[HotS] Why I'll Keep Playing HotS
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konadora
Singapore66060 Posts
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Woosixion
110 Posts
On January 22 2019 11:38 konadora wrote: not a big follower of HotS but i do enjoy watching/playing it sometimes. why did they pull the plug on HGC though? Because at this point it's become painfully obvious to Blizzard that HotS will never be anywhere near as popular/profitable as LoL or Dota2, no matter what they do, so they've decided to cut their losses. | ||
EsportsJohn
United States4883 Posts
On January 22 2019 13:29 Woosixion wrote: Because at this point it's become painfully obvious to Blizzard that HotS will never be anywhere near as popular/profitable as LoL or Dota2, no matter what they do, so they've decided to cut their losses. This is a really oversimplified point, but it's more or less correct. Blizzard pumped ~$5-6 million into HGC the first year and ~$10 million into it the second year and never saw any significant increase in viewership or sponsorship. The monetization of the league was terrible, with Blizzard likely fronting almost all of the costs, including player salaries (calculated to ~$15k-20k per year per player for close to 150 players) and all production costs. The whole system was incredibly dysfunctional...ownership slots were bungled horribly, the league paid for literally everything, and Blizzard, on multiple occasions, made it difficult or impossible for new brands to join the league with a sponsorship. The bottom line, however, is that Heroes of the Storm is not a significantly popular game. Blizzard can't throw millions of dollars at it like Riot did for League of Legends and expect it to be sustainable. The player base is minuscule compared to LoL and Dota, partly because Blizzard was late to the party in the MOBA world and partly because the game lacks scaling skill levels to separate good and bad players (AKA design issues). Hero bans didn't even exist until 2 years into the game's existence. It would have been possible for HotS to have a successful Blizzard-sponsored league if it hadn't been poorly implemented. Blizzard pumped in way more money than they ought to have in order to artificially create an esports scene that could not exist without that money, and in light of budget cuts, they could not retain that esports scene on a reduced budget. The difference between a league with almost no broadcast time, no more player salaries, and significantly reduced prize pools is the same as nixing it altogether. As a side note, OWL is on the same trajectory. Despite a fairly steady first season, the player and viewer base is becoming stale. Eventually the lack of results after such a significant allocation of resources will force them to downsize considerably. But at least they somehow suckered multiple orgs to pay them a shitton of money to sustain the league for another year or two. | ||
Kuroeeah
11696 Posts
Anyone that looked at the game probably could have told you HGC was never ever going to touch DotA or League. I’m curious if the twitch viewership was so bad that it matched SC2 during it’s low point (Maybe 5k viewers?) The super immature part of me wants Overwatch League to crash. I have nothing but contempt with the way Blizzard their e-sports across the board. They have this “me too” philosophy where they see Riot and want to jump on the band wagon. I’m not big into Overwatch so I don’t know too much about it outside of watching some OWL games in the beginning of it’s first season and briefly enjoying it because nothing else was on in Twitch. There’s practically no story line in OWL in both the teams and it’s players. Every big e-sport has a big name. Maru or Serral for SC2, Dendi or Arteezy for DotA, Faker for League but who’s the equivalent for OWL? It feels like Blizzard plastered this idea of making “home” teams just for the artificial purpose of people to cheer for whatever they’re most local to. Probably very wrong here though but would still love to know.. Anyway I digress. I hate the way Blizzard just dropped HOTS. It probably makes a lot of sense financially but the it was handled was done in the worst possible way ever if you remotely liked HOTS. I sort of want OWL to fail, not because I bear any ill will towards the game or the people that follow it. I want it to fail because Blizzard needs a hard lesson that their general bandwagon attitude towards e-sports (imo) is pretty disgusting. | ||
MarianoSC2
Slovakia1855 Posts
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Waxangel
United States32432 Posts
On January 22 2019 17:05 MarianoSC2 wrote: Oh I thought this was about Heart of the Swarm. The good old days... NVM granted, a lot of people DO miss the TvZ dynamic from heart of the swarm... | ||
BigFan
TLADT24917 Posts
