by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

The recent Heroes of the Storm patch brought with it two very contentious additions: Murky and anti-snowballing measures. There’s been a lot of discussion as to whether or not either are healthy for the young game, and the developers have not been ignoring the discussion. Both Senior Game Designer Richard Khoo and Game Director Dustin Browder took the time to comment on the pair of problems.

Browder on anti-snowballing measures:

Good discussion! Here is our current thinking: 

We think that if you are 3 levels up you have, in a sense, won the leveling game. At that point, you’ve proven yourself in that area. We’re not sure it makes sense to be 6 levels up; that’s not the kind of fun we want for either team and probably represents a failure of our match-maker. 

We do not believe the game should get to the point where one team finds the game to be unwinnable. So we are capping how far ahead you can get to 3-4 levels by giving out more “trickle” XP to the team that is behind as well as more XP for killing enemy heroes that are higher level than you. Generally the level split will stop at 3. 3 levels is far enough ahead that you have a definite advantage but you are not in an auto-win situation. We are very aware that this is not how other games in the genre function. 

Once you have “won” the leveling game you want to keep that advantage but you want to also focus on winning in other areas of the game as well (objectives, mercenaries, destroying towns). 

In general we think this change makes the game more competitive. You can never really relax, you cannot slack off because you got an early lead. You need to always be on top of your game and pushing to win, because now even a team you’ve initially out-leveled can come back as a contender if you get sloppy. 

That’s our current thinking anyway. But it’s Alpha and we could be wrong. We can and will change stuff. Your discussion on this challenging topic is appreciated as always.

Khoo on Murky:

When we released Murky we wanted to introduce new styles of gameplay that players have not traditionally seen in this gamespace before. The most straightforward Murky playstyle is Pufferfish base harassment. This build is very similar to say, a Warp Prism warp-in attack in StarCraft 2. Countering that strategy effectively requires strategy and tactics that are new to most players. Ideally, your team sends just one person to take out Murky. I have seen a lot of teams overcommitting to kill Murky and spend too much time trying to find Murky’s egg. Oofa. But, that brings me to my next point!

We want one of the many ways to counter Murky to be finding his egg, destroy it, then destroy Murky. However, in practice, finding the egg is difficult. We believe that in time, players will learn the common Murky egg spots through fighting Murky enough or playing as Murky and seeing the battleground through his eyes. In my experience, some battlegrounds are more difficult than others for Murky to hide his egg. Blackheart’s Bay has very few nooks and crannies to hide my egg unlike say, Cursed Hollow, where there are plenty of spots. Understanding how Murky plays and intuitively knowing where to look and/or actively using scouting abilities to find the egg are tactics that are new and players have yet to master.

One of the ideas we were kicking around internally was to further incentivize hunting Murky’s egg was to reveal Murky if his egg is killed for some period of time, like say, 10 seconds. That makes it so putting Murky down after finding his egg more feasible. We also feel that because Murky could be “alive” so often, his ability to harass with March of the Murlocs was too strong against unguarded structures. So, we are taking a look into that balance as well. The goal is to keep that moment as awesome as possible, though.

Edit – Trikslyr’s grammar pass :>

While both are definitely defending the team’s visions, it’s clear they’re making considerations based on player feedback.