by JR Cook - 7 years ago     show comments

Welcome everyone, Alan Dabiri, Travis McGeathy and Matthew Cooper join us for the Heroes of the Storm What’s Next panel. They’ll be covering upcoming changes.

First off a 2017 recap, they lead off with the Heroes 2.0 release, mentioning that it player engagement was at an all time high at that release. They continue on about the 2 maps, the first being Hanamura. They comment about it bringing a new game play mechanic, in payloads, they continue on how that map didn’t exactly work out and they plan on bringing it back bigger and better. A single “Yay” penetrates the silence. They talk about Volskaya and there being another piloted objective.

Beyond the battlegrounds they continue about the 15 new heroes they’ve brought to the game. They continue on about bringing Hanzo and Alexstrazza to the game. It seems Hanzo will be coming first and will be the 75th hero to be released.

They move onto reworks (NOTE: CHEN ISN’T ON THE LIST) and the 16 heroes they’ve done full reworks for. They move onto 59 different heroes with balance changes. They note that take heavily take community feedback into consideration when doing balances and reworks.

They go into an anatomy of a release and how this varies from release to release. Not that sometimes new battlegrounds sometimes get overshadowed by a new hero. They now talk about how they begin to spread this content out a bit better now than a giant patch all at once in various ways.

They now move onto Travis to talk about some of the new stuff coming to the game. Opens with some interesting stats. Talks about item crafting, and the top 5 items crafted is:

Now they change the data and put into the most shards total used and we get:

Now moving into new things, first off target panel info. Allowing you to see more info on your targets.

Next up is Heroes in Hiding, like showing who’s in a cocoon, who’s in a maw, or who’s in a Dragon Knight.

Now is Voice Chat, they’re intergrating Blizzard Voice directly into the game. They want to make communication as easy as possible. The default opt in rather than opt out. It will be coming to servers over the next few months.

Next up is Performance Based Matchmaking. They’ll be improving it by taking into account an individual player’s performance when doing MMR adjustments. Currently the system tries to match players by their current MMR, and attempts to match players by close MMRs. Admits its a challenge to do this accurately given that Heroes is a team based game. They’ve added many data hooks that have shown up in things like MVP, Stats, and the On Fire system. It also slices these stats up by region and map.

They show a few examples here, Illidan starts it off by using damage dealt, xp soak, dying infrequently, and number of camps taken, they note a good Illidan and a bad Illidan, these numbers will vary greatly.

They bring kerrigan as the next example, using 3 of the same four metrics and note that there’s not that much of a difference in the 3 catagories. However, the 4th catagory, Crowd Control is the difference that seperates good and bad Kerrigans.

You’ll still lose MMR with a loss, but now it won’t be as much if you are overperforming in your games. Notes that the system has been constantly been updating these new ranking.

They show some an example, a master level player taking a broze 5 account and running it up to master tier. The difference is staggering, under the new metrics a player would have reached master much faster than under the old system. Almost twice as fast. This also stops griefing and smurf stomping as smurfs will exit out of the early ranks of MMR quicker and quicker. (screen shot). They’ll be automating this in the future to punish players who are obviously griefing. They’re looking to roll this new system out with the new ranked system in december.

We now turn to Matthew who will be talking about new content and how the game is constantly evolving. They’re going to be releasing what will be called the 2018 Core Gameplay Update. Talks about some of this being covered in the Opening Ceremony. They move into talking about the new camera. The mentioned the camera feels a little clasutrophobic in 5v5 team fights. They wanted to re-evauluate the camera and everything. Talks about Performance vs Visability, if they note that if they pull the camera up too much it affects performance.

They start off with the old camera in a camera at first. Then move into the new camera, showing Chromie off to the side, letting people see more of the battle field.

Next they move onto stealth heroes, noting they are actually popular heroes in quickmatch. They’ve made Stealth heroes a little easier to see. They show another example, of Jaina, and show the old stealth heroes and how hard they are to see, commenting its akin to an eye test. They show the new stealth shader, and show that stealth heroes totally vanish if they stop moving.

They’re doing a few updates to heroes, starting with Nova, new active to put herself into stealth, 15% move speed while stealthed, and snipe master is now baselined but snipe base damage is reduced. We’ll cover more with the Deep Dive panel tomorrow.

Next up is Lane Updates, they dislike that the laning phase ends so quickly. One of the fixes they talk about ammunition and how they don’t like how quickly ammo drains from structures, they wanted to see if they could fix it. Now all towers have infinite ammo. They want players to get meaningful damage and not let creeps just autopush into things. Changes to fortifications are incoming as well.

First up is the “Stand Alone Tower” note that these aren’t very meaningful and can be a detriment to defenders. So they’re gone. No adjustment, they’re just deleted them. Notes that Volskaya has this change. They want to pass that missing health onto the other structures.

Note that Murky and Aba actually used these towers for defense, so to makeup for that they’ve given all Forts and Keeps Truesight, which will reveal any stealthies.

Next up is regen globes. They love regen globes and what they do for the game and want to see if they can do more for the game. Regen globes will now last for 4 seconds and then shift into a “neutral state” where either team can pick them up for 4 seconds.

Next up is Map Mechanics. They wanted to see what changes they could make to lane heavy maps like Dragonshire, Braxis, and Tomb, not that the map objectives are built into the map. Not that some maps pull you out of lane, like Temple, Cursed, and Shrines. They wanted to reevaluate how quickly those maps pull you out of lane, their solution was to push back the map objectives to give people more time to lane fight. Some other changes, they’re going to simplify timers, so players have to learn less times. So now there are two rule sets, 1:30 vs 3:00. They’re providing earlier information, maybe even show where the next shrine or tribute will spawn before the timer pops up. They do still want variation still, but still want info ahead of time.

They definitely don’t want to increase the length of game, which is around 20 minutes. Notes that with all the internal testing there hasn’t been an increased game length.

Next up is Merc Camps and reinforcing them, which are admittely lackluster, especially with the recent ammo changes. Knight camps are mentioned and the wizard merc will emit a spell armor aura. Hellbats will reduce armor that will stack, also Siege Giants now telegraph attacks, also you can dodge Siege Giant attacks while capturing them in the jungle.

They’re talking about the timeline, talked about the community summit that happened recently, now mentioning blizzcon up next, and now talking end of november talking about the extended 3 week PTR and then the rolling the changes live with the new ranked season in december.

Now onto Q&A:

Question 1: Will Duo Queue in Hero League come back?

Answer: Nope. Not at this time.

Question 2: Will McCree have his cigar if he comes to the nexus? If not, will Tychus get his cigar back?

Answer: We’ll give Tychus McCree’s cigar.

Question 3: 4k resolution messes up emojis, they come out super tiny, will this get fixed?

Answer: Yes.

Question 4: Are you guys planning on personal commendations ala Dota 2 with the eventual release of voice chat?

Answer: Its something we’re pursuing.

Question 5: Wants to know if things like converyer belts will be coming out.

Answer: Maybe, team is always looking for ideas.

Question 6: With Stand Alone Towers gone, will the healing well positioning get adjusted.

Answer: Perhaps, but not much priority on it.

Question 7: Will there be a LoL Style queue finder?

Answer: No, we kinda want Quick Match to be something like the Wild West. We’re making minor tweaks, but we feel by and large is fine.

That wraps the panel up. Thanks for joining us everyone.