The best Moba has been dead for 2 years – but that’s exactly why we still play it

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MyMMO demon Cortyn plays a MOBA that has been dead for years. But for a dead game, it is still a great entertainment.

When games “die” and development stops, it’s usually a cause for sadness. Especially if you’ve spent many years playing a game, it can be very frustrating to know that there will be no more updates, the player base will slowly dwindle, and the golden years will be over.

But all of this, which is an annoyance for many, means that my group of friends and I play Heroes of the Storm more than ever before. Because Blizzard’s MOBA gives us exactly what we miss in other MOBAs: consistency.

One of the last heroes to be developed for Heroes of the Storm:

Heroes of the Storm: Spotlight on Deathwing

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But to define “dead” in Heroes of the Storm:

  • In 2018, Blizzard had drastically reduced the Heroes of the Storm team. Only a few heroes were released and patches became less frequent.
  • In 2022, this team was more or less disbanded. Since then, there have only been maintenance patches. There is no new content.
  • Even now, in 2024, Heroes of the Storm is still playable. The servers are still online.

    • Now you might be wondering: Cortyn, why do you play Heroes of the Storm when other MOBAs are more modern and have more content?

    The answer is simple: exactly because of that.

    Consistency helps – because there are more and more active games

    The number of games I actively play in recent years has grown significantly. In addition to the evergreen World of Warcraft, there is Overwatch, Dead by Daylight, the occasional Hearthstone, and large-scale single-player games such as Baldur’s Gate 3 or the occasional Stellar Blade.

    That means: There are always months in which I basically don’t deal with a MOBA at all. When you then come back, everything is different: the “meta” has shifted, heroes have changed, there are new maps and somehow what you knew to be “good” has become completely different.

    That’s exactly what you don’t get with Heroes of the Storm. The game is the way my friends and I like it. It doesn’t change. It stays the same and we don’t have to learn anything new. Once we know it, it stays with us.

    In HotS, all heroes from all Blizzard universes fight.

    Added to this is everything that made Heroes of the Storm good from the start and sets it apart from other Mobas:

  • The team spirit. The whole team shares the experience points, everyone levels up together. There are no “last hits” or “you stole my kill and XP”. The team always benefits together.
  • Talents instead of items. There’s no shop where you have to spend gold to stock up on items. Instead, every few levels each hero has 2-4 talents to choose from that change abilities or grant new ones, allowing you to customize each hero for each match without having to memorize dozens or hundreds of items.
  • Goals that force action. Each map has additional tasks that inevitably force both teams into team fights. This means you never get bored or are stuck in a “never ending back and forth on a lane” where you’re just waiting for a micro-mistake or a jungler to secure the kill.

    • Although Heroes of the Storm has been “dead” for several years and is now only in “maintenance mode”, there are basically no waiting times. Regardless of whether we play ARAM or Quick Matches, a match is usually found after a few seconds. I can’t say whether this is also the case in the early hours of the morning, but from the afternoon until night you can basically play one match after the other. There are obviously still enough people playing to avoid any waiting times.

    In a world where games have to reinvent themselves every few years, where every update has to bring an overhaul, I love a game that is basically dead. Because Heroes of the Storm no longer changes, it is the perfect MOBA for me that I can always return to. A game in which I immediately feel at home again and know immediately which character has which abilities.

    This is something that no “living” Moba can do.

    mmod-game