Nexus Anomaly: the sometimes arbitrary nature of the late game and a missed opportunity
_the_cheeseThe latest Patch has brought many interesting changes to the game but with this post i'm not trying to discuss whether or not the recent tower changes are good or bad and what their primary impact on the game is.
Instead i want to take the opportunity to highlight a problem that i think has been with us for a very long time now and that i had hoped the recent patch would fix. The issue that the structure changes had the opportunity but failed to improve, is the sometimes arbitrary nature of the late game.
The late game in Heroes of the Storm sometimes feels like a coin flip. Of course it isn't a coin flip but it feels like that at times.
You can have all of your structures still intact after a near flawless game, but if the enemy wins just one team fight post 20 and gets the objective, there is a very high chance you loose the game instantly. Emphasis on instantly, i am not talking about loosing the game 10 minutes later after the enemy fought their way back. i'm talking about one team losing in the most severe fashion for 20 minutes straight, and then after just one secured objective marching down a lane, through a fort a keep and destroying the core.
If your composition is just stronger in the late game, or your team finally pulls it together, or even the opponents are simply letting the game slip out of their fingers, if you win a late game team fight in a situation like that you definitely should have the opportunity to capitalize on your victory, get several structures, or other advantages and start a comeback. But in my opinion you should not be able to so easily win the game on the spot after being so massively behind just a second ago and in complete disregard of how the early- and mid-game played out.
Instances like these are thankfully not the norm but they happen way more frequently than they should. The Nexus Anomaly had the opportunity to address this.
With the Core getting defensive abilities and Structures providing more protection, games should feel less "swingy" and momentum should shift not as quickly, because whichever team is on the back foot, their defenders advantage has been buffed and while it makes it harder for the winning team to press their advantage it makes it equally hard for the other team to perform a come-back after momentum has shifted in their favour. at least in theory.
Apparently the effect that this has is not enough though, because the exact scenario i was describing earlier i experienced several times this week.
Our team was dominating, good macro and map control, we won every team fight, barley had any deaths, in general made very few mistakes and most notably, we didn't loose a single structure up until the last objective. while on the other hand the enemy team had lost two keeps up until that point made several severe mistakes throughout the game and were basically falling apart with 20+ Deaths.
Then the first objective post lvl 20 happens, our team barley loses the fight and right at the moment where the enemy captures the objective they manage to kill the two heroes on our team that can de-push effectively.
This was the moment in the game where we made our first big mistake, and it should have been the moment for the enemy team to start a potential comeback. Where they should have gotten the opportunity to recover the ground that they had lost in the last 15 minutes, crawl their way back into the game and if they were able to carry their momentum long enough eventually take the win, ultimately deserved.
Instead what happened is that they just marched down one lane, through a fort, a keep and destroyed the core. After playing a bad game, all it took for them to win was one mistake on our side. All the good plays our team made and the mistakes of the enemy before that moment felt completely meaningless. Moments like these make the game feel more random. It makes structures feel more meaningless.
I went straight into the next game and it was basically the same thing in reverse, me and my team played a horrible game but we ended up winning after one of these late game team fights, it felt completely undeserved. I think most of us have experienced similar games, sometimes you are on the winning sometimes on the loosing side but both times it feels bad, at least for me.
This has been a problem for such a long time now and with the current Nexus Anomaly my hope was that as a side-effect it would combat this issue, but it did not, at least not in a sufficient way.
Possible Solution: Core Armor
It has been suggested many times, but at this point i would really like to see all cores getting the Alterac Pass treatment with armor based on the remaining keeps, because for obvious reasons on that map this whole issue is way less noticeable.
you could even experiment with forts contributing as well, with every core starting the game at 60 armor:
3-lanes maps: 6 structures à 10 core armor
2-lanes maps: 4 structures à 15 core armor
This is the most elegant solution that i can think of to make structure advantage more meaningful while reducing the number of games that are solely decided by just one team fight post 20 regardless of how the early- and mid-game played out. It would make it significantly harder to just run down one lane and go core with all the other lanes still completely intact.
