heroes Six Aspects of HotS That Need Improvement

[Oxygen 446]

 

Oxygen goes over some of Heroes of the Storm's features that most need improvement.

BlizzCon 2017 will be Heroes of the Storm's 4th showing at our favourite yearly event. Since Blizzard has certainly delivered on the esports side of the game with HGC, I thought I'd share my thoughts on some of the game's systems. Here it is, then: Six aspects of Heroes of the Storm that need improvement.

 

I) The Class System

This point is extremely complex to discuss because it directly criticizes one of the core aspects of the game, and cannot be separated from resulting issues. I’ll try and break it down as simply as I can.

The premise of this discussion point is a firm belief in the following statement: Heroes of the Storm was designed to be played with team compositions that include at least one tank, and at least one healer.

I’ll develop this point further, but I’d first like to draw a parallel with World of Warcraft’s 5-player dungeons. In World of Warcraft, dungeons are specifically designed with parties composed of 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 damage dealers in mind. You are allowed to twist party compositions at your own risk, if you can field 5 players willing to partake to the experiment, but the automatic group finding tool will never deviate from the established “1-1-3” norm. Why? Because these dungeons are designed, and tested that way. The damage taken output is normalized for a single healer to handle; the kill timers are made for 3 competent damage dealers to handle; no tank-switching mechanics are present, and so on.

I understand that the normalized team composition statement is very bold for Heroes of the Storm because we have all experienced those matches where the above rules were all but respected. But, you may have observed that matches involving irregular team compositions were either extremely long or extremely short, or that they featured absurdly high or absurdly low kill counts. Why do such extremes occur?

Not my most memorable performance. Or match.

Tanks and healers are what I might call “inhibitors”; they inhibit kills. The sheer resilience of tanks – which is generally about 3 to 4 times that of your typical assassin or support hero – and general access to long-range mobility allows them to scout with relative safety to contribute to the own safety of teammates. Their access to reliable crowd control allows them to protect teammates as well. On the flip side, this crowd control also punishes poor positioning dearly… which is where healers intervene.

Healers’ ability to undo damage contributes to safely capturing certain objectives, razing structures, closing out games, and, of course, making mistakes less impactful. Have you ever tried sieging a guarded core without a healer? Unless your team has a 3-man advantage or the help of a map objective, and assuming relatively competent players, this is generally unreasonable to pull off. Structures hit hard in this game, and minions die very quickly.

Actually, everything hits hard; most assassins can kill each other in less than 5 seconds; heroic ability combos are devastating and almost always lead to kills. But tanks and healers help reduce these outcomes drastically; they create breathing room, partly due to their defensive nature and utility, and partly due to the fact that they generally have limited or otherwise very situational sustained damage outputs.

6 paragraphs in, and I have yet to explain why this is problematic. Here it is, then: in essence, I feel that matches where tanks or healers are absent are too different from so-called “normal” matches. Lacking either role closes off several strategic options for your team; the game loses strategic depth, and often breaks down to which team fields the greatest abilities to quickly wrench kills away – usually through raw combat mobility or long range poke which makes retaliation difficult. This is not a problem (beyond design intent) when the playing field is even, of course; when both teams do feature irregular compositions, but the playing field is seldom even in this respect. Why? Two reasons, both related to drafting.

The first reason deals with player preferences and proficiencies. The tank and healer roles are essential, but by design, less represented in any given team composition. Due to their importance, the skill disparity between two opposing tanks or healers may be felt more strongly than for assassins; in other words I feel it is much less punishing to have to handle a poor assassin player, as team compositions generally feature at least one or two more. This is especially true when considering that tanks and healers tend to require more knowledge and practice to play well. In a random drafting environment, you may find yourself in a situation where neither you nor any of your teammates are proficient at either role versus players that do display proficiency in these roles. Of course, it makes sense to reward players that master multiple roles, but the set drafting order, inability to trade hero picks, and questionable ability to blanket-block all forms of communication with teammates makes coordinating a messy business. This contributes to making the drafting process random at best, and toxic at worst. How? Nobody likes being forced into playing a role they do not wish to play, especially if they know they might perform poorly. But, nobody likes having a sub-par team composition either, nor tilting teammates before a given match has even begun. After all, specializing one’s hero pool and role is the norm for the MOBA genre, not the exception. If a player is stuck playing a role they do not wish to play due to the game’s design heavily promoting specific team compositions, they may set their team at a disadvantage. Would you rather risk something unconventional, or stick to one of your weaker or less interesting roles? In both cases, you are setting yourself up for a potentially frustrating match.

