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Kith posted:Anyway congratulations you've made Gazlowe into a shittier Artanis, play accordingly and you should be fine Oh wow, I wasn't expecting in-depth poo poo like this.  I'll try it out. Also I never tell people in-game what builds to use but I do tell Kael'Thas players that Mana Addict is the 1 true way. That's the only Strong Opinion I have about HotS. That, and that the Ana remake rules.
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Jan 31, 2021 06:10
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I am addicted to effortposts Also Mana Addict is the only viable Level 1 talent for Kael, final
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Jan 31, 2021 14:31
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Funny how you all misspell convection but I’ll forgive you
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Jan 31, 2021 18:57
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Star posted:Funny how you all misspell convection but I’ll forgive you Convection is a trash talent for trash KTs. It encourages being risky and does nothing to help his weaknesses (ie he is a little baby wizard with a skillshot escape). Mana Addict gives you more mana, more survivability, and no one ever loving notices when you activate it. also, put zenyatta in hots so we can actual lore about him 
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Jan 31, 2021 19:14
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Karma Guard posted:Convection is trash i fixed your post
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Jan 31, 2021 21:58
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If you don't take convection you're admitting you're gonna die, and have mentally conceded defeat already
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Feb 1, 2021 02:19
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Kith posted:As a result, there are outdated design elements everywhere, and that's very distinctly not good. If Siege had been completely removed instead of depowered and all of the relevant characters and strategies were adjusted to accommodate, that'd be different, but instead we're stuck in a halfsies situation where we've got the worst of both worlds and nothing to show for it but a disillusioned playerbase. I'll pick up on this point by saying that HotS had quite a few systems that were in various states of finished, but the thing that stood out the most was how they would release new heroes which incorporated their latest design philosophies and yet they would take forever to update older ones. And it wasn't just that the older designs could no longer compete in the meta of the day; those older designs were often simply less interesting or engaging to play. So at any one time a decent chunk of the roster was functionally or aesthetically obsolete, and while I never had any great ideas on how to solve this problem it used to really grate on me because while I generally approved of how their direction evolved over time I wanted the game to always be in its ideal best state. I wanted HotS to have everything. I wanted all of the heroes and the maps to be maintained at the cutting edge of their latest design processes. I wanted it to be feature complete; I wanted it to have a spectator system on the main menu like Dota 2, and hero swaps, and a better reconnect system, hell, a better engine! I wanted it to have better marketing and a bigger eSports scene. And the reason I wanted all of that is because from the very first match I ever played I believed they'd created something very rare in gaming : they had made a game that was, at its core, genuinely fun to play. It was exciting to imagine where it would end up, how it might grow to compete with or even eclipse the two heavy hitters in its field. It certainly had the potential, but we all know how that ended up. And despite accepting the reality check fairly early on, I still believed it would continue to chug along in the background and gain momentum and one day it could have its moment in the sun. After all, Blizzard had proven time and again they were in it for the long haul. But now we all know Blizzard isn't the same company it used to be. Still, I like to believe Blizzard realized they had something special on their hands with HotS. When it was first brought up at an early Blizzcon with a different name it was going to be a SC2 mod. At some point during that early development phase, though, they transitioned to a standalone game and invested in branching the SC2 engine. They had confidence in it, but unlike Overwatch, I presume it never had top-level executive backing and so while it was allocated a lot of resources it never really had that whole-of-company enthusiasm behind it. And perhaps that was a fair call for the boardroom to make, considering it was a latecomer to a genre dominated by two big players. Of course, we'll never really know what their intentions were for HotS. Did they just want to cash in with their own MOBA? Or did they really want to take on the titans? I feel like they did want to take them on, because pride, but they were never willing to spend what was needed to make it happen (and I'm not just talking about money). And since I mentioned Overwatch, I'm going to get a bit "How about those clowns at Blizzard?" here, but hopefully not as much as they do in the Deathwatch thread. At some point before Overwatch and Hearthstone, Blizzard's guiding principle for creating games was 'make it accessible,' but after those two games it became 'make it prolific.' Was this because they were chasing that high from