You know I haven't played this in awhile, went back to league and every once in awhile hop back to this when promotions were going. But I'm shocked blizzard is closing this down. I can't see this losing money, even if it's not printing money like blizzards other games. But it has a dedicated fan base, puts people on your client, and has to be turning at least some profit. It's not my cup of tea but it's a fun enough game that did things different.
You know I haven't played this in awhile, went back to league and every once in awhile hop back to this when promotions were going. But I'm shocked blizzard is closing this down. I can't see this losing money, even if it's not printing money like blizzards other games. But it has a dedicated fan base, puts people on your client, and has to be turning at least some profit. It's not my cup of tea but it's a fun enough game that did things different.
Doing ok isnt enough for Activision blizzard
Blizzard is not closing this down, actually. It has a dedicated fanbase and puts people on the client, so the game will continue to exist and be supported for the foreseeable future. There are still new heroes and content being released.
It's just been vastly scaled back. It's no longer really a flagship Bliz game.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
tormented souls won't ever be worth taking until they add something else (something significant) to it
what does it do that your autoattacks and E cannot?
Hits in a continuous 360 degrees so you don't have to worry about getting into melee range and can instead focus on just keeping the marks up and Qing
yknow what else keeps the marks up? autoattacking. or tossing out E. if you can hit someone with tormented souls, you can hit someone with an autoattack/E.
if you're playing malthael and you're in a position where you can't afford to get into melee range, why are you even playing malthael
tormented souls literally does nothing and has done nothing ever since they added a cleave to his AAs, there is literally zero point in taking it except kneecapping yourself i suppose because surprise, you don't have an ult now.
It's dead. Blizzard officially reclassified it was a "Classic Game" , alongside titles like StarCraft II and WarCraft III, back in like April.
But hey, if anything, maybe that means we'll get a Heroes of the Storm Remaster soon.
Yes, there's still a dedicated fanbase that puts people on Battle.net, in much the same way that there's still a dedicated fanbase for Secret of Mana that puts people on the Super Nintendo. And yes, the game will continue to exist and be supported for the foreseeable future, in much the same way that StarCraft II occasionally gets a new co-op Commander. But it's dead: a majority of the development team was cannibalized by other departments; the pro-scene was dismantled; many of the best players moved on to other, more popular games; and yes, the content's been scaled back tremendously.
I love Heroes of the Storm, and I had a tremendous amount of fun with it for a few great years. I've even been feeling the urge to jump back in lately (and the only reason I haven't is because a vast majority of the people I played HotS with don't log into it anymore, and when they do, they just spam Brawls because the Matchmaker's a fucking joke and nobody knows how to actually play properly anyway so fuck it), but the game's dead and done with, and that's something we all need to come to terms with.
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Quickmatch has been a joke ever since they changed how the matchmaker works. It's no better than brawl.
Draft is the only real way to play it atm.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
It's dead. Blizzard officially reclassified it was a "Classic Game" , alongside titles like StarCraft II and WarCraft III, back in like April.
But hey, if anything, maybe that means we'll get a Heroes of the Storm Remaster soon.
Yes, there's still a dedicated fanbase that puts people on Battle.net, in much the same way that there's still a dedicated fanbase for Secret of Mana that puts people on the Super Nintendo. And yes, the game will continue to exist and be supported for the foreseeable future, in much the same way that StarCraft II occasionally gets a new co-op Commander. But it's dead: a majority of the development team was cannibalized by other departments; the pro-scene was dismantled; many of the best players moved on to other, more popular games; and yes, the content's been scaled back tremendously.
I love Heroes of the Storm, and I had a tremendous amount of fun with it for a few great years. I've even been feeling the urge to jump back in lately (and the only reason I haven't is because a vast majority of the people I played HotS with don't log into it anymore, and when they do, they just spam Brawls because the Matchmaker's a fucking joke and nobody knows how to actually play properly anyway so fuck it), but the game's dead and done with, and that's something we all need to come to terms with.
You can describe it however you want. "Blizzard is closing down Heroes of the Storm" is inaccurate. "Heroes of the Storm is a dead game" is also not particularly accurate as much as we like to say it.
