In the past: Let’s make a MOBA without itemization, surely it will work out right?
Present: Hmm, hots is failing, o well, lets kill WoW pvp gear, remove it, then add some weird scaling no one really knows how it works, that will definitively work out.
Future: ??? ??? ??? ??? ???
Wait, they’re cancelling HOTS? O _O
Ive no idea what the OP just said tbh .
Yeah, I had a “Huh?” moment too.
Not cancelling, but
the cadence will change. Ultimately, we’re setting up the game for long-term sustainability.
They’ve cancelled the e-sports tournaments HGC and Heroes of the Dorm. And of course a free-to-play game needs external sources of revenue, so I suppose this means maintenance mode.
https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/blizzard/22833558/heroes-of-the-storm-news
I’m not getting the connection OP seems to be making with WoW. HOTS was always what it was, AFAIK; it just didn’t take enough share from its competitors to succeed at the level it needed to. They’re deliberately changing what WOW is. Different cases.
Listen lads, let’s just open our eyes, Blizzard will slowly decay, very, very, very slowly, unless they change, but if they don’t.
HoTs will slowly be forgotten until they shutdown the servers, in maybe a year ?
A month ?
Maybe a decade !
Activision needs to wake up, profit can also be reached through satisfaction of the playerbase.
It gets annoying to read Blizzard talking about new projects and moving talented developers away from current games.
Is it really so much more profitable to have a lot of medicore games where you win new players but also lose a good amount of old players that just switch to other games?
It costs a lot to create and serve tournaments within huge venues with the addition of prize money on top, if a free game is not attracting players who will purchase additional items/in game currency with real money then decisions have to be made on how to make it sustainable. After all, gaming companies are looking to create games that will give them a bigger return on the revenue spent to create them. Sponsorship helps but Sponsors also want to see a return on their investment in events like this and that their products or branding is being represented well enough to achieve this.
HOTS was never going to take that much from the competition, it simply doesn’t play as fluidly as the other big names in the MOBA scene in my opinion. If they could redesign the game and make it feel a little more like the other MOBAs whilst keeping within the theme of HOTS then they might even attract more players who will stay and even purchase in game stuff, it could even lead for them to taking more of the MOBA player base.
HOTS was only blizzard game with dev team that actually did something for game. New hero every month, often balance patches, cool skins, game mechanics changes to make it feel better, old heroes reworks, maps and stuff.
While OW team have patches once per 4 months, which break game even further, events now have even less items, nothing new. And there’s also BFA
Oh that’s sad… I loved following it when it was up. That was nice to watch ; ;
I play HotS as much as I play WoW.
I think HotS is actually Blizzard’s best game right now.
Sadly it’s just not very popular.
So yeah, it’s super sad for the people interested in the eSport side of things, and all the pro players and casters and so on. But if the viewers aren’t there, then it does make sense to shut it down, however sad it is.
The game development side of things was to be expected, I think. HotS has been without a game director for a long time, and Blizzard haven’t been looking to hire anyone for the position. So the fact that the game was going into a sort of maintenance mode was to be expected.
Hopefully the game will still get new heroes, skins, events, and game systems changes every now and then – just more infrequently than today.
Like I said, I really enjoy the game, and I think everyone else who plays HotS also really enjoys it, despite the fact that it’s not a super popular game by any stretch of the imagination.
As far as Blizzard goes, then they’re basically in a transition phase right now.
It’s a bit like when Blizzard went from their old portfolio of StarCraft, Diablo II, and Warcraft III, and into a new portfolio consisting of StarCraft II, Diablo III, and World of Warcraft. And then later they added Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, and Overwatch as well.
Many of these games are getting old, and Blizzard needs to transition out of them and into new ones once again.
Next Blizzcon we’re going to see a lot of new game announcements, that there is no doubt about. The future of Blizzard obviously cannot reside with games that are all a decade old. They have to make new games.
World of Wacraft will most likely also see some changes over the coming years. It seems that the playerbase has sort of stabilized between Legion and Battle for Azeroth, so whatever is needed to maintain that playerbase, that’s the developer investment Blizzard will likely settle on. They’re not going to grow the development team or try to get 12 million subscribers again. They’re just going to try and maintain and please the playerbase they have – similar to how other MMOs operate.
