heroes Update on Community Feedback: Apr 10

[Stan 5,252]

Game Director Alan Dabiri admitted that the Heroes of the Storm team does not interact with the community on a regular basis to talk about the game, but improvements are well underway.

The Heroes of the Storm team has been internally discussing various topics like ranked play or matchmaking improvements, but failed to share their thoughts and plans with the community. Game Director Alan Dabiri apologized for the lack of communication and promised improvemenets in the coming days, starting with a blog post and a follow-up Reddit AMA. The goal is to improve communication with the Heroes of the Storm community through regular blog posts, livestreams, or AMAs.

Blizzard (Source)

Hi guys,

We’ve been reading through a lot of the conversations that have been happening in the Heroes community about various topics like ranked play and matchmaking improvements. While we’ve been discussing some of these areas internally for some time, we definitely haven’t done a great job of communicating our thoughts and plans with you, and for that we apologize.

However, we do have thoughts that we’d like to share with you on some of these topics, and we’d like to start with a blog post we're looking to get posted in the next couple days. This blog post will focus on several of the most commonly discussed topics we've seen. We want to follow it up with a Reddit AMA on the Heroes subreddit a day or two after the blog post. That should help us dive into even more of your questions that we may not have answered in the blog.

As always, we really appreciate everyone who takes the time to share constructive feedback with us about the game. We're going to keep working on improving our communication with you guys. We’re looking forward to talking with you more this week, so keep an eye out for our blog and Reddit Q&A over the next few days.

Thanks.

Is it possible for the community blog post to become a weekly or bi-weekly thing in the future? I think the Overwatch team clearly demonstrates that communicating with your playerbase on a regular basis can really help the playerbase know that their feedback is being listened to.

Yeah, it's definitely something we want to do more of. We've talked about doing regular blog posts, livestreams, or AMAs in the past. We just haven't delivered on those plans yet. We'll try to do better here!

[ArusVicious 156]

Certainly about time. Very glad Alan stepped up and finally said something. I hope this can continue in the future.

On a different topic... WHERE ARE THE FENIX NERFS?

[Valhalen 1,486]

Pardon my language, but the Blizzard fan community is very bitchy. Always complaining. I've been seeing dozen and dozen of topics with the same complaints, in a very rude manner, calling the devs "incompetents" and such.

Really, Blizzard has always done a great job with community feedback as part of their design philosophy, something 70% of the game developer industry doesn't do. But yeah, they can't always attend the nitpicks of a crybaby community who says the game is dying (the typical move of a Blizzard player; "WoW is dying", "Diablo is dying", "HotS is dying") because of some issues the devs already told they're working on.

Not to mention the 1290314 topics complaining about Fenix being OP, and topics that STILL pester Blizzard to change Alexstrasza's model because she "looks fat".

[Morcalivan 86]

The problem with Fenix is that anyone who played him immediately knew 100% that he's OP. How does something like that get live unless they intentionally wanted to make him overpowered all other characters? Not sure why anyone would be ok with the devs doing that to any game. The same could be said about Maiev's release. This makes it look like a new standard practice to purposely and clearly OP any new character for new sales. If this happens with a monthly release, then would the game have more than 1 week releatively balanced at a time if this keeps up? Seems like an odd and self destructive model to me.

[Dejo93 1,023]

37 minutes ago, Valhalen said:

Pardon my language, but the Blizzard fan community is very bitchy. Always complaining. I've been seeing dozen and dozen of topics with the same complaints, in a very rude manner, calling the devs "incompetents" and such.

Really, Blizzard has always done a great job with community feedback as part of their design philosophy, something 70% of the game developer industry doesn't do. But yeah, they can't always attend the nitpicks of a crybaby community who says the game is dying (the typical move of a Blizzard player; "WoW is dying", "Diablo is dying", "HotS is dying") because of some issues the devs already told they're working on.

Not to mention the 1290314 topics complaining about Fenix being OP, and topics that STILL pester Blizzard to change Alexstrasza's model because she "looks fat".

You must be new to the Internet 

[Lampanelli 75]

Fenix nerfs are needed for sure, though to me, the most important question is: When will Deckard Cain be on the PTR? I'm really looking forward to him. :)

[Dejo93 1,023]

1 minute ago, Lampanelli said:

Fenix nerfs are needed for sure, though to me, the most important question is: When will Deckard Cain be on the PTR? I'm really looking forward to him. :)

He's waaaay overtuned, just like Ming and Genji were on release

[Valhalen 1,486]

13 minutes ago, Morcalivan said:

The problem with Fenix is that anyone who played him immediately knew 100% that he's OP. How does something like that get live unless they intentionally wanted to make him overpowered all other characters? Not sure why anyone would be ok with the devs doing that to any game. The same could be said about Maiev's release. This makes it look like a new standard practice to purposely and clearly OP any new character for new sales. If this happens with a monthly release, then would the game have more than 1 week releatively balanced at a time if this keeps up? Seems like an odd and self destructive model to me.

That is indeed what they do. Release an OP Hero so everyone will buy, and then nerf it. This has been pretty much every Hero to date, with some few exceptions that come really undertuned (Xul, Medivh, Probius).

