Heroes of the Storm

Doesnt really have an impact on if ill play the game or not tho. Am still having a blast logging on and playing with my dudes every so often. It really is an awsome team game. The only thing that comes close to it in terms of having a a good time with my friends online is back when i played CS in its golden days.

A new hero every now and then really do keeps things fresh.

slippery_sl said:

Give a general TLDR of it?

I tend to agree, but I don't really have a reason. Saturated market and just feeliing

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* No real ladder
* No/too few "huge impact" individual play
* No carry
* Early game is boring to watch, doesn't have enough impact

The big thing they were driving at is why twitch viewership is so low so it was mostly addressing that.

Whats the no carry argument? Didnt really play any other moba so i dont understand that point.

In DOTA and LoL since it is more farm based than Heroes there is a concept where if an individual hero can farm well enough and fast enough he can basically win 3v1's and things of that nature from just being so powerful. So later in the game he becomes so powerful that he "carries" the team to a win. These are generally heroes that scale very well with items and stat growth. Since there is no individual farm in Heroes you can't have the concept of an individual carry. I think possibly they should look at making more talents like Seasoned Marksman where you CAN individual carry in the game. Try and divorce the team leveling up a bit from the individual player experience. So if you see a hero take lets argue seasoned marksman and some other level4 scaling talent you simply have to address him by setting up ganks. Then the opposing team can react by anticipating your rotations on their carry and punishing you for it. Right now there is very little reason to perform any early game ganks on a targeted individual because their absence from the field of play effects them in no real way. In LoL and DOTA the absence on the field effects not only the individual XP growth but also the gold growth which would hinder their item timings.

Kind of.

I'll speak for LOL since I'm not a DOTA2 player. LOL has a single map everyone plays on with hardly any PVE (there are two mobs that spawn that give rewards every 5 minutes and one of them doesn't pop up until 20 minutes in). You have defined roles and lanes so there is a structure to play. for the first 2/3rds of a typical game (time will vary depending on skill level) you have a lot of 1v1s and skirmishes. During that time a player can rack up a couple kills by himself and gain a very large gold lead which gives him more items. He can then take that lead, and wander into other lanes and push his teams advantage.

In HOTS you have very fluid maps where teams usually stick together and it's always team fights. Also there are no individual gains when something happens, everyone benefits on an equal level.

The only analogy I can make is that imagine if when you racked up kills and assists it gave you "points" and every X points you were able to by an extra talent point.

In the end, an individual player can really impact a game beyond the level of just having a really good player on the team. If that player makes impactful plays, he just gets stronger.

I hope that makes sense. When Tenks says "farming well enough and fast enough to win 3v1s" is only in extreme cases with certain champs. To carry in LOL you still have to play smart and have enough awareness to know where to apply your advantage or you eventually lose it.

I really should stop saying LoL and DOTA since I have no experience with LoL. But in DOTA a well farmed antimage or phantom lancer can truck a 3v1.

Although saying LoL has hardly any PvE seems odd since the rare time I watch a LoL stream the person is just last hitting and trying to throw some skills at his lane opponent. I consider the creep wave phase certainly a PvE phase even if it does contain some PvP interactions such as trying to bully and gank/counter-gank.

I can see why you might think that, but the laning phase to me is really a duel. It's all about harassing, pushing and out playing your opponent and trying to take an advantage. If you do end up watching a lane where both champs just passively farm, then yeah, that's PVE.

I dislike last hitting myself as a mechanic but I think it creates an interesting gameplay scenario. There are probably more interesting things you can do to replace that part of the game. Shame Blizzard went the direction of just flat lining the whole thing.

Yeah I think that they could still work with HotS but some of the issues in the game are really starting to come to light recently. I think mounts are somewhat an issue as well since it is very, very difficult to just be "out of position" for a fight because you can traverse the map so easily. If I was going to try and take a stab a fixing some problems it would be something like:

* Takedowns enhance the stats of those involved
* Early game death timers are at least doubled
* Mount speed is halved
* Add more "farming" talents 1-7

I know that the new-curve map is trying to address some of these and possibly it will fix more grievances than I'd expect but there is still the problem like Kirun said where one bumbling retard can make you lose the game because no matter how well you play it is really, really hard to win a 4v5 in this game.

