#322 - Into the Nexus: “Building a Better Anomaly”
• Garrett • Kyle • NotParadox or Guest
Tracking Link:
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/
Sponsors:
Our Patrons support Into the Nexus at Patreon.com/ITN. If you enjoy the show consider supporting it with 25 cents, a dollar, or however you would like! We thank all our Patrons for their support!
Intro: Welcome to Into the Nexus! The Heroes of the Storm podcast!
Lessons From CCL
- My Yrel got banned!
- Mewn is nice
- Mal’ganis is First Pick Status
- Anybody and Everybody should be able to play Johanna
- Right click forts until they are dead. Don’t touch the enemy or the lane.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/627165637
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL4FtEu7858ge-iSrQQuucL223_hdaFmP
Patreon Mention: Patreon.com/ITN
Thanks to our Patreon producers Declan H, CheezyBob, Chris K, Mike C., and Eric C.
Don’t forget
Patron Thanks Doc for keeping track
- Doctor Jalapeño
- Patrick Cullen
Bonanza next week!
News
The Heroes Team Wants Your Feedback
- The Design team is trying to decide on “what to do with the Call for Help Nexus Anomaly”
- This lead to a REALLY long post on the official forums
- They like the Core changes
- “This article will be focused solely on the more controversial changes that were made to Towers, Forts, and Keeps”
- If you want to hear a lot about the history of structure aggro and what lead to the current anomaly read Jackson’s post in full.
What We Like
- We believe we succeeded in Towers feeling smarter as a defending player. They “feel” like they’re doing what they should be
- We believe we’ve created cool, high-tension moments when enemy Heroes dive under a Tower. We also like how attackers have some ability to manipulate who gets the Tower aggro to make intelligent, coordinated plays. We believe this can be even better with improvements in the future
- The combination on our end of being able to manipulate Tower damage and the stacking Armor debuff gives us a lot of room to manipulate exactly how we want these interactions to feel going forward, and gives us good tuning knobs to decide how much defensive power is from the Tower itself or from the nearby enemy Heroes who are there to defend it
Issues With The Current System
- We believe Towers are currently too punishing to consistently create the cool, high-tension moments we described above. They currently hit too hard to make those moments happen as often or as long as we’d like them to.
- Many players don’t like how much they have to change their behavior when near enemy Towers, particularly the ones near the Gates, mainly due to splash damage inadvertently causing Towers to attack them.
- A lot of the map is now more dangerous than before, making it less possible to fight enemy Heroes, particularly in the early game. This exacerbates issues we already have with our desire to make the laning phase of the game more interesting
- When too powerful (which we believe it currently is), it disincentivizes players from pushing with their map objectives, which can make those moments feel less awesome
- Some players just like the way things have been for years, and don’t want such a large change to a fundamental aspect of the game. While not a commanding reason to never make changes, it is something we always try to keep in mind, and why we think the bar needs to be high in order to keep these kinds of fundamental changes to game systems
Change all structures to prioritize Map Objectives before anything else
Pros
- It would fix players not wanting to push with Map Objectives
Cons
- It adds another rule that can be unintuitive for the defending players since they will not always be defended by their Towers, only most of the time, which can be confusing and goes against the primary goal of Towers “feeling” smart in how they work
- Towers don’t defend their teammates in the moments of the game when they need them most
Change Tower aggro so that the front Towers prioritize Minions, but the Forts, Keeps, and Kings Core prioritize Heroes who attack other Heroes
Pros
- The early game would better reward aggression and pushing, and less of the map would be as dangerous as it currently is with the new system
- Players could attack gates without feeling like their splash damage could get them into trouble
Cons
- It adds complexity to the game with two different Aggro rules depending on the Structure
Lower the damage that Structures do to Heroes
Pros
- Towers won’t be as directly threatening themselves, which mitigates the issue of them being too punishing in the early game
- Players will have more time to be aggressive with Tower diving and less immediately punished when Towers initially start to shoot them
- It puts the onus of properly defending towns more on the defending team, which incentivizes interaction between heroes
Cons
- It makes Towers weaker, which could result in Tower diving being too prevalent.
Links
Bombas
Bombas makes the most comfortable socks in the history of feet.
They’ve literally re-thought every little detail of the socks we wear to make them way more comfortable.
I wear them every day, and...[IN YOUR OWN WORDS describe how you are enjoying your Bombas socks and what you love about them i.e. style, comfort, quality, etc.]
