After the cancellation of HGC, tournament organizers began to work on new projects in 2019. HeroesLounge presented their league, Division S, and HeroesHype announced their HH Premier Series. However, a third, more unique competition emerged in North America: the HeroesHearth Fight Nights.
Fight Nights are neither a league nor a series. Its format resembles more HeroesHype Series, as they take place every two weeks, and each edition is independent from the rest. Unlike HH Series, Fight Nights are invitational, and only two teams are invited per week: the winners of previous edition—or a new team if the winners decline the invitation—and a new challenger.
Every Night has its own prize pool: $200 for the winner and $100 for the loser. Winner will also take “the bounty”, a 50% of all Bits that are donated by viewers during the broadcast. For example, in Night 14, the bounty reached almost 30k bits. This initiative brings us memories of the cheer system back in the HGC days—a nostalgic touch from HeroesHearth team. But the HGC legacy doesn’t stop there. The Fight Night casters are two familiar faces: JHow and Halorin, with some McIntyre interventions.
The Show
Traditionally, tournaments get the best competitors they can, and with that they try to make a great show. HeroesHearth does the opposite: they focus on making an incredible show with the expectation that contenders will keep coming and fight hard for the bounty.
Though the games are a Bo5 series, additional games with weird picks and compositions can be played after the winner is determined. Moreover, the map pool of Fight Nights isn’t limited to the usual maps; they include Lost Cavern and Silver City, which encourages teams to focus on brawling and showing off their playmaking. Even some drafts are random (with the Brawl mode system of picking one out of three heroes), which makes teams play unconventional compositions and mirror matchups.
Invitations for Fight Nights aren’t limited to Div S and HH Premier teams. Every team can apply. Therefore, we’ve witnessed former HGC Team Twelve battle the remains of Team Freedom (now styled “Team Feedem”). But two Feedem victories weren’t enough for KilluZion and Hosty, so they came back with The Lost Boys to get a couple more. That’s not all. OSD, LFW, Close to Death, Team Good Guys, wrong orc…the list continues up to 15 different teams.
You can’t talk about the great HeroesHearth show and miss Fight Night 9, the Celebrity Deathmatch. In that one, personalities from HHE stream team formed two teams, Lava Wave OMEGALUL and Coffee Sucks But Not The Drink. Featuring Khroen, Casanova, Trikslyr and many others. Both teams did their best to put a good fight and make one of the most hilarious episodes of Fight Night.
The Content
The strongest pillar of Fight Night is the content creation by HeroesHearth Entertainment team. From the beginning, advertisement has been an important point, starting with the “Crush the King of the Hill and claim the bounty!” slogan. For almost every edition, HHE staff has made posters to announce the contenders, date, and Twitch channel for the event.
In addition to these announcements, HeroesHearth has published some interviews with Fight Night players, both transcribed on their site and on their YouTube channel. These interviews included serious questions but also featured some cheesy (literally talking about cheese) and funny ones. Letting players express themselves in this mixture of show and competition has turn banter into a regular of Fight Nights. For example, we can find Khroen’s words before Night 8, announcing his comeback to go for the bounty.
HeroesHearth has expanded the Fight Night format to Warcraft 3, where a couple familiar faces to the Heroes community, KendricSwissh and Grubby, conduct the show. Most recently, they have begun Teamfight Tactics Fight Nights with Casanova and Khroen. We hope more teams keep joining the show, but for our own sake we also hope the first rule of Fight Night isn’t “you do not talk about Fight Night”.
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