is this game dying the final death?

[Twoddle]

Nah, HotS is very much alive guys!

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Admire my MS paint skills btw

The current streamers for HotS are pretty boring tbh. People like AlexProG and Grubby who I used to watch left the scene yonks ago.

[Hollycakes]

I miss Grubb playing Hots. Dearly. It only leaves me with Pallytime who isnt playing as much so I have zero Hots stuff to watch anymore. Ugh.

[sam86]

dota was so popular as an esport before dota 2 amirite?

so was click and move puzzle games but they all died out, u judge 2003 game by 2019 ...
not to mention i still wait an answer on how a game lost 2/3 of its team is expected to stay in same spot in first place

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This game was born dead and has been artificially kept alive by Blizzard and handful of die-hards.

it was blizz mishandle that was killing it
the game is better than 40 min dota/lol competition, even on esports, both dota/lol suffer from very boring early game that - rarely - can turn to gankfest interesting match, but the usual is 20 min of boring farming and even trying to avoid destroy tower to not push lane much and risk ganks ... not to mention how lol/dota use 1 map no alteration, making if a hero sucks he sucks, not hero works in a map and bad in another, they just flat out sucks
hots had so much potential that i never understood why blizz sh8t on it (mostly because OW success pulled the rug from under it? no idea)

Besides what's with the hysteria that every Blizzard game must be eternal?

1) blizz old reputation as most trusted pc games developer (which was shattered with 'don't u have phones')
2) dota is still alive and well and massive even after 15 years since its release, dota 2 is only graphic upgrade and was using same as dota 1 mechanics (got tweaked later, but so did dota 1 with every major patch)
so why expect anything else from blizz? well now we don't but back then we did

[Trumpcat]

...
1) blizz old reputation as most trusted pc games developer (which was shattered with 'don't u have phones')
2) dota is still alive and well and massive even after 15 years since its release, dota 2 is only graphic upgrade and was using same as dota 1 mechanics (got tweaked later, but so did dota 1 with every major patch)
so why expect anything else from blizz? well now we don't but back then we did

I agree with you, Blizzard was THE developer of PC games. Not many but each one defining its genre. But again, they were late with HOTS, they could have owned that genre, but they missed to recognize the potential when it was happening right in their garden with the popularity of the Warcraft 3 DOTA map.

Put that next to the poor design decisions in early Diablo 3 and cancelling its future expansions, WoW expansions that miss the mark, no content for SC2 or anything else about the franchise and we just have to accept Blizzard are not immaculate and that's fine, nothing is.

[Acidbaron]

I find with perhaps less people playing games got a bit better, not all the time but at times it has.

HoTS still has the benefit of being enjoyable and not being that try hard as the rest.

[sam86]

I agree with you, Blizzard was THE developer of PC games. Not many but each one defining its genre. But again, they were late with HOTS, they could have owned that genre, but they missed to recognize the potential when it was happening right in their garden with the popularity of the Warcraft 3 DOTA map.

Put that next to the poor design decisions in early Diablo 3 and cancelling its future expansions, WoW expansions that miss the mark, no content for SC2 or anything else about the franchise and we just have to accept Blizzard are not immaculate and that's fine, nothing is.

again i don't think hots died because it was 'late', lol is 7 years late after dota and still dominate even over dota
blizz ignored hots, why no idea, my guess is because they found far more profit in the gumbling machine loot boxes of OW (and OW had no competition in hero shooter genre, paladin was released a month earlier but it had no media attention at all in compare to ow)
if u didn't read the pro player post about how blizz treated them, recheck it, blizz own employees didn't even know about heroes of the dorm, and mocked it, not to mention they were treated like trash, something never heard from blizzard before (however activision is well known with that...)

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I find with perhaps less people playing games got a bit better, not all the time but at times it has.

HoTS still has the benefit of being enjoyable and not being that try hard as the rest.

for me the queue times now is starting to get noticeably longer

[ophion1990]

I have to disagree with the notion that HotS released too late aswell. It could be a reason but looking beyond that, there's plenty of other stuff which made it so people didn't stick around. TL still being riddled with smurfs/being dead, heroes like Hanzo being borderline broken for months or even more than a year, the new player que which was added because people's ego couldn't handle the fact that they weren't improving fast enough to ever climb, long standing bugs on maps like BoE,... One of the things that bothers me quite a lot, even though it's somewhat minor, is probably that Uther's Holy Shock still doesn't give him a seperate button, so you don't accidentally heal people, even though Whitemane's Clemency does. I know Clemency and Holy Shock do the opposite, you get my point, though. It's stuff like this that shows that devs are aware that something is bad, yet somehow it's taken them... how long to fix it?

