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Yes, this is their attitude, and it is objectively wrong. Wide appeal never works without hardcore buy in. The hardcores are the tastemakers of virtually every IP, perhaps rom-coms excepted, I don't know much about that area. "But League of Legends" you will exclaim. Well, first DOTA2 is still incredibly successful despite being punishingly hardcore, and second, its weird you aren't touting the overwhelming success of the super casual Heroes of the Storm, which even had the benefit of tons of loved characters! Fact is, it was way too casual, it couldn't succeed even with you being able to make Jim Raynor fight Diablo and Arthas fight Kerrigan. LOL is the example of what you want to do, balance hardcore appeal and skill expression with the ability to be a bit casual. This is actually what early MCU did. Hardcores enjoyed Iron Man and Captain America. Hardcores don't enjoy She Hulk, and its tanked.
As someone who was quite into Heroes of the storm and was regularly a top 200 player I think you misdiagnose it's failure. The primary reason it flopped wasn't because it was too casual, it was because it was too team oriented. From the bottom up it was a game that required team coordination to such a degree that solo queue players felt they couldn't impact the end result of the match very much. Five 2k rated players on comms would beat the 3k rated player with 4 average pubs every time. In DOTA or league a carry, and they're literally called carries which gives the reasoning away, would be able to dominate their lane and then use that advantage to by them selves win the game. In heroes you can win the solo lane as hard as you want, but the coordinated team will have taken every objective and you'll be a lower level anyways. They tried to mitigate this a bit with stacking characters but those are even better with a team that can help you stack.
This makes the game hard to catch on for a few reasons:
Very difficult to stream. People watching a stream want to interact with the top player and watch them play well. In Heroes top players are all practicing comm discipline and following shotcallers which can be fun to watch but is really not the standard streaming experience.
People like to at least aspire to be the ones who carry games, this is reflected in the incredibly high pickrate of stacking abilities even when they are suboptimal. This was mechanically not supported by the game.
Solo queue play is the primary way people engage in mobas and heroes just didn't have a very good solo play experience
HotS had a really rich and deep meta game that was a ton of fun, especially because it mostly skipped the tedious laning phase and the interesting strategy started from minute one and continued the whole relatively short match without much of a foregone conclusion late game. But if you can't find 4 other dedicated players that you enjoy queuing with it was not a great experience.
Why didn't Blizzard simply ensure solo queuers are only matched up with solo queuers, and team queuers are only matched up with other team queuers?
They tried quite a few things over the years including that. Team league VS hero league. Duo queue seems like it's an unusually popular experience though and it made team league queues very long. Part of the problem is they just didn't have the player base required to split between so many queue types.
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HOTS does have some depth, but I think you are seriously underrating the skill expression of DOTA or even LOL laning and what that brings to a hardcore fan that well, listening in on comms cannot. Shotcalling and cooperation is certainly a skill, but it isn't one that gamers have really cared about, so its still a point of not understanding the audience if you build a game around it.
And lets not confuse ourselves here. HOTS might have depth, but that is wholly accidental on Blizzard's part, just like wavedashing was wholly accidental on Nintendo's part in SSBM. They set out to make the most casual of casual mobas possible to try and suck in fans of their existing IPs into a FTP lootbox gambler.
It's a very different kind of game than the others. I'm of the controversial opinion that any real time PvP game not overly filled with rng taken seriously will have pretty much unreachable depth because difficulty is derived by an opponent using the same tools. HotS trades things like the item shop and carefully last hitting minions for precise team rotation and timings being paramount. What I'm definitely not saying is that DOTA and LoL lack depth, they're obviously very deep and require very strong technical skills to succeed, which I've laid out is probably something that makes them more popular. But I always feel the need to push back against the kind of sneering reception Heroes gets as a "casual" game because someone who played thousands of hours of league loads up the game, plays it like league and doesn't understand that there are other ways to outplay your opponent(s) than last hitting/denying 10% more minions than your lane interlocutor until you can snowball out of control.
