To balance Heroes of the Storm, remember that MOBAs are not a real sport.

In the midst of the many game updates announced this weekend at Blizzcon, Blizzard has also made a remarkable announcement for The Heroes of the Storm–The company's MOBA that mixes characters from different Blizzard games. The company publishes a new hero named Orphea, whose original game is in fact The Heroes of the Storm.

Its release, combined with a series of changes announced for 2019, shows that Blizzard is still interested in powering its internal MOBA while other genres of games dominate the multiplayer market. With this type of investment, we wanted to know what Blizzard was doing to keep professional players and recreational players in a competitive market.

This curiosity led us to lead live designer Brett Crawford and battlefield designer Steve Holmes, two The Heroes of the Storm we have been able to hunt down Blizzcon. Like many other multiplayer game developers, both players have explained how the short list of changes to the 2019 update came from a long targeted iteration, but what was interesting to hear from the pair is that the team's balance strategy for the next year It's not so much a matter of tweaking the characters, but rather folding the known MOBA systems to keep the matches competitive.

"All MOBA have the problem with … it's not a real sport!" Crawford exclaims trying to analyze the minute game changes being discussed. "In basketball, if I do a 3 pointer, I'm not taller than 3 cm now." In the MOBA, that's what's happening! I just did something good and I'm not too good. have a power advantage over someone else. "

Crawford explains that this philosophy means that in recent years, the dedicated team of Blizzard has been studying everything from eliminating character levels to eliminating the concept of Mana. Instead, they focused on the rules of the game to prevent power imbalances from accumulating quickly.

Holmes, who is responsible for analyzing the different cards of the game (and their innumerable mechanics, the card is not standard, unlike what it is currently). League of Legends or DOTA 2), explains how Blizzard uses its metrics to analyze the impact of changes on different types of players. "We can take the [game] data and cut them into different categories of players, so what MMR (ranking of skills), what league we can tell what effects have on different players. "

So, by Holmes, the The Heroes of the Storm The team can examine the micro-decisions and ask if they will have a major impact on professional players or on others.

What unites many of the data points measured by Holmes and Crawford, is the time at which these metrics take place in the game. Crawford hires to point out that each battlefield has different standards, so do not can not he mention universal indicators, but decisions such as changing what happens after the players have destroyed the dungeon of the enemy are motivated by the attempt to stack different types of peaks power too fast.

But Crawford adds that this temporal analysis also involves downtime for competitors. "We want these highs, and then we want the players to have a break, not to be blown away, we want the match experiences to feel different here, and if each card does exactly the same thing, we want to push that to be different. "