HotS doesn't have to die, here is how we fix it

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You are here because you care about this game. Like many people, you have seen Hots in its best moments, you have seen Hots at its worst. But you are still here, and you still care. Lately though, you have been losing that passion, you are wanting to log in less and less. Some of your friends have already quit, or maybe you have. Is it you, or is it the game?

It doesn't matter if you are gold, master, stick to quick match or even AI, you have probably noticed something is off lately with Heroes of the Storm. You are not alone, and there are a lot of passionate people like yourself who want to see change and improvements so they can love their game again. So how can we accomplish this? Here is a list outlining the significant issues that I and many other members of the community would like to see resolved in order to bring hots back to its former glory, and maybe propel it into a new era.


BETTER MATCH MAKING-
This is probably the worst offender, and has been plaguing HotS since release. I don't think any one person can tell you exactly how to make this perfect, and everyone has their own ideas, but what anyone can agree on is what we have right now isn't working. Gms with diamonds during prime time. 5 mans playing vs 5 solos in quick match. 10 minute wait times when you can see on your friends list 9 other players on your server, at your rating, and in queue. The list goes on and on. While there is not an obvious fix to this, its obvious it needs a fix. So we can only hope to see some improvements soon.

FIX MMR / ADD POINT DECAY-
Make placements MUCH less impactful. When people finish placements they should be lower than they were last season not higher. When it comes to mmr issues, the placement system is the root of all evil. Numerous mistakes have led to a complete snowball of mmr where people playing 10-15 games a season move up a league every time they finish placements. That should not be possible, and if anything they should be moving down.

This creates another issue, people who aren't playing the game are not decaying in points. Not only does this hurt the ranked system as a whole because of rusty players coming back and ruining games, but it also gives much less of an incentive to continue playing consistently. Master / diamond / plat should not be handed out so freely to people just because they played QM and went 60% win rate with a group of friends.

Which comes to the next problem, QM should not seed into ranked mmr. People need to start at the bottom and work their way up, it is the only way this system can ever be fair. As much as you want to make everyone feel good by giving them a cool rank, if you do this no ones rank means anything. People who got placed into bronze and silver feel cheated, and people who get placed into diamond/master unfairly either feel scared to play, or like they have no reason to grind anymore.

FIX POINT SYSTEM-
During the time when you could duo queue in ranked, winning games would not give you many points if the match was uneven. A perfectly balanced match would yield 100 points a win, and -100 points a loss. If the match was uneven, you could lose 40 or more of those 100 points on a win, meaning there was a real risk/reward factor. Now it is rare to see more than +10/-10 for either team being favored, and that's subtracted off of a 200 point average.

An additional problem is that people are simply getting too many bonus points in master and above. With 30-40 bonus points slapped on your wins and softening your losses, you cant go down in rating. So up everyone goes, where the rating cap stop nobody knows. Try and count how many people have above 14k points, a number hardly seen in hero league before this season. This creates a problem where rankings are more about games played instead of win rate (which really kills the drive to play for most players like me). You should not have to play 500+ games to cap out at your deserved rank in master/gm, this number should be closer to 150-200 games.

hero league NEEDS duo queue, and why team league isnt an option-
If you are a player who wants to be competitive, and also play with your friends, you have very limited options in what you can do with said friends. The most competitive game mode is Hero League undisputedly, and yet you have to go into this arena completely alone. Not only is that very daunting for a lot of inexperienced players looking to jump into ranked, but veterans of the moba genre coming to hots will be very disappointed seeing as all other relevant mobas have some way to duo.

You might be thinking "what about team league?" or "how can you say hero league is more competitive than team league?" To address the first concerns id first say as a team league player, most regions you will be hard pressed to find a game outside of prime-time hours, and even then often after a 10 minute queue.Not to mention the game will be lopsided and/or with players far above below your ranking.

As for why hero league is more competitive than team league, the game itself tells you so. You must be level 5 on a hero to play in hero league, but not in team league. Team league you can play on a fresh account, on level 1 heroes. Basically, the game tells you team league exists for leveling heroes, since it gives you the most xp. This adds to why team league is unpopular, and noncompetitive.

How can you fix this? There are a lot of ways to go about fixing team league, its hard to say what will work. But I can tell you how to let people play competitively with a friend right now without fixing team league, and thats adding duo queue. Duo queue was removed because of the match making systems inability to balance it, but in order for people to want to get into this game with their friends, it needs to return.

seasons need to be longer-
You just grinded to your highest rank ever, and your games are going great. You have had the best teammates since this season began, and are really enjoying the game. But in the back of your mind you know tomorrow the season is resetting and you have to do it all over again, after only 3 short months.

