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Nah, gently caress that activision apologism.
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Jan 9, 2019 20:47
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activision sucks rear end, that's just what i think though.
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Jan 9, 2019 21:05
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yeah grubby's viewership is more than doubled now that he's wc3 only. it was always higher during his wc3 streams and it was weird he'd only do them on the weekend back in the hots days.
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Jan 9, 2019 21:32
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Toady posted:It's bizarre to think the game would have succeeded if Blizzard made more skins, as if that would have solved the game's fundamental issues. Skins don't matter if there aren't enough players to buy them. Why does it have to be either or? They left money on the table by not providing the people who DID play the game with sufficient ways to spend their money. Obviously them blowing money on esports when the game wasn't even done was another huge factor, and like you said, missing key features for years also pushed people away, but they had enough people playing the game for 4 years that they kept investing in it. If they had actually tried harder to sell people something, they might have made more money and could have kept the ship running a bit longer. You are acting like the game came out and died within a year or two. It didn't. Eraflure posted:Oh. Welp guess Overwatch is hosed too then Overwatch isn't free and the only way to get the skins in that game is to play the game a poo poo ton (thereby grinding out loot boxes and hoping you get gold drops or the skins you want outright) or to buy loot boxes, which are just as likely to get you poo poo you don't want. Add to that the fact that most new skins in that game are part of temporary events with their own loot boxes, and it isn't hard to see how Blizzard made a bunch of money. Buying loot boxes is the only way to give Blizzard money AND get your skins without basically making OW the only game you play (unless you hate most of the skins I guess.) The problem with HotS is that you generally can't buy skins or mounts either, BUT you can much more easily unlock them for free, which is what most people did post 2.0. There was never much reason to spend gems unless you really wanted stims or just didn't feel like grinding gold for a hero. And you get 150 gems for free like every 25 levels or something. You didn't really need to buy loot boxes in HotS because you could earn them fairly easy and you can even get free stims within the free boxes you got. I got 9 straight days of stims a month ago from free loot boxes. Which leads to me getting more loot boxes, and more shards, and more heroes and mounts in general. I mean, its nice that I didn't have to spend money, but I wouldn't have wanted it that way if it meant the goddamned game dying. Like, I understand the basic concept that companies need to make money to run or make these games. ToastyPotato fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Jan 9, 2019 |
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Jan 9, 2019 22:09
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Loot boxes are a pox on everything sane and good. Don't let me catch you fuckers defending them, by god.
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Jan 9, 2019 22:18
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(no one is defending loot boxes itt)
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Jan 9, 2019 22:33
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It's not about defending them, it's about the fact that at some point, with a free 2 play game, you gotta figure out a way to monetize. Blizzard decided to not let you just give them money for most of the content, added loot boxes, but then made the loot boxes themselves not really worth buying. It was always better to just spend money on Stims, which could get you way more loot boxes than the equivalently priced box bundle would get you. It's like they added lootboxes to sell stims, but then also decided to try to sell the lootboxes themselves, but also made them easy to get and had them filled them with opportunities to just get a ton of currency, which could then be used to unlock stuff that you didn't get in your box for free anyway. Then they proceeded to not outpace the rate at which people were unlocking poo poo for free by releasing more poo poo to unlock, which pretty much guaranteed that anyone who played the game with any regularity was probably going to have enough free currency to unlock most of what they wanted, especially if they got a stim once and a while. Also, I want to address the late to the party argument. That is obviously a factor, with regards to things like breaking into saturated markets, but you also have to consider that in games, someone is always going to release a new game in an already established genre. Overwatch did amazingly well despite TF2 being a pretty damned big success. Marketing to EVERYONE likely had a lot to do with that. HotS could have easily carved a successful niche for itself in the moba market, but they focused on all of the wrong things. Even when they had the time to course correct. Look at Fortnite BR. Not the first BR game. Not the first successful BR. PUBG had already exploded when Fortnite BR came out, and Fortnite had very little to spend money on when it launched. But they course corrected, and managed to add a ton of vanity poo poo to the game for people to blow vbux on. Lo and Behold, you end up with a game that is super popular with casuals and kids, and is printing money. You don't have to spend money on Fortnite to play it, but if you really like vanity items, you probably will. Fortnite also exploded without the need for esports, because marketing to the widest possible audience and giving them tons of poo poo to waste money apparently works.
