HGC and Heroes of the Dorm 2019 Cancelled, Some Developers Switching Teams

[Nerraw]

Well, we have a couple of names of people who are moving on.

Matt Villers, Lead Hero Designer is moving to WoW: https://twitter.com/matthew_villers/...46685015146496
Alex Klontzas, Live-Ops and Live Designer is moving to an undisclosed project: https://twitter.com/azgaz/status/1073677363420946432

And we have a couple of people who have given lifesigns but haven't said whether they're moving on or not yet.

Kevin Johnson, Creative Content Lead (and voice of the hero spotlights): https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthe..._team/ebt7gzr/
Lana Bachynski, Senior Animator: https://twitter.com/Latienie/status/1073780595291877376

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I know I haven't made any personal comments on this whole thing yet. I guess I'm still in a bit of a shock on how they went about it. I'll probably try to write down my thoughts in a couple of days when my brain isn't scrambled to bits.

[DesoPL]

Well, we have a couple of names of people who are moving on.

Matt Villers, Lead Hero Designer is moving to WoW: https://twitter.com/matthew_villers/...46685015146496
Alex Klontzas, Live-Ops and Live Designer is moving to an undisclosed project: https://twitter.com/azgaz/status/1073677363420946432

And we have a couple of people who have given lifesigns but haven't said whether they're moving on or not yet.

Kevin Johnson, Creative Content Lead (and voice of the hero spotlights): https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthe..._team/ebt7gzr/
Lana Bachynski, Senior Animator: https://twitter.com/Latienie/status/1073780595291877376

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I know I haven't made any personal comments on this whole thing yet. I guess I'm still in a bit of a shock on how they went about it. I'll probably try to write down my thoughts in a couple of days when my brain isn't scrambled to bits.

You know i don't get it. Why keeping game with small bunch of devs and core members of dev team, move to other projects them? It's dosen't make any sense. It could be better just turn off hots and move all employers to other projects.

I feel, HOTS will be now live in false stagnation...

[Deleted]

Not surprised. Had never played this genre before i tried HOTS and Dota2 one night. Started off with HOTS and played it for 20-25 minutes before i was bored, gameplay was just uninspiring. Even if it was cool to play character like Lich King it wasnt enough. Then i tried Dota2, it was like 10.30 pm. Felt a lot more interesting for whatever reason. Played some more and noticed the time was 2 am lol.

[Acidbaron]

People still blaming activision for Blizzards choices, bunch of sheep.

The whole focus on team setup, where a single player could ruin the game badly for the other 4 was a flaw from the start that in a casual gaming market.

[Deleted]

You know i don't get it. Why keeping game with small bunch of devs and core members of dev team, move to other projects them? It's dosen't make any sense. It could be better just turn off hots and move all employers to other projects.

I feel, HOTS will be now live in false stagnation...

Because they would have to
->refund ingame purchases as they are no longer supported at all
->cut down on the list of the " more live games and unannounced projects than at any point in the company’s history"
->admit failure to stakeholders

All of them are big no-no's in corporate language.

[ophion1990]

Well, we have a couple of names of people who are moving on.

Matt Villers, Lead Hero Designer is moving to WoW: https://twitter.com/matthew_villers/...46685015146496
Alex Klontzas, Live-Ops and Live Designer is moving to an undisclosed project: https://twitter.com/azgaz/status/1073677363420946432

And we have a couple of people who have given lifesigns but haven't said whether they're moving on or not yet.

Kevin Johnson, Creative Content Lead (and voice of the hero spotlights): https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthe..._team/ebt7gzr/
Lana Bachynski, Senior Animator: https://twitter.com/Latienie/status/1073780595291877376

- - - Updated - - -

I know I haven't made any personal comments on this whole thing yet. I guess I'm still in a bit of a shock on how they went about it. I'll probably try to write down my thoughts in a couple of days when my brain isn't scrambled to bits.

Fingers crossed that Lana and Cloaken are here to stay. Whatever hope I have left I probably gonna be gone if all big names are removed from the HotS roster. T.T

[dragnipur]

They made Hots as a game to compete against LoL and Dota 2 in 2015 and it failed in doing that.The only thing it acomplished is to take the 3rd spot as most played moba with Smite breathing right behind it.The game was not something ground breaking.Blizzard are not such creative company anymore.The game was dead on Arrival.It just can't compete against such giants.Also it came a bit to late.

Now about all the whiners.Shut the fuck up.If you like the game you will play it.If you don't then just leave it.It's Blizzard's game they can do with it what they want.There is one certain thing.They will keep supporting it.Much older games than WoW are with still running servers.Like D2,SC:BW or battle.net!The game is going no where.Stop panicking over nothing.

The only bad thing for Blizzard here is the bad PR for the company.Canceling the E-sport's scene and not expanding on it like Valve did over the last 20 years with CS and Dota 2 or Riot did with LoL is a bad move.Is Hots an easy to watch Esport?Not really.But removing it as an option is not great.

Moving the developers from the game is also not something to die for.They are either needed or they aren't.Looks like the game can do without them.I repeat stop fucking whine about dying game or something.By this logic their older titles which are still supported are dead games.Put this in your fucking heads.Those games are still alive and kicking.Hots may not have many players but it has enough and will keep being developed.

