With the changes to Blizzard highlighted at the last Blizzcon, I’m somewhat scared they may decide on a dumbed-down version of HotS for mobile. So to get a better idea of how that might feel, I briefly hopped into Onmyoji Arena (I would have included a link to the google play store, here, but the forums won’t let me), which happens to have been developed by NetEase.

I won’t go into details on how very bland the game felt in comparison to HotS and how horrible the controls were, but there WAS one element that I appreciated and that I would definitely want to see introduced to HotS:

pre-composed text messages.

Basically, in HotS, we have pings and they certainly have something similar in OA as well, but ADDITIONALLY you can for each character set a bunch of text messages (eight or so, I think). These selected text messages would then be available during a match, where hitting a button would display them in a dropdown menu and selecting them there would post them.

And I thought to myself: that would be a great feature to have.

Yes, we have voice chat … and near-nobody uses it.

And obviously, you need to find a relatively safe spot to use the text chat, even when you’re a fast typer.

If we could instead write down a couple of text messages beforehand, and then simply hit a key and select them while playing, that could help communication quite a bit. (“Thanks for the help. :*”, “This is way too risky!”, “I’m about to oom, start disengaging.”, “Wait with that mercenary until the objective counter comes up.”, etc.)

(I will admit, I also like to do character-specific greetings at the start of a map and this would mean I wouldn’t need to store them in a text-file outside the game, anymore. )