But yeah on the whole, I'm enjoying this a hell of a lot more than I did League/DOTA. Blizzard have worked their magic, taken a preexisting formula and smoothed off the rough edges to make it a fun and addictive experience.

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See, I disagree completely. I played this when I first got in the beta and thought "meh, bad version of league" and didn't touch it for two months. Then some friends got in and convinced me to play with them. I got to 30, did some ranked, got a bunch of different champs, etc, and it still feels like a shitty version of league. Communication is terrible, each map has variations on objectives and priorities depending on the game state and good luck getting any coherent form of teamwork going in that sort of scenario with pings. Individual players can't carry even half as hard, there is no firm monetary advantage and exp only matters in very specific windows. The game to me boils down to two things: Does your team group correctly, and does your team react correctly when one person refuses to group. If you group as five and get shit done, great. If you realize some guy is not coming into the mines and is instead soaking, well you better adjust accordingly otherwise you're going to get stomped. Basically the killing blow for me for this game(other than performance) was realizing that numeric advantage was pretty much the end all be all since outplay potential is so much lower, and once I realized that the lack of vision control and the inability to realistically follow the positions of all five players on the map just killed my enjoyment of it.

It can be entertaining if you just want to dick around for a bit with buddies, but if it ever catches on as a legitimate competitive game then I am giving up on the genre entirely. This game is less designed to be taken seriously than Hearthstone is, and that's saying a hell of a lot.

I still find lol players so cute these days saying shit about other mobas when they are a version of dota designed for retards

mures_sl said:

At the same time though I can see why they don't add a surrender option because I've won so many games we should have lost. Every once and a blue moon you have a game where it just goes perfect for the enemy team, several heroes get away with less than 50 hp and they are up 4 lvls by the time you hit 10, but so many times we'll be down 2 lvls and ppl will want to surrender when you're just a team fight or a couple of kills + objective away from catching up. I had 2 different games on different nights I played with rl friends last week that they wanted to just give up and I rallied the troops so to speak and we won. I've also turned those 4 lvl difference stomp fests into real games. Once ppl are up that much they have a tendency to start playing sloppy/greedy, we were in a game like that last week, ppl wanted to give up and I just told them, look they are playing really greedy now (they were split pushing and trying to take objectives) so we killed the 2 ppl pushing which allowed us to take the objective and it turned that game which started out an unfun stomp into a real game where we had a legitimate chance to win. Of course everyone wants to win, but making the enemy team clinch their assholes when they were all laughing and high fiving each other can be just as sweet.

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I don't think they ever add that option because of this. I've also had a lot of these games where we get fucking shit on early game and end up winning or at least making it close. I've also been on the other side where we go up early and do something stupid late and loose. They have build the game to allow for comebacks, I don't see them just letting you drop.

I came close to the Murky dream game of 0 deaths.. my 2 deaths happened in the first 5 minutes too.

mures_sl said:

At the same time though I can see why they don't add a surrender option because I've won so many games we should have lost. Every once and a blue moon you have a game where it just goes perfect for the enemy team, several heroes get away with less than 50 hp and they are up 4 lvls by the time you hit 10, but so many times we'll be down 2 lvls and ppl will want to surrender when you're just a team fight or a couple of kills + objective away from catching up. I had 2 different games on different nights I played with rl friends last week that they wanted to just give up and I rallied the troops so to speak and we won. I've also turned those 4 lvl difference stomp fests into real games. Once ppl are up that much they have a tendency to start playing sloppy/greedy, we were in a game like that last week, ppl wanted to give up and I just told them, look they are playing really greedy now (they were split pushing and trying to take objectives) so we killed the 2 ppl pushing which allowed us to take the objective and it turned that game which started out an unfun stomp into a real game where we had a legitimate chance to win. Of course everyone wants to win, but making the enemy team clinch their assholes when they were all laughing and high fiving each other can be just as sweet.

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Yeah I get where you're coming from and I've had the same experience occasionally, but it's still a frustrating experience when it doesn't work out that way.