"Dead" means the servers shut down and you can't play the game anymore. Using the word in any other way is just hyperbolic. Starcraft 2 is not dead. But yes the new development on HotS is slowly winding down and at some point it will stop, barring some miraculous change in management. Once development stops, the game just is what it is - people will still play it as long as they continue to find it fun, and they're not taking down the servers any time soon. So no, it did not succeed in becoming LoL or DotA 2, but it is by no means a failed multiplayer game by most anybody else's standards.
people call the game "dead" to make themselves feel better about the state of the game and as a means of justification or vindication for they themselves not wanting to play or just not playing anymore period
meanwhile the game's still chugging along and people are still playing and literally nothing has changed except people are complaining more, i guess. i mean, you could say that Diablo III is "dead" too, but that's still trucking. people have been saying WoW is "dead" or "dying" since literally forever and yet that's still trucking
the word has lost any and all meaning at this point because it has been slung around so much to the point where it literally doesn't mean anything anymore. it's effectively a meme.
play the game if you want to play it. or don't. i'm still gonna, because i'm still having fun with it.
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Yeah I think the population has dropped dramatically, and will likely continue to drop over time, but I don't think the game is "dead". It's just...smaller. And different.
Like, I no longer go into games expecting anyone to know what to do. I've also dramatically lowered my own expectations of my own play (hence why my most played heroes in the past few months have been solo queue Illidan and Medivh in QM). I watch maybe an hour a week of streams when I used to have them on even if just in the background constantly. And I don't spend any time critically thinking about the meta, drafting, macro strategy, etc. and as everyone here knows I used to over-analyze HotS to a fault.
But even taking all those things into account, I'll play a few games a week. I just treat it much less as a competitive endeavor and much more like fun leisure time where I get to screw around and play dumb heroes.
Does this mean the game is "dead"? Maybe in some sense, some facets of it are. But if I'm still able to play it, and I'm still choosing to play it (albeit much less frequently) and having fun, then when all is said and done, it's still very much "alive".
Played a few QM games yesterday... memeing a bit here and there
one game this thrall was obviously newish to the game. Didn't know that you shouldn't just chase murky everywhere while he slimes you back to 1979,
I killed him about 3 times 1v1 in-lane
almost felt bad
another game was also doing well 1v1 vs butcher. Kept just out of his melee range and kept sliming him.
He was down to 30% hp most of the time, never killing me. Alas we had one super toxic ally and the game went downhill.
Patch notes out! There's one specific important change they made:
[UPDATE] We are currently revising the list of maps but the below list will be the final map rotation for Storm League.
[NEW] The Storm League pool is now:
Alterac Pass
Battlefield of Eternity
Braxis Holdout
Cursed Hollow
Dragon Shire
Hanamura Temple
Infernal Shrines
Sky Temple
Tomb of the Spider Queen
Towers of Doom
Volskaya Foundry
The Quick Match pool is now:
All maps that are available in Storm League
Blackheart’s Bay
Garden of Terror
Warhead Junction
[NEW] Dev Comment: Due to player feedback about their favorite Battleground being removed or least favorite added, and also us questioning the value that we were gaining by having a Battleground rotation, we’ve decided to get our Storm League pool to 11 Battlegrounds and probably leave it there for the immediate future. The original idea behind a rotation was to facilitate a different metagame and make the game feel fresh and different, but we found that this wasn’t really panning out this way and in fact created more confusion and volatility than enjoyment. We still think that altering the game from season to season is important to keep things feeling fresh, and we’ll be exploring ways to do this beyond our regular Hero updates and new Heroes in the future.
That's real good, honestly. Thanks guys, y'alls still the best~
Good to hear them tease a little bit about new ideas coming in the future. I think HotS now has a small and loyal dev team who probably won't be taken off the project any time soon - these are the resources they were given for this game, and they're doing what they can with it. Which maybe isn't a lot, but it's enough to keep the people who are still playing engaged, and I hope they aren't losing too many devs to attrition.
The worst consequence I could foresee is that skill matchmaking becomes increasingly unreliable as the number of people to choose from is smaller. I wonder what you could do with the game to address that. Maybe try to adjust the skill curve? Like tweaking the objectives to force everyone to show up (e.g. freeze the towers/creeps) so there's no ambiguity about where you should be.
+1
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Yeah, I actually freaked the fuck out when they said they were rotating Dragon Shire out
It’s the best fuckin map in the game and putting like, warhead junction in its place is basically a war crime
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
Agreed - calling hots dead is pure hyperbole. Once upon a time there was little enough content that we legitimately needed new heroes and maps, but now there are plenty. Yes, it will be nice to get a couple new heroes a year, but the game would also be just fine if the hero pool never changed.