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Jan 9, 2019 22:41
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And there's plenty of people who play HotS who never got into other MOBAs (they all feel so samey to me), which I think is super important if they executed the rest correctly. I probably won't try other MOBAs if HotS does get shut down. Smash Brothers comes to mind here: Sure the hardcore fighting fans don't like it, but they figured out to cater to a different audience.
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Jan 9, 2019 23:03
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Outside of subscription based MMOs, there really haven't been any game markets that were so saturated that a new game couldn't enter. Even mobile consistently has new hits despite the sheer amount of money being thrown around. The idea that mobas were fully saturated at 2 big hits seems to fly in the face of just about every game market we've ever seen, especially when you consider how much HotS tried to do differently. It could have easily become the Smash of mobas, but outside of wasting money, they never committed to delivering on anything.
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Jan 9, 2019 23:35
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Smash added more features than it subtracted. It added a breadth of very intuitive angles of interaction like crazy stages, hazards, more movement, items, and did it while preserving character identity. Like there's a lot going on in a game of smash but it's so intuitive that it comes off as dead simple (which is why it's engrossing to play). Melee did all this in the most beautifully realized piece of software I've ever had the pleasure of playing, where even the music far surpassed the source material. (imo the reason melee still pulls audiences has more to do with what an unbelievably well made game it is and less to do with it being especially interesting competitively) Hots took away but what it added back (talents, ammo, objectives) wasn't sufficient and the game really started going down the toilet once ammo was removed. For a "simple" game it's a real struggle for many players to improve beyond gold because what you're doing wrong is unintuitive and there aren't obvious things to improve on. It's just not especially well designed. The complete and utter team dependence is the other thing that makes it hard to play in a relaxed way, caring deeply about what your teammates do is the opposite of chill. No Wave fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Jan 10, 2019 |
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Jan 9, 2019 23:37
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I think a big problem with the design is that they seemed to be devoted to a rigid class role/ team comp structure, which unfortunately included the addition of main healers, while delivering a game that neither taught new players about team comp dynamics, nor even showed it to them, since neither QM nor vs AI gave a poo poo about team comps, especially when the game came out. So the only two actual game modes for the entire first year were basically free for all clown fiestas, which is where most of the playerbase spent their time. All of this, in a radically redesigned moba that had few game parallels with its more popular competitors. Add to this, poor balance among a relatively small cast of characters, and it wasn't going to create an environment where most players would actually improve. Where the other mobas perhaps have skill caps that are a bit too high, HotS had the problem of simply not giving enough of a poo poo to actually get people to play properly, and then they poured money into an esports scene anyway. I mean with Smash, casual and high level play can look very different. Items, the rulesets, the levels themselves, etc. But even playing the most casual Smash, you are going to pick up on skills that transfer over to the more advanced levels of play, if you put minimum effort into learning. With HotS, you were never really going to learn poo poo playing QM, because QM simply doesn't even function remotely like how Blizzard apparently wanted the game to be played (judging from how they designed their esport league.) Even in League of Legends, their version of QM still has you essentially drafting a team. It's a blind draft with no bans, but you are still picking teams. The game goes out of its way to make sure you understand the concept of the different jobs different characters fill. Granted, it could probably do a bit more than it does, especially with regards to teaching things like Jungling and Support, but I feel like LoL in general exposes you to more general game info than HotS does. QM and the overall skill of the HotS community would have been greatly improved had they not made the Support role be about healing. QM would have instantly been astronomically more relevant, and a lot of time in QM could have genuinely prepared people for ranked play, which has the added effect of helping to potentially increase interest in esports, go figure. If you couple that with not splitting Warriors with Main Tanks and everyone else, they could have actually had the casual moba they sort of wanted to have. ToastyPotato fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jan 10, 2019 |
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Jan 10, 2019 00:02
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Toady posted:It's bizarre to think the game would have succeeded if Blizzard made more skins, as if that would have solved the game's fundamental issues. Skins don't matter if there aren't enough players to buy them. jesus this is quite a post
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Jan 10, 2019 00:16
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You don't need a lot of players spending money to have a profitable free-to-play game. You only need a few people willing to spend a lot of money. Which means a steady stream of content for your biggest fans to consistently spend money on. My understanding is that this is why this game wasn't profitable.
