heroes BlizzCon 2018 Heroes of the Storm Rewards

[Stan 5,242]

BlizzCon 2018 rewards have been added to the game in the latest content update. Virtual Ticket holders will receive a mount, spray, banner, and portrait this year.

Nexus Razorgrin Mount

BlizzCon 2018 Banner

BlizzCon 2018 Portrait

BlizzCon 2018 Spray (Cartoon Nexus Razorgrin)

[Haheisenberg 32]

Funny how blizz pretends that someone cares about this game yet the token price doesn't move up by even one gold until WoW reward gets announced.

[Istinon 17]

9 minutes ago, Haheisenberg said:

Funny how blizz pretends that someone cares about this game yet the token price doesn't move up by even one gold until WoW reward gets announced.

Why so negative? I, for my part, will take this news for what it is: A cool new mount announcement for HotS and not about WoW

[Arcling 898]

4 minutes ago, Istinon said:

Why so negative? I, for my part, will take this news for what it is: A cool new mount announcement for HotS and not about WoW

It's that mob mentality, very often when I see news about HotS somewhere people spam "no one cares about this game", "lul dead game" etc. Sadly, that even spread to Overwatch now. It's basically with every game that had surge of popularity at one point, but then lost many players or isn't in spotlight anymore.

Edited September 19, 2018 by Arcling

[Aasgier 36]

13 minutes ago, Arcling said:

It's that mob mentality, very often when I see news about HotS somewhere people spam "no one cares about this game", "lul dead game" etc. Sadly, that even spread to Overwatch now. It's basically with every game that had surge of popularity at one point, but then lost many players or isn't in spotlight anymore.

Every game that is at the end of its growth cycle has to deal with these comments. That does not necessarily mean the game is declining - it might just be that the game is stagnating - but it sure as hell isn't growing much anymore.

[ShiiNex 2]

Sad that it's just a Reskin 

[Haheisenberg 32]

25 minutes ago, Arcling said:

It's that mob mentality, very often when I see news about HotS somewhere people spam "no one cares about this game", "lul dead game" etc. Sadly, that even spread to Overwatch now. It's basically with every game that had surge of popularity at one point, but then lost many players or isn't in spotlight anymore.

It's more about blizz releasing an unfinished game which BfA certainly is (don't say it's not, even Icy Veins had an article titled "is wow in open beta?" which was quickly changed). I know those teams are not related but it still feels annoying to see any news from other game, knowing that a rushed expansion will be slowly fixed over time instead of being released later but actually completed. You may ask wouldn't the content draught be a problem if we waited some more time for a new exp? Well maybe if there were more resources put in the main game instead of another shitty, toxic, imbalanced game, then we would have mkore content or the new exp would actually be complete earlier. 

Edit: 

Besides what I wrote above, let me say again that if a considerable amount of people cared about this, the token price would already skyrocket. You will see this if we get a nice mount for WoW as a ticket reward.

Edited September 19, 2018 by Haheisenberg

[SirSlapzAlot 28]

57 minutes ago, Haheisenberg said:

Funny how blizz pretends that someone cares about this game yet the token price doesn't move up by even one gold until WoW reward gets announced.

I always wonder why toxic people take the time to comment negative stuff on forums about things they "don't care" about...

[Arcling 898]

30 minutes ago, Aasgier said:

Every game that is at the end of its growth cycle has to deal with these comments. That does not necessarily mean the game is declining - it might just be that the game is stagnating - but it sure as hell isn't growing much anymore.

That's true, usually if game is at least successful to a degree, it will get rather stable, albeit smaller playerbase. There is always a wave of players who will leave the game once it's "newness" wears out, usually that's when these comments start appearing.

@Haheisenberg Yes, BfA was released with plenty of unfixed bugs and unfinished content. As for token prices, some people play only WoW, so it's not going to increase just for HotS mount, which isn't even that unique, as it is a retextured model of already existing mount. Gold prices also skyrocket when there is new game on BN (like it was the case with Destiny 2). I guess mount for WoW will have a unique model, so more people will care.

