I would like to play with SB folks. Long-time SBer and my brother Frequent Pilgrim also plays. I saw someone mention it, so I made a thread.
I love this game.
I don’t have much to say here other than that I think about this game so, so much. It’s definitely my no. 1 game of 2015 in terms of hours spent, and it consumed my life for a time. I am interested in nearly every aspect of the game and its development.
In many ways, this game feels like a natural and beautiful culmination of everything that Blizzard has accomplished - this is coming from someone who became very alienated by the company’s shift in focus to World of Warcraft.
I’ve been toying with giving the HOTS a shot because it looks easier to get into (and less crufty) than the other popular MOBAs, but jumping into a team game with randos to try and learn mechanics is really not my idea of fun.
I’m ElleElle#1827 on Battle.net, and I play on the Americas server. I’m usually free to play most nights by 12:30 AM EST, but I have more time on my off days which are Tuesday and Wednesday. If we could scrounge up 5 folks to make a full stack, I am certain it would result in a splendid time for all.
I think I saw Tim Rogers stream this game once or twice.
It took about 100 games to become relatively comfortable with everything on offer. Maybe a bit more now, since they’ve added several new heroes and maps in the meantime. Luckily those 100 games feel pretty breezy since they’re usually over in 20 minutes and almost never go past 30.
As with most MOBAs, there is a stunning amount of depth merely due to the logistics of organizing your RTS army using 5 different, conflicted folks - and that’s before you get to the mechanical nuances. This ensures the game is still pretty damn hard to pick up, but I’ve found that HOTS is the most forgiving and beginner friendly of the MOBAs I’ve played (LoL, DOTA2).
Smite is actually pretty good too, but I like HOTS a lot more than anything else.
The only game that did co-op with random publics properly was Left 4 Dead, because the whole premise of it was “you’re stuck with some survivors you’ve never met and everything goes wrong”. I don’t really understand why all the other team games are so popular. They look great if you could always play them with 4 friends of similar skill level, but it seems like almost nobody is in that situation.
I don’t think a full stack of friends is remotely a prerequisite to enjoy this, or many other team games. HOTS matches are fun even with duo queuing; solo queuing can be hit-or-miss until you reach a high enough rank where folks more or less know what they’re doing. Solo queuing Quick Match is not always the best experience if you’re trying to take the game seriously, I’d agree with that.
Team games are popular because people like playing as a team? I don’t know what you’re looking for here or why you posted in this thread.
I play Heroes like 20-30 hours a week, we should play. My Blizzard ID is Ronnoc#1897
I play with a friend on skype and, although that is not a requirement for playing with us obviously, it’s a pretty good time if you want in on that too.
I like this website a lot, but I wish Blizzard would get around to adding more stats in the game proper. I am very interested in all the minute numerical details of everything that’s occurred during a match for self-betterment practices, but Blizzard has been stingy with that data.
Well, I posted that because 90% of what everyone ever says about the genre online is either “I’m salty because my teammates are incompetent” or “I quit playing after my teammates insulted me”. It makes teamplay seem like a giant negative overall. You said"people like play as a team" but that’s a total non-explanation. Why do they?
I’d hazard a theory that the core appeal of this genre is variety. The combination of large number of heroes and large number of teammates each with their own style makes every game different and fresh even after hundreds of hours. Is that accurate?
Yes, variety is king in MOBAs - you rarely see the same thing twice, and you have to think on your feet because there are always more things to consider, more information to parse, new teammates to sync with.
People like to play as a team because humans are social animals. Accomplishing a great victory with 4 teammates has an entirely different flavor to it than winning a 1v1 battle in StarCraft. In Heroes, the difference between winning and losing can be how you word things, how you communicate - in a fighting game it’s always mechanics and reads and outplays. There’s another layer of depth in interfacing with multiple people and coordinating and affecting a workable strategy. It’s logistics and politics on top of the mechanical aspects, and I love that. It gives me a strategic advantage if I can communicate effectively, even if my mechanics are not the best.
Someone described MOBAs on SBv1 as “complexity generators” and I think that’s pretty accurate. You get more or less the same depth of tactics as an RTS, without the exclusionary barrier of a much steeper learning curve in terms of basic control of the game - at the cost of having less individual control over the army. Many have argued that the reason why RTS games have become increasingly less popular in the last 10 years or so is because there is an almost insurmountable barrier to less-mechanically-skilled players to play competitively, which partly explains why things like DOTA became so popular in the first place: WarCraft III is a ridiculously difficult, complex game. Heroes cordons off some of the complexity to your teammates, leaving communication and shared strategy as the means to accomplish your goals in opposition to mechanical brute force.
hots seems more willing than any of the other MOBAs to do really really interesting things with hero design!
abathur is one of the most interesting heroes in a MOBA I’ve played – he’s a hero that pushes lanes through sitting in a lane, hidden, spawning little soldier people, and can also attach itself to other heroes in the game, providing some shielding and extra damage. cho’gall is a hero where one player is literally attached to another player and they play as one entity, which is something that just doesn’t work in other games like this
the removal of last hitting and making the in-game progression curve tied to the entire team’s performance as opposed to individual performances gives blizzard the opportunity to do these kinds of weird heroes. the mechanical complexity and design focus can then be transferred to the way that the player interacts with the hero, as opposed to the way the hero interacts with the map and other heroes, if that makes any sense
it’s also the game in which putting in an actual car as a hero is a Very Distinct Possibility. if the lost vikings can get in then any car from rock n roll racing can do it
and yes, games finishing in ~20 is amazing compared to the 20 minutes before you can even think about surrendering in League of Legends
(I’m using the quote as a starting point, don’t take this as a reply)
Skip on over to 50 minutes in. This match from Blizzcon has eventual world champion Cloud 9 picking a hilarious composition against a more conventional, “meta” team from DK. They make it work because, for all intents and purposes, their frontline is disposable (Murky more so than Leoric) and they have support and split-push pressure from Abathur. Near the end, even though they start to lose map objectives, they get keeps down and force DK off balance, combined with Murky becoming a threat almost entirely due to being able to get so much shielding. They win because they are able to take the weirder character mechanics and combine them to make smart plays.
That kind of wacky nonsense working because they make it work is why I like HotS.
That game is amazing, but to be fair, that’s not a unheard of composition. It was infamous for cheesing hero/team league a bit ago, and the really cheeky bit is C9’s gamble that DK didn’t recognize it and counter it because iirc, none of them have played very long.
man I would watch more pro hots if I didn’t find the constant yelling of the commentators annoying as shit
this is probably me being a curmudgeon but look, if the commentators are confident that the game they’re playing is interesting enough to be viewed on its own (and they obviously seem to be considering how excitedly they’re talking), then they don’t need to be straight up yelling over the entire game