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Jan 10, 2019 01:24
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No Wave posted:Smash added more features than it subtracted. It added a breadth of very intuitive angles of interaction like crazy stages, hazards, more movement, items, and did it while preserving character identity. Like there's a lot going on in a game of smash but it's so intuitive that it comes off as dead simple (which is why it's engrossing to play). Melee did all this in the most beautifully realized piece of software I've ever had the pleasure of playing, where even the music far surpassed the source material. (imo the reason melee still pulls audiences has more to do with what an unbelievably well made game it is and less to do with it being especially interesting competitively) Mobas are the opposite of chill tbh. HotS is the most chill among them but that’s still not saying much
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Jan 10, 2019 01:57
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Clarste posted:You don't need a lot of players spending money to have a profitable free-to-play game. You only need a few people willing to spend a lot of money. Which means a steady stream of content for your biggest fans to consistently spend money on. My understanding is that this is why this game wasn't profitable. yeah all other things aside, even if you had people wanting to spend money on hots, there just wasn't much for them to spend money on. League shits out fairly high quality skins pretty frequently. HoTs skins were mostly bad and many heroes would go incredibly long periods of time without getting new skins.
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Jan 10, 2019 03:59
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It looks like my division 1 team may qualify for heroes lounge division S so the death of hots may mean i get to play professional hots. Nice.
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Jan 10, 2019 04:30
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Is hearthstone dead?
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Jan 10, 2019 07:01
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Paranoid Peanut posted:Is hearthstone dead? It's slowly dying. But it helps that there is nobody else to pick up the slack. It wasn't Gwent, it wasn't Artifact, it's not going to be MTG: Arena. Compare this to HotS where Dota 2 and LoL were already doing Kenshiro impressions on day one.
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Jan 10, 2019 10:09
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QM report: Gazlowe still fun, rarely (if ever) something that people know how to handle Dropping turrets and just walking in circles while people get shot to death is 💯 Toady posted:It never had significant long-term viewership. Grubby, one of the most well-known HOTS streamers, got more viewers playing Warcraft 3. you got the brainworms real bad, dude
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Jan 10, 2019 11:47
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:It looks like my division 1 team may qualify for heroes lounge division S so the death of hots may mean i get to play professional hots. Nice. Can you sub one of your teammates for tcjimbo and get him on the mic during a professional game? tia
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Jan 10, 2019 14:44
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They did start with “just give us money for things you want”. Anecdotally but I almost newer saw skins back then so that probably wasn’t profitable either.
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Jan 10, 2019 15:39
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Again, the game was released in a sorry state and people usually don't want to spend money on that kind of mess. Even if HotS got better after a while, first impressions are very important.
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Jan 10, 2019 17:16
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Avalerion posted:They did start with “just give us money for things you want”. Anecdotally but I almost newer saw skins back then so that probably wasn’t profitable either. Yeah, but like you said, there was not much that was for sale just from the fact that the game was new and the devs didn't think to build a buffer of content for the first few months. Johanna was released during that time, for example, and she didn't get a new skin until 2.0 launched, IIRC. She only had that Roman skin, which I didn't like and never bought. By the time SWAT came out, I easily had enough shards to get one. For comparison, I did actually buy a Thrall skin back when you could. And the Zagara lady skin.