 

Edited September 19, 2018 by Arcling

[Kuarinofu 78]

HotS is certainly not dead, but the playerbase feels low, especially if you play team league of unranked at night, you will be playing with the same people over and over and in team league queue times will be huge unless you will get into an extremely unfair match because there is no way around this.

IMHO, HotS worked only because it had Blizzard characters that we all love. It had some conceptual flaws (like shared XP, team dependent gameplay, inability to see your and enemy's MMR etc.) and if any other studio would've made the same game it would've been dead a long time ago. I'm not even talking about matchmaking since perfect matchmaking just wasn't invented yet and it impossible in a game like HotS (too many heroes, maps and other variables).

What I think happened is Blizzard was probably unhappy since they missed their golden chance with DotA and they decided to make their own DotA (if you remember, it was called Blizzard DotA for some time while in pre-prodution). Then they decided to make their vision of a MOBA game, different from MOBAs of the time (DotA, Dota 2, LoL, HoN, RoT, whatever), featuring their characters and lore.

HotS is probably the least profitable Blizz game (besides Diablo III of course), and it treated that way as well. I don't know how it is currently, but it used to be just a side project and an additional workload for Dustin Browder and his SC2 team. It really feels like this was indeed calculated and they perfectly know how much they are spending and what they are doing with their games. 

Also, they sort of cornered themselves with very weak customization and low micro-transaction incentives before HotS 2.0. They could've made much more money off the game if they'd thought of that before, like Gabe did with Dota 2.

[Arcling 898]

18 minutes ago, Kuarinofu said:

HotS is probably the least profitable Blizz game (besides Diablo III of course), and it treated that way as well.

It's above D3 for sure, and maybe SC2 too, since it also seems rather dead and mostly in maintenance mode. Also the fact that all new co-op commanders and skins are locked behind paywall, isn't attracting new players. Most casuals have abandoned this game, and those who are still playing it are mostly those following esports and/or those who are very competitive in ranked.

I actually like shared team xp in HotS, though many players coming from others mobas hated it and also complained that they couldn't play "solo", to carry whole team. All skins initially locked behind paywall certainly didn't help to attract more casuals, something like heroes 2.0 should have been there from the start. Agree that Blizzard was rather late with releasing this game (and originally it was even supposed to be a part of SC2 arcade), which is rather funny, because this genre started in W3. Another issue is that they initially advertised HotS as casual game, "hero brawler", but later started making changes for the sake of it becoming more "esport friendly" (shorter cc, burst damage being more prevalent than sustained etc.).

Edited September 19, 2018 by Arcling

[CyberDVonaven 82]

5 hours ago, Arcling said:

Most casuals have abandoned this game, and those who are still playing it are mostly those following esports and/or those who are very competitive in ranked.

You guys are all just being echo chambers of each other... You're wrong.

HotS is not 'dead'.

It's not 'stagnate'.

It's not something that 'most casuals have abandoned'.

And it's not something that only esports and 'very competitive' players play.

All my friends who play HotS are casual players and we play just about every night together (about 10-15 of us). Most of them don't play much else games wise. This is pretty much their one thing they do other then tv/videos to past the time when off work. I play lots of video games myself, but I'm by NO means very competitive.

I rarely ever play ranked matches. I and many of my HOTS friends I game with all the time just do our placements in TL for the free mount. And placements in HL just to see how we stack up. And then don't worry with ranked for the rest of the season. I do have a few HotS friends that play ranked a lot on my friends list but they don't play as much with us more 'casual' players.

And trust me the majority of my friends on HotS are 'casuals' about it. We just enjoy playing the game with each other more then anything else. And getting to play with characters we find fun to play And playing a game that's fun and not got all the bullshit that LoL and DOTA do. Also most of my HotS friends have either never played LoL of DotA or only played it very briefly before trying HotS and MUCH preferring it to the competition.

