sirlin

sirlin

Sirlin on Game Design, Ep 15: Heroes of the Storm

Added 2016-03-03 23:30:13 +0000 UTC

http://www.sirlin.net/posts/sirlin-on-game-design-ep-15-heroes-of-the-storm

As a natural followup to our earlier episode on Starcraft 2 (http://www.sirlin.net/posts/sirlin-on-game-design-ep-13-starcraft-2) here's our thoughts on Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm.

Btw, I feel like a juggernaut of content here considering it was only yesterday we finished the Codex kickstarter, and there are *23* articles and a podcast about that, all collected here: http://www.sirlin.net/codex/

Thank you to all patrons and kickstarter backers. Enjoy the show.

Comments

I am struggling to play devil's advocate here because I mostly agree with you. HotS should not have banning and could get away with blind picking if they chose to balance around that. Then a team would speculate about counter picking based on an opposing team's reputation. Team A knows Team B is very good with Tyrael, so Team A picks with the possibility of Tyrael in mind. Team B can go ahead with picking Tyrael or pick a different (normally inferior) lineup that is good against an "anti-Tyrael" lineup. This creates a little yomi which is fine in my opinion. Approaching the game in this way would impact how heroes are balanced of course, but we are talking about an ideal/long term situation.

2016-03-15 16:24:27 +0000 UTC

Limit of 1 character per team is fine. I'm aware that duplicates of a character tend to cause problems and can be hard to design around. Yeah there is less to a moba character than Blanka, but that doesn't nullify the point. It means the point still stands, and it's just slightly weaker, yet still an extremely strong point. If someone is the best in the world at moba character X, it's STILL ridiculous that we won't get to see them play that character in the tournament finals. It's STILL ridiculous that we see people's 3rd or 4th best character instead of their best. That's a worse showcase of skill, just objectively speaking, than if they played their best. It's STILL ridiculous that in a huge HotS tournament, the winning team banned Tyrael every game simply because they don't know how to play against him. (Imagine that in any other sport or esport, lol. How to play against Michael Jordan? Eh who knows, just ban him. How to beat Blanka? Eh just ban him.) It's STILL a fail in that I think choosing your own character should be some sort of fundamental right in an asymmetric game. It's STILL a problem that it punishes any kind of way different characters (Abathur, Lost Vikings, etc) because the specialized knowledge and skill they require is hurt a lot by bans compared to more general characters. The effect on that one is less bad than if you could ban Venom in Guilty Gear (you have to have a PhD in Venom to play him), but the badness for, say, Lost Vikings is still there, just in a lesser form than in the Venom example. I could go on, but all the arguments against banning are still there even if you accept that each character is less complicated than Blanka. Yeah my starting point would be blind pick on both sides, mirror match allowed, probably no duplicates within a team. It's sad to me that the playerbases for these games are so trained to accept bans as a bandaid that they'd probably see the format I just described as WORSE even though designing around it would get rid of all the bad stuff I mentioned earlier. I don't think it's that far-fetched to still have an even matchup after picking a team of 5 either. Ideally any matchup imbalance is far outweighed by playskill anyway (mobas tend to have a really high skill ceiling I think).

2016-03-10 21:16:25 +0000 UTC

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