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Jan 10, 2019 18:09
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i think a big difference between overwatch lootboxes and HOTS lootboxes is that HOTS lootboxes have a ton more trash in them. a new overwatch account that buys 100 lootboxes is going to start getting lots of duplicates halfway through that, which means they'll be able to use the currency gained from dups to grab whatever they want. if a new HOTS account were to buy 100 lootboxes, they'd probably still be getting mostly new emojis, and if they didn't happen to roll the legendary skin they wanted, they might not have enough shards to grab it. HOTS' lootboxes are just a bad value proposition, because the chance that you'll end up with nothing that you wanted is very high, and unless you've bought an immense number of lootboxes anyways, there's not the same backup "failsafe" mechanism to make sure you can still end up with the skin you desire. so not only do you have to pay to play overwatch, but like, you're getting a much better deal out of buying overwatch lootboxes too, so it's pretty win-win in comparison to HOTS also, does anyone have any opinions on like, how imperius plays in the game?
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Jan 10, 2019 18:36
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I haven't played him yet but from what I've seen he seems to play a similar role as Sonya.
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Jan 10, 2019 19:04
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ninjewtsu posted:a new overwatch account that buys 100 lootboxes is going to start getting lots of duplicates halfway through that... I don't think you can get dupes anymore in Overwatch, something HotS desperately needs.
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Jan 10, 2019 19:08
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They implemented that after I quit due to getting too many dupes.
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Jan 10, 2019 19:22
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I do think there's a pretty fundamental difference between a game where the lootboxes are purely cosmetic and a game where they gate off most of the gameplay.
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Jan 10, 2019 19:43
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Im_Special posted:I don't think you can get dupes anymore in Overwatch, something HotS desperately needs. You totally can if you've been playing a while. My boxes are almost always dupes (which is fine, more gold)
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Jan 10, 2019 19:49
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Macaluso posted:You totally can if you've been playing a while. My boxes are almost always dupes (which is fine, more gold) Well, they roll what slot it is, and what rarity it is, and then only if you actually own everything of that slot, will give a dupe of it. So for example, they roll skin, rare. If you actually own all rare rarity skins, then it'll give you a dupe, otherwise it'll try to find one that isn't a dupe and then give it to you. You notice this phenomenon when you have people with actually near everything, like Muselk back when he played Overwatch. His earlier 101 box opening videos were tons and tons of duplicates, and after they added the change, he would get the new holiday stuff without fail up until he owned all of them, and then he'd just start getting duplicate holiday items. And if a legendary was rolled, it always gave a holiday legendary for him because he actually owned most all the other skins period.
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Jan 10, 2019 19:54
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HotS should've learned from a better source than dumbass LeL, if you're not gonna copy Dota and make every character open from the start, at least copy Smite and give people a proper buy-in for every character.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:07
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Why avoiding dupes is very good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coupon_collector%27s_problem "For example, when n = 50 it takes about 225 trials on average to collect all 50 coupons." It's been very nice in Hearthstone with the slow trickle of classic card packs via the brawl. It means that I've gotten a few classic legendaries that would have taken much, or else it would much longer to pull unique ones if they didn't have that rule in place.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:08
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ninjewtsu posted:i think a big difference between overwatch lootboxes and HOTS lootboxes is that HOTS lootboxes have a ton more trash in them. a new overwatch account that buys 100 lootboxes is going to start getting lots of duplicates halfway through that, which means they'll be able to use the currency gained from dups to grab whatever they want. if a new HOTS account were to buy 100 lootboxes, they'd probably still be getting mostly new emojis, and if they didn't happen to roll the legendary skin they wanted, they might not have enough shards to grab it. HOTS' lootboxes are just a bad value proposition, because the chance that you'll end up with nothing that you wanted is very high, and unless you've bought an immense number of lootboxes anyways, there's not the same backup "failsafe" mechanism to