Hotso manifesto?

Hello everyone, I wanted to make a post that updated on what I've been up to and my plans, but more importantly just talk about the Hots experience and really just what went wrong with the game. I'll touch on the shutdown of HGC but I'd say that has been pretty well covered as a complete dick move from Blizzard towards their community, production crew and the players that were grinding away because they thought they were living the dream being an esports player.



Before I dive into the meat of what's in my head regarding everything about Hots I'll just give a quick update on what I have been doing the past few months since I've been so quiet. After leaving the HeroesHearth team I dived into playing and streaming Dota 2, I got top 1000 on the leaderboard but after that I just kept losing mmr and eventually that kinda crushed me and I stopped playing as much and streaming at all. I want to continue playing Dota 2 as I love it just as a game and want to get better at it. At the same time however I have been enjoying card games as well, namely Artifact and MTGA, and am excited about future tournaments for these games. It is hard to multitask as a gamer though, especially across multiple genres, but I'll see what works best and most importantly what I feel I can achieve in any game.



Streaming has always been inconsistent for me, as I feel I don't play as well as I could if I was just alone and to be honest to myself it is hard to keep streaming if you don't ever break past 15-20 viewers which is what happened when I was just streaming Dota 2. In that aspect my main goal is to reach a high enough level to give people a reason to watch me in the first place as I tend to be quiet and not the entertaining type. 2019 I have set a goal for myself to be a consistent streamer and honestly playing different games will help with that. This simply was not possible with Hots cause there were too many problems which I will get into.



As a final note to this first part of the post, my ultimate dream would being able to play/stream Classicwow and live off of that. I simply love that game and the community thatll come with it. But that is probably not a realistic goal but regardless I will be playing and streaming the crap out of it once it is out. So all in all I will be pursuing Dota the hardest for now, but will devote a good amount of time to Artifact/MTGA as well since entering tournaments is really fun.



This post is already way longer than I wanted it to be, but I wanted to touch on my journey in Hots and just finally get what I think of that game out there in text. If you know nothing about me I started playing Hots in early alpha and formed what would be the most successful team at least in NA for over a year, Symbiote Gaming. That went onto Tempo Storm and after that roster I found myself on Cloud9. After a year hiatus I came back to once again form a top NA team HeroesHearth. But lets talk about what I think were the biggest flaws of the game. To be honest I could write a whole book on why Hots felt bad to play but maybe that'll be for another day.



To prevent this from being even longer and slogging I have simply made my top 5 points of why I think Hots ultimately failed as a game. These at the end of the day are my opinion, but there would still be HGC if Hots truly didn't have any problems.



1. Lack of individual player agency



This applies in-game and to the esports side of the game, there simply was not enough in the game to differentiate you from other players. Talents were basically the only way to stand out from someone else, and if you know Hots you know a majority of the time you took the same talents no matter what, but even if you did switch it up at the end of the day it really didn't change your hero too much. No matter how many hours you have put in or simply how good you were at a character you were restricted to the same style and power level of the hero with nothing in game to empower that. Scores were very arbitrary since you only needed to be in range of the kill (haha excuse me, takedown) and not even having contributed anything towards it. Even if you were a 10/0 valla in a game, at most you probably had a level or two above the enemy and nothing to show for it outside of team wide exp. At the end of the day it came down to how your team played a lot more overall than individual decisions in a game, which for a game genre where people's wet dream is to stomp and crush the enemy because they're better and build an advantage, this left a very bad taste in people's mouths I believe.



2. Horrible ranked matchmaking for the majority of the time.



This is a double whammy when you consider point 1, but Ranked in Hots never did feel that satisfying. To start off the system they implemented a simple rank 1 through 50, which when pretty much any player that just spammed enough games hit rank 50, meant nothing at the end of the day. This changed to having the same system as league with bronze-diamond and master/grand master with a leaderboard which was much better. Go talk to any Hots pro and they will tell you bad the matchmaking was though. Was this due to a bad system set in place or was it a population problem? Only Blizz could answer that but I will go ahead and assume it was a bit of both. I could list countless tweets about 20 or so pros queuing at the same time and being placed in 5 different games with master/diamond players instead. Granted in NA this issue was exacerbated due to having split servers (East/West). Europe as a whole probably didn't think it was that bad since they all played on the same server. Also something I noticed was for how inclusive being master/gm was supposed to be, it seemed you ran into randoms you have never seen way too much. I can't pinpoint this issue but in NA at least this has to be the most agreed upon point among the pro players.