On January 22 2019 17:05 MarianoSC2 wrote: Oh I thought this was about Heart of the Swarm. The good old days... NVM This is a bit odd seeing as no one really cares about older expansions and this is the heroes part of the forum. Makes me wonder if one posted before reading All in good fun ^^ | ||
hairswigs
United States2 Posts
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Charoisaur
Germany15598 Posts
On January 22 2019 17:05 MarianoSC2 wrote: Oh I thought this was about Heart of the Swarm. The good old days... NVM That would be odd considering you can't even play Heart of the Swarm anymore. | ||
figq
12519 Posts
EDIT: I'm gonna throw this in just to make people angry ^^. (But really it's just a good comparison to prove the point that the game is not dead.) Here it goes: I bet HotS still has bigger active player base than Broodwar globally. And Blizzard is not hosting their own world championship for BW either. Is BW dead because of that? Far from it! Disclaimer: Personally, I haven't played much HotS, but I don't play any mobas regularly. So I believe my point can be objective enough, since I don't feel invested in HotS at all. I still can acknowledge its worth. | ||
EsportsJohn
United States4883 Posts
On January 22 2019 16:49 Kuroeeah wrote: I think people can agree or disagree about HOTS as a game. I went from disliking the game from it’s beta to growing warm to it with quests and heroes. Have I stuck with the game like I did with League or DotA? Nah but what I will say for HOTS is that I do feel the game is easier to return to just for a quick match when you compare it to it’s competitors. They kept adding to the game, whether the ideas were good or bad, the developers of the game were vocal, relatively easy to talk to (through online channels or in person) and I felt the small tight knit community HOTS had the devs and their player base a stronger relationship than their other games. Anyone that looked at the game probably could have told you HGC was never ever going to touch DotA or League. I’m curious if the twitch viewership was so bad that it matched SC2 during it’s low point (Maybe 5k viewers?) The super immature part of me wants Overwatch League to crash. I have nothing but contempt with the way Blizzard their e-sports across the board. They have this “me too” philosophy where they see Riot and want to jump on the band wagon. I’m not big into Overwatch so I don’t know too much about it outside of watching some OWL games in the beginning of it’s first season and briefly enjoying it because nothing else was on in Twitch. There’s practically no story line in OWL in both the teams and it’s players. Every big e-sport has a big name. Maru or Serral for SC2, Dendi or Arteezy for DotA, Faker for League but who’s the equivalent for OWL? It feels like Blizzard plastered this idea of making “home” teams just for the artificial purpose of people to cheer for whatever they’re most local to. Probably very wrong here though but would still love to know.. Anyway I digress. I hate the way Blizzard just dropped HOTS. It probably makes a lot of sense financially but the it was handled was done in the worst possible way ever if you remotely liked HOTS. I sort of want OWL to fail, not because I bear any ill will towards the game or the people that follow it. I want it to fail because Blizzard needs a hard lesson that their general bandwagon attitude towards e-sports (imo) is pretty disgusting. Viewership was holding fairly steady throughout 2018 at 5-10k concurrent viewers for NA/EU, a little more for big matches like DIG vs Fnatic or some of the early games in the season. The finals of Mid-Season Brawl and BlizzCon were 20k+. Not anywhere close to LoL/Dota numbers, but it wasn't necessarily bad; it just didn't grow over 2 years. On January 24 2019 11:11 figq wrote: HotS is not automatically dead since Blizz is not making a championship, or since it won't be as big as LoL or Dota. It's still a game with a fanbase larger than many other active games. If anything the move by Blizzard just proves that organizing their world championships costs a shit ton of money for them and is a huge investment. So my admiration to them for still doing those for the other games. EDIT: I'm gonna throw this in just to make people angry ^^. (But really it's just a good comparison to prove the point that the game is not dead.) Here it goes: I bet HotS still has bigger active player base than Broodwar globally. And Blizzard is not hosting their own world championship for BW either. Is BW dead because of that? Far from it! Disclaimer: Personally, I haven't played much HotS, but I don't play any mobas regularly. So I believe my point can be objective enough, since I don't feel invested in HotS at all. I still can acknowledge its worth. I'm not sure that Heroes of the Storm will have a burgeoning pro scene now that HGC is gone. A large part of the community is casual, the game is designed to be casual, and there is very little investment interest in the esport after Blizzard destroyed it. In comparison, games like StarCraft are kind of built on the competitive aspect. Still a fun game though, and Blizzard is still developing it. | ||
