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Heroes of the Storm |OT2| Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

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scoobs

Member
So, League of Legends just announced they're doing the crowdfunded prize-pool for their big tournaments, just like Dota 2 has been doing with The International. I wonder how long it takes Blizz to finally jump on that train.

I mean, it seems like a smart thing to do right?

Seems smart, but it might also look kind of sad when HOTS can only generate prize pools 1/20th the size of LoL/Dota2
 

Alavard

Member
tournament streams are free for Blizzcon.

I guess I didn't explain myself. Let me rephrase.

Let's say I'm Blizzard, today. Let's say I sell $1 Million worth of the virtual tickets today. Blizzard keeps that $1 Million as profit.

Now, let's say that Blizzard adds in a crowdfunded prizepool to the virtual ticket. 25% of proceeds go to prize pool in this theoretical example. Blizzard sells $1 Million worth of virtual tickets, which now includes prize pool money, but has to give $250K of that money to the prize pool, and only makes $750K now instead.

Now, maybe Blizzard would sell enough additional virtual tickets to make more money if they included the crowd-funded prize pool. Or maybe they don't care about losing some of the money, if it attracts a better tournament scene. I dunno, just think it may be a concern.
 

Alur

Member
They shouldn't be selling virtual tickets to fund it, though. They sell shit in game to fund it, like portraits, mounts, skins, etc.
 

scoobs

Member
Well shit they announced HGC today. It's LCS but for heroes like we all guessed. Sounds wonderful. Hoping this brings stability to rosters and attracts the big names like cloud9, tsm, etc.

Very very promising
 

Alur

Member
The league news is awesome. Finally.

An underrated part is we're gonna have plenty to watch in Nov/Dec apparently since that's the qualifiers for the league. Figured we'd have mostly dead space there like last time.

And you currently get stuff like that from the Virtual Ticket.

They do, but that's not where the majority of the funds are coming from. They could do something similar to the virtual ticket but call it something else that's just for esports, but I don't see any reason for them to give up their cash cow as it has no bearing on watching the actual games.
 

brian!

Member
Only issue is "top 8" in na is going to have some huuuge variance in the beginning lol

Insofar as the top 4 seem a good tier above any other competition they might run into. So it might be hard to incentivize sponsorship of lower tier teams when relegation is a for sure thing. Plus top tier teams have low incentive to scrim unknowns, so the latter will be learning trial by fire style, could make for good storylines tho
 

Alur

Member
No different than League, IMO. The top 4-5 teams are always known and the bottom teams are also always known. Pretty much goes for any league that features relegation, even the Premier League and the like.
 

brian!

Member
Yeah for sure. League had some nasty shit going on w/ last minute rosters, team buyouts, wages, etc. on the lower end of teams, but that should be mitigated a bit with what they recently announced.
 
Only issue is "top 8" in na is going to have some huuuge variance in the beginning lol

Insofar as the top 4 seem a good tier above any other competition they might run into. So it might be hard to incentivize sponsorship of lower tier teams when relegation is a for sure thing. Plus top tier teams have low incentive to scrim unknowns, so the latter will be learning trial by fire style, could make for good storylines tho

I think this kind of a thing will drastically improve the talent pool over a year or so time because good players won't have as much incentive to retire/quit and amateurs will have more motivation to improve.

Running an esports scene the way DOTA works is just silly for most organizations as if you can't get your hands on a top-4-per-region, tier-1 level team, you get zero exposure as you won't reliably play in majors or TI. The same thing is true for HOTS. A great example of this is C9 not having a DOTA team since their team with EE split after TI5. They didn't have a team last season and haven't picked up a team for this season yet either.

The way DOTA is set up gives players a lot more power/value and you see this manifesting in player-owned teams like Secret and OG who are able to find their own sponsors. EG gives their DOTA2 team an incredible amount of attention, support and transparency because if they didn't, those players are marketable enough and good enough to easily find their own sponsors/partners and create their own team.