3. Awful balance and design choices



It'd be one thing for Blizz to not balance around pro play, but to me they fucked up casual balancing as well. I'll start off by saying Genji. That monstrosity of a character was simply broken for a very long time, more than a year I want to say? A year of this character being first picked or banned in every game ever (with only one starting ban by the way lmao) and was only ever slightly nerfed instead of the behind the shed shotgun it deserved. I can list some others in this same area like Malfurion/Muradin/ETC. These characters were always so strong and meta defining yet it seemed they never got touched in weekly balance patches. Instead it would be random stuff like Chen/Nova nerfs. Granted my memory is foggy and these characters all did receive big changes at one point but I believe it was too little too late. I've only been talking about balance but let me hop into the design part. And I will start off with another character: Chromie. Now Chromie was a headache to deal with for most players since she was so far away all the time and really didn't have much counterplay if the Chromie player was good about positioning, but this wasn't the issue. I knew hots was entering the gutter stage when they added this mechanic to her Q: For every time you an enemy hero, you gained 5 permanent damage on your Q. There were many changes like this added to the game afterwards (Tyrande/Muradin) and I believe this had no place in what is supposed to be a strategic game. This turns your abilities from making smart choices with them to MUST SPAM MY ABILITY AT ALL TIMES AND HIT AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE TO GET NUMBERS. Just completely mindless thought process that is supposed to make players feel better by adding up points to your ability. Instead of shooting an owl to scout vision, you are now launching it off cooldown to hit an enemy in the face to get stacks. Instead of storm bolting to disrupt the enemy and pick off you are now spamming your storm bolt to hit an enemy in the face. One final note on this part is the reworks of hero kits, which really were ever only talent changes. I don't think there was one rework past alpha (I believe Illidan had a different kit at some point and maybe arthas?) that actually changed the abilities of the character, rather it was just talent bungling. This often involved moving talents around different level tiers and combining bad talents until the point where they might be taken cause they were so bloated. I wish at the end of the day they were way more aggressive with changing heroes that needed it. Vikings? Why not add actual abilities to each viking so yknow... you can micro them instead of having them sit as close to a gate or bush as possible and soak exp. Zarya? clearly her shield mechanic was a flop since there was no in between for her being strong on all energy or pitiful without.I could go on and on about this, like healers being homogenized, the shitshow that was brusiers outclassing everyone else in offlane, and all around every role becoming bland instead of unique and flavorful, so yea.



4. Maps



I have a couple issues with maps. The main one I want to bring up is I think Blizzard overall failed with making maps truly unique and different to play on. There were exceptions to this, like in the beginning Haunted Mines and Blackheart's bay were truly unique maps, but overtime every map that was churned out was just chopped up from other existing maps with maybe a new mechanic here and there thrown out. The only new map that was truly different and exciting to play on was Towers of Doom. I will also say BoE was pretty different but I hated that map anyhow as immortals were just too game deciding more than anything else. The others? Infernal, Tomb, Garden, Warhead, Braxis, Volskaya? They all just felt samey, youre doing slightly different things, things that were already present in other maps, to achieve the same result which was some kind of PvE push. Where were the truly different and unique maps? Why not make a map that is as competitively balanced as possible, with a ton of macro decisions to make and not just obvious contention points? This point is probably my weakest of them all but personally I just felt like maps were not utilized enough when that was the main part of what made Hots different to other games. My final point is that at least for pro play all these maps devolved into Big map/Small map, which for the most part you picked the same comps/heroes for all the small maps (tomb/boe/volskaya) and big maps (dshire/cursed/warhead/garden).



5. Blizzard resources



I think at the end of the day Blizz simply tried to dip their hands into too many pots with their games. The hots devs did a lot of hard work and did do good. I don't want my post to just shit on them and who knows I might be completely wrong about a lot of it. But this is what I felt as a player that has played a metric ton of League, hots and dota. I think if Blizzard truly wanted to make the best moba out there they could have. If they had people in charge who wanted to push that envelope and make the best competitive moba to play and watch they could have. This was my hope and dream for the game when I started playing it back in Alpha. But they didn't. They instead made Hots 2.0 that literally just added loot boxes/dumb currency system to the game, the exact same as Hearthstone/Overwatch. It just felt like through the entirety of hots existance they did the bare minimum to keep it afloat instead of pushing boundaries. That is not to mention the game is still present on the SC2 engine instead of having its own dedicated engine (not gonna pretend to be knowledgeable on this) but come on, surely you could do more with the game if it had it's own dedicated engine instead of a DIFFERENT GAME AND GENRES ENGINE. I didn't even bring up the fact that Blizz opted to not make Dota 2 (and thank god they didn't) but instead made this polished turd of a game.



Don't get me wrong, Hots was an incredible journey and I met so many awesome people in it. The esports scene of it was not huge but it felt like family. I ran into the same production crew, players and teams, and everyone was there to work hard and put on the best show we could. If I'm being brutally honest though I wish I never got into Hots and instead pursued another game. If I knew this was the destination for the game I am sure me and many others would have hopped off the ship a long time ago. Perhaps I was dumb for getting into in the first place. Maybe one day someone will take Hots and make actual Hots 2 that is everything Dota 2 was to Dota 1. Until that time I am done with playing Blizzard/Activision games besides Classic Wow, and I hope many others follow suit. Cause fuck what this company has become. To look at warcraft 3/diablo 2/WoW and what great games they were and see that every game is just some bland generic crap makes me really sad. Instead of making great games they make 7 different ones with systems to milk players dry. Am I being too brutal? Maybe, but I don't really care, you don't get to just suddenly cancel everyone's hopes and dreams right before Christmas and come out of it with any real excuses.



So yea, that was that, if you read this far I am really surprised. I will start streaming in the next couple of days and hope to see all my old viewers and friends again. 2018 was the best year of my life and I want 2019 to be even better. I am happy to share it with anyone and everyone. At the end of the day I know I love games and competition so that is what I want to keep pursuing. Thank you for all the support over the years when I have been not so good about giving it back myself. Too-da-loo gamers.

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