III – Defining Personalities
This week I decided to finally put to test my limited understanding of HOTS facing matches alongside human comrades. I don´t know exactly how the Matchmaking system works, but I noticed something quite peculiar. In my first two clashes, I had as companions two players above level 30 and the rest of us below 20. I thought matching rookies with other slightly more advanced players would be a constant. However, it appears that Blizzard trust blindly in its community letting very advanced players match with simple pawns like me… During my third run, some of my comrades were above level 80, I don´t know to what extent you can level up in HOTS, but 80 seems like a lot to me.
After a week of playing with humans I´ve realized something important. We’ve all seen enthusiastic people who seek to highlight, people full of initiative that ignore the concept of failure so they can keep going further in their projects. People that I would call inspiring, necessary in the world to cross new frontiers and push us to be better. Well, thanks to my short personal experience as a player of HOTS this week, I can say that I´m the exact opposite to the type of person I just described… This doesn´t mean that I haven´t tried… I will attempt to explain my process trying to define my HOTS player personality in this post.
Good design in MOBA games (Mom Obviously Bought Alcohol) presents varied characters and interesting options for all kinds of players. In Heroes of The Storm, there are three main categories:
Assassin: Clearly created for hyperactive people who can´t leave their fingers still for two minutes. They are fragile characters capable of generating large amounts of damage and create an immense hatred on behalf of the opponents.
Warrior: Do you remember your chubby friend at school, who had to play defense do to his body type? That same friend that was extremely dedicated to throw all his weight and commitment in every match? The Warriors are basically that chubby kid, very resistant and heavy characters; generally the cornerstone of every team fight.
Support: Altruists, philanthropists, benefactors destined to greatness. Always behind the scenes keeping the team alive (a completely objective description, it has nothing to do with the fact that my Main this week was Tyrande who is Support…)
Specialist: Every game needs hmm… Special people. Creative people that can´t conform to traditional roles. It is difficult to define the role of a Specialist hero, but they are basically unique characters with certain gimmicks that define them. The thing that they all share is that they are especially good pushing the team to destroy the enemy base (I think…).
Taking into account my semi understood character type division in the game, I devoted myself to gradually define my personality in HOTS. Due to my inexperience with the controls and little understanding of the development of each match, I feel it was quite difficult for me to meet the needs of certain roles (especially Assassins and Warriors). For example, to play an Assassin you need a thirst for blood. The good Assassin players are constantly looking for errors from the enemy team, harassing them until they get a kill. I like to see them as professional stalkers with even darker intentions. My problem is not knowing when to stop stalking, following the match rhythm… and certain input sequences. Let´s asume I am a real life stalker, if we transform my game abilities to real life, I would be the kind of stalker that forgets to bring food while spying on a victim. Also, I would probably let them notice me every time I get out of my very obvious van with tinted windows to smoke a cigarette…