EsportsJohn
United States4883 Posts
On January 23 2019 04:43 Waxangel wrote: granted, a lot of people DO miss the TvZ dynamic from heart of the swarm... Maybe a lot of Terrans. Speaking as a Zerg player, I do not | ||
konadora
Singapore66060 Posts
On January 22 2019 14:10 EsportsJohn wrote: This is a really oversimplified point, but it's more or less correct. Blizzard pumped ~$5-6 million into HGC the first year and ~$10 million into it the second year and never saw any significant increase in viewership or sponsorship. The monetization of the league was terrible, with Blizzard likely fronting almost all of the costs, including player salaries (calculated to ~$15k-20k per year per player for close to 150 players) and all production costs. The whole system was incredibly dysfunctional...ownership slots were bungled horribly, the league paid for literally everything, and Blizzard, on multiple occasions, made it difficult or impossible for new brands to join the league with a sponsorship. The bottom line, however, is that Heroes of the Storm is not a significantly popular game. Blizzard can't throw millions of dollars at it like Riot did for League of Legends and expect it to be sustainable. The player base is minuscule compared to LoL and Dota, partly because Blizzard was late to the party in the MOBA world and partly because the game lacks scaling skill levels to separate good and bad players (AKA design issues). Hero bans didn't even exist until 2 years into the game's existence. It would have been possible for HotS to have a successful Blizzard-sponsored league if it hadn't been poorly implemented. Blizzard pumped in way more money than they ought to have in order to artificially create an esports scene that could not exist without that money, and in light of budget cuts, they could not retain that esports scene on a reduced budget. The difference between a league with almost no broadcast time, no more player salaries, and significantly reduced prize pools is the same as nixing it altogether. As a side note, OWL is on the same trajectory. Despite a fairly steady first season, the player and viewer base is becoming stale. Eventually the lack of results after such a significant allocation of resources will force them to downsize considerably. But at least they somehow suckered multiple orgs to pay them a shitton of money to sustain the league for another year or two. thanks for the detailed explanation! | ||
Odoakar
Croatia1833 Posts
Classic stockholme syndrome 101. I'd never even start a HotS anymore as a matter of principle. | ||
Odoakar
Croatia1833 Posts
On January 22 2019 14:10 EsportsJohn wrote: This is a really oversimplified point, but it's more or less correct. Blizzard pumped ~$5-6 million into HGC the first year and ~$10 million into it the second year and never saw any significant increase in viewership or sponsorship. The monetization of the league was terrible, with Blizzard likely fronting almost all of the costs, including player salaries (calculated to ~$15k-20k per year per player for close to 150 players) and all production costs. The whole system was incredibly dysfunctional...ownership slots were bungled horribly, the league paid for literally everything, and Blizzard, on multiple occasions, made it difficult or impossible for new brands to join the league with a sponsorship. But who is the blame for this? This is not a matter of 'oh poor ol' blizzard tried, but the gamers just didn't commit'. We asked multiple times for crowdfunding tournaments. We asked multiple times to provide team specific mtxs with cut of profits going towards teams. Community figures provided countless feedback to the game. Hell, they even flew pros to Summit where pros would directly tell them what needs to be changed, and then a year later you would hear from those pros that not one suggestion was implemented. Then they introduce 2.0 and lose 70% of sales because who the fuck would by something just to get stupid tints, banners, emojis and so on. Pre 2.0 I was spending a lot of money on stims and premium skins for my favorite heroes. Than they brilliantly remove the option of buying the skins you want but start giving you 'free' skins for heroes that you don't play. Then the OW speed meta cancer starts. Then they start moving away from their original gameplay vision and start doing awful hero reworks, laning changes, xp changes and so on. And for some reason, they were unable to produce a good map ever since Infernal Shrines and BoE. There's only Blizzard to fault for running this game to the ground. Players gave them more than enough chances to succeed. I fully agree with the part of Blizzard artificially creating esport scene and going towards a crash with OW that will destroy many naive orgs that bought spots in the OWL. Richard Lewis nailed it here: | ||
