HEROES OF THE STORM PROFESSIONAL

The primary stats, XP gained and buildings destroyed, are team-wide, and the individually-tracked stats, like damage taken or healing done, are essentially meaningless, indicative of nothing and routinely (and properly) ignored by casters. In Heroes of the Storm there are no meaningful stats to compare individual players, either to members of their own team or to players on the opposing team. One of the critical errors of Heroes of the Storm is that the increased team emphasis, a nod to keeping play more casual by reducing individual responsibility for losses, largely destroys the ability to produce player-centric stories. eSports are no different - the best eSports games regularly produce stories of matches, seasons and careers. (Sometimes these stories can be a bit contrived!) They are also about in-game stories - the ball going through Bill Buckner's legs, Babe Ruth calling his shot, Curt Schilling and his bloody sock. Stories of athletes overcoming adversity, such as the familiar Olympic tale of the kid who fell face-first into a puddle but managed to soldier on and become an award-winning diver. Right: League of Legends Championship viewers - on the Riot Game Turkish channel.

HEROES OF THE STORM PROFESSIONAL

This post examines the design decisions that ensured that HoTS would have limited success as a serious professional game, as well as a few non-design issues for the sake of completeness. That optimism, however, ignored the serious design issues that made Heroes of the Storm a poor fit for competitive play. Many commentators were understandably bullish that HoTS would quickly overtake League of Legends and Dota 2 and become the dominant MOBA. The state of competitive HoTS is no doubt surprising to some - Blizzard games tend to be at the top of their genre, and Blizzard's Starcraft was one of the first eSports hits. This was met with a spate of 'Competitive Heroes of the Storm Isn't Dead' think pieces - pieces that would never be written about a game in good health. Over the summer a number of professional Heroes of the Storm teams had major shakeups or disbanded entirely, including Cloud 9, the 2015 world champions. By comparison League of Legends had about 80,000 viewers at that same time, even though there was no LoL event going on. A few weeks ago I tuned in to the Blizzcon Heroes of the Storm Fall Championship, one of the most important HoTS competitive events of the year.

Heroes of the storm