Heroes of the Storm - Blizzard's MOBA

The Game Room
321

That’s a terrible game design philosophy, since overtuning ruins the whole game. There’s going to be 3 weeks straight of tracers on both teams in QM, and if you’re not her, your game is going to suck. So for the 20% of people having fun melting people’s faces, you get 20 minute queue times, and for the 80% of everyone else, you’re going to have a bad time for 3 weeks.

Constantly releasing overpowered heroes is bad for the game because it just gets looked at as a pay to win game. It destroys any credibility they have that they’re aiming for a fun, balanced game and not a cash grab. If they continue this trend they’re going to strangle their game to death.

At least they put in bans in HL. But if a hero is banned 90%+ of the time, like Li-Ming and Tracer are now, that should tell them that something is very wrong.

322

I had the most baffling toxic game earlier. Was playing some HL and picked vikings on garden of terror, their best map. All my teammates were yelling at me from the start.

Every time one of my vikings was idle for 3 seconds, everyone on the team would spam ping them. I said I’m laning during objectives, and they said WTF VIKINGS HELP TEAM. The entire time my team was screaming at me and pinging me.

In fact, they were so busy watching me like a hawk that they didn’t actually play their own characters. They were terrible and did nothing.

At the beginning of the game, I said “let me get the terror, it only requires one of my guys” and so when we got our first terror, they rushed to get it before me. “Wtf, why didn’t you let me get it?” “CAUSE VIKINGS SUX LOL”

It was weird, it’s like all 4 of them decided to join in on the trolling.

Here’s the crazy thing, I was carrying that team hard. We got one terror to the enemy team’s 5, because everyone just stopped trying to play, and yet we only lost the game at the end by one fortress, and I kept them even level or +1 the entire game. If they had just tried to play instead of basically spontaneously decided to form a 4 man abuse team, we’d have won just fine.

At the end, of course, they all blamed me, saying that I talked to much. I only talked in response to ask them to stop spam pinging me and play the fucking game.

If that was a 4 man team that all just decided to troll me, I’d understand. But 4 independent players somehow decided to throw the game to abuse me instead, when I hadn’t done anything at all.

323

If that were true, then it’d be all the more reason to let Vikings get it.

324

Prepare yourselves. I give you the greatest ring of frost in the history of the game.

325

That was stupid for all kinds of reasons.

326

We had an awesome game on Garden of Terror when the enemy team had killed 2 of us and had a clear path to kill our core if they just pushed. We had one guy grab our terror and two of them basically just lead the entire enemy team around in circles while the terror made a mad dash to their core. At any point they could’ve saved our core, or at any point they could’ve pushed and killed our core first, but instead they chased around Lili and ETC while oblivious to the fact that we were backdooring their core. One of the most satisfying victories I’ve ever had. Unfortunately I didn’t have shadowplay running because I forgot to turn it back on after installing drivers or I’d post a video.

I’m 17-4 over my last 21 games. Almost got myself up to 50% lifetime in QM.

327

Which were you? Terror, Li-Li, ETC, or a corpse?

328

I was the Lili, actually, and the ETC was a buddy of mine.

The funny thing is that neither he nor I realized that our terror was in the enemy base until the very end. Nobody on voice chat was talking about it! I did not know that I was doing anything other than running for my life until somebody said something to the effect of “holy crap, we might pull this off.”

Then I glanced at the minimap and saw we had our terror at core. At the exact same moment, the entire enemy team tried to peel away from us to teleport back to base. So of course it flipped to he and I chasing them around the map while they tried to get back to defend, but by then it was waaaay too late.

But yeah, I had no earthly idea that we were winning the game until it was just about over. Too funny.

329

Toast, the terror, did say it. He said “I guess I’ll go for the core, nothing else we can do now”

I’ve lost a game or two that way (mostly when my teammates ignored my pings) so it’s nice to be on the winning end of one.

330

On the plus side, running for her life is something Li-Li is pretty good at.

331

Just had a weird game. Final kill count was 56-20. Must’ve been one of those long ass 35 minute matches, right? Nope, 20 minutes. I think 56 is the most kills I’ve ever seen, and we achieved it in a short game. I snagged 18 myself as Nova.