- But these socks do more than keep feet cozy. They help give back to the most vulnerable members of our community.
- Because for every pair of socks you purchase, Bombas donates a pair to someone in need. The generosity of Bombas customers has allowed them to donate over 34 million pairs of socks and counting through their nationwide network of 3000+ giving partners.
- And the impact is more powerful than ever. To those experiencing homelessness, these socks represent the dignity of putting on clean clothes—a small comfort that’s especially important right now.
CALL TO ACTION:
Give a pair when you buy a pair, and get twenty percent off your first purchase at Bombas dot com slash nexus. That’s B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash nexus
Two Week Check In
Reworks
Buffs
- Artanis - Up .1%
- Dehaka - Up 2.3%
- Imperius - Up 2.1%
- Ragnaros - Down 3.0%
- Anduin - 0%
- Brightwing - up 2.43%
- Deckard - Up 2 .9%
- Alarak - Up 2.4%
- Chromie - Up .5%
- Jaina - Down 1.6%
- Li Ming - Down 1.3%
- Orphea - Up 6.22%
- Probius - Up .7% or down 5%
- Tassadar - Up 6.8%
Nerfs
- Deathwing - Down 1.5%
- Xul - Down 3.9%
Links
Force 50% According to AZJackson
- “The forced 50% win rate discussion is weird and complicated because it’s both true and not true at the same time”
- What forced 50% ISN’T
- “Forced 50% isn’t the matchmaker putting potatoes on your team because you had a win streak.”
- It’s difficult enough to find good games. They’d never program the system to intentionally mathmake poorly.
- They want every match to be between the most equally skilled players possible.
- They believe these are the most fun games to play. So that’s what the matchmaker tries to do.
- The matchmaker assigns MMR as a measure of a player’s skill.
- It tries to find games where each team has as close to an average MMR as possible
- MMR is based solely on whether you win or lose. “Nothing else.”
- “someday we may find improvements in the future in how MMR is calculated, but there are many good reasons for this and almost every game uses this kind of system to determine player skill.”
- “ The 50% win rate of those players isn’t the matchmaker punishing those who have win or loss streaks, it’s just a natural consequence of the matchmaker working properly.”
- “In real life it’s not quite so cut and dry since every player doesn’t have exactly the same MMR, but the fundamentals still hold true. As you win games, your MMR gets higher, which means that you will get into games with higher and higher skilled players until you hit your “ceiling”, where you start to lose games because you are the worst person in the game and bring your team down. Conversely, as you lose lots of games your MMR goes down until you eventually get into games where you are the best person on your team.”
- “The matchmaker getting you to a 50% win rate is a natural consequence of the matchmaker finding where you, over a long period of time, actually belong.”
The end paragraph is my favorite and a great explanation of human behavior.
“Keep in mind also that even 10+ win and loss streak games are perfectly natural in the realm of statistics, even when the true chance of something is 50%. These win and loss streaks are often what people point to as proof that something’s broken, which is simply not true. If you were to flip a coin 10,000 you would not get heads, then tails, then heads, then tails again over and over. Over those 10,000 times you would get each result half the time overall, but you would see streaks of getting heads or tails. This is also true for players who are at their appropriate MMR but still get streaks. It’s not that the matchmaker is broken, it’s just how things are. Also keep in mind that people have good and bad days, and sometimes decide to throw or to try extra hard to win. These behavior changes on an individual game level are impossible to predict and account for, which is why some games, even when they should be evenly matched, can still easily be blowouts.”
This is just scratching the surface of how these things work, but again, for a TL:DR:
- The idea that the matchmaker forces you to win or lose after having streaks is completely false
- Having a 50% win rate over time does happen and is “true” in that it’s the result of the matchmaker finding your proper place in the game over time
Links
Bans and Warnings issued over Imperius Bug
Warnings and 7 day bans
Links
Method is going to host a Heroes Tournament
SC2 pro DeMuslim recently joined Method. In a tweet announcing a StarCraft 2 tournament, they also announced that they’ll be putting on a Warcraft 3 and Heroes of the Storm tournament.
“With @DeMusliM joining Method, you knew it was just a matter of time before we got a @StarCraft 2 tournament going! And because we spoil you, Method Mayhem @Warcraft3 and @HeroesEsports are also incoming!”
Links
Emails
Kestle
Was a much bigger email. Heavy heavy editing. Bold and blue the main statements.