[Morcalivan 86]

Then they need to bump up that third ban time table because then it's essentially just two bans for one team and one ban for another if the new monthly character is automatically OP and therefore a sure ban. Takes the choices out of banning, robbing a team of one of their bans. Still doesn't stop a team from getting an extra ban on the other, but at least gives a team back their 2 bans. Or auto-ban new heroes until after a month of being released from league.

Edited April 10, 2018 by Morcalivan

[VegaPl 88]

19 minutes ago, Morcalivan said:

Then they need to bump up that third ban time table

Now I don't play Hero League that much, but I feel like even 4 bans would be overall more interesting for the game. That would block 8 heroes and make players use a wider variety of heroes in general. In Oxy's latest Meta Tier list there are 10 heroes in total in Prime Tier, which would pretty much MAKE people consider other heroes more [on a side note, I'm not sure if making people do sth is the right way, but let's leave that for now].

I feel like it's the same heroes all the time, on almost every map. Even when you watch HGC, you can see a very narrow roster. Basically every time a less popular hero is drafted, it becomes qutie an event - like Illidan some time ago (HGC China I believe, Towers of Doom).

As for the voice of community, it is not always good and beneficial to listen to it. What people want is not always what is best for the game.

[PrivateJoker 27]

3 hours ago, Valhalen said:

That is indeed what they do. Release an OP Hero so everyone will buy, and then nerf it. This has been pretty much every Hero to date, with some few exceptions that come really undertuned (Xul, Medivh, Probius).

I'm not sure their intent is this malicious. I think a balance/design philosophy where you ere on the side of making a thing stronger, and scaling it back as necessary, is smarter than erring on the side of caution. If they made every new hero shit, and then tried to buff them later, chances are they'd just overbuff them, and have to nerf them again later. It's a lot easier to look at what a hero CAN do (perhaps too well) and balance that, rather than look at all the infinite things it CAN'T do, and try to add things.

[Valhalen 1,486]

41 minutes ago, PrivateJoker said:

I'm not sure their intent is this malicious. I think a balance/design philosophy where you ere on the side of making a thing stronger, and scaling it back as necessary, is smarter than erring on the side of caution. If they made every new hero shit, and then tried to buff them later, chances are they'd just overbuff them, and have to nerf them again later. It's a lot easier to look at what a hero CAN do (perhaps too well) and balance that, rather than look at all the infinite things it CAN'T do, and try to add things.

Yes, but this can easily "trigger" the community. Releasing an undertuned Hero and then buffing them in the following patches is better than releasing an overtuned Hero and then nerfing.

[Orshova 31]

I don't see how Anyone can expect/ demand anything from blizzard.  The game is literally free. 

[PrivateJoker 27]

4 hours ago, Valhalen said:

Yes, but this can easily "trigger" the community. Releasing an undertuned Hero and then buffing them in the following patches is better than releasing an overtuned Hero and then nerfing.

Sure, but at the end of the day, Blizzard is a business, and HotS isn't exactly their biggest cash cow. They dedicate their time and resources to making as few adjustments as they can, so they can also have time to keep adding new heroes, battlegrounds, skins, etc. Hurling more resources at development just to make the internet stop crying, is not good business. The internet will always find something to cry about, and the game is free, so they don't exactly have to prove their good will to the community. And if you really want them to spend more time on balancing heroes in a particular manner, it would slow down the release of new content. We literally just had reworks for Medivh and Sonya replace a new hero release, in case you're not sure that would actually happen. And if they wanted to just hurl money at the issue, and hire more employees, they could always start charging for the game, instead of letting everyone play it for free. Blizzard loves their games, but they're not in the business of losing money.

Edited April 11, 2018 by PrivateJoker

[SteveFrost 97]

16 hours ago, Valhalen said:

That is indeed what they do. Release an OP Hero so everyone will buy, and then nerf it. This has been pretty much every Hero to date, with some few exceptions that come really undertuned (Xul, Medivh, Probius).

This is pretty much the norm in every similar game, not just HotS. I've seen it in HoN of Newerth, LoL of Legends, Smote, Infinite Crisis and Supernova (rip the latter 2 :( ). You can indefinitely argue whether it's intentional or not but overall, it really seems to be the former cause the only other explanation would be that the devs everywhere are (censorship) and don't read a character in this state imbaOPbroken.

16 hours ago, Valhalen said:

 

Not to mention the 1290314 topics complaining about Fenix being OP,

Liked just because of that sentence

12 hours ago, VegaPl said:

Now I don't play Hero League that much, but I feel like even 4 bans would be overall more interesting for the game. That would block 8 heroes and make players use a wider variety of heroes in general. In Oxy's latest Meta Tier list there are 10 heroes in total in Prime Tier, which would pretty much MAKE people consider other heroes more [on a side note, I'm not sure if making people do sth is the right way, but let's leave that for now].

I feel like it's the same heroes all the time, on almost every map. Even when you watch HGC, you can see a very narrow roster. Basically every time a less popular hero is drafted, it becomes qutie an event - like Illidan some time ago (HGC China I believe, Towers of Doom).