Of course this together with the current new structure mechanics, could make games too hard to close out, but that could be adjusted with number changes to for example to structure damage, HP etc. These numbers and the other mechanics revolving around game length and how to end games would be designed around the fact that every building destroyed decreases the cores armor (with Towers of Doom as the exception ofc). This way it is always ensured that the early- and mid-game have a more noticeable impact on the outcome of a game.
It would also make the game easier to read, especially for new players. Right now, building count is not necessarily an accurate representation of how your chance are on winning a game. you can have every fort and keep up and still lose the game after one lost objective. i have been playing this game since alpha but i imagine for a new player this would feel even more unintuitive.
Core Armor would therefore even enforce the intuitive understanding of how the game should work! destroy enemy buildings, the more you destroy the easier it makes it to win and on the flip side the more buildings i still have, the harder it makes it for the enemy to win. this is a very simple concept to understand even for new players. destroying buildings is the ultimate goal of a MOBA anyway and this mechanic only emphasis that.
I really hope we see Core Armor or something similar coming to the game with the next Nexus Anomaly. What are your thoughts on this? If you are a dev reading this, what is your evaluation of the sate of the late game right now and do you see the things that i have described as a problem? Maybe you can share a bit of the dev teams thoughts regarding this topic and core armor in general, since i'm pretty sure you guys have already thought about how it would look like if core armor would be implemented on other maps.
cheers and all the love
TLDR: Many games still feel arbitrarily decided by one late game team fight, regardless of how the early and mid game went. Solution: Core Armor for every remaining Structure (ala Alterac Pass) as the next Nexus Anomaly!
EDIT: after some comments suggesting that i am against comebacks in general, i'm gonna copy paste here what i wrote in response:
i am not advocating against comebacks. comebacks are amazing and should always be a possibility, nor are these suggested changes meant to simply make all games last longer. in a normal game(which are most games) both teams will have caused some structure damage before the late game hits, in which case the core armor would already be lower. in most games core armor would make very little to no difference. the only games where it would matter are the games that where so one-sided that one team didn't manage to afflict any structure damage at all and then attempts to go core after their first won late game objective.
FuenteHey _The_Cheese. Thanks for the write up.
Oh boy, there’s a lot to unpack here. I’ll try to explain my thoughts on this, though it’s important to say that this is and has been a topic of debate within the team basically since our game started development.
So the topic of how much early game vs. late game matters is incredibly hard to parse because there are a lot of interconnected pieces that are balanced on their own spectrums. When we mess with any of these pieces (hero power scaling, death timers, structure power, minion/merc power, map objectives, etc), it will cascade down to other parts of the game, which is why we are careful before changing any of these components and why the chance of getting things right on the first try is basically 0%.
So before getting into the nitty gritty, I think it’s important to start with what our goals of a healthy game state would look like, because without a north star it’s extremely easy to get lost in the weeds. Keep in mind that these are ideal goals that are incredibly difficult to achieve, and that it’s not going to happen in every game that’s played because people are very complex beings with influences on their gameplay/psychology that we will never be able to account for (for example, having a bad day and not playing at your current MMR level, trying a new hero for the first time, orbeing on a loss streak and tilted before a game starts). Even so, in my vision, a healthy state for Heroes overall is:
At any point in the game, the team that has been playing better has some kind of advantage
There is not a point in the game where the losing team has no chance to come back (otherwise why keep playing it out?)
Aggression is rewarded, and players are motivated to go out and make things happen (no infinite turtling)
So before getting into feelings, as far as the data is concerned, for as long as I’ve been on the team it’s been the case that the team that gets an early level lead has a much higher chance of winning the game. If one team is Level 10 vs. the other team being Level 8, their chances are much higher to win. This is also true of the team that destroys a Keep first – they have vastly increased their chances of winning. Of course, there’s a lot of lurking variables here, but the comeback games that you’re describing are much more rare, but they are also much more memorable because they had the unexpected outcome. Snowballing has been and always will be an issue that has no perfect solve – our game hinges on a power fantasy where you want to get stronger and dominate your opponent over time, yet we also want the other person to still feel like they have a chance to win while they’re essentially acting as your punching bag as your “reward” for playing well in the early game. Essentially what I’m saying here is that the notion that all games hinge on one late-game teamfight is not happening most of the time, though it does sometimes happen. The question here is: Is this OK, and if not, what would your expected outcome be, and where on the spectrum should a late-game teamfight exist when it comes to comebacks?