making ever more popular games, or was it because around that time the casual gaming market was exploding in popularity and they wanted their share, or was it an early sign of the corrupting (heh) influence of Activision? Whatever the reason, I've always felt Overwatch is a good example of a game that made fundamentally bad design decisions up front and has been paying for it ever since (and thinking about all of the torturous ways they've tried to mitigate their failure only proves my point, to myself, with the latest example being the role queue). Blizzard wanted the holy trinity of tank/healer/DPS because it was familiar and because it meant that people who can't aim will stick around and play their FPS game, but they didn't do it properly like TF2 did and design the game around not-aiming, they wanted their hitscan characters too because that appeals to all of the people who can actually aim. They wanted to appeal to everyone, to make their game prolific, and it shows in other aspects too like the existence of the ult meter; every X minutes a less skilled player can level the playing field and defeat a better player by pushing a button (I'm generalizing here). It's the same reason Hearthstone's RNG was cranked up so highly : less skilled players will stick around if they can win every now and then against better players. And while I think HS eventually got the balance right and it's a better game than I give it credit for (at least in the Standard mode) the Overwatch team has just been compounding their failures since day one. If you want to see where the pinnacle of FPS design (hell, good design in general) is these days check out Apex Legends. That game is a tour de force. So to bring it back to HotS, I think it managed to avoid the Overwatch trap. Sure, you have shared XP so that no one player can dominate the rest and give people the feel-bads, but you also have the exceedingly astute and not at all completely obvious good move of excising the 30min laning phase. Oh, and removing last-hitting and items too. As someone who never played the original WC3 mod, when I first tried the other two MOBAs I couldn't believe people actually thought that stuff constituted fun or engaging gameplay (I also couldn't believe how bad Riot's art direction was - presentation is possibly Blizzard's greatest strength, to be honest). Ok, none of this is interesting to people reading the Heroes of the Storm thread. I'll stop rehashing the MOBA Opinion Wars right now. Kith posted:That's good for you! And I really, genuinely mean that, I'm not saying that sarcastically or to be a poo poo or whatever. I am honestly glad that you were able to branch out and find enjoyment in the game despite changes that you were unhappy with. However, you're in the minority when it comes to these things. The vast majority of people who play HotS do so for the sake of playing X character (or characters) or enjoying Y playstyle. When something happens that makes those characters unrecognizable or that playstyle non-viable, the players move on - sometimes to another character, sometimes to another game, and the former will eventually run out and encourage the latter. Thanks! I take your point, but I guess this is the part where I mention I played a Holy Paladin in WoW from almost day one (even being exclusively a healer in early MC and PvP days) but half-way through 8.2 I grew entirely disenchanted with the direction they were taking Holy (specifically the Glimmer of Light playstyle) so... I didn't quit, I switched to my Outlaw Rogue and I haven't looked back! Granted, I've been a casual since TBC, with just a brief raiding stint in Cataclysm, but I dunno, I guess I've always appreciated games that offer a multitude of experiences to choose from, whether it's different heroes or classes to play, or even just pondering about design (or sometimes trying to do things that let me think I'm outsmarting you as a designer - yes, I loved devising the most efficient way to level an army of alts for WoD mission table gold). I genuinely believe that the latest WoW expansion is always the best, and also that the latest Civilization game is the best. I have fond memories of the older ones, but I can never go back to them. Kalko fucked around with this message at 14:06 on Feb 1, 2021 |
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Feb 1, 2021 13:53
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Karma Guard posted:Convection is a trash talent for trash KTs. It encourages being risky and does nothing to help his weaknesses (ie he is a little baby wizard with a skillshot escape). Mana Addict gives you more mana, more survivability, and no one ever loving notices when you activate it. 
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Feb 1, 2021 14:37
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If they change murky I’ll fuckin freak out and post
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Feb 2, 2021 20:12
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 the trend of "dragging idiot pubs to victory whether they like it or not" continues. guess how many mercenary camps i took to make this happen It's 20. Kalko posted:I wanted HotS to have everything. god, same also as a fellow effortposter your effortposts are cool and good, please do more of them
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Feb 3, 2021 02:07
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Kith posted:
Reminds me of the one time near Butcher's release my team was getting its rear end kicked and I just got sick of it and just spam-took the boss camps each time they were up and eventually we won. Good times.
