I Really Like HOTS

Quick Match is not HOTS

Quests Make You Selfish

The Class System Encourages Ignorance

The holidays are over, and now all that's left is to endure the long, painful wait until the HGC season kicks off. During this break, we've seen a ton of tweets and Reddit discussion about the state of Hero League. How people at high levels of play don't know how to draft, don't understand rotation timings, and so on and so forth. Initially, I wrote these things off as simple pro-player frustrations we see in every game. League and DOTA players also think their solo queue experience is garbage and that everyone is a moron.However, as I started to watch top player streams and read more comments on Reddit, the tone began to shift. I was a part of the League of Legends competitive scene for five years, I remember what streams and comments looked like in those early days where HOTS is now, and they were never this level of ignorant. Some of the simple practices that are commonplace in other games are just flat out missing from Heroes of the Storm. At this point, I genuinely believe that the majority of players in HOTS are less knowledgeable about how to play the game than similar players in other MOBAS, smaller games like SMITE included.Today, I want to identify what I believe to be the culprit for this problem and discuss how Quick Match has created the problems our Hero League players face today.Now, before we dive into this, I think it's important to clarify something. I think HOTS is the best MOBA on the market. I wouldn't be spending all this time on content if I didn't adore the game and believe in it as an esport. To discuss the problems with the state of ranked play, I think we have to first understand the reasons why I love the game so much.No other game has this. It creates completely unique dynamics where each map must be optimized entirely separate from the others. The rules of one map don't always apply to another. Siege camp timings on Tomb are entirely different from Haunted Mines.There is no analogue for something like Abathur in another MOBA. The draft and map play dynamics completely change when he or Lost Vikings are in the game. HOTS pushes the envelope in Hero design unlike any other game.I change my opinion on this about once a week, but overall I think this is a great system. It creates an easily understood power dynamic between the teams, and rewards a better understanding of macro play. The system rewards the better team, not the team with the best individual players.I was a tank main when I raided in WoW. I love tanking, I love watching good tank play, I love the concept. The fact that the competitive meta revolves heavily around a dedicated tank fills me with indescribable levels of joy.So, now let's examine the most common, introductory style of play, Quick Match, and how it matches up to what makes Heroes a great competitive game.In Quick Match, you pick your hero, and you're randomly assigned a team. After years of complaining, that team will sometimes include a proper competitive setup with a "tank" and a "healer" but we'll get to that later. This system completely fails to teach you any of the things that make HOTS work as a competitive game. Every map has a distinct meta where some heroes are strong and some are weak. The game revolves around selecting the right heroes for the map. By having you pick you hero and then randomly assigning a map, Quick Match teaches you the exact opposite. The game tells you that every hero is ok on every map, because every map is available. Nothing in the QM system remotely implies that you should consider the map when choosing the hero.This is also what makes unique heroes so interesting. There are maps where Abathur and the Vikings shine, and maps where they suuuuuuuuuuuuck. They require specific compositions and playstyles to properly function. Blind picking Abathur in any situation is just flat-out wrong. But in Quick Match, you can just be an Abathur main, and no one can tell you otherwise because the game picked that bad comp and map, not you.QM also flies in the face of the shared XP system. The system creates a team-focused dynamic. It's about working together to manage wave soak, camps, and structure pressure. You can only succeed by working together, by building a team that optimizes the XP opportunities of the map. Quick Match instead tells you that Heroes is about playing the hero you want regardless of your teammates. It isn't about proper lane setups or having enough wave clear, it's about playing Butcher because I have a quest that says play an assassin and I like playing Butcher. It isn't my fault if we don't have enough wave clear, I picked my hero and I'm playing what I want. Every system in HOTS reinforces this "me first" mentality in the one MOBA that removed the ability to be an individual carry. Now we need to look at the other systems that go hand in hand with Quick Match in reinforcing the wrong lessons about how to play the game.HOTS' daily quest system is designed around playing in Quick Match.Yes, I'm fully aware that you can complete any quest in draft regardless of the Hero you pick, but your quest