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I feel like blaming Fortnite for this is a stretch. When there has just been a noticeable decrease in quality of Blizzard games since they have merged. - Hero

I feel like blaming Fortnite for this is a stretch. When there has just been a noticeable decrease in quality of Blizzard games since they have merged. - Heroes tried to to cash in on the loot box craze and from what I have seen has been very negative - Diablo has basically been ignored except for their mobile app (which went on to hurt Blizzard's reputation and just strengthen a competing game, Path of Exile) On the Activision side, there were reports that a good portion of this could be tied to support staff for Destiny 2 no longer being needed. Overwatch seems to actually be doing pretty well, and I would not be surprised if it was the only team not affected by layoffs.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Whoa there. Heroes of the Storm has, by far, hands down, the best loot box model in the industry. I'm still irritated Overwatch doesn't use it yet. And please, tell everyone you know in the game industry to steal the monetization model from Heroes. If Heroes is a failure, it's because it doesn't behave badly to try to make you spend money. Heroes hands out loot boxes like candy, I'd say you'll get three or four times as many as Overwatch. And then Heroes also adds a reroll mechanic, where for a trivial gold (currency from doing matches and in-game quests) amount, you can reroll the box up to three times. And as with Overwatch, of course, loot boxes are cosmetics only (except for the very rare hero unlock, which most people aren't getting via loot boxes anyways). I've rarely been dissatisfied with a Heroes lootbox because I can reroll it until it's good, and I've always gotten so many Heroes lootboxes I've never even felt the drive to buy any. And then in addition to the ability to use your duplicate currency to forge the exact cosmetics you want, Heroes is going to re-add direct cash purchase for all skins, so you don't need to buy loot boxes to buy skins. I've bought a number of skins over the years, but never paid for a loot box. Probably the "best" way to spend money on Heroes if you want to (though you have really no reason you have to), is you can get stim packs to increase your XP (no in-game benefit) and gold generation.
- jrockway 8y ago
  I've never been dissatisfied by Overwatch loot boxes. If I play an average amount I usually get every item. If I don't play I don't get any items. Seems fair.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I'm not trying to say Overwatch's model is bad, but that Heroes is better. I often want a couple of specific skins from a given event, and it's nearly impossible to get them on luck, and they're exceptionally cost-prohibitive via gold (especially given Overwatch's policy to triple the cost of new event skins). Additionally, countless Overwatch lootboxes are just disappointing, especially if you've been playing a while, and often see three out of four items in a box being duplicates and scoring maybe a new voice line. This often leads to a response of saying "I got crud" when opening a lootbox. The reroll mechanic in Heroes is really really nice, I've never been really "disappointed" with a loot box open, and that's after playing it pretty regularly since beta.
    - jrockway 8y ago
      Overwatch does give you a lot of duplicates. It's better than Hearthstone where you get 4 duplicate commons and a duplicate rare every time you open a pack. Yay, 30 dust! Only 1570 more until I can get that legendary I want!
      - hajile 8y ago
        I'd note that duplicates in Overwatch pay out half their value, so find 2 legendary things you already have and you can buy any one of your choice that you didn't have.
- nerdjon 8y ago
  For a loot box it is ok, but they still changed their business model completely and I know several people who are upset about it. Unless I am mistaken, they removed the ability to buy them outright (with cash, not with in game currency) outside of Loot Boxes.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    They did transition from real currency to gems for purchases like most other games already have done since the get-go, though my understanding is that the reason for that is so that Heroes can give you that currency for free without invoking various monetary laws. (So you can earn, very slowly, the ability to buy stuff that's "real money only" over time.) At least in the case of US Dollars, 1 gem is 1 cent, though, so the real value isn't obfuscated in any way. They also took out, for the most part, the ability to straight up buy skins (rather than rolling lootboxes for them), but they are reintroducing that very soon (edit: tomorrow!), it was just announced: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/t/heroes-of-the-storm-update-feb-08-2019/14370 https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/t/heroes-of-the-sto...
    - nerdjon 8y ago
      You could argue that they would not be adding this feature if there were not enough people upset about the change to begin with. Yes they brought it along the lines of many other games (however that argument is how we got Battlefront 2's loot box disaster). But it is still a major change in how the game works post launch. Something that could very realistically piss off a lot of people. The timing of this however. - 2.0 launched about a year ago - 3 or 4 months ago they announced a shift of resources away from Heroes - Now they are adding in a feature back to the game That isn't actually showing that Heroes necessarily did anything right when it came to adding loot boxes.
      - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
        You could argue that, but it would be a bad argument. :) People could not get cosmetics for free at all prior to HotS 2.0, so everyone got more stuff, for free, when HotS 2.0 launched. Originally, skins were solely relegated to people who forked over cash, for each and every item they wanted. The loot box mechanics in Heroes are, indeed, the most pleasant way one can possibly receive loot boxes, hands down. If you are going to do loot boxes, you should do loot boxes the way Heroes does loot boxes. But I do not want to buy loot boxes, the limited direct buy options actually limited how much I was spending on Heroes, as I want to buy items. And thankfully, they are going to reintroduce that option, while still maintaining the best loot box system ever made, which gives you delightful free loot boxes at extremely frequent intervals. So I can spend money to buy what I want, and still enjoy the free loot. And perhaps that's the model loot boxes will hopefully someday be moved to, once the paid gambling aspect is illegal: Just give players free stuff in loot boxes, and let them buy the stuff they really want.
- bliblah 8y ago
  As a Dota 2 player I don't understand how anyone is supposed to take that game seriously when you have to Pay to unlock heroes when the game tried to appeal to hard core competitive players (at least with a ranked ladder and the big tournament it had until recently). I am very surprised that League also gets away with this but I guess it has more to do with how these games play and who in your circle of friends play them than anything else.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    You actually can't unlock heroes with cash (unless you were to roll a LOT of lootboxes). If you're doing daily quests, you'll get enough gold to unlock heroes every week or so. This is one case where you'll be more successful unlocking by actually playing than spending money.
jrockway 8y ago
Indeed. Fortnite and Overwatch are very different types of games, though certainly some skills transfer between them. I do wonder about the software engineering practices at Blizzard. One release fixes a bug, the next release adds it back. Hearthstone very clearly has zero unit tests, because so much easily testable stuff is just broken. I think it's always been that way, though; the "Blizzard polish" is about art and sound, the code is very average in quality. (That may be the norm for the game industry, though.) Having said that, I doubt Blizzard is quite ready to give up on Overwatch. They are probably going to make quite a bit of money off of Overwatch League. But the balance changes they implement for the pro players is off-putting to casuals, so I doubt many new players will be buying the game. (Mercy and D.va were always appealing to players new to FPSes because they can contribute immediately to their team with strategy rather than raw mechanics... but both heroes have suffered nerf after nerf after nerf because OWL viewers really want to see raw aim, not someone holding up a defense matrix to save their team from that aim. I see the game in 3 years being 6 Widowmakers vs. 6 Widowmakers, because that's what pro players really want.) Hearthstone is in a pretty good place. I feel like they've stepped up their balancing a lot, and their competitor Artifact seems to have fallen flat on its face. I am guessing that their team won't see many cuts. They should hire some software engineers in test, though.
hw 8y ago
I don't think it's a stretch to blame Fortnite. It's completely changed the gaming landscape, and there's only so much gaming dollars and attention out there and a lot of it is going to Fortnite (and the new Apex Legends) that would otherwise have gone into games like CoD / BF / etc. Just take a look at the vast differences in viewers on Twitch for the different games, as well as EA and Take Two's (and likely Activision's out tomorrow) recent earnings calls which noted Fortnite as a concern for them.
bliblah 8y ago
I think it has more to do with the fact that Activision doesn't have any games that aren't Call of Duty. I was looking at their website and it's just Spyro Remastered and Crash Remastered. Destiny 1 and 2 were huge commercial successes until the players ended up hating the games and they cut Bungie loose which is really concerning if I were an investor. Blizzard meanwhile just maintains their flagship products but some are no longer growing like WoW (over a decade old but man it's time to let go) and Hearthstone (Magic Arena is making a huge push for the more competitive crowd, Gwent is struggling but is releasing new content, Artifact was a bust but valve has money to burn and no investors to please). Don't get me wrong, these games are the market leaders but they aren't growing anymore which is what investors worry about. Overwatch seems very promising but I think OWL is overvalued with franchise fees going from $20 million to $60 million in a year while CSGO; Dota 2 and League tournaments have a greater amount of viewership at a fraction of the cost. Diablo Mobile is pretty much DOA from a fan perspective but mobile games can make a ton of money especially when targeting the asian market which they have a lot of experience in. And the WarCraft 3 remake is a crowd pleaser but I can't imagine it selling like hotcakes, but I could be wrong. Again, If I were an investor I would jump ship and probably invest in another publisher.

