“I think if we had won, I wouldn’t be here today. For sure I would not be.”
Yusuf “Kure” Sunka sits in a side room at Blizzard Arena reminiscing about his first Heroes of the Dorm experience. It’s the week before BlizzCon, and he is competing with Team Freedom to secure a spot at BlizzCon 2017 and the HGC Global finals. Just on the other side of the wall, Tempo Storm is playing against CE in the final match of Group A; Kure won’t set foot on stage until tomorrow when Team Freedom will double-eliminate Beyond the Game and stamp their ticket to the final event of the year.
Kure is a fairly unique individual in esports. Unlike most of his peers, Kure competed in college before moving on to professional play. Pro scenes in the majority of esports are far more developed than their collegiate counterparts so stories like his are rare, but Heroes of the Storm — his game of choice — has been a rare exception to that rule. It has also been a large part of the title's past, and something that has helped propel it into a rapidly-changing future.
The past
Even since before the title’s official release in mid-2015, Heroes of the Dorm has brought collegiate teams together to compete for school pride, a full scholarship for the rest of their college careers, and a unique path into the esports universe.
Kure is the perfect example of Dorm's influence. For him, a traditional esports career would have been impossible; coming from a family that holds education in high regard, the idea of pursuing gaming over school wasn’t even a passing thought in his mind. “A couple of guys I played with [on a collegiate League team] decided to play in Heroes of the Dorm. They had played in it in 2015, and wanted to play again in 2016,” Kure said. At the time, he hadn’t even touched the MOBA. “I didn’t really expect to get much out of it — I just did it to hang out with my friends.”
That feeling changed quickly.
Kure and his team rocketed through the event, and ended up flying out to Seattle for the final event. The pomp and circumstance of it caught him by surprise. “This was something I hadn’t experienced before … Even though I was really good at League of Legends, I never pursued competitive. I didn’t really think about it — I watched it a lot, and I played with a lot of the pro players, but it wasn’t really on my radar to become a pro gamer, because I was focused on school.”
Going pro in esports is an opportunity cost no matter who you are, and it was one that Kure had to weigh heavily. On one hand, his education and his future were of utmost importance to him, and still are. “I still want to go to law school,” he said. “That was my main focus: get really good grades, good LSAT, go to law school.”
On the other, players don’t casually stroll into esports as a competitor in their late 20s. His chance had come, and he wouldn’t get another like it years down the road. “I experienced tastes of [pro play] — because at Dorm, that year specifically it was in Seattle in a huge arena, and it was televised on ESPN2 — and that to me, even though we lost, that was such a big deal to me. So instead of quitting HotS and just focusing on school, maybe playing some League on the side like I had originally intended to, I decided to keep playing HotS.”
It's worked out pretty well, by most estimations. He and his UT Arlington team won Heroes of the Dorm 2017, and he ultimately made the leap to become a professional player for Team Freedom. Given Kure and his teammates can claim to be one of the best eight teams in the world with an appearance at BlizzCon 2017, it looks like that’s been going pretty well so far.
The present
Kure’s entry into professional play was as unique as it was timely. The Heroes of the Storm Global Championship — commonly referred to as the HGC — was announced at BlizzCon 2016 and launched in 2017, laying a solid foundation for Heroes esports. One of the driving forces behind the HGC has been Sam Braithwaite. His official title is Heroes of the Storm Esports Franchise lead, and is ultimately responsible for any and all official competitive initiatives around the title. Not only is that a bit of a mouthful, but it’s been a huge responsibility — and opportunity.
At the beginning of the inaugural year, Braithwaite and his team wanted to impart the message that they weren’t the ones in charge of the HGC; they were simply the ones helping to make it happen. “This is something I said to [the professional players] at the Summit — and that holds true now — is that this is their league. This isn’t our League as Blizzard. This is the community’s league, this is the pro player’s league, and we all need to work together in order for this to continue to reach new heights, and we need to be open, available and ready to change if that’s what these other groups need.
“The Heroes team is very agile. One of the things that people have noticed is that every tournament we have done is different,” said Braithwaite. “And the reason why we do that is because we poll players, talent, and even the community afterwards to figure out what went right and what went wrong in order to make changes.”
Heroes of the Storm is not the biggest esport out there, or even the biggest in its genre. Braithwaite knows that — and in facing down that fact and taking it to heart, it’s allowed him and his team to be scrappy in ways that HGC’s competition sometimes isn’t. But it also means that there are real stakes to missing the mark. “Our stance on that is, we understand that we’re growing. We’re not the biggest esport right now. But we are a contender, and in order to become the best, we need to be agile. We can’t afford mistakes, we can’t afford things that piss people off ... we need to capitalize on every opportunity that we have.”
While the finals at BlizzCon drew some ire for its cutthroat format — something Braithwaite can appreciate — it also tells the story of a league that’s been able to experiment with several different styles of event over the past year. From the Western and Eastern Clash events to regular season play to the week-long group stage the week before BlizzCon 2017, competition in the HGC has existed in several different forms.