The second reason has to deal with drafting and in of itself; what if, for whatever reason, your team did not manage to secure either role? Most players are used to having a certain stability, and while I do not doubt that many would not mind experimenting, not everyone is capable of nor open to doing so. As I see it, the role system exists to guide players very strongly towards what the developers had in mind. We simply need to remember the Varian debacle to see what happens when the intended system fails to function properly. For those of you who weren’t around back then, here’s a recap: Varian, as a multiclass hero that can elect to become a tank or an assassin, used to be considered an assassin for matchmaking purposes. This left Quick Match players in a situation where they were consistently matched against a tank without one of their own. Blizzard addressed the situation by making him a tank for Quick Match-making purposes.

This ties in nicely with my next point: Quick Match, as the most played game mode by far, and the “logical” introductory step to PvP, ill-prepares players for drafting. It makes little sense to me to, on one hand, have a well-defined class system around which the game is designed, to then have a game mode that essentially throws the concept of team composition right out the window. As it turns out, tanks and healers are less popular than assassins, which often forces the matchmaking system to deal with an unevenly distributed population of players. It then has to make a choice between creating irregular team compositions, or to keep players waiting for an indefinite amount of time. I’ll also argue that Quick Match, in its current form, tends to put players into an “I play what I want when I want” mindset that translates poorly into other game modes. This would be fine if the natural progression was not Quick Match into Unranked Draft into Ranked Draft, but it is. When you design a game around team play, you need to groom your players into becoming team players from the get-go.

If Blizzard is bent on keeping its current role system, Quick Match mode simply cannot continue to exist in its current form. The solution is rather simple: Just like the World of Warcraft dungeon system, and, more closely related, League of Legends’ Draft Pick system, players should simply select the role they wish to play before a given match, and not the hero itself. Enforce a basic 1-tank, 1-healer, 3-assassins/specialists rule. If there aren’t enough tank or healer players around to make queue times reasonable, incentivize players to switch to these roles with gold and experience bonuses that scale directly with how many players for roles are necessary to regulate said queue times. This would have the positive side effect of pushing players towards experimenting with new, different roles, potentially increasing hero purchases, and giving players a better understanding of the game as a whole. The same system should certainly be introduced to non-Team-League-Draft modes as well.

For the record, changes to the class system were announced recently. I’m certainly looking forward to attending BlizzCon and reporting on those changes.

tl;dr: Heroes of the Storm’s class system puts an inordinate amount of importance on drafting a basic, functional team composition, as individual matches come apart at the seams by design when tanks or healers are not present. The importance of such roles puts a huge amount of pressure on players playing these roles, making them less popular and generally more punishing to experiment with. Quick Match ill-prepares its players for mid- and high-level drafting experiences.

 

II) Lack of Transparency

It’s no secret that the MOBA genre is extremely competitive from a business standpoint. Two extremely well established giants – DotA and League of Legends – are estimated to hold over 80% of the genre’s market shares, and have accustomed players to a number of transparent systems.

Heroes of the Storm features several systems that could benefit from improved transparency. One of the most broadly discussed subjects in this regards has been the nonexistence of an API for the game. Such a system would essentially allow third parties to use Blizzard’s data to disseminate information about a wide variety of game-related statistics, such as player performance information. This might include information such as experience level and win rates.

While alternative ways of obtaining this information do exist as of today, they must rely on clunky user-submitted replay scraping to gather said information, meaning that their success depends directly upon the goodwill of players to feed the system. This presents several problems. First, it is difficult for newer websites to compete fairly with older monopolies, as good data depends on quantity. Second, statistics at different skill levels may be misleading due to low and otherwise uneven player contributions. Third, the ability to “rig” one’s performance by uploading only desirable replays may skew data. Furthermore, some of the more well-known Heroes statistics websites have been notoriously poorly managed and come under fire like clockwork. Whether ill-intentioned or not, this poor management ends up hurting the integrity of the game.