EsportsJohn
United States4883 Posts
On January 26 2019 19:56 Odoakar wrote: But who is the blame for this? This is not a matter of 'oh poor ol' blizzard tried, but the gamers just didn't commit'. We asked multiple times for crowdfunding tournaments. We asked multiple times to provide team specific mtxs with cut of profits going towards teams. Community figures provided countless feedback to the game. Hell, they even flew pros to Summit where pros would directly tell them what needs to be changed, and then a year later you would hear from those pros that not one suggestion was implemented. Then they introduce 2.0 and lose 70% of sales because who the fuck would by something just to get stupid tints, banners, emojis and so on. Pre 2.0 I was spending a lot of money on stims and premium skins for my favorite heroes. Than they brilliantly remove the option of buying the skins you want but start giving you 'free' skins for heroes that you don't play. Then the OW speed meta cancer starts. Then they start moving away from their original gameplay vision and start doing awful hero reworks, laning changes, xp changes and so on. And for some reason, they were unable to produce a good map ever since Infernal Shrines and BoE. There's only Blizzard to fault for running this game to the ground. Players gave them more than enough chances to succeed. I fully agree with the part of Blizzard artificially creating esport scene and going towards a crash with OW that will destroy many naive orgs that bought spots in the OWL. Richard Lewis nailed it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZdHDsxykQ8 I never said that Blizzard wasn't to blame. I've seen that clip before and totally agree with it...I just wish I had realized Heroes was a dud in 2014 when he did. This is also quite good: | ||
StarStruck
25339 Posts
On January 22 2019 14:10 EsportsJohn wrote: This is a really oversimplified point, but it's more or less correct. Blizzard pumped ~$5-6 million into HGC the first year and ~$10 million into it the second year and never saw any significant increase in viewership or sponsorship. The monetization of the league was terrible, with Blizzard likely fronting almost all of the costs, including player salaries (calculated to ~$15k-20k per year per player for close to 150 players) and all production costs. The whole system was incredibly dysfunctional...ownership slots were bungled horribly, the league paid for literally everything, and Blizzard, on multiple occasions, made it difficult or impossible for new brands to join the league with a sponsorship. The bottom line, however, is that Heroes of the Storm is not a significantly popular game. Blizzard can't throw millions of dollars at it like Riot did for League of Legends and expect it to be sustainable. The player base is minuscule compared to LoL and Dota, partly because Blizzard was late to the party in the MOBA world and partly because the game lacks scaling skill levels to separate good and bad players (AKA design issues). Hero bans didn't even exist until 2 years into the game's existence. It would have been possible for HotS to have a successful Blizzard-sponsored league if it hadn't been poorly implemented. Blizzard pumped in way more money than they ought to have in order to artificially create an esports scene that could not exist without that money, and in light of budget cuts, they could not retain that esports scene on a reduced budget. The difference between a league with almost no broadcast time, no more player salaries, and significantly reduced prize pools is the same as nixing it altogether. As a side note, OWL is on the same trajectory. Despite a fairly steady first season, the player and viewer base is becoming stale. Eventually the lack of results after such a significant allocation of resources will force them to downsize considerably. But at least they somehow suckered multiple orgs to pay them a shitton of money to sustain the league for another year or two. As simple of a point as it is they were never going to compete with Dota or LoL. | ||
Harris1st
Germany6036 Posts
It was a nice ride, we had some good times and some bad times but in the end it was worth it. Goodbye HotS! | ||
Destructicon
4713 Posts
The game has lots of maps with different gameplay, very different and unique hero designs, its a lot faster paced and I get to play with some of the most famous and iconic characters in gaming history, what's not to love? Its a pity the game never rivaled Dota or LoL and the way Blizzard handled the eSports scene was tragic, but it won't change my opinion of the game. | ||
Harris1st
Germany6036 Posts
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