Hate to say it but your summary lacks information that comes off just wrong.
1st off: This game is based of the Starcraft 2 engine.
So alot of updates to this game could been used from SC2. They didn’t do that.
2nd off: Quality started shifting from amazing to meh. When Dustin Bowler left.
Dustin kept the competitive level high and was the reason we got fun alternate play heroes like Abathur. When he left the quality was still good but inconstitent.
Don;t get me wrong… we got more themed stuff and alot of stuff became accisable for all… but some things were blegh.
3rd off: Abuse of the systems.
You can go politics or smurfing is bad (wich it is) but you didn’t adress the abuse of the main systems of the game.
How ranking worked and how the report system worked to be abused.
Minus the unbalancing of heroes… sometimes or broken patches being abused by ranked players…
The report system wasn’t just used to ban any form of negativity.
It wasnt being abused because players didn’t want negative talk.
it was abused to bump players out of ranked matches or to troll players.
This player horribly outskilled me. “Report for abusive chat” Ooh I have 20 smurf acounts? “Report for abusive” And silenced… Haha now I can win again!
That’s how Smurfing and Abusive chat was ABUSED in the past. Now or days it’s fixed but it ran rampat for almost half a year.
I do agree on your marketing.
HGC and The game’s marketing were “weak” to say the least.
The only way fun hype reached like Mechastorm was to people who loved the game… but the problem remained that HOTS’s competitve scene was way too restricted due to Blizzzard not advertising 3rd party communitties and such!