#anyone else notice how the pornbots have vanished

[official-alan-dabiri]

Official-Alan-Dabiri and the 5 Stages of Grief

Okay, I’ve been doing some grieving for the esports side of Heroes of the Storm, and I’d like to kind of put my thoughts out here for my three human and three-hundred pornbot followers. I’m just going to step outside of what has been mockingly referred to as my “blizzard fursuit” and be real for a minute here. Hi, I’m Rob. I am a Heroes of the Storm player since alpha, and a Heroes of the Storm esports fan since before the custom game mode had been added, when maps were random and they had to be cast afterwards off of replays. The recent announcement of the cancellation of HGC and Heroes of the Dorm hit me - and the rest of the community - very hard. So I’m just going to touch on the stages of grief as they pertain to this event, and my feelings on the whole matter.

For those of you here for silly patch note commentary, fanart, and moba memes, I’ll put this behind a read more out of respect for your dashes.

Denial

I think Denial is the shortest stage we’re facing here. Denial came when there was no announcement of 2019 HGC for two months, and some of us shrugged it off. At Blizzcon, outward-facing Blizzard employees assured the fans, the casters, the players, and other esports-attached people that HGC would be back in 2019, and be as big or bigger. I’m not going to say that they lied, but their statements fed into the idea that this would be fine, and some people latched onto that in the wake of the expanding silence before it was finally broken.

To be in denial is a defense mechanism. It is denying that this is happening in order to numb our emotions and make it through the first wave of pain. Here, denial is the shortest stage because this is so believable. In the wake of so many questionable moves Activision-Blizzard has made lately, the severity and suddenness is a shock, not the event itself. This is really happening. Professional-level Heroes of the Storm is dead. And of course it is. After all, these are the numbskulls who made a mobile game the centerpiece of Blizzcon 2018, right?

Anger

I just want to preface this by noting that I, personally, never move past anger. I may struggle through it, but that anger never goes away. After the loss of my maternal grandfather to COPD over twenty years ago, the smell of cigarettes still enrages me. So please understand that when I say that I will never forgive Blizzard for this, I am not being melodramatic. I will be angry about this for a very long time.

Anger, however, needs to be appropriately directed and channeled. I’m upset at losing my weekend HGC fix. I’m upset that my amateur team no longer has a pro scene to watch together and work to emulate. And I’m very upset that Heroes of the Dorm is gone, since it was the catalyst that drew many of my friends into the game in the first place. This loss is the end of an era of entertainment. But that’s not the real crime here.

Hundreds of people - some of whom I admire and idolize - across the world are now unemployed. Very abruptly. Right before Christmas. Forty players, per region, are now out in the cold, along with any coaches and managers the team might employ. Add to that the casters, production staff, and analysts? Those people just got hosed. Some of those players dropped out of college to be here. Some of those players dropped out of college literally this fall in preparation for the 2019 season, after being picked up after the region’s playoffs, or fighting their way up in the Open Division and through the Crucible. There are people who have leases they’ve signed based on income that just got ripped away from them. Blizzard just brutally smacked down every one of them, tore away their jobs, and smashed their dreams.

And they did it in a blog post. That was how most of the players and casters learned about this. This wasn’t an event that was common knowledge, and the announcement just broke the NDA for them all. They have been living their lives up until literally the blog post, making plans dependent on HGC 2019. They found out they got fired by reading the news. And Blizzard selfishly kept this under their hats for this long to make sure that no players, sponsors, or other organizations got spooked before they were already locked in to Blizzard’s other esports. This was the worst way to do it. It’s unforgivable.

Bargaining

The bargaining stage is about seeking control over a terrible situation. It’s looking for how things should be when how they are is unacceptable. And for this announcement, there are a thousand different ways that would be preferable to this.

For one thing, I would love if this just weren’t happening. If only the HGC were just on a limited budget. If only the HGC was following a different, cheaper format. If only either HGC or Heroes of the Dorm were gone, and not both. For another, I would love if the call had been made six months ago. Cancel the crucible, make sure everyone has months of notice before the doors close to seek other work, or go back to school, or whatever. Literally any notice whatsoever would be preferable to this. Even if it’s just all in NDAs and the public doesn’t know, half of my anger is mitigated just because I know those folks aren’t entirely hosed.