I can tell you right now that even in the super late-game, if one team is ahead and loses a teamfight by only 1-2 people, those extra buildings that they have absolutely do act as a barrier/second life of sorts to keep them in the game when otherwise they could lose. The question here is where on the spectrum is it acceptable to lose the game when you were previously winning? Is it when you lose a fight by 1 Hero? 2? 4?
A comparison that I think is useful with these kinds of thought experiments is to compare MOBAS to traditional Sport games. In basketball for example, the winning team doesn’t get taller, or faster, or more accurate with their point shots. MOBAS have a growth and power fantasy that is a large selling point to players, and the drawback of that growth that we have to accept to a certain degree is that snowballing is much more of a thing, and that comebacks are more important to have be possible to counter-act that. This means that the swings in both directions (snowballing and comebacks) in a MOBA are going to happen more often than a traditional sport due to the decision of having power scaling based on performance. When we reduce this power growth too much, we get complaints like: “the early game doesn’t matter”, or “I can’t carry hard enough”. When we increase this too much, we get the complaints like: “all that matters is the first map objective” or “why bother even playing anymore, the game’s already over”. The weird thing to wrap your head around is that all of these are both true and false on an individual and larger scale due to how different each game and each person’s interpretation of that game can be. The part where we as designers come in is where on the spectrum of Snowballing vs. Comebacks do we want the game to be as a whole.
My personal view is that if I’m ahead in a game and I lose a full fight 0-5, I deserve to either lose the game or lose a fort/keep and have my core exposed and likely damaged. This is because I likely had lots of opportunities to bully the enemy team throughout the game while I was ahead, and if I won that last teamfight by an even less margain than a full wipe, my team would have won the game. The enemy team had to drastically outplay mine to win by enough to end the game, so they deserve the comeback win. This is actually the most rare of cases though, and more often what happens is my winning team loses a fight by a small-medium margain, the enemy team takes a keep and exposes the core, then the winning team makes a second mistake and the enemy team comes back to win the game. In this case I also think they deserve the win.
This is all theoretical where the game ought to be, but let’s talk about where we’re at right now:
Currently I think there is an argument that our tower changes have punished aggression a little too much with the current tuning on towers, particularly in the earlier portions of the game, and we have some changes coming that should help address this.
I don’t believe that every game is arbitrarily decided by one late-game team fight. The data does not support this, nor does my personal experience playing the game a ton and watching others play. It does happen, but I don’t think it happens too much (if the meta shifts to Nazeebo being first pick/ban, you’ll know we’re on our way there :P)
Core Armor is something we’ve discussed in the past. I think it’s a valid idea, but has some aspects that concern me. I’m partially dissatisfied with the current implementation on Alterac Pass, largely because it’s a hidden rule that it’s almost always a super bad idea to try to attack the enemy Core with only one Keep down. This took players longer to learn when it first came out that I was happy with, and to this day players try to take this largely incorrect fight more often than I would like, causing a winning team to make a huge misplay due to a mechanic that they don’t really understand. Armor in general is a powerful mechanic that is hard to sell to players, so if we were to do something like this we would probably need much better Art/UI to make it super clear what’s going on.
Thanks again for the post. I probably rambled a bit much and didn’t even cover everything that is going on with this subject due to how complex it is, but I hope it sheds some light on how we see things.
BlizzAZJackson24-04-2020 22:14:18mdotbeezyOne thing sports nearly universally have: a clock.
The advantage superior teams have is that the other team runs out of time.
In hots, the only real clock is Hammers infinite bfg, or an open lane to the keep. I think perhaps the minion scaling should increase starting at level 16 to the point where winions are an extreme threat at level 21 and beyond.
FuenteFunny enough I wrote a paragraph about this difference but cut it in the name of brevity.
I'm not really a fan of minions scaling to be out of control mostly because it's super unfun to be stuck in your base killing minions all day. It cuts down on aggressive play in a big way when they're too strong.