I don't play it as much as I did at my peak, but I still put in a healthy (probably a more healthy) number of hours into it. And as long as there is NGS there will be a good avenue for quality play... I'm not worried.
Supposing hypothetically that things are better in HotS land than people say, and the current pace of development will continue for many years - I wonder what they could do at this point to assuage people's fears or even increase the playerbase. That announcement was so incredibly damaging, and it's really hard to shake the notion that "Activision" execs want to kill the game. I think it would really take some big 3.0 patch that they can position as a reboot or revival or something. But they probably don't have the resources to do that.
Damn, I kind of forgot that they made it up to 14 (non-mothballed) maps. That's pretty crazy.
really hurt them. constantly making new half baked maps that just were not fun to play on. you could halve that number and you'd still have a couple stinkers left.
They should add Deathwing for sure, I dunno wtf kind of character he is though. If he's not massive it's not interesting, nobody cares about Deathwing's human form. I could maybe see him being Alexstrasza-sized at all times, even though the body-blocking could have a lot of side effects.
Damn, I kind of forgot that they made it up to 14 (non-mothballed) maps. That's pretty crazy.
really hurt them. constantly making new half baked maps that just were not fun to play on. you could halve that number and you'd still have a couple stinkers left.
Shire, Shrines, Spiders, BoE, and ToD/Sky Temple sometimes are all I need really. I guess Volkskaya can come too by virtue of being a nonshit 3-lane map.
Also I think the complaints against ToD are valid, but oftentimes teams are not coordinated enough to exploit of the attackers' advantage. Like I've often had random solo defences with me on Nazeebo cause our Diablo decided to wander off and help our DPS finish the red team pumpkin camp.
mmm, and pro tip: the bleed quest at level 1 is by far the best one. no doubt in my mind. also, her hinterland blast sucks! just go unrelenting strikes. shit's cray. and then you auto-win the game at level 20 with the silence.
If you need any indicator that Qhira is busted, notice that @Dibby absorbed 20k more damage than me with her vs my Garrosh. And at a certain point, she can 1-shot a lane of minions with her Q. That is absurd.
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If you need any indicator that Qhira is busted, notice that Dibby absorbed 20k more damage than me with her vs my Garrosh. And at a certain point, she can 1-shot a lane of minions with her Q. That is absurd.
yeah but i also had a pocket medivh so i was being a LOT more aggressive than i normally could afford to be
they were also focusing the hell out of me anyway because they knew i was The Problem
also technically for the waveclear she needs both Q+W, but, yeah. her waveclear is good.
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Doing ok isnt enough for Activision blizzard
Blizzard is not closing this down, actually. It has a dedicated fanbase and puts people on the client, so the game will continue to exist and be supported for the foreseeable future. There are still new heroes and content being released.
It's just been vastly scaled back. It's no longer really a flagship Bliz game.
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Like I said.
It's a niche pick but it does work when you set it up.
yknow what else keeps the marks up? autoattacking. or tossing out E. if you can hit someone with tormented souls, you can hit someone with an autoattack/E.
if you're playing malthael and you're in a position where you can't afford to get into melee range, why are you even playing malthael
tormented souls literally does nothing and has done nothing ever since they added a cleave to his AAs, there is literally zero point in taking it except kneecapping yourself i suppose because surprise, you don't have an ult now.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
It's dead. Blizzard officially reclassified it was a "Classic Game" , alongside titles like StarCraft II and WarCraft III, back in like April.
But hey, if anything, maybe that means we'll get a Heroes of the Storm Remaster soon.
Yes, there's still a dedicated fanbase that puts people on Battle.net, in much the same way that there's still a dedicated fanbase for Secret of Mana that puts people on the Super Nintendo. And yes, the game will continue to exist and be supported for the foreseeable future, in much the same way that StarCraft II occasionally gets a new co-op Commander. But it's dead: a majority of the development team was cannibalized by other departments; the pro-scene was dismantled; many of the best players moved on to other, more popular games; and yes, the content's been scaled back tremendously.
I love Heroes of the Storm, and I had a tremendous amount of fun with it for a few great years. I've even been feeling the urge to jump back in lately (and the only reason I haven't is because a vast majority of the people I played HotS with don't log into it anymore, and when they do, they just spam Brawls because the Matchmaker's a fucking joke and nobody knows how to actually play properly anyway so fuck it), but the game's dead and done with, and that's something we all need to come to terms with.
Draft is the only real way to play it atm.
