Heroes of the Storm would benefit greatly from such a role queue. Sadly, Blizzard killed HGC late last year and relegated the game to a mere skeleton crew of devs. One of my prime complaints about...
Heroes of the Storm would benefit greatly from such a role queue. Sadly, Blizzard killed HGC late last year and relegated the game to a mere skeleton crew of devs.
One of my prime complaints about HotS (and MOBAs in general) is that the draft pick process breeds toxicity by forcing players into 'bitch duty' roles they don't want to play, like tank and healer. Riot have fixed this to some extent in League by allowing players to queue by specific lane role, but it's not a perfect system like what the Overwatch devs are pushing into the game. There's no separate per-role queues with separate MMRs and players may end up being assigned a completely different role when a match is found.
In my opinion HotS is dying because it is a frustrating and un-fun experience. A lot of Ranked matches are decided in the draft phase in that game, largely because a lot of players troll pick and lock in something stupid like Valeera, Murky or Gazlowe instead of the healer or tank that the team needs. Blizzard do nothing to stop troll picking either. In fact, the report system they use in all their games is entirely automated, will not trigger a ban unless a player is reported frequently in a short space of time, and will punish a player without any prior investigation, despite the lies that Blizzard make up.
It's funny that many people point to late 2018 (Diablo Immortal, HGC's cancellation and the layoff of 700 Blizzard CS and esports division staff) as the moment Activision took over Blizzard, but I disagree. In my view Blizzard's been cost cutting and heavily monetising their games with lootboxes and MTX for years to appease their Activision-Blizzard director overlords.
Heroes Of The Storm had such a role queue, briefly, before they killed HGC and started winding down development. For a hot minute, Quick Match had stronger rules about forcing real team comps; it...
Heroes Of The Storm had such a role queue, briefly, before they killed HGC and started winding down development. For a hot minute, Quick Match had stronger rules about forcing real team comps; it dramatically increased queue times for DPS players (because nobody soloqueues as support), and Blizzard rolled it back amid the hue and cry from assassin-only players.
Ahh, I remember that update. There's a few reasons why it failed spectacularly: Blizzard only did this for Quick Match, the most popular mode that players did not take seriously due to its...
Ahh, I remember that update. There's a few reasons why it failed spectacularly:
Blizzard only did this for Quick Match, the most popular mode that players did not take seriously due to its tendency to create imbalanced clown fiestas. Much of the competitive scene which would have benefited from a role queue played Unranked Draft and Ranked Draft instead, which were the modes most in need of work.
On less populated servers like Oceania and SEA, queue times skyrocketed to absurd several hour levels. If anything the QM update and the time it took Blizzard to reverse it completely killed the communities on these servers.
Tanks and healers are not fun to play. This is partially due to the poor hero design/reworks of the later team that took over HotS after Dustin Browder left the team. As much as I like to crap on people like Dustin Browder and David Kim for how badly they fucked up SC2, they did great work on HotS. This is also partially because tanks and healers don't do much damage, don't feel very impactful in a team fight and often get the blame from teammates for losses. On top of this, the typical HotS player has zero clue how to play them. Basic concepts like peeling and CC are alien to them.
Healers had several months prior received a blanket 5% nerf to their damage, healing and health numbers, which nerfed every healer aside from a pantheon of three ultra-overpowered champions to sub-45% winrates and shit tier viability. I recall the only 3 viable healers at this point being Deckard Cain, Malfurion and Stukov This was done by Blizzard as a lazy band-aid fix to address a rising double support meta, which many players did not see as a problem. This change was wildly unpopular and even to this day there are still players petitioning Blizzard to revert it.
Multiclass heroes like Varian (Tank/Bruiser), Gazlowe (Bruiser/Ranged Assassin) and Kharazim (Melee Assassin/Healer), which can be played in multiple roles. Such heroes with diverse/versatile builds completely fucked up the concept of having role assignments in Quick Match. For example, classing Varian as a tank for matchmaking purposes would have meant that any player picking Colossus Smash or Twin Blades instead of Taunt would be screwing over their own teammates by picking a non-tank build. Not classing him as a tank would have led to a similar imbalance when a player picked Taunt and suddenly they have more tanks than the enemy.
It came too little too late. A lot of players had already left by then due to bad game updates and Blizzard's shitty implementation/enforcement of their automated report system.
I can see you’re still pretty salty about it, but I really don’t agree with your assertion that tanks and healers were unfun. (I mostly played tanks for the several years that I played, and had...
I can see you’re still pretty salty about it, but I really don’t agree with your assertion that tanks and healers were unfun. (I mostly played tanks for the several years that I played, and had fun throughout.)
This is awesome. I'd love to play more competitive multiplayer games, but can't hit anything worth shit so I always opt for support roles when I can, but unfortunately when those roles are nabbed...
