Frenetic Pony

HOTS... no the other HOTS. The Lords Management one damn it!

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I got in!

 

Ok, bragging over. This thing is REAAAALLLY noob friendly. Like you're forced into a tutorial, then into a practice game, then a cooperative game, then finally you can play an actual game. Not totally "someone with too many hundreds of hours in League/DOTA/whatever" friendly out the gate I must say, but I guess that's not the point.

 

It also feels slower and more steady than DOTA/2. At least slow in that "getting a no death/ 8 person kill streak in in DOTA would make me unstoppable." But here I still had to hang back a lot.

 

At the same time it's a lot faster, maps are smaller but more varied. Matches last maybe half an hour and less. Also there are actual "mapS" which is honestly pretty nice, and frankly I already think hardcore LOMA players need to get the hell over themselves and get some variety up in there. That being said the maps mostly feel like a variation on the same layout, but I digress. Surely there will be more to come later.

 

I can hear Brad Shoemaker and Nick Brekon already agreeing that this is "such a baby game". Because the noob frienliness doesn't just extend to the opening. There's gates around the tower points enemies can't even get past, so just going around the side to kill some fools. There's also a non combat useable "mount" for everyone that just seems to be an acknowledgement that their movement speed is a bit slow normally. There's a "warp to base" stone, which is useless until the endgame when your all the way across the map from any of the more local healing places and need to go back.

 

Speaking of healing, there's of course no items so healing feels like a big problem that you do have to go back for. Which actually makes it an interesting tradeoff.

 

The err, lords, also feel well designed. There's pushers and healers and tanks, damage dealers as well but the combat is rather "forgiving" so there's nothing you'd recognize as the rapid death dealers from other LOMAs.

 

Overall it feels like it has some interesting ideas, I like the multiple maps and captureable "merc" camps which spawn you extra creeps. I don't mind the possibility of faster matches, but the game already feels too hemmed in by trying to make itself ultra inviting for newcomers. As a recent spate of developers have said, people are smart enough to get most games if you just let them at it. You don't need to hold their hand all the way, and especially not designing the entire game just to keep holding their hand. I get the idea of a quicker, more casual DOTA, but this pushes a bit too much into simple and safe. Considering LoL has 27 million active players a month I'd say something a bit more complex still wouldn't be any real "barrier to entry" that Blizzard seems so intent on breaking down.

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Are the Lost Vikings in this game? If not, they fucked up.

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Are the Lost Vikings in this game? If not, they fucked up.

 

I haven't looked through everyone, they'd better be!

 

I also REEEEEEEEEEEALLY don't like the team level up mechanic. It might "alleviate" things for the lesser players, but it really, really, really lessens any feeling of personal accomplishment and holds back the better players. If you have uneven teams, like 3 not so good players and 2 good ones, then the good ones can be doing quite well but not really make up for as much as they would in DOTA  because their overall XP pool relies on those not so good players.

 

It really makes it a drag to be doing well personally and yet feel the drag of your team not doing as well on YOU hero, because the enemy in your lane is a higher level than you even though you've been soundly kicking their ass all game. It SUCKS, It's hard to describe how much it sucks. Imagine if you were playing... any online shooter and even though you're doing really well personally, you are simply not even allowed to get a "kill streak/bfg 9000/enter thing you get well for doing here" simply because other people you've little control over aren't doing well.

 

Frankly this could just kill the entire for hardcore players that just want to play randomed games on occasion, basically requiring you to play with players of a near equal or greater skill level than yourself unless you want to maddeningly stare at your own success with nothing to show for it. It kind of goes against Blizzard's own lesson from Wow, in that any mechanic should be framed as a reward and not a punishment if possible. This feels like an indirect but still tangible punishment for something you didn't even do.

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I saw some videos of it a while back, or maybe a stream, and thought it looked pretty neat in a lot of ways, although as with every game like it I had no idea what was happening in teamfights because I hadn't been playing it for a long time.

But the team-level-up mechanic completely put me off for the exact reasons you state. I'm not interested in that kind of game at all.

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Shared experience seems like something that might have the opposite effect of what they intend. I mean, in Dota 2, if you're not amazing, you can kind of hang back and play support, just try to keep your carry happy. If everybody is sharing experience though, everybody needs to be on top of shit.

I'm not sure where this race to the bottom with accessibility is going to get anybody.

 

Learning to play Dota 2 was one of the harshest learning curves i've ever been through, and it reminds of trying to learn to play fighting games. The emphasis on broad rosters of characters, the way fights are all about positioning and searching for that opening and nailing those ability combos, and even the completely non-evident game systems that you basically need to just have somebody explain to you. The way other LORDS MANAGEMENT games are chasing Dota even feels to me like how so many fighters, even today, follow the footsteps of Street Fighter. (Much has been made of how all these LORDS MANAGEMENT games are emulating eachother's characters, but it's not much different from how so many fighting games spent years emulating the SF roster.)