But none of that would be possible if the strong viewership and massive prize pools weren't there.

HOTS really needs the organization/sponsor support right now to provide additional money and stability into the scene to attract more outside talent and motivate existing talent. With more talent comes more competition, and with more competition comes more fans. So I'm really happy they're going to a league system, and I think it will help the scene tremendously.
 
Seems smart, but it might also look kind of sad when HOTS can only generate prize pools 1/20th the size of LoL/Dota2

Blizzard just has to up the ante a little bit and perhaps give up slightly more at the beginning to get the engine going. TI3 was the first International that had the compendium and it only added $1.2 million to the pre-existing $1.6 million prize pool. TI4 was where it really blew up ($11m total vs. $2.8m) but as you can see you don't build into huge things like that overnight.
 

Maledict

Member
I don't know if it's because of legion launch, but my placement matches have been awful. Like, seriously bad. I'm being matched with players whose skill level is so incredibly poor it feels like I'm suddenly in bronze. Leorics who attempt to solo knight camps? Jaina's who die 5 times to a non-dive team before the three minute mark?
 
So dumb question.

You know rank points are supposed to carry over if you go over the limit and win your promo match.

Well if you wait too long to do your promo match will you lose your accumulated excess points? Cause I just did a promo match and won only receiving 198 rank points for that victory. When I reached the promo match last night I only needed like 50 points so I should have had an excess of 100 points at least.

I've had excess points carry over during previous promo wins so I'm wondering if the system forgets if you wait too long or something.
 

Strider

Member
Last night I introduced a friend to the game and thus queued a quick match game with a person who was level 1.

Shit was.... uuuh... interesting to say the least lol We won tho!

Also I was given a zarya bundle code today :D
 

scoobs

Member
Awesome. I played 4-5 games on the new Butcher today and WOW is he ever amazing. Holy shit when you complete that quest you hit like a fucking truck. I love him now
 
My limited experience playing Braxxis Holdout is that it's functionally Haunted Mines 2.0. But, somehow, it's even less fun. Whichever team can manage to deathball and/or split hold the points the first time is pretty much the team that holds the points every time for the duration of the match. I have yet to play a match where teams trade the objective. One stomps, the other gets stomped.

A strong ranged specialist pushing behind the zerg wave just crushes a lane. It feels like how Haunted Mines used to with old Sylvanas wrecking your shit behind the golem and enemy team.

I don't know why they went back to the two lane format with this map.
 

Alur

Member
I don't know why they went back to the two lane format with this map.

Agreed.

Honestly not impressed with either of the new maps. I like the visual style of em (particularly Braxis), but beyond that...meh. Give us a Nepal/Hanamura/Ilios/Volskaya themed one from OW next plz.
 
We barely lost the objective the one time I played the map and my team thought it'd be smarter to push with ours than to defend against sylvanas pushing with theirs.

We were behind multiple levels when all was said and done.
 

brian!

Member
I like braxis a bunch better than warhead junction

Reminds me more of dshire than haunted

Couple of things i noticed in my limited exp. w/ the map, my exp. also a bit off because ive only ever played this map w/ someone who insisted on playing guldan every game (guldan fucking destroys zerg waves):

Ppl are wary of tanking out those early banelings or jumping on enemy heroes once the wave gets to the buildings (ppl also dont time ultralisk orb drops woth engages)

Ppl still dont know how to rotate just like in dshire, they deathball a lot still

It's really important to control enemy side jungle but a lot of ppl are scared of it for some reason, that's the dshire triangle bush you have to create

It has those tomb/infernal style bushes in the middle of the lane and a lot of ppl overextend not realizing

Most of the nuance in this map comes from the middle being blocked off from vertical rotations

Medivh is the best character on this map
 

sobaka770

Banned
Ugh, placements games - started Diamond 4, won 5, lost 5. Last game was lost with one player disconnecting for 90% of the game - ended up in Gold 1.

This soft MMR reset really did me a solid!