[msdos]

I liked HotS to screw around in QM.
Other than that, it gets boring rather quickly.

Also playing the healers/supports in that game is utterly painful (Deckard, Bright, Malf, Rehg.) They either move super slow or their attacks are super dumb and hard to land for no reason (compare Ana to Malfurion. Ana can just dominate with skillshots because apparently noobs can't handle playing her so that justifies Malf needing to land starfires to heal people for a tiny amount? I would play as Ana and wonder how she is even allowed to exist in that game compared to other healer's kits and they just now nerfed her not too long ago.....)
Most of the tanks aren't too much better (Anub, Etc, Ty, Zarya, and Patch before rework are so boring and stupid to play as).
I mean if you as a developer are wondering why you need to add an XP boost to the supports and tanks, it's probably because they are boring and painful as shit to play, just a thought!

[Leonaras]

Honestly, i see this as not cutting costs but transferring resources to something they feel will be better spent on.

I can see in 2019 blizzard promoting the warcraft 3 esports scene rather heavily.

[DesoPL]

Second video from YongYea and tbh. Disgusting af. But he is sometimes slowpoke tbh.

[alach]

This is really sad. I really enjoyed HGC.
I feel like I should blame mewnfare for talking shit constantly whenever he was playing with basically the highest viewer count, while the other big streamers just drifted away, but I know there is a lot more to it than that. The major players have been asking for just a few fixes for years now, mostly matchmaking, and I guess they just got tired of waiting.
This year I think saw Hots at its highest viewership, think it was midsummer brawl or something? It did pretty well and was showing that it was growing, but guess it wasn't enough.
And now, the streamers can't even play cause half of the ones that were left have gone as well, so people are left with 30 min + queue times.

[therealstegblob]

No, they are abandoning the game completely.

Look, dude. I think HotS is an awful game with terrible hero balancing and I wouldn't actually mind if it died, but that doesn't mean I'm going doom and gloom like a retard the second the winds taste a little sour. That's the rhetoric of angry manchildren who desperately hope that whatever game they don't like (or love to hate) at the moment will DIE AND BE TAKEN OFF LINE11111111

First of all, you cannot have a PR statement ever say the truth behind your intention if you are a corporation, but they had to highlight that

Yes, they used a bunch of fluffy PR-anese, but all they really said was "we're discontinuing our shitty pro tournaments that no one cared about for a year, they may be back next year we don't know", admittedly it's unlikely they'll ever really bring them back if they're going to cancel them to begin with, but still.

because if they didn't, they were liable(legally) for paying any transactions ingame afterwards.

Uhhhhhhh, no. You asspulled this. It is in no way true in any way at all lol.

As you said, this isn't the same as Diablo because this is designed to be a 5vs5 multiplayer game. In the absence of continued support, multiplayer games die off because Queue times skyrocket as people quit the game. I mean if your idea of fun is playing with and versus AI, sure...but for 99% of players this game is dead.

Queue times in HotS are already abhorrent (outside draft queues, though those can take a long time as well), but it's not really due to lack of players. The problem right now is the way their stupid matchmaking works when it pairs different heroes together/pairs a team vs a team because of all the ridiculous stipulations put on how it builds a team and a game. If you try to queue as Butcher and Ragnaros, for instance, it's going to take you like 3 minutes to find a match. If you queue as anything that is slightly unconventional, it'll take you much longer to find a match. It's not good design and it's something that is massively impacting the game very negatively right now. This is because 90% of the heroes in this game are gimmick characters, so the game has to try to build around the fact lots of the characters have stupid gimmicks that make them unstoppable if not properly countered.

Whether the game will die without frequent updates remains to be seen, however. As player count goes down, so too does stress on developers. As paradoxical as it might sound, a game with 10,000 players can often times be more net profitable than a game with 1,000,000 players, just because the costs associated with keeping servers running and staffing around to provide for those 1 million players ends up being less of a final profit than if you just had 10,000 dedicated whales buying everything you put in the game, with relatively little stress on the developers compared to if they had a huge game that was putting so much financial stress on the company that it lives or dies depending on how many angry players decided to quit/unsub or not. Again, it might sound crazy, but Blizzard is in constant threat of bankruptcy and disaster if one of their heavily-invested-in projects massively flops, simply because their games are so fucking expensive to create and especially to maintain that if they're not turning in fat profits, they're not a good investment. Blizzard reinvests so much of their profits back into the company that, even though they're a giant household name releasing overrated hit after overrated hit, that one serious flop could spell financial disaster.

So anyways, what I'm saying is that HotS leaking a bunch of players isn't necessarily an innately bad thing. If they lightened their fucking stupid and game-ruining queue stipulations (which I predict they eventually will, because they'd have to be RAGINGLY FUCKING STUPID not too, and not even Blizzard is that dumb), we could go back to quicker queue times and you'd probably never end up noticing that the game has less players than before. And who gives a shit about the awful skins, anyways? And is Blizzard releasing less terrible heroes who are intentionally overbuffed really a bad thing?