So, and here's the point i want to make, maybe it's worth pointing out that the broad majority of fighting games with any enduring legacy are ones that cater almost exclusively to the hardcore set. High skill ceilings and competitive balance are what keep people coming back to games for long periods of time, and HOTS sounds like it's trying to curtail at least one of those.

Perhaps the more salient point though, is that nobody's going to jump in and become the magical, inexplicable "Smash Bros" - something that seems able to appeal to everybody equally - by imitating something with such hardcore roots as Dota, they're only going to do it by coming from a wildly different place. (Perhaps though, perhaps Blizzard thinks this is the game they're making... Is it?)

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It's not so bad in a balanced game, or when you're winning. But it is awful when you're losing and you feel it's impossible to turn around no matter how well you do personally.

 

Smash Bros is indeed awesome. I loved it just start out and sucking, and I loved it when I could relate to pro matches and would play people that also played the local tourney scene a lot. I get it's the goal, and understand that it could be out there somewhere. But it doesn't feel right in a bad situation, frankly I think they should go for something else.

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I'm mostly interested in hearing how people not already into LoMAs (aka normal people) respond to it. I'm kind of expecting it to get a lot of praise and completely leave me feeling cold and annoyed, like Hearthstone. Blizzard seems to be on a comeback lately, at least in terms of internet dorks liking them. 

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I'm mostly interested in hearing how people not already into LoMAs (aka normal people) respond to it. I'm kind of expecting it to get a lot of praise and completely leave me feeling cold and annoyed, like Hearthstone. Blizzard seems to be on a comeback lately, at least in terms of internet dorks liking them. 

 

People not into LOMAs are now the weird ones. It is the most popular video game genre in the world.

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People not into LOMAs are now the weird ones. It is the most popular video game genre in the world.

 

There are as many concurrent players on League of Legends at any given time as there is on Steam.

 

All of it. 

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Man, I saw that shared level thing and thought it was genius, because it allowed for players to change their roles on the fly. If you've got someone super-efficient earning XP for the team, you've got room to have a rover messing up the other team.

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Sorry to be a noob-baby gamer but what is HOTS? I have worked out it is a Lord's management game, but that's about it. :S

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Sorry to be a noob-baby gamer but what is HOTS? I have worked out it is a Lord's management game, but that's about it. :S

 

Heroes of the Storm, the Blizzard Lords Management game currently in alpha testing. Earlier in development it was called Blizzard All-Stars, since it draws its Lords from the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo (but sadly not the Lost Vikings, Rock n' Roll Racing, or Blackthorne) games. It was also called Blizzard DOTA even further back, before the trademark settlement with Valve that cleared up who owned the rights to the Dota name.

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Man, I saw that shared level thing and thought it was genius, because it allowed for players to change their roles on the fly. If you've got someone super-efficient earning XP for the team, you've got room to have a rover messing up the other team.

 

It's not so bad in many games, just the occasional time it just eats away at you. It also dampens out any highs you get, getting a kill doesn't feel as rewarding here as it does in say, DOTA 2.

 

That being said it can still be an enjoyable game to just start up and play for a match or two, which only lasting 20 minutes apiece isn't bad. I already knew DOTA 2 could go on too long at times, any hour+ game has a 50/50 chance of just feeling like an absolute slog. And to top it off making games MUCH shorter really doesn't seem to detract from anything.

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So what are the beta invite things for this looking like? I signed up a while ago on B.Net but haven't heard anything. Do they give them to people to hand out to friends like what happened with Dota 2. I want to try this out.

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It also dampens out any highs you get, getting a kill doesn't feel as rewarding here as it does in say, DOTA 2.

 

I didn't see this the last time, but this seems fixable with drops from kills.

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I got my invite yesterday, i shall try it out tonight.

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Added you. Didn't see your message till 25 mins after you sent it. Always better poking me on steam, at least that one makes noises!

i'm dibs#1306

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I would play if I could since all my friends inexplicably stopped playing DOTA in the last week or so.

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What a lot of the people who use 'casual' as a pejorative towards this game seem to forget that Blizzard has a way of boiling down mechanics of a genre to their core, fun aspects and making it work brilliantly. We saw this with WoW with Everquest as well as Hearthstone with Magic. It's this unfounded sentiment that almost exclusively directed from prejudiced people who'd rather not give the game a shot before forming an opinion. Of course, there is no credibility to these claims and I know I shouldn't pay any attention to them but it still a thing that bugs me, especially when it comes from people who enjoy or enjoyed HS or WoW some time in the past. It's a word that gets thrown around a lot when HotS is mentioned and it's a barrier that quickly gets broken down once you start having fun with it. As with anything, people find it easy dismiss and attach labels to things they don't like. More doesn't necessarily always mean better. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this game blew up to the extent that Hearthstone did.

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