make sure you can still end up with the skin you desire. Yeah buying loot boxes is a huge trap in HotS especially. You'd do much better with a stim/boost for the same money, and would probably be able to get the same number of lootboxes out of it, unless we are talking about the kind of player who blows money on games like this but never really play. In that case, it is still bad for the reasons you mentioned. This person isn't going to get much out of throwing money at loot boxes, which will make them less likely to do so in the future. HotS monetization is basically a weird feedback loop. Game is free to play. You get gold to unlock heroes just from playing and you get loot boxes, which are pretty much the only way you are going to unlock vanity items, just from leveling. You also get free gems every bunch of levels, which is the equivalent of real money and can be used to buy things. So you get loot boxes regularly from playing and leveling up, and you can buy Boosts to gold and leveling, and the boxes can have boosts, with 3 days considered a "common" item, which means with minimal money, you can effectively slowly unlock a ton of content just by playing through a $20, 30 day boost efficiently (especially abusing the friend/party bonus and playing Team League for its bonuses). No real reason to spend money on anything else. Unless you get lucky and a skin you want is featured or something.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:44
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I spent $30 CAD on Azmodunk
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Jan 10, 2019 21:32
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They need to do a last ditch big effort where they radically simplify the monetization, make everything cheaper, and alter game modes. 3.0 or something. Then promote the hell out of it across other blizzard games.
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Jan 10, 2019 22:26
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The only way they can possibly rope people back in at this point is to just make heroes free and concentrate on selling other poo poo. Either that or severely cut the cost of buying heroes. Other than that, they would need to focus on the various quality of life issues that they have never solved, and that is way less likely to happen now that the team was reduced. And those are the "Easy" things they could do.
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Jan 10, 2019 22:43
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Another big hurdle a second HoTs redesign would face is that all the talent left Blizz
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Jan 10, 2019 22:45
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With regards to game design/mechanics, I am not sure the HotS team ever had any kind of all star talent in their roster. Not trying to go for a sick burn, but looking at how directionless and baffling many of the design and balancing choices have been seem to really indicate that the designers were like D-list material. This was not a game made by the best and brightest at the company.
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Jan 10, 2019 22:49
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just had four games in game 1, the banner banned picks other people were showing, then him and his party member alternated between going afk behind walls and feeding. they never spoke, but spam-pinged each person who died as soon as they died. the game was over in less than ten minutes in game 2, that winning pair was on the other team, but for some reason decided to play the game seriously. meanwhile nobody on my team knew the meaning of the word soak and immediately charged in in every outnumbered fight. we ended the game with 0 kills to 20. in game 3, the other team had no healer. however, my team decided that meant that they could engage freely whenever they want and chase like mad. they also insisted on splitting 3-2 in Hanamura instead of 4-1, then while the top 2 were easily held off by Dehaka, the other two on the bottom repeatedly tried to engage into the enemy team's 4. when they did teamfight, they went straight for varian and dehaka and let falstad, alarak and sylvanas clown all over them. in game 4 our imperius walked into a bush and simply went afk until he disconnected. somehow, we won with a bot off of some truly heroic diablo/whitemane play by my teammates and a skilled abathur, but seriously. maybe i just need to start playing later in the day.
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Jan 10, 2019 22:53
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ninjewtsu posted:also, does anyone have any opinions on like, how imperius plays in the game? I haven't played him outside of screwing around in Try Mode on the PTR, but from what I've seen in Quick Match he's not very impressive. His stun is good and he has the potential to put out pretty okay Blaze-tier damage stats, but his big damage combo (the exploding rift) is easy to sidestep and not getting ripped apart by his aura is as simple as "don't fight him without something else nearby". He's an underwhelming solo laner because his aura (which is his primary source of damage for duels) spreads out its damage, meaning you can cut most of his damage in half by standing next to a minion.
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Jan 11, 2019 01:19
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