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

Whoa there. Heroes of the Storm has, by far, hands down, the best loot box model in the industry. I'm still irritated Overwatch doesn't use it yet. And please, tell everyone you know in the game industry to steal the monetization model from Heroes. If Heroes is a failure, it's because it doesn't behave badly to try to make you spend money. Heroes hands out loot boxes like candy, I'd say you'll get three or four times as many as Overwatch. And then Heroes also adds a reroll mechanic, where for a trivial gold (currency from doing matches and in-game quests) amount, you can reroll the box up to three times. And as with Overwatch, of course, loot boxes are cosmetics only (except for the very rare hero unlock, which most people aren't getting via loot boxes anyways). I've rarely been dissatisfied with a Heroes lootbox because I can reroll it until it's good, and I've always gotten so many Heroes lootboxes I've never even felt the drive to buy any. And then in addition to the ability to use your duplicate currency to forge the exact cosmetics you want, Heroes is going to re-add direct cash purchase for all skins, so you don't need to buy loot boxes to buy skins. I've bought a number of skins over the years, but never paid for a loot box. Probably the "best" way to spend money on Heroes if you want to (though you have really no reason you have to), is you can get stim packs to increase your XP (no in-game benefit) and gold generation.

jrockway 8y ago
I've never been dissatisfied by Overwatch loot boxes. If I play an average amount I usually get every item. If I don't play I don't get any items. Seems fair.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  I'm not trying to say Overwatch's model is bad, but that Heroes is better. I often want a couple of specific skins from a given event, and it's nearly impossible to get them on luck, and they're exceptionally cost-prohibitive via gold (especially given Overwatch's policy to triple the cost of new event skins). Additionally, countless Overwatch lootboxes are just disappointing, especially if you've been playing a while, and often see three out of four items in a box being duplicates and scoring maybe a new voice line. This often leads to a response of saying "I got crud" when opening a lootbox. The reroll mechanic in Heroes is really really nice, I've never been really "disappointed" with a loot box open, and that's after playing it pretty regularly since beta.
  - jrockway 8y ago
    Overwatch does give you a lot of duplicates. It's better than Hearthstone where you get 4 duplicate commons and a duplicate rare every time you open a pack. Yay, 30 dust! Only 1570 more until I can get that legendary I want!
    - hajile 8y ago
      I'd note that duplicates in Overwatch pay out half their value, so find 2 legendary things you already have and you can buy any one of your choice that you didn't have.
nerdjon 8y ago
For a loot box it is ok, but they still changed their business model completely and I know several people who are upset about it. Unless I am mistaken, they removed the ability to buy them outright (with cash, not with in game currency) outside of Loot Boxes.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  They did transition from real currency to gems for purchases like most other games already have done since the get-go, though my understanding is that the reason for that is so that Heroes can give you that currency for free without invoking various monetary laws. (So you can earn, very slowly, the ability to buy stuff that's "real money only" over time.) At least in the case of US Dollars, 1 gem is 1 cent, though, so the real value isn't obfuscated in any way. They also took out, for the most part, the ability to straight up buy skins (rather than rolling lootboxes for them), but they are reintroducing that very soon (edit: tomorrow!), it was just announced: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/t/heroes-of-the-storm-update-feb-08-2019/14370 https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/t/heroes-of-the-sto...
  - nerdjon 8y ago
    You could argue that they would not be adding this feature if there were not enough people upset about the change to begin with. Yes they brought it along the lines of many other games (however that argument is how we got Battlefront 2's loot box disaster). But it is still a major change in how the game works post launch. Something that could very realistically piss off a lot of people. The timing of this however. - 2.0 launched about a year ago - 3 or 4 months ago they announced a shift of resources away from Heroes - Now they are adding in a feature back to the game That isn't actually showing that Heroes necessarily did anything right when it came to adding loot boxes.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      You could argue that, but it would be a bad argument. :) People could not get cosmetics for free at all prior to HotS 2.0, so everyone got more stuff, for free, when HotS 2.0 launched. Originally, skins were solely relegated to people who forked over cash, for each and every item they wanted. The loot box mechanics in Heroes are, indeed, the most pleasant way one can possibly receive loot boxes, hands down. If you are going to do loot boxes, you should do loot boxes the way Heroes does loot boxes. But I do not want to buy loot boxes, the limited direct buy options actually limited how much I was spending on Heroes, as I want to buy items. And thankfully, they are going to reintroduce that option, while still maintaining the best loot box system ever made, which gives you delightful free loot boxes at extremely frequent intervals. So I can spend money to buy what I want, and still enjoy the free loot. And perhaps that's the model loot boxes will hopefully someday be moved to, once the paid gambling aspect is illegal: Just give players free stuff in loot boxes, and let them buy the stuff they really want.
bliblah 8y ago
As a Dota 2 player I don't understand how anyone is supposed to take that game seriously when you have to Pay to unlock heroes when the game tried to appeal to hard core competitive players (at least with a ranked ladder and the big tournament it had until recently). I am very surprised that League also gets away with this but I guess it has more to do with how these games play and who in your circle of friends play them than anything else.
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  You actually can't unlock heroes with cash (unless you were to roll a LOT of lootboxes). If you're doing daily quests, you'll get enough gold to unlock heroes every week or so. This is one case where you'll be more successful unlocking by actually playing than spending money.

