Anti-snowball Mechanics in Heroes of the Storm :: Heroes of the Storm discussion on HeroesFire

A couple of days ago a video on the Heroes of the Storm subreddit popped up showing evidence of anti-snowball mechanics. The video, done by Squishei, watched the team XP bar when they were down by 3 levels or more. When the team was down by 3 or more levels they were gaining significant XP for doing absolutely nothing. You can watch the video below:

The changes make it to where it is difficult for a team to just coast to victory after having a great early game. The tournament director, CyaSteve, posted this image of his team dominating the team in kills and XP but the other team was able to keep within three levels and made the game more difficult to close out.

The Game Director for Heroes of the Storm, Dustin Browder, answered concerns on the mechanic on the official forums.

Quoted:

Good discussion! Here is our current thinking:

We think that if you are 3 levels up you have, in a sense, won the leveling game. At that point, youâ€™ve proven yourself in that area. Weâ€™re not sure it makes sense to be 6 levels up; thatâ€™s not the kind of fun we want for either team and probably represents a failure of our match-maker.

We do not believe the game should get to the point where one team finds the game to be unwinnable. So we are capping how far ahead you can get to 3-4 levels by giving out more â€œtrickleâ€ XP to the team that is behind as well as more XP for killing enemy heroes that are higher level than you. Generally the level split will stop at 3. 3 levels is far enough ahead that you have a definite advantage but you are not in an auto-win situation. We are very aware that this is not how other games in the genre function.

Once you have "won" the leveling game you want to keep that advantage but you want to also focus on winning in other areas of the game as well (objectives, mercenaries, destroying towns).

In general we think this change makes the game more competitive. You can never really relax, you cannot slack off because you got an early lead. You need to always be on top of your game and pushing to win, because now even a team youâ€™ve initially out-leveled can come back as a contender if you get sloppy.

That's our current thinking anyway. But it's Alpha and we could be wrong. We can and will change stuff. Your discussion on this challenging topic is appreciated as always.

The team XP and lack of items and gold make Heroes of the Storm a difficult experiment to balance. For instance, the way Riot tackled their snowballing was by giving more gold to the support and jungler, scaling up the rewards from dragon, and tuning down the gold from first blood. One could argue that Riot overdid it and now every game tends to push towards the later game with the early game meaning much less. In Dota 2, comebacks can happen many ways: maybe the team comp is better in the late game, a smoke gank allows the team behind to get a great engagement and take a teamfight decisively, but once again everything comes down to gold and farm to buy the items that can change the game and decrease the snowball. Obviously

Heroes doesnâ€™t have gold or items that can turn around or slow down a snowball, so the developers have to do something different. Personally, I believe this type of change takes away the satisfaction of dominating the early game. Yes, most teams will be able to close out a game where they had a 3+ level lead but the end game screen may just feel depressing when you see the type of stats that CyaSteve linked. Also, I feel like one of the things that Heroes has going for it is the quicker games, so does it make sense to push every game late? Wouldnâ€™t it be better that if a team is getting stomped, to just let them lose and re-queue?

Then there is the problem of how this affects the meta-game. One of the top players in the alpha, ZPs, responded to Browder with concerns about the mechanic having unintentional side effects. ZPs is concerned about the mechanic forcing team comps and it forcing teams to make unintuitive decisions. Here is what ZPs had to say:

Quoted:

Just as an example in a game I had today:

We were 3 levels up (10 to 7) and had just won a team fight. We could have pushed down an outer fort raw with all 5 heroes, but instead declined to do that and instead went directly to mercenaries. Why? Because even though taking the free fort is logical, taking the free fort would literally have been equivalent to giving the enemy team a free level which would have brought them closer to level 10. It actually made more strategic sense to not immediately push and instead do slow map control, despite having an overwhelming advantage. The fact that this sort of thinking even enters in to your head with the new system is nothing short of horrible. There should never be a point in the game where you're afraid of getting further ahead because it'll bring your opponents further ahead (to a level break point) at the same time.

As far as team comps go, we're already seeing teams building around the idea that losing early game is OK because the game mechanics will help bail them out. Rather than late game comps having to take risks in contesting/soaking lanes at max efficiency, often times right now its better to just play defensive to a fault.

Browder did respond to ZPs saying that they are discussing the issues and that they may be able to tune the problem. He commented that there is a possibility that towns giving so much XP is no longer needed.

What do you think about the changes? Do you think this is good for the competitiveness of the game? Let us know!

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