 And I'm pretty sure money wise it's Overwatch/WoW/HotS/SC2/D3. But it could be that HotS is number 2 in profits for them behind Overwatch or WoW/Overwatch/HotS. but still either 2 or 3 in profits.

And don't even count Destiny 2 or CoD:BC4. Those games have NOTHING to do with the Blizzard studio teams. They are only on B.net by order of Activision (who own Blizzard) for a platform/launcher for them to be played on PC to bypass Steam. So Activision can make all the profits from the games rather then having to give a percentile of it to another service like Steam and the like. So rather then making another launcher they just started having stuff like that added to b.net. Plus it exposes those games to a user base on b.net that might not have thought about getting the games otherwise.

So yeah... you guys are just plain wrong about HotS. And like someone else said, if you don't like the game so much and think it's 'dead' why are you even on here talking about it / bad mouthing it to begin with.

It sounds to me like you guys are all just whining and crying cause you didn't get a fancy new toy that you wanted so now your bitching and complaining and calling your parents assholes for not giving you one. Rather 

Plus they're bonuses for buying the Blizzcon tickets in the first place. The point of bonus items isn't suppose to be the reason you buy something. The primary item is. If you don't give two shits about watching all the Blizzcon event stuff live on Twitch or YouTube or you don't plan on actually going to Blizzcon then don't worry about it. You can easily watch all the important stuff on YouTube soon after. And they run a bunch of the Esports event stuff for it on Twitch live during them without a ticket to watch for free too.

 Infact you should consider the fact that it's 'just a reskin' a good thing! Cause that means you didn't have to spend a SUPER high price just to get an ultra rare unique one time only item. 

[Arcling 898]

51 minutes ago, CyberDVonaven said:

You guys are all just being echo chambers of each other... You're wrong.

That part with casuals abandoning the game was about Starcraft 2. HotS is mostly casual, with GMs already complaining about long queues.

Edited September 19, 2018 by Arcling

[Aasgier 36]

That, and stagnating is not necessarily bad. Games can spend a long time in this phase of their life cycle (World of Tanks, for example, is around for slightly less than a decade now and has spent three quarters of its life in this stage).

A stagnating game is also not dead by any means - it means it is no longer growing rapidly in playerbase. But stagnation (HotS life stage) is far from a decline and even declining games are not dead.

Let's take another example from a game I played; Rise of Mythos. I remember when it was growing (for about 9 months after it came out, then it was stagnant for 9 months, then the game developers introduced completely broken bullshit and the game died off in another 6 (losing over 90% of its playerbase in that timeframe). This is what I would call a dead game, currently. It has gone through all of the phases in its life stage, suffered from a complete decline and queue times are through the roof.

Edit: Rise of Mythos, for those that don't know, is a Chinese card game. They tend to have relatively short life cycles, as the numbers here show, since Chinese game design philosophy does not care about longevity - it is all about milking consumers as quickly as you can.

 

Edited September 20, 2018 by Aasgier

[CyberDVonaven 82]

On 9/19/2018 at 6:49 PM, Arcling said:

That part with casuals abandoning the game was about Starcraft 2. HotS is mostly casual, with GMs already complaining about long queues.

Oh, ok. That makes fair more sense :).

In regards to the GrandMasters complains, I would assume that's an issue in any game with ladders at the highest levels of ranked play.

I know if I was Master or GrandMaster (which I'm far from either, but a can dream ? ) I would always just expect my queue times to be longer and longer the higher up in rank I got. It wouldn't exactly make much since for there to be a TON of GM players. It would kinda defeat the principle that so few are good enough to be a Grand Master in the first place.

Edited September 21, 2018 by CyberDVonaven

[CyberDVonaven 82]

On 9/20/2018 at 4:32 AM, Aasgier said:

This is what I would call a dead game, currently. It has gone through all of the phases in its life stage, suffered from a complete decline and queue times are through the roof.

