![]() Access to teleportation and healing wells makes it very hard to die in lane without being ganked and reduces the penalty for playing poorly in lane. But in Heroes of the Storm the laning phase is, for a variety of reasons, somewhere between less important and non-existent. Even without careful, evident stat tracking it's clear when one laner is dominating another. In LoL and Dota 2 a significant portion of the game is spent with players arranged opposite each other in lanes, making for easy per-lane comparisons - in mid Team A's player is outplaying Team B's, but at bottom lane Team B's duo is outperforming Team A's. It's hard to compare opposing players due to a lack of meaningful stats, but a lack of real laning phase also plays a part. While it's possible to observe that a player is playing well or poorly that observation is not backed by any stats and is not surfaced by the UI - it is effectively anecdotal, a short mental history of "they made some good plays here and here.” In Heroes of the Storm there is no formalized notion of a good player vs a bad one or a good individual performance vs a poor one, only of a good team vs a bad one. Or, over a longer period of time, that of the player who dominates in the regular season only to choke in the playoffs, or of the clutch player who turns it on in playoffs. This makes a variety of familiar stories impossible to tell: that of the player who struggles in the early portion of the game then makes a dramatic comeback and puts the team on their back, or that of the player who dominates early then falls off as the victory slips away. The primary stats, XP gained and buildings destroyed, are team-wide, and the individually-tracked stats, like damage taken or healing done, are essentially meaningless, indicative of nothing and routinely (and properly) ignored by casters. In Heroes of the Storm there are no meaningful stats to compare individual players, either to members of their own team or to players on the opposing team. One of the critical errors of Heroes of the Storm is that the increased team emphasis, a nod to keeping play more casual by reducing individual responsibility for losses, largely destroys the ability to produce player-centric stories. eSports are no different - the best eSports games regularly produce stories of matches, seasons and careers. (Sometimes these stories can be a bit contrived!) They are also about in-game stories - the ball going through Bill Buckner's legs, Babe Ruth calling his shot, Curt Schilling and his bloody sock. Stories of athletes overcoming adversity, such as the familiar Olympic tale of the kid who fell face-first into a puddle but managed to soldier on and become an award-winning diver. Right: League of Legends Championship viewers - on the Riot Game Turkish channel. #Heroes of the storm arenas professional#This post examines the design decisions that ensured that HoTS would have limited success as a serious professional game, as well as a few non-design issues for the sake of completeness. That optimism, however, ignored the serious design issues that made Heroes of the Storm a poor fit for competitive play. Many commentators were understandably bullish that HoTS would quickly overtake League of Legends and Dota 2 and become the dominant MOBA. The state of competitive HoTS is no doubt surprising to some - Blizzard games tend to be at the top of their genre, and Blizzard's Starcraft was one of the first eSports hits. This was met with a spate of "Competitive Heroes of the Storm Isn't Dead" think pieces - pieces that would never be written about a game in good health. Over the summer a number of professional Heroes of the Storm teams had major shakeups or disbanded entirely, including Cloud 9, the 2015 world champions. By comparison League of Legends had about 80,000 viewers at that same time, even though there was no LoL event going on. A few weeks ago I tuned in to the Blizzcon Heroes of the Storm Fall Championship, one of the most important HoTS competitive events of the year. ![]()
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