It's still in technical alpha. It's supposed to be free to play. It could be a while before it's open to everyone.

Every character will be buyable with in game gold that you get from leveling/quests. Skins/mounts will be buyable with real money.

Sitting here at work at 4:21am and see that keys went out. Checked my email and I'm in! Now just have to wait until I get home.

I have been playing this game quite a bit, a lot more than any other game I have played in a long while. I just hit level 12.

It started off really fun. The objectives were a nice addition, not having to buy items is a good change, nonstop action makes the game very engaging, and the games are really fast (most lasting between 10 to 18 minutes from what I've seen).

Now, it's just annoying at times. I lose way, way more than I win. The game tends to be heavily unbalanced by the addition of a couple heroes, most notably Murky. All too often you can't find the egg or get to it so he just comes back over and over to destroy your base.

The new meta for the Haunted Mines is to not even go for the skulls for the first wave. When the other team rushes for the skulls, you just team up, hit every mercenary camp, and then pound the base as much as possible. Last night my team got 100-0 skulls and we lost pretty quickly. Once your team is on the defensive it's very hard to overcome.

The trickle XP when you're down 3 levels doesn't do much of anything, but that is now going away for an Underdog Bonus. Basically, when you're down in levels, every kill of the enemy team gives you more XP while a kill of the "underdog" team rewards less XP. It seems like Blizzard is trying to emphasize a teamwork aspect to the game, but it just doesn't work unless you're actually in a coordinated party.

Part of my annoyance is/was this weeks hero rotation. I didn't really care for any of them.

But overall, don't get me wrong, the game can be super fun when the team is working together and you're in a close game or dominating. When you're just getting pounded left and right, there is no point in even trying.

This week's hero rotation was god awfully annoying. Kerrigan is broken.
Every game was Diablo/stitches/kerrigan/nova and then usually Li Li or Malfurion.

You just get chain cc'ed by their team and die.

And you always get the bad Gazlowe, who dies to nova while jungling.

LiLi is hilariously strong. I've never played her and only had her on my team a couple times, but yesterday I was playing Valla and was at like half health when their Illidin dove me. I dashed back and he stuck to me doing Illadin things and im at like 1hp, then our LiLi comes to save me and I just 100-0 him and ended the fight with 100% health somehow.

Yeah, she can do that like twice + do damage

I'm really enjoying this game. I can't wait for it to become more accessible to more people to see how big it can really become. I think it will quickly overtake Dota and LoL as the most popular, as Blizzard really improved upon both of those games, although each will survive with a big enough player base.

seems unlikely

Theres no chance it gets ahead of either of those games, especially LoL which is overwhelmingly the most popular game atm. But I could see it climbing to a healthy 3rd place since the current crop of contenders is pretty shallow. Whats the #3 moba now, assuming HoN is near dead? Smite?

It will secure#3rd and blizz will be fine with it, their clientel roll in much more cash than the LoL/dota2 counterpart. Hots is lots of fun and the by far lowest entrylevel of all games making it cater alot to casuals or old gamers like me that just dont have the time anymore to keep heavy mechanics fresh. (Think sc2 macro/the prime aim of your abilities in q3/cs, lasthitting in LoL and so forth). Its very underwhelming to lose **** because you are out of practice. Hots will not punish me in the same sense as much. And i got lots of monies for them cool skins.

Someone who never played an alpha before ? Wow. For an alpha this game almost looks like a ready to be released game from any developer but blizzard. Diablo 3 OPEN beta had more issues than this alpha. They deliverably put input lag and stress their own servers etc to see if it holds up. Sure your gameplay experience might suck but 3k ppl raging a bit is a spit in the ocean compared to the rage of a game shutting down in the release week. Chill the **** down, im even surprised all models are done/working

This could very well be a problem on your end. A very high packet loss on the line or a problem with your network card can both cause these problems. If you can see the X it just means the culprit is not the GPU.

If it continues, make a bug report, which is your reason of being in the alpha in the first place.

Don't be so daft. I've played many alpha releases before (seems like everything on Steam is early access lately), would wager many more than you, but from Blizzard I expect somewhat of a sound foundation to actually test their platform. Granted that post was over 3 months old and they've fixed that massive issue with the "stuttering", you can't honestly say D3 open beta was unplayable to the point where the game would just continue without you for 5 seconds at a time. You must have just got into the alpha since you don't seem to have experienced this issue, or just are just grossly misunderstanding the bug I've described as something that wouldn't literally prevent people from testing their alpha build.

What does deliverably putting input lag mean? Deliberately? Why would they actually try to put input lag in their build? Maybe you have some deeper insight into developing games than me, but that doesn't make any sense? Obviously they want to stress test their servers (Which by the way, they haven't done yet. 3000 concurrent users is NOTHING), and probably don't have one near my East Coast location, explaining the server lag, but could you explain why Blizzard would intentionally put input lag in the game?

I did report the bug, it's since been fixed. It was probably due to [their] network issues at the time.

someone i play daily hots with is a blizzard employee. I wont go into details since i dont get 10% of what he says anyway but they bomb the servers and so all kind of things to it. Game really isnt for our pleasure yet, i mean, Champions arent close to being fine tuned yet as lili easily demonstrates with being stupid op, and yeah i got into the alpha about a week ago.

Edit : deliberatly, yeah auto correct owned me there. I just rolled my eyes when i read lots of complaints when i scrolled some pages since this alpha at this early stage runs steadier than 90% of any early or even late beta ive ever tried. hell if we would only talk blizzard games hots wins. WoW, d3, starcraft were way worse to me, even hearthstone was a pain at times and i was pretty late into beta there.


To sum it up, for an alpha this game feels pretty damn close to a finished product imo if the company were any other than blizzard.

New patch coming up for hero quests and stuff.

Cliffs: whatever progress you have gained in that tier of hero quest, it will be reset to the beginning of that tier.

For instance: if you're 28 games into the mount tint tier(which is 30 games long), it will be reset to 0, so you lose that progress. Finish up the big tiers if you're going for them.

Not sure when patch is happening. I'll post link to website when I get home.

Here's the new artifacts that they're adding:
http://us.battle.net/heroes/en/blog/14833869/

So this is like the masteries in LoL? Something similar? If so, I hate everything about it.

Closer to runes. Masteries are free.

I liken them to runes that you can level up, instead of paying for a tier 1/2/3.

Not sure if I like it, but it can't hurt anything. My only main fear is say... things being too tanky that should be squishy. Like imagine a 6k hp valla with damage reduction or something.

Well it's health +% based, so it wouldn't really turn a DPS into a tank.

They need to start handing out a lot more gold if they want us to test those artifacts.

They're awarding gold based on your current level when the artifact patch comes out so people can more easily test them.

Only two levels left till 40 so that should be good enough to upgrade stitches to the max for even more fun against pug's that don't understand his abilities.

He's probably referring to load testing. I administer an app at my company, and when testing new changes in our test environment, we can simulate the max load we would ever have in our production (live) environment. So what they might do is hammer the servers while testers are on to see what might fail. No idea if that is what was going on or if there was another issue, but that's the simplest way I can explain what the other poster was referring to (just reread it, wouldn't really explain input lag of an end user, though).

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