I've played the game on and off casually for several years as a comfort food kind of thing, my take on the game kinda soured after the introduction of lootboxes with 90% deliberate garbage bloat in them, instead of just paying for the cosmetics you wanted outright. But I still kept playing for a good while even tho the economy of it clearly became more exploitative.
Unfortunately on the back of that came a lot of map changes that kind of homogenized the whole game more and more. And heroes reworks that more often then not did not appeal on personal level. And then there were the new characters. I've noticed more and more that after getting the next new character I simply dropped them after a few games, they just did not appeal and failed to hold my interest. To the point where eventually it just became unreasonable to buy new heroes if i wasn't going to play them. Which lead to the obvious dropping of the game on my part in the first half of this year.
Honestly they also I felt like just burned out releasing as many new heroes as they did at a kind of breakneck pace, and I feel their overall quality and mechanical diversity suffered as a result.
The biggest tell in this news is not so much that they are moving some dev people (and blah blah PR messaging that it will kept getting new stuff), as it's that they are going to be closing the book on their main e-sports events. Not because HoTS is amazing esport or anything but because a very significant portion of the HoTS streamers come from that scene, they are either pro or semi pro player current or retired or whatever. There are a few entertaining personalities that do not play professionally, I'd even say the best ones are such; but there is a huge chunk of this games streamers from that esports scene; so if Blizzard is stopping further support of that, well, those people are going to start scattering; and less people streaming is going to significantly impact HoTs numbers and longevity I feel as it's not that massive of a player base to begin with.
And not just that, an address like that itself will start streamers abandoning ship and reevaluating what they spend their time on instead of HoTS, people gotta live. many of them were already scraping by, with some moving away. If Blizzard themselves aren't making enough money on the game to keep it fully spun up as before, why would other subsidiaries right. And multiplayer viewer based games like HoTS these days are so significantly based on how many are watching them, which also drives more people to keep playing them. It's a vicious spiral that I feel like Blizzard just sped up by x10 with a post like that.
So I guess what I'm saying is: RIP
(actually a similar reason I dropped Hearthstone too, overly aggressive, random nature, driven monetisation scheme; coupled afterwards to not feeling the games direction, kinda just gives the perfect excuse to quit then and there)
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