Still, I must hold back a bit and admit that I’m thankful – not only as a player, but also as a guide writer – to have a way of accessing such data at all. If it weren’t for third parties, we’d be left in complete darkness with regards to any of the aforementioned information.

Could we live without having data about, say, individual hero win rates or talent pick rates? Of course; and we did for a long time. However, I’ll be capricious and quote myself here: “Two extremely well established giants have accustomed players to a number of performance-related information systems.” When trying to create a name for yourself, you need to offer more than the established standard, not less. Regardless of the state of Heroes of the Storm, I feel that having an API or an equally transparent system is extremely important to make your typical MOBA contender feel like a complete game.

The first reason is about being able to find concrete information about the metagame. MOBAs are – at their core – complex strategy games; thousands upon thousands of strategic choices and permutations are open to players. Even though outstanding websites do exist to help players out, the complexity and highly competitive nature of MOBAs makes them particularly cutthroat for beginners. Having access to detailed and accurate statistics allows content creators to provide new players with the information they need to get off on the right foot. Veterans, too, can make use of such data to analyze, adapt to, and potentially exploit metagaming trends to their own benefit. Ultimately, information is power for all players, and power is player retention.

Information also empowers players in another markedly different way that I might call watchdogging. Without basic data such as win and pick rates, players would never be able to meaningfully criticize the state of the game’s balance. Blizzard developers are known to use individual hero and talent win rates to dictate at least some of their balance changes, as they so often comment. We cry out when things feel poorly tuned or unappealing because we love Heroes of the Storm. But without data, we are left relying on subjective and ineffective hunches to discuss balance; with it, we can support our assertions, and be proactive when things aren’t moving. Having access to exact player statistics also allows players to track and compare their progress, instills players with a sense of competition, and allows for watchdogging of the matchmaking system.

I feel I must insist on how difficult proper design- and system-related criticism is to produce without data at our disposal. Transparency might mean exposing yourself to scrutiny, Blizzard, but it also means significantly improving your image, and providing yourself with an effective way of self-regulating. I suppose this is where I mention that the company has been displaying questionable transparency as of late; Overwatch doesn’t have an API either (though it is regularly discussed by Blizzard staff, and scraping websites do exist as well), and Hearthstone players can’t see their win rates or match history. By contrast, Warcraft III still lets you browse its ladder.

The creation of an API is not the only way Blizzard can improve its transparency, however. In fact, an API might not even be necessary if all desirable information was simply given to us somewhere or in some form. Some of it is available, such as individual player statistics, but remains hidden behind a clunky, hermetic system that requires you to work through the chat or friends list system to use. In other words, if you want to look a specific player up, they need to be in a chat room with you (general channel, in-game, and so on) or on your friends list. No ladder exists outside of the Grandmaster ladder and unofficial ladders spawned by data websites. The match history log makes no listing of who played with you. There’s no way to see anyone’s mmr (matchmaking rating), including your own, so you can never tell if you’re being matched with and against players of your skill level. And to this I must ask a resounding “Why?”

tl;dr: Heroes of the Storm lacks the basic level of transparency other similar games have accustomed players to having. This lack of transparency makes it difficult to assess the quality of the matchmaking system and of balance and design changes. The reliance upon third-party websites for such basic data creates a number of ethical issues.

 

III) The Reconnection System

If I were asked to point out the most frustrating element in Heroes of the Storm, this might just be it. If you’ve never experienced being dropped out of match before, for whatever reason – crashes, connection or computer issues, and so on – here’s how it goes: after obviously relaunching the game, you are treated to a screen inviting you to rejoin your game in progress. There are no other options here, not even an exit button; you either hit “Rejoin” to, well, attempt to rejoin the match, or ALT+F4 your way out of Heroes of the Storm. That’s fine; it incentivizes players to not purposefully disconnect from their matches to go and play another match right away. For some obscure reason, however, this screen doesn’t always appear. I’m not sure what triggers this problem, but if this happens to you, you’re done. There’s no rejoining that game, and you’ll be awarded a loss, your rating will feel the consequences of a left game (that’s 600 points – or 3 wins worth of points, on average) regardless of the match’s outcome. You might also earn yourself a leaver status, on top of potential player reports. This is a rather rare occurrence, however.

Under normal circumstances, the Rejoin screen will appear, and you’ll hit rejoin, naturally. If the game you’re trying to rejoin is in the process of ending, however (in the Defeat/MVP screens), you’ll be stuck on this screen for an indefinite period of time and have to reboot the game. Again, you’ll be awarded a leave & loss. If the Rejoin button does work, you’ll have to go through the classic Loading screen. Once this is done, you hop right back into the match and get the full control of your Hero and, ready to make a comeback. At least, that's what you'd expect from playing League of Legends, DotA II, or Smite.

No. After this short loading period, you’ll experience one of the most bizarre and scary things in Heroes of the Storm: The “Reconnect Successful” screen. It looks like this:

Well, is it? Where'd the game go?

I’m not certain why it exists, and I certainly don’t claim to understand the underlying systems, but this screen might be best described as some kind of limbo where you hear every sound (including death “bings”) in the match and see every shattered screen from the AI controlling your hero’s inevitable, repeated deaths, in a fast forward kind of replay. As the image above shows, during this time, you’re trapped “catching up” because “the server is X minutes ahead” of you. The quirkiest part of this strange experience, however, is that the time it takes you to reconnect is directly proportional to the current length of the match. On average, you can divide this length by four and end up with a pretty good guess of how long it’ll take you to actually successfully reconnect. Since most Heroes of the Storm matches last between 15 and 20 minutes, disconnecting at any point after 12 minutes means you’ve probably lost, or at least made the match excessively difficult (and more importantly, frustrating) for your teammates. If you do manage to finally reconnect, you’ll have to deal with the AI’s suboptimal talent choices, just to add insult to injury. As it stands, disconnections simply end up being too impactful. Nobody likes their losses (and victories, for that matter) to be defined by outside factors. Online tournaments, too, are affected by this, as thousands of viewers often end up held hostage by the system.

I feel like I need to reiterate here that I don’t claim understand how the system works. What I do know is that this is the most frustrating reconnection system I have ever experienced, in any game. There’s no sugar coating this one: The process simply needs to become faster; the dreaded “Reconnection Successful” screen has to go. Players need a way to force the system to put them back into matches if the Rejoin screen fails. AI-controlled heroes need to stop picking talents for you; have we considered implementing a shared unit control system instead?

 

IV) The Replay System

Heroes of the Storm’s replay system shares its biggest issue with the reconnection system: Skipping through replays also happens to be an awfully slow process. Jumping to the end of a 16 minutes game took about 2 minutes of loading time, leading me to believe that replays can’t “seek” any faster than their 8x maximum play speed. Thankfully, scanning only has to be performed once; subsequent skipping is much faster. This lengthy initial loading time can still certainly turn off content producers from browsing replays to create highlight reels or showcase certain aspects of the game if they have a number of replays to go through. This also disincentivizes players from reviewing their matches to go over specific events or study certain strategies. Other than that, the replay system is functional, but very bare bones. Blizzard is obviously aware of this because they’ve officially promoted Ahli’s work on a better replay interface. But even with these enhanced features, the system’s polish and features pale in comparison to DotA II’s and League of Legends’ own.

 

V) The Queue System

Although I find queues to be on the long side of things, I can at least understand how the system would struggle to find an appropriate match for players with unusually high win rates, let alone 5 of us – and especially when considering that the game’s population is split across six different game modes. What I do find completely unacceptable, however, is receiving the all too familiar “A player you were matched with has disconnected or left the service” message followed by the need to go through the entire queue again. My group typically has to wait between 8 and 10 minutes to find Quick Match and Unranked matches, and often twice as long for Team League matches. Forcing 9 people to go through the entire process is both insulting and inefficient; if the system has found a match, why not just toss all 9 of us back into the queue and just look for one more instead of wasting some 90 minutes of collective time? Again, I don’t claim to understand the system, but other games do it, and for good reasons. This behavior is considered baseline, not exceptional.

Awfully typical.

 

VI) The Drafting System

Although Heroes of the Storm heavily touts itself as a team-oriented game, I find it rather strange that we still do not have access to a draft hero trading system. I say “still” here because, as with the above features, hero trading is considered commonplace in the MOBA genre. My guess is that, at this point, there was an active decision to not include one. If this is the case, I must protest: On top of promoting draft interactions, hero trading reduces the impact of randomness in picking order. In other words, the system allows specialized late-pick players to focus on their role, and early-pick flex players to cover a broader variety of roles without feeling forced to play high priority heroes, regardless of the randomized picking order. Imagine yourself in a situation where your tank player might be the 4th or 5th player to pick on your team, in a metagame environment where tanks are generally prioritized. As the 1st pick, would you push your dedicated tank player’s away from their role so as to secure heroes considered high tier? As I mentioned earlier in this article, specializing one’s role is the norm, not the exception; the flexibility of this system is needed to reduce the randomness of drafting. I will mention that about a year ago, there were talks of adding such a system to the game. Here’s to hoping the upcoming BlizzCon will bring us good news about this. If the system does end up implemented, blanket chat blocks will have to be reworked to exclude lobbies. Or, at the very least, an indicator should show who isn’t receiving messages so that attempts at communicating aren’t in vain.

While we’re at it, I’d also like to quickly touch on the horror that is giving AFK players a random hero instead of outright removing them from the game at hand. I don’t really have an argument for that one; it’s just annoying, and players who are serious about playing should be present for the drafting process.

 

VII) Bonus Comments About Other Systems

Here are some other thoughts that I feel don’t really need a dedicated paragraph to be taken into consideration. In no particular order:

• I’d like to be able to check out mounts in Try Mode.
• I wish I could use my Stimpacks whenever I please. As it stands, I don’t open Loot Chests unless I know I’ll be playing for a while, and if I do open a Stimpack by accident, I just ALT+F4 my way out of the game to preserve it.
• I would love to have an item gifting feature for my teammate’s birthday.
• I don’t particularly care for the forced MVP cut scene after every single match. I rarely see more than 2 people vote anyway; let’s at least have the option to opt out of it.
• I’d like to be able to check out anyone’s profile, at any time, if I happen to know their BattleTag.
• I wish my heroes were available across other regions.
• Players who opt out of receiving messages from non-friends probably shouldn’t be able to whisper other players.

 

Conclusion

Heroes of the Storm is relatively feature-rich as far as modern MOBAs go. Unfortunately, many of these features and systems feel unpolished or underexplored when compared to the game's competitors. While it's difficult to tell just how much they affect the game's popularity, Blizzard has a history of continuously improving and supporting its games over their extensive lifetimes. Furthermore, many developer comments hint at improvements for some of the topics underlined in this article to be announced no later than this BlizzCon, making me excited about what's to come. I'll be there in person to report everything, so stay tuned!

[Plergoth 277]

An incredibly thorough and well written piece reflecting everything and more the kind of improvements and features HotS players want to see. The reconnect system for me should be a priority, both with the AI control and the catch up after reconnecting makes an otherwise fun game extremely stressful out of nowhere, but things like a gift system wouldn't go amiss either. There are times where I feel like ringing up Blizzard and offering to come and push the HotS engine down to the local garage so it can get jump started. 

They have been fairly consistent with improving the game in many other areas, I just hope they have a lot of goals that they are aware of and are pushing to reach for next year. 

Edited October 23, 2017 by Plergoth

[En1gm4z 0]

Totally agreed.

[AnotherRussianGamer 0]

The reason the reconnect system works as it does is simply because of the hots runs on the SC2 engine, which is designed to have both the client and the server on the same page, and record every single action that happened in game. In SC2, this works fine because you simply cannot continue the game when someone dcs simply because those who have the extra time will win period, as every second is precious, so the game pauses when someone DCs. In Hots however, you can't simply "pause the game" when someone leaves when there are 9 other players in the match, so they had to come up with that backwards reconnect system. 

[Oxygen 446]

6 minutes ago, AnotherRussianGamer said:

The reason the reconnect system works as it does is simply because of the hots runs on the SC2 engine, which is designed to have both the client and the server on the same page, and record every single action that happened in game. In SC2, this works fine because you simply cannot continue the game when someone dcs simply because those who have the extra time will win period, as every second is precious, so the game pauses when someone DCs. In Hots however, you can't simply "pause the game" when someone leaves when there are 9 other players in the match, so they had to come up with that backwards reconnect system. 

I played a bit ignorant there, but I know this is the reason. I need to question *why*, however, we must endure this system. Good insight.

[AnotherRussianGamer 0]

7 minutes ago, Oxygen said:

I played a bit ignorant there, but I know this is the reason. I need to question *why*, however, we must endure this system. Good insight.

Bad design. As most of us know, Blizzard Dota was originally an SC2 arcade game mode, and as it got bigger they had to make it a standalone title, and were too lazy to develop a new engine, and thought that if Valve can make a moba on a pre-existing engine meant for another genre, why can't we? Unfortunately, unlike Source which Dota 2 was originally built on, the SC2 engine is not versatile at all, and came with more detrimental engine restrictions than Dota 2 originally had, so ultimately, Blizzard needs to do an engine remake.

Edited October 23, 2017 by AnotherRussianGamer

[Rexx 41]

This is all well and good - But the Class System only needs one change. And that change requests some hero re-design but that is also something that would fix it up.

Time and again I see morons saying that Heroes needs more sub classes to be more like LoL and Dota. No. Heroes just needs Warrior - Healer - Assassin and Specialist.

Have Warriors be Tanky, there is no need nor any reason for them to be DPS'y like Sonya and Artanis.

Healers should be healers, not "supports" - They should heal and focus on keeping members of their team up, not doing damage.

Assassins can keep on doing what they do now.

Specialists should be better rounded so they all can deal with both structure damage and camps as right now a great deal of Warriors are better for camp clearing than most specialists while some Warriors and Assassins are better IN the lane than specialists (But not necessarily on structure damage)

[Kurosu 58]

How about bad behaviour and people that constantly afk/alt tab mid game ( especially on start but even mid game),those that assist enemy ( garrosh throwing you to your death or saving enemy  for example), etc etc?

[Godeyes 25]

@Oxygen

You are totally on point with this article.

I couldn't agree more - especially with points 2 and 3.
Lack of transparity + reconection issue are so disappointing in this game. Not to mention you are totally punished if you do not manage to reconnect in time - even if it isn't your fault.

I would add 1 other issue that somewhat corresponds to the first issue - current role system is BAD. We get chars like ETC and Zarya in 1 basket called "warriors" when they are so damn different. New players take those chars like Zarya/Sonya/Rexx and don't understand that they are NOT tanks...

[Hanz39 53]

The reconnect system should be devs highest priority since that garbage is there from so long and make you lose games even if you DC for a short period you take much longer to use the hero again even if you are already online.

Also yeah those stupid talents picked by AI are very annoying since they pick always the same thing for example if you DC with tyrande at 9 AI will take starfall no matter what resulting in rage after you reconnect cursing blizzard.

I wish they add to select all talents at lv 1 so when you reach the level it gets autopicked so AI can't take it in your place.

[Valhalen 1,484]

5 hours ago, Oxygen said:

If Blizzard is bent on keeping its current role system, Quick Match mode simply cannot continue to exist in its current form. The solution is rather simple: Just like the World of Warcraft dungeon system, and, more closely related, League of Legends’ Draft Pick system, players should simply select the role they wish to play before a given match, and not the hero itself. Enforce a basic 1-tank, 1-healer, 3-assassins/specialists rule. If there aren’t enough tank or healer players around to make queue times reasonable, incentivize players to switch to these roles with gold and experience bonuses that scale directly with how many players for roles are necessary to regulate said queue times. This would have the positive side effect of pushing players towards experimenting with new, different roles, potentially increasing hero purchases, and giving players a better understanding of the game as a whole. The same system should certainly be introduced to non-Team-League-Draft modes as well.

This could work, but would completely contradict the concept of Quick Match being a... Well... Quick Match. Where you simply pick a Hero you feel compelled to use.