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Feb 3, 2021 02:13
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Imma try your whack rear end robot goblin massacre build
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Feb 3, 2021 15:02
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The best part about it is that it hard counters Murky. Taking Gazlowe up against fish boy is basically a free lane. poo poo, Abathur is more trouble than Murky.
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Feb 3, 2021 15:41
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I tried it after never having played Gazlowe since his rework and I hate everything about him. I'm constantly trying to swivel his lazer around and expecting structures to drop scrap. I keep looking for a different level 7 because I hate the lazer so much and realized they force you to pick one of several lovely upgrades to it. Oh well, he'll probably be stuck at level 15 or whatever the first gold tier is.
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Feb 3, 2021 16:59
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Yeah, Newzlowe is nothing like Oldzlowe. Literally the only skills that transfer are turret placement mechanics and the Grav-O-Bomb mechanics (and even that's hosed up because the combo got flipped backwards - now it's ult first, bomb second). He's a completely different hero with a completely different skillset. IMO, play him like Artanis or don't play him at all.
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Feb 3, 2021 17:42
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I tried to play Zarya yesterday and a dude straight up took the time in a QM match to write a paragraph about how much I suck and my build sucked. I was trying the Dignitas build that got posted somewhere. (He was a bad murky. we did not win that round.)
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Feb 3, 2021 19:25
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Kith posted:The best part about it is that it hard counters Murky. Taking Gazlowe up against fish boy is basically a free lane. poo poo, Abathur is more trouble than Murky. Yea if I was murky against this I would just loving leave the lane lol. Not a chance I’m getting any value there.
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Feb 3, 2021 20:02
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A little late to the conversation on “blizzard ruined my favorite hero”, but this is a complicated issue because sometimes people equate “being overpowered” with “fun”, which leaves developers in a pickle. Yes, some reworks fell flat and didn’t have a lot to do with being overpowered (Malfurion for me), but some of the builds Kith listed just sound like they were fun because they were OP or had too much of an advantage, like Tychus. The reasons you listed for why you liked heroes for several of them read to me as you enjoyed what you were able to accomplish via the builds tuning, not necessarily how it felt to play. I’m not posting this to say you’re wrong for feeling those things, but I can also see how it can be hard as a developer to fix things knowing it will make mains of that hero sad or frustrated. And I definitely don’t think Blizzard should be afraid to do reworks because of these reasons, even if some fall flat.
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Feb 3, 2021 21:11
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How I have grown to hate Abathur, and in particular, the swingy nature of the +25%IAS Hat Talent. It’s basically antithetical to the way every other Talent in the game works, because it breaks the ‘Contained’ aspect of not having items. There’s no way for it to be balanced, ever, because some Heroes & lineups it’s worthless, and in some it’ll snap the game over it’s knee. I don’t like Abathur in general (he slows down my Medivh Quest, damnit!) but that talent in particular I’d really love to see change.
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Feb 3, 2021 22:12
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Abathur used to be about minions and map control, and now he's much more about creating melee carries and laying down traps. On the whole, the previous state was much healthier for the game.
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Feb 3, 2021 22:25
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Shockeh posted:How I have grown to hate Abathur, and in particular, the swingy nature of the +25%IAS Hat Talent. That's literally the ideal for how talents should work, though. Power level completely dependant on game state and player composition. Is the talent too good with the right comp and needs to be brought down? Probably, but the concept of the talent itself is fine. As for being "contained", Abathur is literally designed based around the idea that he's not present on the battlefield but provides battlefield impacts which isn't "contained" at a fundamental level. That's ignoring that quite a few other heroes have talents that buff allies and are thus dependant on which allies are buffed (ETC's Prog Rock, Raynor's Rallying Cry).
