On the eSports Failure of Heroes of the Storm
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. I was one of 18,000 viewers on Twitch. By comparison League of Legends had about 80,000 viewers at that same time, even though there was no LoL event going on. Overwatch had over 100,000 viewers.
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. 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. 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. Many commentators were understandably bullish that HoTS would quickly overtake League of Legends and Dota 2 and become the dominant MOBA. That optimism, however, ignored the serious design issues that made Heroes of the Storm a poor fit for competitive play.
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.
Left: Blizzcon Championship viewers. Right: League of Legends Championship viewers - on the Riot Game Turkish channel.
Lack of Storylines
Sports are about stories. 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. (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. eSports are no different - the best eSports games regularly produce stories of matches, seasons and careers. 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.
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. 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. This makes a variety of familiar stories impossible to tell: that of the player who struggles in the early portion of the game then makes a dramatic comeback and puts the team on their back, or that of the player who dominates early then falls off as the victory slips away. Or, over a longer period of time, that of the player who dominates in the regular season only to choke in the playoffs, or of the clutch player who turns it on in playoffs. In Heroes of the Storm there is no formalized notion of a good player vs a bad one or a good individual performance vs a poor one, only of a good team vs a bad one. While it's possible to observe that a player is playing well or poorly that observation is not backed by any stats and is not surfaced by the UI - it is effectively anecdotal, a short mental history of "they made some good plays here and here.”
It's hard to compare opposing players due to a lack of meaningful stats, but a lack of real laning phase also plays a part. In LoL and Dota 2 a significant portion of the game is spent with players arranged opposite each other in lanes, making for easy per-lane comparisons - in mid Team A's player is outplaying Team B's, but at bottom lane Team B's duo is outperforming Team A's. Even without careful, evident stat tracking it's clear when one laner is dominating another. But in Heroes of the Storm the laning phase is, for a variety of reasons, somewhere between less important and non-existent. Access to teleportation and healing wells makes it very hard to die in lane without being ganked and reduces the penalty for playing poorly in lane. Access to mounts for fast travel makes rotating between lanes quick. And the lack of individual XP or gold earned through last-hitting means there’s low opportunity cost to traveling between lanes as long as one player is left to “soak” XP. These factors combined makes comparison of opposing laners rarely worthwhile, as lanes are largely decided by the outside influence of roaming gank squads. And with HoTS' increased emphasis on map objectives the the importance of laning is greatly reduced; some maps - like Eternal Conflict, in which players battle to defeat enemy titans while protecting their own - have essentially no laning at all.
Without a way to assess individual performance even a story as simple as “this player started poorly but is now doing well” is hard to tell.
Imagine watching a professional sport with no individual stats - instead of individual ERAs a pitching roster only has a team ERA, and instead of individual batting average or home runs hit the hitting lineup only has team averages. In that ludicrous scenario Lou Gehrig, who in 1927 hit .373 with 47 home runs, was no better than Joe Dugan, a player on that same team you’ve never heard of, who hit .269 with 2 home runs. Using the HoTS philosophy you can only say the same thing about both players: they both played on a pretty good team.
Game Length vs Total Time, or Why It's Just Kind of Tedious to Watch Competitive HoTS Events
Watching competitive HoTS you see an awful lot of this.
As will be a recurring theme in this piece, game length is another design decision that caters to casual while knee-capping competitive. Heroes of the Storm games are short, which goes a long way towards making it more "accessible." When you queue up for a League of Legends or Dota 2 game you know that the game will often take at least half an hour, and can take up to an hour or more. In Dota 2 Cloud 9 and SFZ played a competitive game that went for more than 3 hours - it went on for so long that the game began to entertainingly break down, spawning random FX and graphical corruption while the casters slowly lost their minds. HoTS games are reliably over in 25 minutes or so. While this is great for a player looking to get in, play a game and get out, it's not so great when spectating a competitive event, as shorter game times decrease the ratio of in-game action to filler.
All competitive MOBA matches begin with a pick/ban phase, which while sometimes interesting is often rote, and at the very least is not the meat of the game. And competitive MOBA matches have breaks between games., which can often be extended due to technical, production or mystery issues. The time these two things take have an effectively fixed lower bound and a high upper bound. Short game times mean that these fixed, non-gameplay portions take up a large percentage of the viewing experience. This would be a problem even if the in-game action were a joy to spectate, but it's a critical problem when the in-game action is less spectator-friendly than comparable games and there's also a lower density of in-game time.
Hard for Spectators to Follow
Roll up your sleeves because we’re going in deep!
During the Blizzcon Championships two teams grouped up and headed towards each other. One team was a few levels ahead in XP and up to that point had been dominating team fights, so as the two teams met the casters expected the winning team to keep winning. They didn’t - they lost the fight badly. As a spectator I had no real idea why the team with the significant advantage lost. The casters, who are ostensibly experts, had this to say: “What just happened?” “I have no idea!”
It’s common for viewers new to MOBAs to have trouble following large battles, but I’m not new to MOBAs and it’s the caster’s jobs to be able to follow along. Yet I find in Heroes of the Storm I often don’t understand what exactly is happening or why - and the casters often don’t either. Two teams clump up, ram into each other, and one emerges victorious for difficult-to-explain reasons.
HoTS action feels hard to follow, especially given that the game is supposed to be more accessible and casual-friendly. In large part this is because the action is hard to follow in a strictly literal visual sense - it’s often next to impossible to see what’s happening thanks to a game design that makes poor use of available screen real-estate, concentrating characters and visual FX in a small portion of the screen while the rest goes unused.
In HoTS characters are relatively fat compared to the map size - in League of Legends a lane is roughly 10 character widths across; in HoTS lanes are often 2 or 3 character widths. In HoTS abilities ranges are typically much shorter. Compare for example Muradin’s ranged stun in HoTS to Morgana’s snare in League of Legends - they are pictured below, with red arrows drawn in to make their ranges clearer.
The prosecution presents Exhibit A, Muradin from Heroes of the Storm first, Morgana from League of Legends second.
Relatively fat characters and short ranges on abilities mean that team fights often consist of characters elbow to elbow, leaving large portions of the screen unused. As another example here's a comparison between two other similar abilities in Heroes of the Storm and League of Legends - ETC's "Mosh Pit" vs Galio's "Idol of Durand", both AOE taunts (more or less) centered on the caster. Once again I've added a red overlay to better indicate range.
The prosecution presents Exhibit B. (Full disclosure - the paragraph above mistakenly referred to ETC as EMC, which is an enterprise storage solutions company and not in fact the name of a Heroes of the Storm character)
As you can see, the screen-space range of the LoL ability is double or more that of the HoTS ability, a common pattern when comparing the two games, which leads to tightly packed teamfights.
League of Legends and Dota 2 spectator modes now include the ability to zoom out farther than is allowed in-game as team fights often take place over a wide range. These fights tend to have a lot of visual separation, making it easy to spot individual ability uses, clutch dodges, etc. This separation can make it hard to take in the entire team fight in one go as there are pockets of activity spread out over a large screen area, but on first viewing the action in the part of the screen the viewer is focused on is clear, and replays can elucidate the rest.
In Heroes of the St