And after the inaugural year, there’s only more to come. “It feels like I am in a movie,” said Braithwaite. “It is a surreal experience being here, and I can genuinely say that it is living my dream. I have dedicated my entire life to esports, did everything in my power, been in the scene for 10-12 years, every job I’ve had has been an esports job. To have a program I created be at BlizzCon, and to be able to be on a stage at BlizzCon and hand away a trophy is … ”
He pauses, choosing his next words carefully. “Honestly, I never thought that I would do that. And I feel so blessed and excited, and I have such a strong team, and we’ve been having such a good year, that this means a lot to all of us. We’re relatively small, our esports team. But we’re scrappy, we get shit done, and my guys have just been putting 110 percent into everything and it’s showing. For me, the moment I’m most excited about is the trophy celebration where afterwards, the entire team gets together and we get to take that picture of our first HGC Finals.
“For us, this is going to be something that we remember forever. Because we plan on HGC being around for a really long time.”
The future
He’s not the only one working toward the future, either. Heroes of the Storm’s lead designer Travis McGeathy is hard at work making some significant tweaks to the game’s core tenets — including a ranked matchmaking system that is evolving upon the now decade-old system that most MOBAs have been using in some form or another.
Throughout its two years, Heroes has undergone some massive changes: gameplay has been tweaked considerably, the amount of heroes and maps has doubled, talent choices have expanded and evolved, and the entire game economy has been reworked. Speaking at BlizzCon, McGeathy made it clear that it hasn’t come close to reaching its final form. A reworked laning phase is the most visible change that will be obvious every game: Tower ammo is going away for good, regen globes will become neutral quickly after appearing and mercenary camps provide bonuses to teams designed to make them better when a team pushes alongside them.
The biggest change is one that lives under the hood: In the coming weeks, Performance-Based Matchmaking will be introduced. By name alone, it sounds like nothing more than what online games have been built on for years. But for the first time, a major MOBA is looking to give players credit for their ability to be good players regardless of win or loss. “It’s been something we’ve been wanting to do for a really long time,” McGeathy revealed. “We started putting data hooks in there a year ago and using them for other systems. We’ve got data scientists that work on this stuff, and … last summer they came up with a model for all of these things, so I’d say it’s probably been in process for almost a year and a half at this point.”
Using machine learning, McGeathy and the Heroes team has been able to determine positive and negative play habits, and reward players accordingly. “The system is just looking at what already happening, and using that to measure things — and it’s doing that constantly. So as things change … we see this all the time, if you see an HGC team pull out a pocket strat that filters down through the community, the system is going to pick up on that as well.”
For those wondering if this will create problems for unique characters, fear not: McGeathy has made sure the numbers are here to keep you safe. “You get questions like ‘well, am I gonna be messed up as Murky, because I die a whole lot?’ No! Because you’re being judged against other Murkys!”
This new system will help players get to their intended rank much faster. In an individual test run by the development team, a Master-ranked player climbed from Bronze to Master, recording his progress on the current ladder *and* the new system to be implemented. In the current system, it took 251 games. In the new one, the same player would have hit Master in 131.
A faster road to success is nice, but the real opportunity in this system lies in its ability to to naturally provide better experiences for well-meaning players — and punish those who look to ruin games hold teammates captive through troublesome behavior. “This is one of the more subtle things that we hope comes out of this,” mused McGeathy. “The way the system is set, you’re still only going to gain MMR on a win and lose it on a loss. But if you are individually performing better than expected for your skill, even on those losing games you’re going to lose MMR. So there’s that incentive to keep trying hard the entire time.”
This system has already been running behind the scenes to help the team more efficiently identify griefers. As McGeathy mentioned in the "What's Next" BlizzCon 2017 panel for the title, "the system can pick up when players are playing abnormally poorly for their rating. We actually already used it to confirm reports of players intentionally feeding for example, to help take action on those accounts."
This 2018 update is a big one, to put it lightly. With tons of mechanical changes, hero reworks, and new content on the way, it only made sense for the development team to push it out all at once. “Some of these changes, they cascade off of themselves. We wouldn’t want to pull out tower ammo without making balance changes to [things surrounding that], and then the mercenary camp changes go along with that because we want to help with the act of pushing … so a lot of these are tied together.”
But as a player, McGeathy’s favorite change has been as simple as zooming out. “The camera change is the one I’m most excited about,” he gushed. “Once you get used to [the change in visibility], makes it difficult to go back."
The constant is change
It’s now been several weeks since BlizzCon, but the changes continue to come at every level. While Kure’s run at Finals was a short one, he has joined the Roll20 Esports roster for the coming season and looks forward to another competitive year. Sam Braithwaite and his team have already moved onto the next Heroes esports event, the Gold Club World Championship. And not to be outdone, McGeathy’s team is keeping pace; the 2018 balance changes have already hit the PTR, and Hanzo is rapidly approaching as the year’s last new hero to be added. (Probably.)
But that seems to be how Heroes of the Storm is meant to be: in a state of flux. It is a game that has never taken a break from iteration. From Heroes of the Dorm to constant hero and gameplay updates to a regularly expanding esports presence, the title isn’t interested in taking a break. As a game it constantly pushes forward — and the people who make up its community do, too.
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