Of course, the greatest bargain at all is to go all the way back. What if they’d designed the HGC better? The HGC was set up to ensure its own demise. The pros being paid salaries by Blizzard was great for their financial security, but those salaries elevated them above everyone else. The rest of the scene withered. Was Tempo Storm ever going to play against an open division team? No. Never. Maybe a scrim if they had connections, but nothing serious. In the days before HGC, those players had a really high chance of getting matched into the best pro team in round 1 just because of the seeding. Amateur tournaments are few and far between right now, and most of them go without casters, or have inexperienced casters who don’t have the platform to bring these games to a sizable audience. The part of the scene that still exists is now tiny to the point of invisibility. If HGC had been designed on a points system like it was for the first blizzcon, though? Those structures would still exist, instead of having been steamrolled over to build the now-derelict HGC parking lot. Scaling back Blizzard’s involvement with that system would have been a minimal change.

Depression

A lot of the community seems to be in this stage. A lot of people think this was a deathblow to the game itself, and, to be honest, it might be. The announcement was accompanied by the news that the development team is shrinking, and that content will be coming out slower, but with no indication of how slow. There is no shortage of doom and gloom, with people predicting no new hero for months - or even years - and balance patches being made by devs with no resources to test or monitor the results.

Ultimately, this is a downer. I’m not going to tell you it’s not bad. The lack of a pro scene to aspire to immediately kills the interest of a nontrivial number of players, who thought they could one day break into that world, whether as a player or as a caster. And the lack of those players kills the motivation of content creators, who are making build guides, tier lists, and learning-related content for those players. Make no mistake, this scene will shrink because of this. Your favorite pro players, streamers, youtubers, and other content creators might just move on, looking for other games to excel in, and take some amount of their audience with them.

Even if you weren’t part of this community, (why are you reading this, then?) Heroes of the Storm ranked 12th on the most influential esports of 2018. The loss of this is going to spook literally every sponsor across all esports, planting the seed of doubt that this is a worthwhile use of funds when it could all vanish overnight at the whim of the game’s publisher.

And even if you don’t care about esports, the professional level of the game had an effect that rippled down through all levels of play. Do you remember suddenly seeing Xul in your games a whole lot earlier this year? Do you remember Alarak suddenly being a contested pick in the last two months? Surely you noticed that the “solo lane” role suddenly became a thing last year when Blaze and Yrel were added, couldn’t main tank, but still had high win rates. All of that was the pro scene trickling down.

What happens now? What’s going to take the place of that influence? I don’t know. All I know is that when the playerbase looks up to see the highest level of play now, there’s just a void where HGC was.

Acceptance

Regardless of your feelings on the matter, though, Heroes of the Storm existed before HGC, and will continue to exist afterwards. It might end up being a much sparser community, with the pros moving on and the content creators in exodus, but we’ll still be here. I mean, I will, at least. They aren’t pulling the plug on the game, no matter what some angry nerd says about false hope. We’ve got years of gameplay and years of snarky patch notes ahead of us. Not to mention that all Blizzard content is HotS content. I’ve got Overwatch heroes to steal from Jeff, and Starcraft units to turn into poc, and lore-defying skins to slap on everyone in between. Heroes of the Storm is here to stay, and anyone who says otherwise is planning for a future calamity that’s still decades away.

That said, there are still high-level Heroes of the Storm tournaments happening. As I believe I mentioned previously, I have a team in Heroes Lounge, and that league has confirmed that they’re not stopping anytime soon. Similarly, the Nexus Gaming Series is gearing up, with sign-ups in January. In fact, there’s a number of options for community tournaments, both to participate in and to watch, with more undoubtedly coming, once the pros and casters finish their grieving and come together, looking to make it clear that they care about the game more than Blizzard does, and they’re willing to show it.

We all care more than blizzard does, or we wouldn’t be this upset. So let’s keep our eyes to the skies and give our support to whatever comes out of this. Because if the death of the pro scene would kill this game, it’s up to us to support a semi-pro scene ourselves to keep HotS alive.