??? o_O? Are you a Master/GrandMaster or something? Queue times are just fine for me and my friends. They're only slightly longer then they've ever been for us.

The only time we have problems with it taking forever is when one of our Master rank buddies plays with us. Then it takes forever because our 5 person team has such differing ranks it makes it harder on the game to match us up to another 5 player team properly.

Also we play on NA and usually are all playing together at around like 2or3am-6or7am EST (mine and couple others) / 11pmor12am-3or4am PST (several others in our group). Cause one of our friends is in Australia (14hrs ahead of EST) and another is in Hawaii (6hrs behind EST) So at those times of night/morning it's gonna be less people on NA. Like when I'm still up playing at like 7am EST it usually takes longing then when I'm playing at like 2-3am to get a match. And it's obvious to me WHY it takes longer at these times. If I was playing around 5pm-9pm EST or so on a regular basis I'm pretty damn sure queue times would be very short comparatively.

So maybe you guys 'idea' of short and long queue times determining if a game is alive, growing, stable, or dead is flawed. Also I have to wonder what times you consider 'short' and 'through the roof' to begin with. And your basis of comparison as well. Cause the few times I've tried to play LoL in recents months, despite the game having such an I assume large player-base, I found my queue times on there to be longer or about the same as in HOTS for me.

ALSO AN IMPORTANT NOTE; Queue times have increased since they changed the way the system does it's matchmaking and how it tries to pair up players (and their choices of heroes in QM). They've talked about this in Dev blogs to the community. Which have been talked about/highlighted here on Icy Veins before. About how times would be longer when they implemented this change, but they felt that the increase in times would result in better matchmaking for the players. And how they would keep refining the system in the future as well to keep trying to get it to a better balance between the quality of matches versus time waiting for a match in queue. So this is something else you guys don't seem to be taking into account or remembering too.

Edited September 22, 2018 by CyberDVonaven

[Aasgier 36]

9 hours ago, CyberDVonaven said:

???

Reading is hard, appearantly.

I was talking about Rise of Mythos in what I would call a dead game. In Rise of Mythos you won't find a game often enough even when queuing for 20 minutes - and that is a mostly 1v1 game.

Heroes of the Storm is stagnating; its initial growth phase is over, but this game is far, far from dead. I tend to find games pretty quickly unless I'm in a 5-man trying to play the newest hero in QM or something. Not always, in off-times it can be 5 or 6 minutes easily (EU, Silver) but it's overall pretty doable. But stagnating it definately is; new players are not coming by the droves anymore, players are leaving because they think they have played the game long enough (not because they think it is a bad game, just because they have had enough of it), but also that the influx of new players is still enough to compensate for the players leaving.

[CyberDVonaven 82]

15 hours ago, Aasgier said:

I was talking about Rise of Mythos in what I would call a dead game.

Ahh, I see now. I thought you had moved from talking about RoM back to HotS in the same paragraph.

So ended up both of my defenses of comments on HotS in this thread ended up being me misunderstanding what subject each commenter was talking about at the time in their comment. ...I feel silly now...

I am glad that everyone is in agreement that HotS is doing well these days. Or at least doing well enough to sustain the game to continue for (hopefully) years to come. On a side note to that current sustaining success. I been watching the HGC matches today on Twitch and I noticed that the LoL EU Masters was also going on at the same time on the Riot Games channel. They were only 200 or so concurrent viewers apart with both being just shy of 18,000. With LoL having the slightly higher viewer count at the time I checked this afternoon. So that's great to see :). 

[Aasgier 36]

8 hours ago, CyberDVonaven said:

Ahh, I see now. I thought you had moved from talking about RoM back to HotS in the same paragraph.

So ended up both of my defenses of comments on HotS in this thread ended up being me misunderstanding what subject each commenter was talking about at the time in their comment. ...I feel silly now...