As for the voice of community, it is not always good and beneficial to listen to it. What people want is not always what is best for the game.

More bans would definitely help create some diversity imho, cause right now competitive is being ruled by 10-12 Heroes at most. I think they should also change the rulings in competitive even more, like making it so a team can't go with the same choices of maps beyond 1-2 matches because diversity in maps currently is the same as in Heroes.

7 hours ago, PrivateJoker said:

Sure, but at the end of the day, Blizzard is a business, and HotS isn't exactly their biggest cash cow. They dedicate their time and resources to making as few adjustments as they can, so they can also have time to keep adding new heroes, battlegrounds, skins, etc. Hurling more resources at development just to make the internet stop crying, is not good business. The internet will always find something to cry about, and the game is free, so they don't exactly have to prove their good will to the community. And if you really want them to spend more time on balancing heroes in a particular manner, it would slow down the release of new content. We literally just had reworks for Medivh and Sonya replace a new hero release, in case you're not sure that would actually happen. And if they wanted to just hurl money at the issue, and hire more employees, they could always start charging for the game, instead of letting everyone play it for free. Blizzard loves their games, but they're not in the business of losing money.

I try to walk the thin line of being neither a Blizzard white knight nor a hater. Blizzard has built a great reputation and rightfully so, being able to deliver top notch quality (games, stories, cinematics etc) to the point where people would buy even a can of literal poop if it was labeled "Blizzard Entertainment" (especially the Collector's Edition). BUT (yes, there is a but) seems like they go too far in trying to milk their fanbase sometimes, especially the most loyal ones. One glaring example is none other than HotS original release; the pricing with in-game currency was just too much with how you earned it, everyone I knew (most being moba freaks, having started with DotA All-Stars like the one appearing below) agreed it was THE worst grind system in a game ever; it practically felt like they wanted to force you into putting money in. New system is much much better, something others can learn from. In a nutshell, they're the Starbucks of vidya games.

As for HotS "dying" it simply won't if Blizz doesn't want it to; they have their other successful titles to draw resources from if needed (which would most likely be a last resort) but the game feels healthy (competitive scene with Blizz making novelties in e-sports foundation, they expanded recently with the entrance of China, a huge market, game has many refreshing elements etc). If staff numbers is an issue, I'd like an increase but oh well.

And to get to the subject in hand, I certainly welcome this approach, communication is key for most things-bad apples will always exist.

P.S. Who's willing to bet we'll hear nothing about a Raynor rework? I already know a guy.

[VegaPl 88]

9 hours ago, SteveFrost said:

More bans would definitely help create some diversity imho, cause right now competitive is being ruled by 10-12 Heroes at most.

This is pretty much what I meant - only a handful of heroes.

9 hours ago, SteveFrost said:

I think they should also change the rulings in competitive even more, like making it so a team can't go with the same choices of maps beyond 1-2 matches because diversity in maps currently is the same as in Heroes.

Funny you should say, because I thought the exact same thing the other day. Imagine a rule of unique drafts throughout every phase, i.e. in every best of 3 or best of 5 phases, you could only pick a given hero once. So basically, if you go with Malf in the first game, you will need to use somebody else later. It does sound a bit forced, but I'd rather see that then same heroes every game.

[CyberDVonaven 82]

On 4/10/2018 at 12:46 PM, Valhalen said:

and topics that STILL pester Blizzard to change Alexstrasza's model because she "looks fat".

WHAT!?! O_O >:(

Who the F*CK are these blind ass sh*ts that are saying such things about my woman! Alex is the best damn looking total (D)MILF there is!! (...other then Tyrande.) If they DARE change her sexy sexy hips and amazing figure I'm gonna be SO MAD!!! (especially in the 'Master' skin outfit. Whoo!) And the only thing 'fat' about Alex is that "p.h.a.t." ass <3 ;).

Edited April 12, 2018 by CyberDVonaven

[Valhalen 1,486]

2 hours ago, CyberDVonaven said:

WHAT!?! O_O >:(

Who the F*CK are these blind ass sh*ts that are saying such things about my woman! Alex is the best damn looking total (D)MILF there is!! (...other then Tyrande.) If they DARE change her sexy sexy hips and amazing figure I'm gonna be SO MAD!!! (especially in the 'Master' skin outfit. Whoo!) And the only thing 'fat' about Alex is that "p.h.a.t." ass <3 ;).

They won't, don't worry. T H I C C  Dragon Mama will remain E X T R A  T H I C C.

[SteveFrost 97]

22 hours ago, VegaPl said:

This is pretty much what I meant - only a handful of heroes.

Funny you should say, because I thought the exact same thing the other day. Imagine a rule of unique drafts throughout every phase, i.e. in every best of 3 or best of 5 phases, you could only pick a given hero once. So basically, if you go with Malf in the first game, you will need to use somebody else later. It does sound a bit forced, but I'd rather see that then same heroes every game.

Yeah, thing is, with pros having to only practice certain comps in specific maps, they have it quite easy and this also takes away one of the game's compelling points and identity, the diversity not only in the characters you can play but also in the maps. Wouldn't hurt taking them out of their comfort zone once in a while imho.