I feel like 56 must not be the most I’ve seen, but I probably would’ve taken a screenshot of more and I don’t have any.

332

I’ve seen Infernal Shrines games that got that high on one side, but they only had something like 2 kills on the other. Getting few kills meant that the losing team stayed low level which meant that they had short respawn timers which meant that they could come back and get killed again quickly. And that was before they re-tuned the map to be less snowbally. I’m not sure how you’d get a 56-20 game.

333

An Interview with Li-Ming Players

334

I looked up the match on hotslogs afterwards. Their Tracer player was brand new to the character and their Artanis was brand new to the game.

Pretty much every teamfight went the same way. Artanis would jump in and die, then their team would fall apart around that death. Almost every fight was a total wipe for them.

What perhaps added to the high number was he fact that our Zagara was also character level 1 and so didn’t really know what he was doing. It meant that we didn’t snowball as quickly as we might have, so the match lasted a bit longer and gave us more chances to rack up kills. A perfect storm of nonsense.

335

It’s weird because it didn’t feel that dominating throughout the game. We’ve had some games where we’ve just totally been in control of the game from the start and had a much lower kill count. It felt like it was actually still a game that could go either way 15 minutes in. Probably mostly because of all the Sylvanas backdooring I suppose.

I wish Hotslogs had some stats sorting for stuff like most kills in a game. It keeps that data, since you can access it under the match history, and you can sort match history by things like time, hero level, etc. But nothing like “sort my games by siege damage done” or number of takedowns.

I don’t know if you guys noticed but there’s a hero overview section in hotslogs now which breaks down your performance by hero with things like average damage done, average kills, takedown to death ratio, etc. It only counts for games since IIRC January since that’s when the replays started tracking that extra data.

336

Speaking of Sylvanas backdooring, I had a game Sunday where I managed to single-handedly destroy a keep, while our team was cursed. That was fun.

I still don’t see how she’s not viewed as primarily a pusher. No other hero could have done that.

337

In PvP games I see her, azmo, and hammer get away with it with some regularity.

Sent from my XT1031 using Tapatalk

338

It’s certainly an interesting debate - should they aim to try and release balanced heroes, or undertuned ones to avoid upsetting balance? I was a bit surprised by Jragon’s point that Blizzard chooses the third option of purposely overtuning new releases, but I sorta see why from their point-of-view (want to get people excited for the new shiny thing after all). That is the sort of thing that can piss off more established players, though. But at least they’ve gotten a lot quicker with the balance patches.

Speaking of which, here’s the preliminary ones for the Tracer nerf: lower HP, lower HP regen, lower basic attack damage, and increased cooldown on E; but buffs to some level 16 traits to bring them up to Sleight of Hand’s level. A step in the right direction I suppose, though I’d kinda like to see them mess with the mechanics of E (such as not letting it be used to break roots, or not break targetted spells like Kael’thas Pyroblast).

Funny enough, after saying I hadn’t had much trouble against her, I had a series of games where the enemy Tracer absolutely dominated. Then after that bad run had a game where the enemy team had a Tracer and Li Ming (we had neither) go a combined 0-13. Guess it just shows a lot depends on the people you get matched up with.

Uh, who says that? That’s exactly what she is - a pusher. And what the “Specialist” classification pretty much means, too (aside from Lost Vikings).

339

Overtuned heroes reeks of pay to win. Yes, you can buy them with gold, but they probably get their most cash hero purchases out of new overpowered heroes. Often they have them bundled with a skin which is probably a popular seller.

And as often as they release heroes, once every 3-4 weeks, and a 2-3 week period where they let them run amok until they nerf them down to being sane, that’s half to 2/3rds of the time when the game is basically broken. That type of bullshit appeals to the small subset of people who will simply play the overpowered hero and take some immature joy of winning games strictly based on that, but it ruins it for everyone else.

You can get by with doing this every once in a while and making it look like an honest mistake. But if it becomes your design philosophy, people are going to leave your game. It’s certainly something that makes me want to play a lot less, and if it happens one more time I’ll probably swear off putting any more money into the game ever.

340

I haven’t played hero, so it’s hard for me to evaluate those nerfs, but they seem milder than the first round of xul nerfs, the ones that took him from a 64% winrate to 58%