Until the day HotS reaches a point where putting any investment into it at all (i.e., simply paying for servers and skeleton crew to man it), it'll be around for years.

[VanishingAct]

huh? I dont understand.

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And man does this suck. I love this game and have thoroughly enjoyed it. We all know the real reason its not being supported though. It doesn't have the potential to make massive profits for them compared to other ventures they want to shovel down peoples throats. No place for ventures made out of love and passion for one's work if they only make some money and not all the money.

You're absolutely right and thats what I mean a bit as well. It seems an increasing number of people fresh from college going into the gaming industry, love and passion in the industry comes second to a career and their own agendas.

You look at old school photos of dev teams compared to now, its like night and day. But the hots team seemed to be the only team that had real love and passion for their IP.

[caervek]

Meh.

Blizzard have spent the last four years moving anyone from the HotS team who has demonstrated standout performance to a "more important" IP, so nothing is really changing there apart from them being open about it now.

The only functional change I see here is them abandoning their attempt post "HotS 2.0" to turn HotS into an E-Sport, which is a very welcome change IMO as I never liked them trying to do this as it ran completely counter to the design goals and intents of HotS (fun/casual QM focused alternative to LoL/DOTA).

[Zandalariprelate]

Blizzard is killing their games, such a shame I really loved Hots compared to others mobas

[dragnipur]

First they kill Diablo and make a mobile game. And now they kill Heroes of the Storm... I am so angry and sad right now. Activision killed Blizzard. Blizzard is no more. There is only Activision now...

All the old veterans are gone now with Mike "Bilbo Baggins" Morhaime.... :'-(

But they neither killed diablo nor Hots.They still have active and running servers right?You can always install the game and play it.What they stopped doing is impactful updates to D3.About Hots well this game was dead on arrival because for the current Blizzard it is not enough just to make a game.It has to make them a huge profit or it is just not worth investing.As Hots was never able to compete against the juggernauts LoL and Dota and deliver all the cash Blizzard expected from the Moba market.So they decided to cut resources from the game.D3 and Hots will still be alive and supported for a long term.They are just bad games.D3 is not equal neither to D2 nor PoE and Hots is a little better than Smite at least Smite developers are more creative than Blizzard.They created a unique moba experience which Blizzard failed to do.

[ophion1990]

HotS Community: "esports is dumb, why even bother, they tried to force it, no one cares, it hurts the community, it's useless, why does it even matter, players don't care, blah blah"

Also HotS Community: "They cancelled esports events?! DED GAEM! WTF!!! GIEF REFUND NAO BLIZ!!!!"

A: The HotS community is not a hivemind, different people will have different opinions, including on stuff like eSports.
B: They're also moving devs to other projects and from what we've seen, atleast some of the big names are gone, with the rest being unconfirmed. In addition to that, they've also confirmed that the cadence for content updates will change.

Good post, though.

[sam86]

It is a terrible game, and that's why it failed. Blizzard's game philosophies doesn't work for mobas at all.

i played dota 1 for like 7 years, then switched to lol, then to hots
hots is better imo, game ends in 20 min instead of 'start' by min 20, average game length isn't 1h+ with pre-picks and bans, it made moba actually playable instead of need to sacrifice a virgin to hope be free for 1h+ for average game, that can still end with loss because a wrong baron fight

It's still a fairly popular game.

I would put the reasons it "failed" down to poor monetization - first the skins and mounts were so expensive that nobody wanted to buy them. When they changed to 'loot 2.0' they made everything so accessible that nobody needed to buy them.

nah it is as said in multiple report since ages, activision is pushing blizzard to mobile market, i'm surprised that they didn't butcher sc2 prior to hots (maybe they did ? I don't follow sc2) but either OW or WoW were be last pc standing before we get warcraft immortal a toilet sh8t since everyone has an a88hole that they can use

[caervek]

Blizzard is killing their games, such a shame I really loved Hots compared to others mobas

OMG lol, people really need to stop with this "sky is falling" nonsense, this is not the death of HotS it's not even close, hell it's not even a bad thing.

The game is simply going back to how it worked for the majority of its existence (also how it worked before things started going downhill). Will new hero releases and events be slower with a skeleton crew, yes but this is how it originally worked for HotS. The game was always ran on a skeleton crew and it did just fine, so much so that the money it was making from the cash skins caused Blizzard to add more devs and create HotS 2.0, now the dev numbers are simply back to normal and the stupid Esports experiment has thankfully been ended (sadly they haven't added an option to buy all skins for money).

[DesoPL]

OMG lol, people really need to stop with this "sky is falling" nonsense, this is not the death of HotS it's not even close, hell it's not even a bad thing.

The game is simply going back to how it worked for the majority of its existence (also how it worked before things started going downhill). Will new hero releases and events be slower with a skeleton crew, yes but this is how it originally worked for HotS. The game was always ran on a skeleton crew and it did just fine, so much so that the money it was making from the cash skins caused Blizzard to add more devs and create HotS 2.0, now the dev numbers are simply back to normal and the stupid Esports experiment has thankfully been ended (sadly they haven't added an option to buy all skins for money).

Even back in 2015 heroes were more often released than in 2018.