Oh well, back to grinding up!
 

scoobs

Member
Ugh, placements games - started Diamond 4, won 5, lost 5. Last game was lost with one player disconnecting for 90% of the game - ended up in Gold 1.

This soft MMR reset really did me a solid!

Oh well, back to grinding up!
Holy shit what a drop, haven't seen many drop that far

Guys, I can't stop winning on Rexxar. He's silly good
 
Alarak just got picked in an EU Nexus Games match. Should be fun to see.

Guys, I can't stop winning on Rexxar. He's silly good

I'm glad he's finally getting his due. He's been my all-time favorite hero since he got the QoL fixes late last year. Just a nigh-unkillable tank and incredible PvE hero.
 
Agreed.

Honestly not impressed with either of the new maps. I like the visual style of em (particularly Braxis), but beyond that...meh. Give us a Nepal/Hanamura/Ilios/Volskaya themed one from OW next plz.

Whatever the theme or objective is of the maps beyond these Starcraft ones, I hope it's a 3 lane map with rotating objectives. Braxxis Holdout managed to combine the worst aspects of Dragonshire and Haunted Mines. Fixed, split objectives and dual lanes, where you lose the first objective, half the match is basically done and the other team starts to just snowball.

Cursed Hollow, Sky Temple and Temple of the Spider Queen are probably the maps I enjoy the most in this game.
 

Alur

Member
I'd say my favorite are Tomb and Infernal Shrines. Not sure my record on those maps back that, but I enjoy them the most.

EDIT: Looks like Infernal is one of my highest winrate maps (~57%) and Tomb is 53.4%. Dragon Shire is my least and only one below 50% at 49.8%. Damn you DS.
 
62% Winrate on Cursed Hollow with Haunted Mines in second at 60%....what? I fucking hated that map. Braxxis is sitting at 29% but I'll need to play it a bunch more to get a more accurate win/loss ratio. Not that I want to.

I finally got Zagara to 10 and unlocked the Zerg portrait, can't believe I got Abathur at 10 faster than Zag.
 

Proven

Member
The most teams tend to snowball on Braxxis because most teams don't play well from behind. It doesn't help that most teams don't draft well enough for wave clear, imo.

Ugh, placements games - started Diamond 4, won 5, lost 5. Last game was lost with one player disconnecting for 90% of the game - ended up in Gold 1.

This soft MMR reset really did me a solid!

Oh well, back to grinding up!

Sigh. I went 4-6. Dropped from Plat 2 to Gold 1. And my losing streak is still going hard enough that I'm starting to get "rank adjustments" or whatever they were called. The game really was rooting for me...
 

brian!

Member
The beacon stuff is a less snowbally than something like haunted (short map, persistant lane) or boe (funneled 5v5 team fights w/ low comeback via low amounts of objs), but there was always things you could do on either map that most of the playerbase didnt get.

Man i kinda miss the door fighting in haunted mines

Most snowbally map after mines imo is prob bhb or towers, and while towers is my 2nd least fav map, both bhb and towers can have really cool specialized comps

Cursed hallow is pretty snowbally too, i imagine this is part of why we hardly ever see it anymore in comp. these days lol, i cant imagine what horrendouz things will come of the two bosses in the new map

I thiiiink the new map is probably the most snowbally of all but mainly because im having issues identifying counters to the nuke or thinking of ways to bait it out that are hard to foil

___

kenma breaks down some drafts: https://youtu.be/2MK_dEW6Nk8?t=26m19s
 
T

thepotatoman

Unconfirmed Member
So, my win rates are so increadibly noticably worse as tank or healer. Like my DPS winrates are 75% and tank/healer is 25%. I honestly can't tell if it's because I suck at those roles in this game, or if it's because it's so much harder to carry a bad team with those roles. Usually squishy dps is my worst role in these types of games.
 

scoobs

Member
With a win rate that low I'd imagine it has a little something to do with your play. Work on those roles, become a more well rounded player
 
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