Meanwhile the devs get patted on the back every time that they show their face on reddit and say that they may or may not have a marginal change coming within the next 12 months. I still like this game a lot so I hate bashing it but it's pretty clear that corners were cut when making/maintaining the game. It's late release into a saturated market was, IMO, just the tip of the iceberg.

[Senphiroth1134]

No, this game is not dying it's final death.

[DesoPL]

Oh really? In february 9 they said next hero is around the corner. Month passed. Also no news about new seasonal event.

Keep dreaming.

[matrix123mko]

Oh really? In february 9 they said next hero is around the corner. Month passed. Also no news about new seasonal event.

Keep dreaming.

Wait until Monday PTR. Then we will see. Rumours are that they don't give teasers, because Anduin has been leaked.

[Twen]

The old release schedule was, frankly, super fast. It was said that the pace would change, slower releases don't mean the game's in the grave. Many currently popular hero-based games take notably longer to release new ones, and they're doing just peachy, rather than being dead. HotS also has pretty extensive hero selection already, it's not like there's a shortage.

This simply depends on the playerbase and how they handle change; will they keep playing or not. As long as there are enough players it'll be fine. If there isn't, then it won't. That's all there is to it.

(Though with how impatience and desire for instant gratification seems to be running rampant I wouldn't hold my breath.)

[ophion1990]

The old release schedule was, frankly, super fast.

If we're talking hero releases, I agree. Skin releases are much too slow, though. It's how the game makes money, yet there are heroes that haven't had a skin in 2 years, or just haven't had a skin since their release (which might have also been 2 years ago).

[Frozen Death Knight]

Nah, HotS is very much alive guys!

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Admire my MS paint skills btw

The average viewership for HotS was overall better last year when we still had people like Grubby and other streamers with established followings still streaming the game. It was not nearly as huge as LoL and Dota 2, but it was decent numbers nonetheless. The announcement in December made a significant dent in the Twitch streaming numbers with big streamers simply quitting their HotS streams, which was more than expected considering how awful that announcement was handled.

That being said, the game is not dead. Just in my own social circle I still have several of my HotS friends playing the game who are high Diamond, Masters, and Grand Masters. The queue times for Team League are still fairly fast even outside of peak hours. We may not get new Heroes at the same rate as before, but the game keeps getting new content like balance patches and more major features like the new ladder system. Hopefully the game will be able to grow again to warrant faster Hero releases in the future, but as of now, the game is still very much alive, even if downscaled.

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so was click and move puzzle games but they all died out, u judge 2003 game by 2019 ...
not to mention i still wait an answer on how a game lost 2/3 of its team is expected to stay in same spot in first place

Where are you getting those numbers, if I may ask?

[Lord Pebbleton]

I played HotS just for the Warcraft rewards. I think I took Zul to level 10, got the master skin, then left the game for good.
Kinda glad I did. I was already suspecting something was going on because very few people (both online and in real life) would talk about the game at all. If there's something I really don't want to experience is playing a multiplayer game, then one day seeing it's doing very poorly compared to other choices in the genre.

[Aleksej89]

Cost of keeping HOTS alive is probably so low that HOTS will likely have its servers and the rare balance patch for many years to come.

But blizzard has clearly stated "HOTS has no bright future, and at some point no future at all".

[tankbug]

Nah, HotS is very much alive guys!

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Admire my MS paint skills btw

Try using the snipping tool in windows. You can easily select what you want to capture, and add basic graphics like brush-strokes etc.

[Twen]

If we're talking hero releases, I agree. Skin releases are much too slow, though. It's how the game makes money, yet there are heroes that haven't had a skin in 2 years, or just haven't had a skin since their release (which might have also been 2 years ago).

Yes, I was talking about hero releases in response to above. On skins I agree, some characters are in dire need of more - like my best boy Lúcio!

(But this was always the case, not something brought on by the recent dev changes, and it's an irritation at best rather than game-breaking.)

[Joeygiggles]

Nah, HotS is very much alive guys!

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Admire my MS paint skills btw

I do agree that yes the game took a big hit and has lots a lot of players, but twitch views arent indicative of the actual playerbase

[MHMabrito]

should i give up on it as well and move on to other games?

Definitely should.

[Keihndeth]

Twitch viewers is not a sign of a games death. There are plenty of games that do incredibly well that aren't represented well on Twitch. Witcher 3, Hearts of Iron IV, Civilization 6, Elder Scrolls Online. Some games just do not translate well to view on Twitch. World of Warcraft is another great example. If the major WoW streamers aren't on, the viewership plummets.