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Feb 4, 2021 06:21
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I want to like ARAM but it's really just a dice roller. The heroes are so poorly balanced for it that generally one team has an overwhelming comp advantage.
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Feb 5, 2021 05:51
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Kith posted:
The default controls let you do this. Alt + Q/W/E/R will cast at your location, and cast the skill on yourself if it is a buff. Anything where you click a single location to cast, or click a unit to cast it on, will work. Vector target skills will not work. I use this the most with Rehgar. It's great to dive someone from spirit wolf form, then immediately alt+W lightning shield myself alt+E drop totem on myself. Once you take damage, alt+Q to start chain heal on yourself, then go back to spirit wolf form and retreat or dive attack again. Gazlowe turrets and TnT are another great use cast to "cast on self" as you said. I also use it a lot as Nazeebo. If someone dives on you, alt+W to cast zombie wall around yourself and immediately retreat. Unless you are heavily slowed you will walk away before it casts, and anyone attacking you can back away or get stuck in the circle of zombies. It's really useful and your skills are on QWER, so your thumb is already in place to hit alt. It is a good default keybind.
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Feb 9, 2021 07:18
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Kaal posted:I want to like ARAM but it's really just a dice roller. The heroes are so poorly balanced for it that generally one team has an overwhelming comp advantage. I like the ones where you clearly lost at 5 mins, but you drag it on for 30+ and your team cries the whole time until you all manage to get one good combo of ults/level 20 talents to wipe the enemy team that thought you gave up. And then the people on your team send you whispers after the match is over telling you to kill yourself. They were angry that they lost, but then when they won they are angry at you for making them win. I agree totally that ARAM is extremely swingy and sometimes you've lost before the match starts. It is less balanced than even QM teams. This should mean that it is just for fun. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. Funny things happen so you get to laugh either way. It's a goofy purposely unbalanced mode and you get to see some really weird poo poo happen with the game engine. You see someone do a cool exploit and hope that you can get that hero soon and try it in your next ARAM match. Nope. ARAM draft screen is deadly serious and I am going to go to your house and kill your whole family, we lost because of the hero you picked. WITCHCRAFT fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Feb 9, 2021 |
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Feb 9, 2021 07:29
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WITCHCRAFT posted:
Technically wrong. Certain vector targeting skills will simply cast from the center of the hero to the direction of your hero. Take Alaraks telekinesis, for example. Self casting it will in effect be a really nice dodge (that incidentally can shift an enemy along with you in your favour). It's a useful spur of the moment tool.
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Feb 9, 2021 11:36
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WITCHCRAFT posted:The default controls let you do this. Alt + Q/W/E/R will cast at your location, and cast the skill on yourself if it is a buff. Anything where you click a single location to cast, or click a unit to cast it on, will work. Vector target skills will not work. I sometimes forget that not everyone wears a 2xl glove like me - hitting Alt-anything is incredibly awkward for me because my hands are massive, which is why I recommend binding self-cast to an independent button. For reference of scale, if I put my palm on Q, I can press the right Enter key with the tip of my middle finger.
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Feb 9, 2021 14:59
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Kith posted:For reference of scale, if I put my palm on Q, I can press the right Enter key with the tip of my middle finger. Holy snap, Thanos plays HOTS.
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Feb 9, 2021 15:58
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I switched Alt -> Shift today for self-cast and it works super well to hit it with my pinky.
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Feb 9, 2021 16:29
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Grei Skuring posted:Technically wrong. Certain vector targeting skills will simply cast from the center of the hero to the direction of your hero. Take Alaraks telekinesis, for example. Self casting it will in effect be a really nice dodge (that incidentally can shift an enemy along with you in your favour). It's a useful spur of the moment tool. Haha that's one that I use and didn't even think of it. Also, got this out of a regular chest:  
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Feb 9, 2021 19:55
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Post a picture of your large hands, coward
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Feb 9, 2021 21:53
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Macaluso posted:Post a picture of your large hands, coward Well, you know what they say about a fella with big hands: big gloves.