This is awesome. I'd love to play more competitive multiplayer games, but can't hit anything worth shit so I always opt for support roles when I can, but unfortunately when those roles are nabbed first I'm like "...shit, time for you fellas to see how crappy of a tank I'll be!"
TFC I'm always an engineer, WoW I was always a Warlock, Overwatch I always pick Mercy.
Heroes of the Storm would benefit greatly from such a role queue. Sadly, Blizzard killed HGC late last year and relegated the game to a mere skeleton crew of devs.
One of my prime complaints about HotS (and MOBAs in general) is that the draft pick process breeds toxicity by forcing players into 'bitch duty' roles they don't want to play, like tank and healer. Riot have fixed this to some extent in League by allowing players to queue by specific lane role, but it's not a perfect system like what the Overwatch devs are pushing into the game. There's no separate per-role queues with separate MMRs and players may end up being assigned a completely different role when a match is found.
In my opinion HotS is dying because it is a frustrating and un-fun experience. A lot of Ranked matches are decided in the draft phase in that game, largely because a lot of players troll pick and lock in something stupid like Valeera, Murky or Gazlowe instead of the healer or tank that the team needs. Blizzard do nothing to stop troll picking either. In fact, the report system they use in all their games is entirely automated, will not trigger a ban unless a player is reported frequently in a short space of time, and will punish a player without any prior investigation, despite the lies that Blizzard make up.
It's funny that many people point to late 2018 (Diablo Immortal, HGC's cancellation and the layoff of 700 Blizzard CS and esports division staff) as the moment Activision took over Blizzard, but I disagree. In my view Blizzard's been cost cutting and heavily monetising their games with lootboxes and MTX for years to appease their Activision-Blizzard director overlords.
Heroes Of The Storm had such a role queue, briefly, before they killed HGC and started winding down development. For a hot minute, Quick Match had stronger rules about forcing real team comps; it dramatically increased queue times for DPS players (because nobody soloqueues as support), and Blizzard rolled it back amid the hue and cry from assassin-only players.
(I stopped playing when they rolled it back.)
Ahh, I remember that update. There's a few reasons why it failed spectacularly:
Blizzard only did this for Quick Match, the most popular mode that players did not take seriously due to its tendency to create imbalanced clown fiestas. Much of the competitive scene which would have benefited from a role queue played Unranked Draft and Ranked Draft instead, which were the modes most in need of work.
On less populated servers like Oceania and SEA, queue times skyrocketed to absurd several hour levels. If anything the QM update and the time it took Blizzard to reverse it completely killed the communities on these servers.
Tanks and healers are not fun to play. This is partially due to the poor hero design/reworks of the later team that took over HotS after Dustin Browder left the team. As much as I like to crap on people like Dustin Browder and David Kim for how badly they fucked up SC2, they did great work on HotS. This is also partially because tanks and healers don't do much damage, don't feel very impactful in a team fight and often get the blame from teammates for losses. On top of this, the typical HotS player has zero clue how to play them. Basic concepts like peeling and CC are alien to them.
Healers had several months prior received a blanket 5% nerf to their damage, healing and health numbers, which nerfed every healer aside from a pantheon of three ultra-overpowered champions to sub-45% winrates and shit tier viability. I recall the only 3 viable healers at this point being Deckard Cain, Malfurion and Stukov This was done by Blizzard as a lazy band-aid fix to address a rising double support meta, which many players did not see as a problem. This change was wildly unpopular and even to this day there are still players petitioning Blizzard to revert it.
Multiclass heroes like Varian (Tank/Bruiser), Gazlowe (Bruiser/Ranged Assassin) and Kharazim (Melee Assassin/Healer), which can be played in multiple roles. Such heroes with diverse/versatile builds completely fucked up the concept of having role assignments in Quick Match. For example, classing Varian as a tank for matchmaking purposes would have meant that any player picking Colossus Smash or Twin Blades instead of Taunt would be screwing over their own teammates by picking a non-tank build. Not classing him as a tank would have led to a similar imbalance when a player picked Taunt and suddenly they have more tanks than the enemy.
It came too little too late. A lot of players had already left by then due to bad game updates and Blizzard's shitty implementation/enforcement of their automated report system.
I can see you’re still pretty salty about it, but I really don’t agree with your assertion that tanks and healers were unfun. (I mostly played tanks for the several years that I played, and had fun throughout.)
This is awesome. I'd love to play more competitive multiplayer games, but can't hit anything worth shit so I always opt for support roles when I can, but unfortunately when those roles are nabbed first I'm like "...shit, time for you fellas to see how crappy of a tank I'll be!"
TFC I'm always an engineer, WoW I was always a Warlock, Overwatch I always pick Mercy.
GOD
YES
FINALLY
E -- I really wish they hadn't implemented it for OWL, though.