Placements don't work like they should, and this is amplified by how short HotS seasons are. For the casual player, this means they only really want to play 10-15 games a season to retain their rank, because it seems like a waste of time to grind if its all going to be gone so quickly. For a hardcore player, this means you spend more time grinding to get to the top of the ladder, than actually playing there.

better/faster draft system-
If there is one thing I know, its that drafting just simply takes too long. Two separate banning phases seems the main culprit here. To most people it seems like it would make much more sense to have all the bans at the start instead of letting so many highly contested heroes through. This and more bans opens up the possibility of more "off-meta" heroes being viable, and increases the variety of heroes you will see in your games. It would make things even faster if multiple people banned at the same time, say the top 3 rated players, in a blind ban fashion, then reveal what the other team banned afterwards. Basically the same way league of legends does their draft.

hero swaps in draft-
For a competitive environment, (especially one where picking all the best heroes as fast as possible will win you most drafts) this is absolutely vital and really doesnt need to be explained further.

better hero balance- This could be 20 paragraphs or more, but the reality is its a pretty simple concept. Bring all heroes power levels in line. When addressing hero balance, look at counter play options for most heroes more closely, as well as how fun/unfun this hero is to play with/vs. At one point I felt like I could queue up as any hero in hero league and have a fighting chance, I want to feel like that again.

rework quick match-
Quick match is unfair. Tyrande always vsing Abathur. No healer games. No tank games. These things should never happen. If you teach players from their first games, the wrong way to play, its much harder to adjust to ranked play.

Every quickmatch game needs to be a real, valid team comp. This game is fun the way its meant to be played, why ever change that? Quick match is the most played game mode and its a completely different game.

banning should be off of rank not MMR in HL/TL-
When you see the #1 gm with 10k points have a master player who's never been GM ban over him, you start to think things are a bit messed up. You earned the rank, you earned the right to ban. Its that simple.

dont force people to play maps-
Want to make a lot of quick match players and hero league players happy? Give them the ability to thumbs down a map, and never have to queue into it if they don't want to. This also can be gathered as a statistic for the devs to see the maps the community doesn't want to play.

rewards/incentives for GM players and for climbing ranks in general-
Instead of getting all the rewards at the end of the season, what about earning them as you go? With longer seasons, you have the chance to give players better rewards, and unlocking say, a new mount because you hit gold for the first time would just feel fantastic. Right now people who want rewards just play 10-15 games a season to unlock them and really don't care to grind. But if you get these players playing hero league because they want rewards, then they want to win. The more players that want to win in hero league, the better.

This doesn't change for gm players, they need a reason to want to win as well. Where are the GM jackets? Where are cool titles? Awesome portraits? Special mounts are cool, but if you are the best of the best you need a little something extra to set you apart. Think rank 1 titles in wow, Think challenger borders in league of legends. Being GM needs to make you feel great, and want to brag to your friends. Being any ranking should, really. Hero league just needs to matter a hell of a lot more than it doesn't right now, and there are simple ways to head down that path to help people actually want to win.

more cross promotion-
We all remember heroes 2.0, and we all want to go back to seeing the game we love grow. Maybe wait till the game is in a bit better shape first, but the benefits are obvious.

better reconnect system-
You dced from your game at 10 min? Don't even bother trying to come back, its done. Also a bot picked 2 wrong talents and ran it down mid the whole time you were gone.

better replay system-
It would help a lot of people improve if they could access a less clunky replay system, and probably help out a lot of content creators.

better control over AI filling in for players-
Sometimes i dont want diablo bot picking terrible talents and charging at the first player it sees. Give me an option to make it stay in base. Stop letting AI pick players talents.

better report system, make it feel like reports matter-
HotS isn't the biggest game in the world, there's always that person you play with consistently who maybe you wish you didnt. Maybe sometimes they are toxic to you and your teammates. You report them every time, you know what they are doing should be punished, and yet you see them every. single. day. Maybe if you got emails saying when someone you reported was punished, it would help out in the feeling that when you send a report, you are sending a tiny little message to float endlessly into the void.

queue priority-
You waited 10 min for a game, finally you get into the draft. someone locks in nova when you have no healer, and your teammate decides to dip. You should not have to wait another 10 minutes. If there is a leaver queue, there can be queue priority.

dont lose 600 on a HL/TL dodge-
There's honestly just no reason for this absurd amount of point loss. one loss worth of points seems perfectly fair. And if you are unlucky enough to have a dc during draft, there's a good chance you consider uninstalling.

allow players to purchase heroes- skins with money on the test servers-
This supports the game and makes it convenient for people who know they will purchase the heroes/skin anyways, and not have to play games to grind a quest on a test realm.

change role/class system-
Tassadar is a support. Sonya is a warrior. Wtf is a multiclass and why is there only one? Why is specialist a thing? This does nothing but confuse new players, if I lock in a hero who's role is tank and I cant tank then why is it labeled as that? I think this is easily fixed by adding more specific roles, and it wouldn't take many more.

SUGGESTIONS:
automated Team League tournaments like in wc3-
Saturday, 4PM-8PM 5v5 tournament! You know a few days in advance and get your friends together ahead of time to practice a few times in quick match. Place well and you get special prizes and gold! This will make team league much more hyped, and possibly breath a lot of life into the league.

be able to pre-select your talents and/or follow in game builds-
In heroes of newerth you had community guides that anyone could write. They would show up with a few builds/items and some tips, and the community would vote on the best, which would be at the top. This could put an infinite amount of information at players fingertips, and increase the overall skill and knowledge players have about the game tremendously.

In closing, this seems like a lot to change, but I think heroes is closer to being as good as it used to be than you might think. I personally hope to see a lot of big changes in the next coming months, and more transparency from blizzard about what they are working on. Thanks for reading.

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