Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Huge shout out to the developers of Heroes of the Storm for their relentless improvement of the game.

I was a huge Dota 2 player back in the day (my most colorful time spending over 1000+ hours playing the game in a span of eight months after finishing high school) and was invited to the alpha/beta of HotS back when it was available. While I thought the game had a wonderful opening cinematic, it just didn't grab me much at all. At this time I had already stopped playing Dota 2 due to the pressures of playing on teams and having schedules (enrolled in College at that time) so I wasn't too keen on playing another Moba, even if it was a shorter, more simple one.

I remember thinking that the game felt rather generic too, even with using so many iconic Blizzard characters. Many of the maps fell flat for me, and many of the early skins weren't appealing to me. Got to around level 10 and stopped playing.

However, the Genji skin brought me back to the game, and I figured I would just play the 15 games and be on my way. The sheer amount of new content and characters, UI changes, and balance changes really floored me. Myself and many others considered HotS to be the failure of modern recent Blizzard games, but I was actually having a lot of fun with the game going through my 15 games. Characters like the Butcher, Xul, Morales, they all feel so raw and fun in a satisfying way. My 15 games turned to 30 and now I've found myself buying a few of those bundles in the store (some of those deals are way too good to pass up), leveling a bunch of characters to five so that I can play ranked, eager to play more of the game. Its really ignited my love of the genre, and the games are much shorter than your average moba to fit with my busier schedule too. Just now I played a game that was incredibly close and exciting, many huge frantic fights being won thanks to our duo of healers. Gives me the same feeling I had back in the day when I'd play Dota 2 all night with my friends.

It's now my slightly unpopular opinion among friends that the developers for HotS are some of the best Blizzard has right now in terms of how frequently they release content for their game and how well they balance it, but I never hear anyone but the HotS community agree with this. While HotS may not be recognized as much as Blizzard's other games, I wanted to give ya'll a shout out for what you've managed to achieve with the game. It really is fantastic.

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