Not quite an RPG, not quite an RTS, MOBAs are fierce, fast games that combine swift fingers, strategic thinking, and uproarious bursts of skill. Two teams of five players duke it out to destroy each other's base with the assistance of computer-controlled units that march forward along set paths, or lanes, as the terminology has it. It's a simple concept that allows for a huge amount of depth, and when two teams are in full flow, firing on every cylinder, it's a joy to watch and play. But there's a precipitous learning curve at every level of skill, and it can just as easily become an exercise in frustration and self-flagellation, especially if your teammates aren't up to snuff—or if you're the rube but you don't know it.

I've played Heroes of the Storm for two years, starting just after it left beta. In that time I've played 2,490 games. Each game takes an average of 20 minutes, though a game can last anywhere from about 12 minutes during an outright stomp to upwards of half an hour, if both sides consist of woeful morons. By my calculations, that's exactly 830 hours of furious mouse-clicks and grimaces of anguish or just over 34-and-a-half full days of gaming. That's a lot. [Pfft, I had over 700 days of World of Warcraft play time! -Ed.]

Since mid-2015, I've obsessively devoured patch notes, posted several despairing notes on Reddit wondering why I always seem to find myself partnered with imbeciles (surprise: the team imbecile is often me), and even found myself watching tournaments played by men and boys 10 years my junior with frightening dedication to the game and faster fingers than I'll ever have—e-sports being something I'd never expected to find pleasure in. These things, if you let them, have a way of taking over your life.

MOBAs are the competitive PC game of choice, even more so than first-person shooters. Players compete for multimillion-dollar prize pots in League of Legends, Dota 2, and Smite, with hundreds of thousands tuning in on Twitch and YouTube. Advertising revenue funds an active ecosystem of experts, players, streamers, podcasts, and T-shirt sales. Players plucked from literal bedroom obscurity burn out by 24, too old to hit their combos as fast as the next wave of teens with terrible haircuts. The genre has been a phenomenon for the past half-decade, and Heroes of the Storm is Blizzard's naked attempt to muscle in on it.

The genre in general is famous for its needless complexity—having to hit enemies last to get experience points, complex character builds that new players need to study offline for the greatest DPS (damage per second) yield—but Heroes of the Storm brought with it some much-needed simplification. It was designed to open an impenetrable format to the masses, adding in Blizzard's world-famous-especially-in-the-Far-East IP, as well as add some of the company's classic triple-A polish.

Blizzard has done its best to open out the genre to people who aren't prepared to theorycraft their way to mathematical perfection. Experience gains are shared across each team, and the massively complex web of in-match item purchases you find in other MOBAs have been replaced by easier-to-digest level-up rewards. Most importantly, it’s tried to deal with the notoriously toxic MOBA community.

Arguably the biggest barrier to entry for casual players is, unfortunately, other players. The truth is, in a game where the margins of victory are slim and only the best survive, those who hold back the team are quickly shunned with the worst kinds of verbal violations. Here's my confession: I was chat-banned once for 24 hours. I'm competitive and hot-tempered, and if, as sometimes happens, I lose the teammate lottery and get paired with players who don't know what they're doing, the temptation to be sarcastic or unconstructively critical can become too great. I've tried to tone it down since feeling the shame of that little crossed-out speech bubble, but this is a game that magnifies and punishes deficiencies.

There are barely any players in the game who don't consider themselves marooned by the vicissitudes of their MMR, hobbled by the echoes of their past, worse selves

Skill—and every player's own inflated self-perception thereof—is the be-all and end-all in Heroes of the Storm. The game itself is simple on paper, but the five-a-side brawl is augmented with numerous deep and confusing systems. There are the characters themselves, for starters, which number 65 in Heroes of the Storm and span fan-favourites across all of Blizzard's IPs. They mostly fall into the RPG holy trinity—tank, damage-dealer, and healer—but there are plenty who fill more abstruse roles. Players are algorithmically assigned slots with and against people of similar skill levels, on evenly balanced maps, each with concentric rings of fortification protecting the home base, which must be wrecked to win.

Each team has an experience pool, and characters, who have three skills each, get new perks at key points during levelling up, earning a significant power-boost at 10 when everyone picks between a choice of two game-changing ultimate skills. The arenas all have different goals: capture a certain number of objectives, capture enough currency to summon some big friendly monster, or rain down cannonballs on your enemies. There are neutral camps of mercenaries who can be hired, somehow, by biffing them until they give in. Other than that, it's kill or be killed.