log is still screaming at you to play a support. Even when you're in a draft, that little box is encouraging your brain to look only at supports rather than consider what your team needs.Moreover, the new quest log in Heroes 2.0 reinforces the "play what I want first" mentality. It literally tells you what hero to play next to get them to the next level and earn a loot box. That system doesn't change when you enter draft. Even if you jump into hero league, that little box is screaming at you to ignore your team, and first pick Ragnaros because he's close to leveling up. Rag is an awful first pick in any draft environment, but who cares, you're gonna get a loot box after this game.This has been talked to death, but at this point it's actually insane that it hasn't been changed. This is among the worst culprits for reinforcing wrong thinking in HOTS. Your quest says play a warrior. The warrior symbol is a shield. You heard someone say that in HOTS you need a tank. Your brain makes a very logical conclusion that "oh, these heroes are all the tanks." You lock in Dva and get ready to tank for your Quick Match team. Then you go into Hero League and get confused as to why people are asking for a tank, then getting mad when you picked Dva.The system makes no distinction between tanks, bruisers, and all the other special snowflakes in that category. Support, Assasin, and Specialist don't help at all either. The specialist icon used to be a tower so you naturally think that these are the heroes who split push and focus on killing towers. So you pick Medivh and don't understand why people are yelling at you to stop split pushing. Now it doesn't tell you anything. "Hey, these heroes...well..they're weird. Do what you will with that." The role system actively works against teaching players how to play the game at a competitive level. It tells you there's no need to learn the distinctions between warriors, because you just need to pick any warrior and you'll keep progressing. The game rewards you for not caring about the subtleties in the roles.From the minute you install HOTS, you are being taught incorrect information about how the game is played. All of your time spent in Quick Match, completing your quests, and leveling up heroes is working against your ability to play the game when you transition to Hero League.When I played League, even in Bronze people understood what heroes could Jungle, what went in the Carry role, what lane to go to, etc.In HOTS most people don't even call their roles at the start of a lobby. That was even commonplace in every unranked draft lobby in League. Even at higher ranks, players in HOTS do not understand the importance of the draft, and they've been taught since their first matches not to care.Now, in League, there was no system teaching you who could Jungle and who should be in the Top lane. However, there was no system encouraging you to ignore those facts either. HOTS' casual mode and progression system incentivize you to play sub-optimally. They teach you not to care about team composition or map strategy. This is also part of why numbers for the HGC are so poor compared to the total playerbase of the game. Why should you care about watching the HGC? It doesn't teach you anything about how to play Quick Match better. The game the pros play is a completely different game from what you're playing in Quick Match.Unfortunately, there's no easy solution to this problem. The progression system would have to be completely overhauled if Quick Match were to be removed from the game. However, there are ways to allow the system to encourage more conscious thought about composition and strategy from new players learning the game in Quick Match:It's not ok that it's been allowed to stagnate for this long. Use this system to educate players, not just to make easy daily quests. I actually wrote my own proposal for a new system back in May that, while not perfect, would serve this purpose far better. This has to happen ASAP.When hovering a hero, have a section for "preferred maps". List 4-5 maps that are the best maps for that hero. This will lead players to think more critically about "why" those maps would be preferred, and open the door to thinking about picking heroes based on maps."Play 3 games as a wave clear hero", "Take 15 mercenary camps", "Collect 100 regen globes", "Do 100,000 points of healing". These sorts of quests would get players to think more critically about the sorts of heroes that best achieve those goals, and teach them about important mechanics in the game.At the highest level, HOTS is an incredible game. There is so much depth, but it's all hidden beneath the surface, and much of it is completely unreachable in the game's introductory mode. Thinking through all of this, is it really any surprise that people viewing the game through the lens of other MOBAs see is as a shallow, casual experience?Some of you may be surprised to not see me writing about the Team12/Roll20 drama that shattered Reddit on Monday. Well, that's because I did an entire hour-long livestream about it! If you don't understand that news, or how the new HGC ownership rules work, give it a listen