Heroes actually predates the lootbox craze and didn't have them until loot 2.0 after the game had pretty much already flopped. I know I'm sounding like a fanboy but the game really did feel like an effort of love rather than a cash grab. I'm not much of an activision/blizzard fan anymore and am well aware of their deserved soulless corporate reputation. They tried lots of weird and creative stuff that I don't think the other mobas would have to guts to do. They could have done what league did and basically just copy the style of dota allstars with some tweaks but instead they greatly changed the formula.
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Citing a few anecdotal examples does not equate to "objectively wrong." But I suspect we'd end up arguing over every IP to be examined and debating to what degree the "hardcore" fans did or didn't like it. I mean, I'd point out that Black Panther and the Guardians of the Galaxy were C-listers who were almost unknown to anyone but hardcore Marvel fans before the movies. If you think those productions, or any others, stood or fell based on the enthusiasm of aging comic book fans, I think you are deluded.
I have not watched She-Hulk, only read reviews and summaries, which convinced me it was badly written and full of characters getting up on soapboxes and pandering to the presumed sensitivities of the audience, which is, again, bad writing. It didn't fail because it was "too woke," it failed because the wokeness appears to substitute for actual dialog and characterization.
A lot of the conversation here seems to be a combination of hardcore fans desperately wanting the studios to believe their opinions are important, and people desperately wanting to find evidence that "go woke, get broke" is true.
Meanwhile, what actually determines success is almost always mass appeal, which correlates only loosely to quality (some very good movies bomb, though usually of the more artsy variety, while the dreadful Michael Bay continues to print money, even if his most recent venture fell a little flat because it didn't feature giant robots), and what motivates studios is making money, with wokeness and social agendas being tolerated because you always have to let the creatives have their little causes while they make money.
That's like the argument that the Soviet Union didn't collapse because of lack of respect for property, it collapsed because the government mishandled people's property (which happened because they didn't respect property).
Being too woke leads to prioritizing wokeness over everything else, which leads to bad dialog and characterization.
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Inconveniently for your argument, these are the things hardcores enjoy and complain about the lack of when absent.
Everyone enjoys dialog and characterization and complains about its lack when absent. Are you using some definition of "hardcore fan" that means basically "people with any degree of taste"?
Hardcores are among the only people in that set, yes.
That wasn't my question, but believing only trufans care about dialog and characterization and other markers of quality is not an uncommon affectation.
I'm saying hardcores are the most turned off by lack of quality. And among non-hardcores there are a much higher % that don't care about quality.
Hardcore fans are defined by their slavish devotion to some IP, if any group especially lacks taste it is hardcore fans. The tasteful enjoyers move on from a product when quality declines, the cultlike fans are the ones still buying iteration 37 even though quality went down the drain
A poor definition of hardcore if I've ever seen it. Hardcore fans are pioneers who discern what is the value early on and then police the ip into quality. Hardcore fans kept super smash bros melee relevant long after all its successor games faded from memory because it is simply better.
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That's the opposite of how it actually works. When Game of Thrones' quality was declining, it was the hardcore book fans that dipped out first (and even started pissing contests about which season was the one where things started going downhill). The "tasteful enjoyers" didn't realize there was anything wrong with the show until the very end.
You can see the same pattern with every franchise.
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Are they? Hardcore fans can be very persnickety, but they'll also grade their favorite IPs on a curve. This is the sort of thing where it's hard to generalize with confidence, but I've been involved in Star Wars fandom since I was like twelve, and looking back one of the things that stands out is the extent to which me and my fellow Star Wars devotees would heap praise on material that would struggle to get a passing grade if it didn't have "Star Wars" on the cover.
It used to be much harder to get any kind of decent nerd content. We had to love whatever shit they gave us, it was the only hope of getting any more.
We have the luxury these days of being able to say that it sucks and can just go consume different nerd content.
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My personal experience also matches this take.
I can enjoy media related to my favorite IPs that are objectively mediocre or even bad in various ways, as long as the IP itself is treated well by the media.
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