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Feb 9, 2021 22:34
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I have to buy all my clothes online, I know how it feels to be a big too. Too big to be convenient, not big enough to be able to just sit in a chair next to standing people, be taller, and get paid for it. I have piano player fingers though. Can you buy a larger keyboard for the big fingered man? I was thinking how someone like you could play guitar, you can stretch over more frets but trying to fingerpick is probably a bitch.
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Feb 10, 2021 18:35
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Alt casting is necessary for Medivh too, so you can self cast Shield and also enjoy the monumental gently caress up that is discovering self casting Portal puts it the minimum distance away, rather than the maximum you’d logically want in any panic speed situation. (There’s no reason for a min distance Portal, ever.)
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Feb 10, 2021 22:19
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Min distance portal self cast is good if like me you mindlessly cast everting on cool down
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Feb 10, 2021 22:50
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So Blizzcon put out their schedule and HotS has literally no panels on it. They even got Critical Role to do a Diablo oneshot game, and then do nothing for HotS. The poor dev had to pop in the inevitable thread going 'hey, what the gently caress, what about us  :' and reassure the players. It's literally the 30th for Blizz, and they have a game that's a great example of all their franchises. Promoting the smash bros for their game should be a slam-dunk. KinaBREW: Hello friends. There's no panel because we didn't have anything to share at the moment. I will say that we have content coming including some of my favorite reworks, new mounts/skins and more. Have a good day! Also, buff Zarya, nerf Tracer some more, carthago delenda est. e: I guess we also get a Carbot Animation Workshop that's it. Karma Guard fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Feb 11, 2021 |
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Feb 11, 2021 17:44
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Makes sense, there's probably not a panel for Warcraft 2 or Blackthorne either.
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Feb 11, 2021 19:17
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Yeah, as someone who still plays this dumb game almost daily, I cannot get over how confused some people are regarding Blizzcon having nothing hots related. The game generates no money, folks. They are not going to devote time and resources beyond the skeleton crew releasing balance patches and some skins.
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Feb 11, 2021 21:28
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That's the worst part: the game could generate money hand over fist if the slightest bit of effort was put in, League of Legends and DotA 2 are great examples of that. All they need to do is make cosmetics that matter! It's really, really loving simple!
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Feb 11, 2021 22:20
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Kith posted:That's the worst part: the game could generate money hand over fist if the slightest bit of effort was put in, League of Legends and DotA 2 are great examples of that. All they need to do is make cosmetics that matter! It's really, really loving simple! I'd love to see HotS be wildly successful as much as anyone, and I've spent no small amount on cosmetics in the game. But if the skins they are/were making didn't bring in enough, what would you define as cosmetics that matter? Honest question here, I really don't know what the solution would be.
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Feb 11, 2021 22:45
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Mind over Matter posted:I'd love to see HotS be wildly successful as much as anyone, and I've spent no small amount on cosmetics in the game. But if the skins they are/were making didn't bring in enough, what would you define as cosmetics that matter? Honest question here, I really don't know what the solution would be. More skins. Seriously, just more skins. Once upon a time when I still cared about this game, I made an effortpost about how to make HOTS grow. The most relevant part to this discussion is here: quote:STEP 3: EXPAND COLLECTION SELECTION The customization options that users really, genuinely care about are the ones that modify their characters and can be easily shown off to other players. Emoticons, Portraits, Sprays, Voice Lines, and Announcers are cute, but ultimately mean next to nothing in the big scheme of things - most users will find ones that they like and then never stop using them. You want to make the big money? Do lots and lots of this:  Minor texture edits to existing content prints money with almost no effort: play with the Hue and Saturation of a diffuse texture until you get something that looks vaguely different enough from an existing item and ship it. Maybe gently caress with the emissives too to add some fancy lights, or throw in a premium user-recolorable variant that can only be obtained with  . Suddenly, Casuals have reason to chip away at their Gold/Shard/Gem hoards to pick up the perfect combinations for their heroes and Whales have reason to spend twice or thrice or howevermuch as much on the game as they used to. Do the same thing with Mounts and you've jump-started your economy.
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Feb 12, 2021 00:30
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