You can describe it however you want. "Blizzard is closing down Heroes of the Storm" is inaccurate. "Heroes of the Storm is a dead game" is also not particularly accurate as much as we like to say it.
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meanwhile the game's still chugging along and people are still playing and literally nothing has changed except people are complaining more, i guess. i mean, you could say that Diablo III is "dead" too, but that's still trucking. people have been saying WoW is "dead" or "dying" since literally forever and yet that's still trucking
the word has lost any and all meaning at this point because it has been slung around so much to the point where it literally doesn't mean anything anymore. it's effectively a meme.
play the game if you want to play it. or don't. i'm still gonna, because i'm still having fun with it.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
i'm always dead
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Like, I no longer go into games expecting anyone to know what to do. I've also dramatically lowered my own expectations of my own play (hence why my most played heroes in the past few months have been solo queue Illidan and Medivh in QM). I watch maybe an hour a week of streams when I used to have them on even if just in the background constantly. And I don't spend any time critically thinking about the meta, drafting, macro strategy, etc. and as everyone here knows I used to over-analyze HotS to a fault.
But even taking all those things into account, I'll play a few games a week. I just treat it much less as a competitive endeavor and much more like fun leisure time where I get to screw around and play dumb heroes.
Does this mean the game is "dead"? Maybe in some sense, some facets of it are. But if I'm still able to play it, and I'm still choosing to play it (albeit much less frequently) and having fun, then when all is said and done, it's still very much "alive".
https://youtu.be/AdZc2zStiAw
one game this thrall was obviously newish to the game. Didn't know that you shouldn't just chase murky everywhere while he slimes you back to 1979,
I killed him about 3 times 1v1 in-lane
almost felt bad
another game was also doing well 1v1 vs butcher. Kept just out of his melee range and kept sliming him.
He was down to 30% hp most of the time, never killing me. Alas we had one super toxic ally and the game went downhill.
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
Patch notes out! There's one specific important change they made:
That's real good, honestly. Thanks guys, y'alls still the best~
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
The worst consequence I could foresee is that skill matchmaking becomes increasingly unreliable as the number of people to choose from is smaller. I wonder what you could do with the game to address that. Maybe try to adjust the skill curve? Like tweaking the objectives to force everyone to show up (e.g. freeze the towers/creeps) so there's no ambiguity about where you should be.
It’s the best fuckin map in the game and putting like, warhead junction in its place is basically a war crime
So she's basically the best.
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I don't play it as much as I did at my peak, but I still put in a healthy (probably a more healthy) number of hours into it. And as long as there is NGS there will be a good avenue for quality play... I'm not worried.
Switch: 6589-6405-3399
but i was in a 600+ sec queue so that's not happening anytime soon (^:
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
Witty signature comment goes here...
wra
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really hurt them. constantly making new half baked maps that just were not fun to play on. you could halve that number and you'd still have a couple stinkers left.
This is literally, word-for-word, exactly what I was going to say in response, as well.
Shire, Shrines, Spiders, BoE, and ToD/Sky Temple sometimes are all I need really. I guess Volkskaya can come too by virtue of being a nonshit 3-lane map.
Also I think the complaints against ToD are valid, but oftentimes teams are not coordinated enough to exploit of the attackers' advantage. Like I've often had random solo defences with me on Nazeebo cause our Diablo decided to wander off and help our DPS finish the red team pumpkin camp.
Steam: CavilatRest
Volskaya is still a good map to have in the pool because it's the one where side pushing and wave clear have very limited value.
The comment earlier about turning of soak during the objective is basically volskaya
teammates: WTF HOW DO YOU NOT GET HIT BY HER STUFF???????
enemy qhira E'd in 1v3 and fucking won because my teammates got SO SCARED to just turn around and hit her????
edit: literally watched as our jagaloon raynor stood still and got hit by qhira's hinterland blast cool cool cool
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
NEVERMIND Y'ALL I'M QHIRA FUCKING GOD
this hero is busted fucking insane holy shit
mmm, and pro tip: the bleed quest at level 1 is by far the best one. no doubt in my mind. also, her hinterland blast sucks! just go unrelenting strikes. shit's cray. and then you auto-win the game at level 20 with the silence.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582
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yeah but i also had a pocket medivh so i was being a LOT more aggressive than i normally could afford to be
they were also focusing the hell out of me anyway because they knew i was The Problem
also technically for the waveclear she needs both Q+W, but, yeah. her waveclear is good.
Battle.net Tag: Dibby#1582