See, I disagree completely. I played this when I first got in the beta and thought "meh, bad version of league" and didn't touch it for two months. Then some friends got in and convinced me to play with them. I got to 30, did some ranked, got a bunch of different champs, etc, and it still feels like a shitty version of league. Communication is terrible, each map has variations on objectives and priorities depending on the game state and good luck getting any coherent form of teamwork going in that sort of scenario with pings. Individual players can't carry even half as hard, there is no firm monetary advantage and exp only matters in very specific windows. The game to me boils down to two things: Does your team group correctly, and does your team react correctly when one person refuses to group. If you group as five and get shit done, great. If you realize some guy is not coming into the mines and is instead soaking, well you better adjust accordingly otherwise you're going to get stomped. Basically the killing blow for me for this game(other than performance) was realizing that numeric advantage was pretty much the end all be all since outplay potential is so much lower, and once I realized that the lack of vision control and the inability to realistically follow the positions of all five players on the map just killed my enjoyment of it.

It can be entertaining if you just want to dick around for a bit with buddies, but if it ever catches on as a legitimate competitive game then I am giving up on the genre entirely. This game is less designed to be taken seriously than Hearthstone is, and that's saying a hell of a lot.

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Like you I wrote it off as a shitty League rip off at first, came back later to play with friends and started enjoying it then, but even when they're not playing I still find it more fun than League.

I like the variety of maps, the smoother gameplay (I know League isn't too clunky, but I find small differences, like skillshots feel a lot smoother to pull off in HOTS), I like the faster matches and variety of maps (so so much, I was bored to tears with League's main map, and the others weren't very well designed imo - just wish HOTS would hurry up and include some Diablo/SC maps), I like that they've streamlined the character building, and I think they've done a great job of directing people towards teamwork to wins matches instead of having every asshole run around trying to do their own thing, competing over objectives and kills (half of the conversation in solo queued League was people whining over "kill stealing" - well, half of the conversation that wasn't in Portuguese anyway) instead of working together to win or trying to be a champion and carry the game by running off doing their own thing.

It's not perfect of course (really want more variety in the maps, especially some SC maps, and I'd like more of the SC/Diablo heroes - I'd also like to see an option for queues to weigh a balanced team over just matching up the first 5 available players, I'd rather wait 5/10 minutes than go through an A/A/A/A/W game), but I think the map variety alone, the streamlined character building and the increased hero accessibility (taking up a new hero to try out feels fun and accessible, compared to League) is enough to keep me playing over the rest of the genre.

That said, I'm nowhere near hardcore about the whole MOBA thing compared to a lot of people, so maybe I'm just in the target market? I dunno. I have absolute zero interest in the whole e-sport aspect, I just want to play 2 or 3 hours a few nights a week and have fun killing dudes, and HOTS has nailed that for me so far. Everything else is gravy.

LOL playing kael during free TLV week is fun.

spreading living bomb on 3 vikings who run into 4 dudes = exploding the entire enemy team

Arent you matched against people of similar skill / lvl even in quickmatch anyways? How could you face open beta noobs.

I dunno, i thought this game could be retail by now haha. It feels solid all around gameplay wise.

Two things regarding matchmaking:

A) Good matchmaking requires a huge concurrent player base. Someone mathed it all out but it's startling how many players you need to actually have a reasonable matchup in a reasonable amount of time. I suspect Open Beta --> Launch will help with this.

B) LoL does its ELO finding in 10 games; HoTS has a much longer ELO finding window. In other words, LoL will skip you tens of games worth of ELO in your initial 10 and try to find equilibrium. HoTS does this over the initial 50-100 games. This prevents the unlucky streak initially fucking over a good player, but also tosses newbs into shark pits to see if they survive.

I suspect A compounds B. Either way, its not a fair comparison between HoTS and LoL -- LoL matchmaking would be incredibly fucked up as well if they reset everyone to 1200 right now... even new seasons are kinda wacky and that's with the soft reset. It'll take a month or two for proper stratification to occur and with an inevitable increased player base, everyone should feel reasonably assured that the bad plays they witness are just bad plays, not overly bad players.

Just started downloading this, I don't know if i'll be able to get over how awful the mounts look.

A good read from Team Liquid, even if you're not yet running Hero League.

Hero League 101