Thanks dude. Killer job working this down.
With the latest “reworks” of Tracer and Cassia, I feel that the developers mentality towards reworks needs to be looked at more harshly by the HOTS community as a whole.
Reworks are morally spineless and more often than not are a greater “debit of good will” than they are a “deposit of good will” as AZ Jackson would put it. I strongly oppose changing heroes to make them more playable by new players or by people unwilling to learn how a character works.
- Zagara taken down to only 3 talents a tier
- Kharazim - Echo of Heaven taken from 7 to 16
- Sylvanas
- Nazeebo
- Tyrande
- Malfurion - now a skill shot hero
- Abathur
- Azmodan
- Murky
- And now Cassia, Tracer and Tassadar
Essentially with Cassia, Tracer, and even Tassadar, the developers took the easy road to create new heroes. Tassadar is no longer a support hero with his shields. He is now an assassin, which makes him an entirely unique hero from the Tassadar that existed before the 2.50.0 update.
They just call these reworks, when in reality they are putting a 2020 engine in a vintage car. Instead of investing the time and effort to create a new hero that the community would embrace with open arms, they decided that the people who love these heroes are less valuable than those who refuse to spend the time and effort to learn and appreciate this world that the developers have created. I fully understand that Blizzard, especially the HOTS team, has suffered major casualties in the last year or so. But turning one hero into another hero and calling it a rework seems dishonest not only to the community but also to themselves and their hard work at best.
You mentioned during your episode covering this patch that people become hero mains because the heroes they main are niche. This I feel is, well was, the beauty of HOTS. At the beginning, HOTS was much more like Pathfinder where you could be whatever you wanted and pick any class and tool them how it worked for you. Now it seems that Blizzard has gone more towards the D&D 5e way of thinking and limiting us to very scripted cut and dry choices. There are so many heroes that are approachable for new players. Why must every hero be playable by new players?
Why has the community lost the expectation that there are some heroes you need to put some research into? When I was first starting, I had a little notepad that told me what talent I needed to take at each level for each hero I had learned. It sat in front of my monitor while I learned in AI and was a quick reference in case I got flustered when I had learned the hero enough to jump into Quick Match. I routinely consulted my brother, MFPallytime, FightingCowboy, and NotParadox on why certain talents were and were not working.
Everyone who plays HOTS wants the fantasy to some extent, but I can’t believe that they want to be bamboozled and have a hero that they love and have invested great quantities of time into changed into something completely different every couple months.
Outro
Patreon Shout Out
ITN is supported by our badass Patrons. You can become a ITN Patron by going to Patreon.com/itn.
Thanks to our Patreon producers Declan H, CheezyBob, Chris K, Mike C., and Eric C.. ITN shirt at shirts.amove.tv. Coffee mugs and glasses are over at etched.amove.tv.
Catch the live show Thursday at 5pm Eastern / 2pm Pacific on Twitch.tv/Amovetv. Mobile live stream provided by Alpha Geek Radio.
Follow the show on Twitter @ITNcast and ITNpodcast.reddit.com.
Thanks to Gorath for our intro music and briangriffithmusic.com (@briangriffith) for our outro..
Personal Stuff
Garrett
Kyle
The Rise of Bloodlust
Inspired by Is Bloodlust now a very strong pick for Reghar even in Storm League?
Grant nearby allied Heroes 40% Attack Speed and 35% Movement Speed and causes them to heal for 40% of the Basic Attack damage to their primary target. Lasts for 8 seconds.
The Stats
- Rehgar is on fire right now. 58% WR in the last week (57% WR last 4 weeks).
- Bloodlust has a 62% WR in the last 7 days on HOTSlogs.
- Bloodlust has been consistently chipping away at Ancestral’s pickrate.
- Bloodlust now has a 44% pickrate anda 62% winrate.
- Three weeks ago Ancestral was picked more than 70% of the time.
- Now only 55%. Winrate is 54%
Rehgar winning with (Duo Winrates)
- Valla - 59% WR
- Sonya - 59% WR
- Mages
- Kael’thas - 61% WR
- Li-Ming - 59% WR
- Jaina - 57% WR
- Raynor - 57% WR
- Varian - 56% WR
- Greymane - 56% WR
Not Winning With
- Lunara - 41% WR | Seems like she’d get a Bloodlust boost?
- Fenix - 47% WR
- Azmo/Junkrat
Kyles Notes: