With the HGC nearly upon us, we speculate on some of the Heroes features and events we are looking forward to most going into the new year.
1. HGC Premier League
It goes without saying that the most exciting thing about 2017 will be the HGC Premier League. How many more ways can we share our excitement? With an official League, the entire ecosystem of competitive Heroes will change. Teams will get better, rivalries will form and the stakes will only get higher and higher.
The long term effects of this league will only be known months from now, but I have a feeling BlizzCon 2017 is going to be a much closer level of competition than we have ever seen before. EU and NA teams will finally have the competitive environment that demands growth from its players. Because you know what happens when you start to slipping...
2. HGC Open League
... your spot gets taken by a hungry open league team! Besides the obvious excitement over GosuGamers official partnership with Blizzard in hosting the open League (Registration for the EU division is still available!), there are plenty of reasons to get pumped for the Open League.
There has simply never been a better time be an amateur Heroes of the Storm team. All excuses are now null-and-void. If you want it bad enough and have the skills to hold your own, you can make your eSports dream come true thanks to the Open League. On top of the motivation, it gives to eSports hopefuls, already established teams that fail to qualify for major events are no longer left out in the cold for months on end. The open league provides ample reason to stay in fighting form and, most importantly, not disband.
2016 brought us a wave of team disbandment and player burn out. Why? Because if you didn't qualify for BlizzCon, MSI MGA, The Gold Series or any other major tournament there wasn't much left to do around the Nexus. Being a serious competitive team requires a lot of time investment, and that becomes harder and harder to do when there is no chance at a payout.
The Open League is the first huge step in solving this problem.
3. Cross regional tournaments and the Mid-season brawl.
NA fans may be more excited about this than others. It's no secret that Korea is the best region when it comes to Heroes of the Storm, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way. A surefire way to improve against the Koreans is to play them more often, and in 2017 there is at least one sure-fire way of making that happen.
The Mid-season brawl is hopefully just one of many cross-regional events available to Heroes teams, as any time where regions clash is a win-win scenario for everyone involved. Viewers get incredible matches with clashing meta's and electric regional pride in the air, while pro-teams get crucial experience facing teams they normally can't.
Just the existence of the mid-season brawl gives teams a mountain to hurdle and a reason to train at their hardest. Want to know the reason Fnatic swept our GosuAwards this year? Because causing an upset against a top Korean team immediately makes you everyone's hero, and you can bet every HGC team wants to be that hero in 2017.
4. Tournament draft in custom games.
What's that noise? Do you hear it? It's the collective sigh of relief and equal parts exhaustion from every single person that has ever watched a Heroes Tournament and endured impossibly long draft times.
The much asked for Tournament draft is finally inside Heroes, and we couldn't be happier. No more false starts, incorrect drafts (that cause us to get hyped over the Murky pick that didn't actually happen) and, most importantly, no more pressure on the community to solve the issue of tournament drafting.
With Blizzard taking full responsibility of it's draft feature, who knows what improvements might happen in 2017. It may be too early, but perhaps more bans are coming?
Let's not get too ahead of ourselves.
5. In game voice chat
We want you to try and solve a complex series of decision-making puzzles with 4 strangers without speaking to any of them. Simultaneously, we are going to need you to predict the actions of these strangers, as it is paramount to you solving this puzzle. On top of this, you will be controlling a hero in the fastest pace, skill-shot ridden, ability spamming MOBA ever made.
This hellish scenario is actually your average game of Hero League. The lack of Voice Chat within Heroes is a problem and it always has been. Everyone knows that the most fun way to play Heroes of the Storm is when your team is working together, but that gets pretty hard when you can't speak and half of Hero league has already disabled the chat feature (I can't blame them sometimes)
If we allow ourselves to play the part of the kid sibling for just a moment, the logic for Heroes getting in-game voice chat is obvious:
"How come Overwatch gets voice chat and we don't? No fair!"
If there was ever a year for voice chat to enter Heroes, it's 2017. We have all the momentum we need and Blizzard is pushing Team League more so than ever. Honestly, we would even appreciate an updated ping system. Perhaps with phrase "Do anything but die right now" mapped to all corners sounds nice.
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