jrockway 8y ago

Indeed. Fortnite and Overwatch are very different types of games, though certainly some skills transfer between them. I do wonder about the software engineering practices at Blizzard. One release fixes a bug, the next release adds it back. Hearthstone very clearly has zero unit tests, because so much easily testable stuff is just broken. I think it's always been that way, though; the "Blizzard polish" is about art and sound, the code is very average in quality. (That may be the norm for the game industry, though.) Having said that, I doubt Blizzard is quite ready to give up on Overwatch. They are probably going to make quite a bit of money off of Overwatch League. But the balance changes they implement for the pro players is off-putting to casuals, so I doubt many new players will be buying the game. (Mercy and D.va were always appealing to players new to FPSes because they can contribute immediately to their team with strategy rather than raw mechanics... but both heroes have suffered nerf after nerf after nerf because OWL viewers really want to see raw aim, not someone holding up a defense matrix to save their team from that aim. I see the game in 3 years being 6 Widowmakers vs. 6 Widowmakers, because that's what pro players really want.) Hearthstone is in a pretty good place. I feel like they've stepped up their balancing a lot, and their competitor Artifact seems to have fallen flat on its face. I am guessing that their team won't see many cuts. They should hire some software engineers in test, though.

hw 8y ago

I don't think it's a stretch to blame Fortnite. It's completely changed the gaming landscape, and there's only so much gaming dollars and attention out there and a lot of it is going to Fortnite (and the new Apex Legends) that would otherwise have gone into games like CoD / BF / etc. Just take a look at the vast differences in viewers on Twitch for the different games, as well as EA and Take Two's (and likely Activision's out tomorrow) recent earnings calls which noted Fortnite as a concern for them.

bliblah 8y ago

I think it has more to do with the fact that Activision doesn't have any games that aren't Call of Duty. I was looking at their website and it's just Spyro Remastered and Crash Remastered. Destiny 1 and 2 were huge commercial successes until the players ended up hating the games and they cut Bungie loose which is really concerning if I were an investor. Blizzard meanwhile just maintains their flagship products but some are no longer growing like WoW (over a decade old but man it's time to let go) and Hearthstone (Magic Arena is making a huge push for the more competitive crowd, Gwent is struggling but is releasing new content, Artifact was a bust but valve has money to burn and no investors to please). Don't get me wrong, these games are the market leaders but they aren't growing anymore which is what investors worry about. Overwatch seems very promising but I think OWL is overvalued with franchise fees going from $20 million to $60 million in a year while CSGO; Dota 2 and League tournaments have a greater amount of viewership at a fraction of the cost. Diablo Mobile is pretty much DOA from a fan perspective but mobile games can make a ton of money especially when targeting the asian market which they have a lot of experience in. And the WarCraft 3 remake is a crowd pleaser but I can't imagine it selling like hotcakes, but I could be wrong. Again, If I were an investor I would jump ship and probably invest in another publisher.