If anything, I think the system should be a bit more "gentle" in a similar vein to Overwatch, where it displays a warning that there is no "Tank" or "Support". Simply forcing players that they HAVE to follow that Team Composition defeats the purpose of Quick Match.

Don't get me wrong, I hate when I get in 5 Assassin Teams VS Traditional Teams; although the current matchmaking does the best it can to try to queue you with another team filled with the same roles (it's not perfect, however). On the other hand, I have a LOT of fun gathering some buddies and doing stuff like running with 5 Supports.

On the other hand, your points are completely valid. But I think that a solution would be, would be to allow the player to select which roles they want to be filled in the other slots; this would be especially useful when solo queueing.

In my opinion Blizzard should also dissect further the roles, adding in-game the "Bruiser" subrank for Warriors, for example. Adding subranks would be useful to teach players that Heroes in the same class can perform different types of tasks (i.e. Medivh is a Specialist, but he is not made to perform Sieging, or that Tassadar is a Support, but is not suited for solo-healing).

6 hours ago, Oxygen said:

• I’d like to be able to check out mounts in Try Mode.
• I wish I could use my Stimpacks whenever I please. As it stands, I don’t open Loot Chests unless I know I’ll be playing for a while, and if I do open a Stimpack by accident, I just ALT+F4 my way out of the game to preserve it.
• I would love to have an item gifting feature for my teammate’s birthday.
• I don’t particularly care for the forced MVP cut scene after every single match. I rarely see more than 2 people vote anyway; let’s at least have the option to opt out of it.
• I’d like to be able to check out anyone’s profile, at any time, if I happen to know their BattleTag.
• I wish my heroes were available across other regions.
• Players who opt out of receiving messages from non-friends probably shouldn’t be able to whisper other players.

THIS SO DAMN FUCKING MUCH.

Oxygen, please, send this to Blizzard.

[Xaethron 36]

I feel like the AI talent picking could be fixed if you could save talent paths on your profile. The AI would just continue the path based on what you picked.

[DeadPixel 0]

As people said before, all actions will be saved in a log. Its a good design for sc and also ok for hots. The cool thing is, you cant have any server laggs. I know this from Battlefield where you killed someone in your client and you die after him because he killed you in his client too and its all because of the client-server connection. And this is impossible in hots due to the system. But so we have to live with this bad reconnctions system. When you try to reconnect all actions have to readjust to the point where your team is and this takes a little bit of time. So hots need a new engine, when they want to change this reconnect/ replay system. Aslong hots isnt more popular i think they wont change it.

 

I only dont understand why sometimes the reconnect button disapears, that i have to restart the game before i can reconnect.

[Godeyes 25]

19 minutes ago, Xaethron said:

I feel like the AI talent picking could be fixed if you could save talent paths on your profile. The AI would just continue the path based on what you picked.

Or do it the simplest way there is - after you reconnect you can pick again talents that were picked by AI.

[countcardboard 3]

just registered to icy veins only to thank you for this awesome article! some stuff i wasnt even aware about, but while reading i was like "hell, yeeah, that's true and i didn't even know better!"

biiiig thumbs up! hope this gets shared and blizzard somehow recognizes it! and yeah, let's see what blizzcon has in stores for heroes!

[positiv2 953]

1 hour ago, DeadPixel said:

I know this from Battlefield where you killed someone in your client and you die after him because he killed you in his client too and its all because of the client-server connection.

Keep in mind that Battlefield hosts games for up to 64 players, while HotS is a game for 10 people. Some system just don't scale so well and have to be replaced by a different one that can handle larger amounts of players at once.
Additionally, in the case of Battlefield, you have to consider projectile speed, as there is a chance of both bullets being in the air at the same time, especially for long range combat.

[Dejo93 1,023]

Is there a way for the devs to see this thread so they can respond to it? 

[Dejo93 1,023]

13 hours ago, Valhalen said:

This could work, but would completely contradict the concept of Quick Match being a... Well... Quick Match. Where you simply pick a Hero you feel compelled to use.

If anything, I think the system should be a bit more "gentle" in a similar vein to Overwatch, where it displays a warning that there is no "Tank" or "Support". Simply forcing players that they HAVE to follow that Team Composition defeats the purpose of Quick Match.