I am glad that everyone is in agreement that HotS is doing well these days. Or at least doing well enough to sustain the game to continue for (hopefully) years to come. On a side note to that current sustaining success. I been watching the HGC matches today on Twitch and I noticed that the LoL EU Masters was also going on at the same time on the Riot Games channel. They were only 200 or so concurrent viewers apart with both being just shy of 18,000. With LoL having the slightly higher viewer count at the time I checked this afternoon. So that's great to see :). 

...Why would I move back to HotS in the same paragraph?

I won't blame you. I made the same mistake of misreading and misunderstanding things often enough, albeit on other forums. It's only a matter of time before I do it here too.

Yeah, HotS is not really in a bad place. The stories I have heard about Riot seemingly screwing up League of Legends can easily lead to a second growth phase for HotS too if they are remotely true. However, it does require that Blizzard gets its act together and gets rid of the bullshit elements (replacing Genji's Protected, Maiev's Vault, Chromie's Time Trap/Time Loop and Mephisto's Consume Souls would probably help a lot). We probably also need some more crazy heroes in terms of design, because those are what make HotS stand out in the first place.

Edited September 23, 2018 by Aasgier

[CyberDVonaven 82]

On 9/23/2018 at 6:00 AM, Aasgier said:

We probably also need some more crazy heroes in terms of design, because those are what make HotS stand out in the first place.

I agree with this for sure. I really do hope they go ahead with the rumored Mira Han & Matt Horner duo Hero. (picked like ChoGal but separate). And after reading the new comic that came out today (Tuesday Sep 25th) they could do a skin for it that's the Queen of Thorns' Daughter & Son too.

Edited September 25, 2018 by CyberDVonaven

[Krogan 0]

On 9/19/2018 at 5:25 PM, Kuarinofu said:

HotS is certainly not dead, but the playerbase feels low, especially if you play team league of unranked at night, you will be playing with the same people over and over and in team league queue times will be huge unless you will get into an extremely unfair match because there is no way around this.

IMHO, HotS worked only because it had Blizzard characters that we all love. It had some conceptual flaws (like shared XP, team dependent gameplay, inability to see your and enemy's MMR etc.) and if any other studio would've made the same game it would've been dead a long time ago. I'm not even talking about matchmaking since perfect matchmaking just wasn't invented yet and it impossible in a game like HotS (too many heroes, maps and other variables).

What I think happened is Blizzard was probably unhappy since they missed their golden chance with DotA and they decided to make their own DotA (if you remember, it was called Blizzard DotA for some time while in pre-prodution). Then they decided to make their vision of a MOBA game, different from MOBAs of the time (DotA, Dota 2, LoL, HoN, RoT, whatever), featuring their characters and lore.

HotS is probably the least profitable Blizz game (besides Diablo III of course), and it treated that way as well. I don't know how it is currently, but it used to be just a side project and an additional workload for Dustin Browder and his SC2 team. It really feels like this was indeed calculated and they perfectly know how much they are spending and what they are doing with their games. 

Also, they sort of cornered themselves with very weak customization and low micro-transaction incentives before HotS 2.0. They could've made much more money off the game if they'd thought of that before, like Gabe did with Dota 2.

Have to disagree on pretty much every point you make, except that hots isn't dead. Sure the blizzard iconic characters helps the game but to suggest that shared xp and team fight focused gameplay are conceptual flaws is incorrect. There is only one reason why Hots isn't bigger, timing. It came out after dota2 and lol had already began to dominate the market and it's hard for people to give up thousands of hours of grind and to also relearn how to play. It's well known that lol and dota2 players that try hots are easily the worst players in the game as they simply can't wrap their heads around how the game works. Personally I could never fathom how badly designed lol and  dota2 are as games and they are only in the lead because they were to big to fail.

Where you really lose me is when you suggest Diablo 3 as being "least profitable" when it's the 10 best selling video game of all time, across all platforms, I wonder how you define profitable? 

[Kuarinofu 78]

By profitable I mean the ability to make money with in-game microtransactions or in other way. Like they first did with RMAH, they can't do that any more anyway.