Hmm. both the assassin and bruiser packs fill in 8 heroes I don't have, (the other two are like 5 and 6 respectively) out of the...21? I'm missing now. That's pretty fucking good, lots of newer ones in these bundles.
Now to decide which one I actually want.
They must have stats showing that as the pool of locked characters grows larger, players spend less money attempting to get them, whereas the fewer locked characters remain, there's a willingness to spend money to get them unlocked.
Blizzard basically weaponizes human psychology to get every last dime out of your wallets.
lol "Must have"...come on man. They and Riot have both stated that they stick with this model largely because the rotating free hero selection actually HELPS new players rather than hurts them. For all the "Oh but they're all free from the start!" that people like to trumpet as some benefit of DOTA, it's actually a huge barrier for entry in terms of learning the game. It causes new players to try and learn many heroes at once, have no idea what they're choosing or why when they do choose one, and generally perform worse early on which leads to it just not being fun (and people quitting, obviously).
I know speaking even as someone that is completely willing to stick with games and learn them, it's damn refreshing to boot up League at times and go into an ARAM or whatever and know that I'm just going to get one of a few dozen characters, and if I spend time learning that character I've got pretty good odds of seeing it again for the week. No, you're not going to be 'fair' going into competitive matchmaking, but you're not doing that anyway. It's not hard for anyone that is actually interested in competitive HOTS to get every character for free, just like it's not hard in League if you're playing all that much, and CERTAINLY not hard to just get the meta relevant heroes you might be interested in. Meanwhile, the benefits are obvious to new players (Hey, you've got like 3 assassins to choose from instead of 30, so it's much easier to make a decision and learn them, or even try all 3 and commit to one to get better with), the benefits to the company are of course obvious (yes, they make mooney this way, but if it were truly unfair to new players they would lose them and make no money at all), but I don't have a problem with companies that make games earning profit off of them. I have never once owned every hero in HOTS (I have played a lot at various times, but never THAT much) but I've been extremely close off and on the entire time it's been in alpha/beta/release, with very little time invested, and never once have I entered a competitive game and been unable to play a hero I felt our team needed. Beyond competitive it doesn't even matter, this isn't a game with a draft or anything, if you want to play Zul'jin just buy zuljin in game, it's VERY cheap to buy individual heroes, and nobody is going to stop you from playing him since you select it prior to even queueing up.
Is gold going away? Should we spend any we've accrued before 2.0 hits?
Gold is also used to reroll chests, which could be VERY nice with the vet reward chests we're getting, like if you get the chests with guaranteed legendaries, yo ucan open one, see what you get, and just reroll with gold if you want a different legendary.
Thanks for the explanation! What the hell, might as well give it a try when this goes live, I like that objective based stuff. Is a lot of the player skill in this game leaning more towards how many clicks you can do per second and how many resources you can manage at all times, or is it more about taking smart chances and understanding the flow of the game and the options available to you? I tried Starcraft before as my only other RTS PVP game, and I just did not enjoy it at all.
Mobas are not really about APM or anything, obviously that still helps a lot, but they're much more a combination of overall strategy and timing and converging into skirmishes or team fights where your mechanical skill matters more in a vacuum. So you'll be doing strategic kind of rote ability usage, keeping an eye on the map etc, then force a fight with another team (or they force one onto you) at a time you or they find advantageous and then you're doing more micro things like positioning, hitting skill shot abilities ((Like firing a sniper rifle, you have to aim the 'line' of the shot, and it has travel time, so you have skill involved in actually hitting someone, while they have skill involved in juking you). The learning curves on these games are very high, which is why people can play them so long. There is always more to learn, even in a 'simple' moba like HOTS.
I would say a good way to describe MOBAs is about leveraging small advantages into larger ones. A very simplistic and easy to understand example, in HOTS when your team gets to level 10 you unlock ultimate abilities, ALA overwatch ults. They're very strong with long cooldowns, So if you can find small ways to get ahead in XP and get to level 10 right before a major map objective spawns, you then force the other team to either recognize that you're stronger and not contest your team for it, or you bait them into fighting you anyway and almost assuredly win that fight. You might have started this whole thing 10% of a level ahead, and end up getting a huge chunk of their base because of that tiny advantage snowballing into a bigger victory.