Don't get me wrong, I hate when I get in 5 Assassin Teams VS Traditional Teams; although the current matchmaking does the best it can to try to queue you with another team filled with the same roles (it's not perfect, however). On the other hand, I have a LOT of fun gathering some buddies and doing stuff like running with 5 Supports.

On the other hand, your points are completely valid. But I think that a solution would be, would be to allow the player to select which roles they want to be filled in the other slots; this would be especially useful when solo queueing.

In my opinion Blizzard should also dissect further the roles, adding in-game the "Bruiser" subrank for Warriors, for example. Adding subranks would be useful to teach players that Heroes in the same class can perform different types of tasks (i.e. Medivh is a Specialist, but he is not made to perform Sieging, or that Tassadar is a Support, but is not suited for solo-healing).

THIS SO DAMN FUCKING MUCH.

Oxygen, please, send this to Blizzard.

I think for the MVP thing, they should give rewards at the end of the game or season. For example a mount or a nice chunk of gold

[Dejo93 1,023]

12 hours ago, DeadPixel said:

As people said before, all actions will be saved in a log. Its a good design for sc and also ok for hots. The cool thing is, you cant have any server laggs. I know this from Battlefield where you killed someone in your client and you die after him because he killed you in his client too and its all because of the client-server connection. And this is impossible in hots due to the system. But so we have to live with this bad reconnctions system. When you try to reconnect all actions have to readjust to the point where your team is and this takes a little bit of time. So hots need a new engine, when they want to change this reconnect/ replay system. Aslong hots isnt more popular i think they wont change it.

 

I only dont understand why sometimes the reconnect button disapears, that i have to restart the game before i can reconnect.

How popular is HotS in comparison to other mobas? I know that LoL is stagnating, and DotA is well DotA

[Dejo93 1,023]

16 hours ago, AnotherRussianGamer said:

Bad design. As most of us know, Blizzard Dota was originally an SC2 arcade game mode, and as it got bigger they had to make it a standalone title, and were too lazy to develop a new engine, and thought that if Valve can make a moba on a pre-existing engine meant for another genre, why can't we? Unfortunately, unlike Source which Dota 2 was originally built on, the SC2 engine is not versatile at all, and came with more detrimental engine restrictions than Dota 2 originally had, so ultimately, Blizzard needs to do an engine remake.

Is there a way to upgrade the existing engine, so it's as versatile as the source engine? I mean if it can be upgraded without the need for an entirely new engine

[Esmer 13]

It's been over two years since the release, and Blizzy didn't even try to fix reconnect issue or improve matchmaking.

I had over 2000 matches in the game and finally uninstalled it because I fed up of getting matched with players who have 100-200 games. They have no map awareness, usually ignore objectives and feed instead of getting xp, but are always the first to blame the team.

Moreover, there are many players who don't even try to come back after just one lost team fight or objective.

The game had bad matchmaking and MMR from the start, which led to good players leaving HotS because they don't want to play with idiots. This led to even worse matchmaking and even more players leaving the game.

After all this time and infamous HotS 2.0 patch that added boxes and more skins but completely ignored gameplay issues, I personally don't have any hope for the game.

There's only one thing they ever did right: disabled chat with opposing team.

[Oxygen 446]

15 hours ago, Valhalen said:

THIS SO DAMN FUCKING MUCH.

Oxygen, please, send this to Blizzard.

My hope is that it'll find them organically. 

[Valhalen 1,484]

1 hour ago, Oxygen said:

My hope is that it'll find them organically. 

Maybe you could post this on the Battle.Net forums too. Although I'm not sure if it is a good idea given how toxic people are there.

[Oxygen 446]

2 hours ago, Valhalen said:

Maybe you could post this on the Battle.Net forums too. Although I'm not sure if it is a good idea given how toxic people are there.

Someone did before I could. 

[Valks 2,377]

9 hours ago, Dejo93 said:

Is there a way to upgrade the existing engine, so it's as versatile as the source engine? I mean if it can be upgraded without the need for an entirely new engine

Any time there has been this kind of thing suggested for other games, there has often been hints at the idea that the code just currently doesn't allow it, or that it's old code and so can't be upgraded without being remade.