The carry concept is what makes DoTA/LoL interesting to watch, in my opinion, at least from an individual streaming standpoint. People want to watch the stars play and dominate games, it's very easy to see their impact (or lack thereof). It's also the reason LoL bronze to diamond type streams are so popular (see Dyrus leveling up his Retireus account right now with 25-45k viewers). You just don't have that in HoTS, the game isn't really set up that way.

Forgot about the mounts and the relatively small size of the maps.

Yeah the maps and lane-to-lane is shorter than traditional mobas then they also made it so everyone moves 40% faster. So it basically makes going to gank free especially if you've pushed your wave into their towers so you have about a minute until you have to run back to soak XP.

BTW here is the link to the Town Hall. Conversation relevant to what I was saying starts around 1h45m.

Ep.82 Town Hall Heroes - YouTube

Tenks_sl said:

1) No real ladder
2) No/too few "huge impact" individual play
3) No carry
4) Early game is boring to watch, doesn't have enough impact

The big thing they were driving at is why twitch viewership is so low so it was mostly addressing that.

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Numbered to give my overall experience as a noob to this genre.

1) I think the frustrating thing about the current ladder is a point that was made earlier: this game is so team based, it can be a detriment to solo queue. I played a crap ton this weekend on solo queue ranked and only got +1 rank because of things I can't control, i.e. my team.

2) See number 1. But also, watching the game, I'll see things likeHTC Heroes of the Storm Brawl Highlight Reel - YouTubeand want to jump in a game to be a monster like the couple Butcher plays in the beginning and I'll fall apart, because again, it's a team game. As a viewer though, that shit is fantastic to watch.

3) I dunno, watching a team rally around a Butcher like in the vid or helping their Azmo stack Q charges can be pretty entertaining. More heroes with that kind of 'farming' mechanic would be great.

4) I think the thing about early game that's hard to understand from a casual perspective (and that I'm only just starting to internalize from my own play) is that dying early game is still bad - the xp gain on the opponents side may not be that big, but the loss on your side from missing lane xp can be huge. Most pros don't die early game or get caught out, and that makes the game boring to watch in the early game; just lots of footsies and posturing. The increase to early game death timers that's being tested should be helpful.

5) Another thing that was mentioned in the Town Hall was the lack of community. I fully admit that I could have pinged someone from this board to play with this weekend or asked here in this thread, but my mind was on improving my pitiful solo queue rank (37). I swear I'm not terrible though and at least I can stay positive throughout a match. I'll be on tonight if anyone wants to play.

Regarding community though, there doesn't seem to be that many content creators doing breakdowns of play. I'm thinking like Day9 style breakdowns of a theme / idea like he used to do with SC2. Maybe I'm not following the right people on YouTube, but that's what I'm missing and if someone would point me to vids like that, I'd watch every one.

Xaldren#1414

Pretty good write up about that one bad player making you lose:If you think matches are determined by the worst player in HotS, data proves you wrong : heroesofthestorm

Take it as you will, I do agree that the game is lacking in the watching aspect, but I haven't played or been a part of other MOBA's, that shit you guys are talking about sounds kind of lame tbh (obviously I'm in the extreme minority in that, not trying to be a hipster faggot with it) and I have no idea what would make it better. I do disagree about good players making plays though, there is definitely not "carries" but there are good players on teams consistently making game winning plays.

Arch_sl said:

I do disagree about good players making plays though, there is definitely not "carries" but there are good players on teams consistently making game winning plays.

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I want to say I don't disagree with this at all. But I also want to say that just because the game gives you the tools to be terrible at the game doesn't mean the game has an endless ceiling for play. Like Skylol said on the TH I linked he doesn't boot up the game daily and learn something new. The game is shallow and can be understood fairly easily. Can you facecheck a bush and get partied on? Yep. Even pros do it. But the ability to outplay against two highly skilled players is nearly absent from the game. You can't even really do anything prior to the engagement to get an upper hand. There is no warding/counter-warding to get a better team fight position (though some heroes like Abathur and Zagara try this a bit.) There is no farming to be objectively more powerful in an even-level engagement. Everything about the game is just snapshots of team fights. Which is fine and all but a tad monotonous and since team fights are generally won and lost on subtleties it makes for a fairly poor viewer experience. You can't "Sick play" a Raynor who managed to stay at 80% of his range the entire teamfight due to great positioning -- even though that is pretty much 100% of what it takes to play that hero well.