Last December, the Heroes development team introduced the Nexus Anomalies. These anomalies are seasonal gameplay changes that can be added permanently to the game if they’re successful enough.

The first anomaly added experience globes, small orbs that minions would drop once they died. The community response was really good, and most people saw a great potential in this change after some tuning. Based on a lot of feedback from the community, last hitting a minion automatically granted experience instead of dropping an orb, and heroes attracted globes close to them. With these adjustments, the majority of the community seemed to like the anomaly and it remained in the game once its season ended.





The next Nexus Anomaly, “A Call For Help,” came with the second 2020 season. It focused on damage from structures: cannon towers, forts, keeps and cores and allowed them to focus enemy heroes attacking allied players. To make this new targeting system more traceable, structures would show an indicator beam toward their target. Besides this general change, cores received unique themed abilities in each map (only triggerable by heroes), and towers, forts and keeps would reduce the armor of attacking heroes with their shots. AZ Jackson stated in a recent post the goal of these changes:





However, while the community response to the first anomaly was a very positive one, the response to this second seasonal gameplay change generated was nothing but controversial and included some particularly crude backlash. It looks like this rejection also appeared in the development team while they tested these changes internally:

Not The First Time

This isn’t the first time structures have suffered such meaningful changes. In the original design, structures had limited ammo, and once they were out they were just stone blocks in the middle of the lanes—as dangerous as gates, walls or healing fountains. This system was one of the particularities of Heroes of the Storm and made the offlane role quite different from its counterparts in other MOBAs. You could quickly clean enemy waves so your minions were targeted by towers and waste some of their shots so that the lane quickly crumbled.





In December 2017, the removal of this ammunition system was announced. It changed an integral part of the game, but eventually everybody adapted to the new gameplay. Similarly, the same thing happened with other modifications in core mechanics,like the experience and armor changes from patch 41.0. As Dehaka would say, “All things change.”

Evolution and adaptability are part of the Zerg culture (if we could call it so), and that might be something we as a community have been lacking lately. This anomaly has affected the game less than the experience globes, and yet the rejection has been much more widespread. But there’s still hope. In his post, AZ Jackson talked about some of the ideas they have to improve this system and asked for the community feedback.





If none of these options makes the anomaly viable, it will probably be removed after this season, so why don’t we give it a chance? Have we played enough with these revamped structures in the game? Have we tried to adapt our gameplay to be more careful when we are close to these stone threats? How would we adjust the anomaly to make it better? Do we prefer an invariable game or one that brings us new challenges every season, even if we don’t fancy them?

Listen to Abathur, for he’s the true Evolution Master: “Work harder, better. Make faster, stronger... Evolution never over.“