So yeah, exciting times ahead for Blizzard and Blizzard fans, but some bitter moments along the way as well, for sure. ![:worried:](https://d1bg94bbsh66ji.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/worried.png?v=6" ":worried:")
That reminds me that the game has been picked up for “Corrective Action” in China due to “over revealing female characters” and “inharmonious chatroom” by the new Online Games Ethic Commitee. So even now WoW should slightly change in Asia market.
China is weird. I shall not try to predict what the Chinese are doing or what they will do in the future, and it’s not really relevant to my gameplay experience either. And even for Blizzard it’s a bit of a distanced thing, since WoW is licensed in China to NetEase. It’s not Blizzard themselves who operate the game in China – because they’re not allowed to by the Chinese government. So yeah, it’s more a NetEase matter than a Blizzard matter.
China is weird. 
As a long time HotS player: the game wasn’t as succesful as it could have been/the company wanted it to be for a multitude of issues. Not having an item shop is not one of those issues and it is extremely daft and short-sighted to claim as much.
not surprising - they got orders to cut costs so they are cutting them .
After all the problems with HotS through the years since it launched I am not surprised to see it fail.
Unbalanced heroes: Either too much or too little siege or hero damage. Most heroes have CC which is incredibly good and can’t be countered by most heroes.
Don’t know if it’s become any better recently, but terrible quickmatch matchmaking. Sometimes you get 3 specialists, 3 tanks, 2 healers or a pure melee team vs a ranged team. Any of those combinations usually mean a loss because there isn’t enough damage in teamfights.
Also it’s been clear since pretty much the start that the game was meant to be a cash-grab. This latest announcement proves it even more.
I think the game might have been unpopular competatively compared to LoL, hence why they are making this decision. This is the final nail in the coffin for HotS.
Hots was meant to fail since day 1.
I was really excited about the idea of it, all blizzard heroes yada yada, but actual gameplay was awful, with A LOT of issues.
when it was released, I reached rank 1, and kept playing with team on tournaments and ladder, until aranis was released, then I slowly quit.
I mean HOTS was good in my opinion, but from a casual point, but there was no way it could compare to LoL or Dota, its no shock to me it went downhill.
I don’t know. I think Blizzard just wanted in on the genre, especially given how the genre was born in their own backyard, and that fans kept pestering them about how cool it would be if Blizzard made their own MOBA with their own universes.
So Blizzard basically just delivered on the thing fans had asked for. I mean, originally it was called Blizzard All Stars, right (terrible name btw!)?
But it’s always had a weird place in the gaming landscape.
The gameplay is more newbie-friendly than LoL or DOTA2. It’s an excellent game if you have never tried a MOBA before. It’s super beginner-friendly.
But then there’s the eSport side, and it never seemed as if Blizzard wanted to commit to that the way LoL or DOTA2 does – again, probably because they wanted to keep it beginner-friendly. Blizzard always wants that mass-appeal for their games, where they’re approachable to the middle-aged soccer mom who doesn’t really play games.
So the eSport scene never got a ton of attention, and the prize pools never grew stupidly large either, which is usually the thing that gets the MOBA popularity rolling.
I don’t know. I think it’ll be a good game in the coming years if you’re a regular gamer and you just want to play some HotS. But the eSport scene is dead. And that’s super sad for everyone involved in that. But for the regular gamer it might even be a blessing in disguise, because now the HotS team don’t have to worry about eSport concerns whenever they make changes or additions to the game. No need to repeat cases like Garden of Terror rework that the players hated but which were necessary for eSport reasons…because now there are no eSport reasons!
I think HotS is Blizzard’s best, most enjoyable game right now – dismissing the eSport side of things.
It’s just not a very popular game. And popularity sadly matters a lot in today’s gaming world.
Allstars part is from Dota Allstars, which was a very popular map of Warcraft 3 & Frozen Throne. Its creator was hired by another company to develop Dota 2 (which was a huge missed opportunity on Blizzard’s part considering how Dota 2 became even more popular than its predecessor). Later they created HotS, but I guess it was overshadowed by Dota 2 and LoL quite a lot.
The only problem with HOTS is exp sharing… I will still play it tho~ since I have all heroes unlocked 