Your friends are over at your apartment for a Friday night party. The hot topic? Your hook-up with girl you met at the bar last night while out for Thirsty Thursday.

You take a swig of vodka and smoke some marijuana as you tell your eagerly-awaiting buddies the details of what happened. They think you’re godlike.

The next day, you hear from your mom that your grandmother is in town visiting, and will be arriving at your apartment shortly.

Scrambling to tidy your place up, you juggle beer cans as you escort the trash out to the dump­ster. With the garbage gone, you whip out your vacuum, running it across your carpet with the fury of Mr. Clean. With mere seconds to spare, you unleash a can of air freshener as you hear your grandmother’s footsteps approaching your door.

“Hello, grandma!” you cheerfully exclaim, as she walks through your door.

For the next few hours, you talk about how excited you are to see her again after a VERY long week since her last visit, how well you’re performing in school, and how well you’re getting along with your devoutly Christian girlfriend. Before the end of the day, you go out to a restaurant with her to get some food.

 
Go back and look through that story again, but this time, skip the part about being fore­warned about your grandmother’s visit, as well as your daring cleaning escapade. Without that bridge, you would imagine that this story was about two completely different people.

So what happened? How did an unfaithful, promiscuous drug user become a nice guy overnight? The answer lies in the power of social expectations.

 
A lot of people will say that they don’t care what others think of them. They claim they do whatever they want, and they won’t let other people affect them. Unfortunately, although most people want this to be true, it often times is not.

Most of our social decisions are heavily affected by our reputation. The concept of you – your personality, your behavior, your actions – is not concrete. Rather, it is an abstract entity that we are constantly constructing and altering everyday. We build ourselves to be, not what we really are, but instead, what we want others to think we are.

So how do we determine what we want others to think we are? Some of it lies in what we ourselves idolize – if we identify something we believe is a good trait to possess, we will integrate it into ourselves. Some of it also lies in social expectations – what we think other people want us to be.

Imagine you really were the nice guy that you were with your grandmother. Would your friends think you’re cool? If you meet the right friends, then sure; but seeing as you have friends who think you’re godlike for cheating on your girlfriend, probably not.

Imagine it the other way around, where you really were the girlfriend-neglecting alcoholic that you were with your friends. Would your grandmother appreciate that? This scenario would probably end up a lot worse than the former.

Your friends and your grandmother have different expectations of you. Your friends expect you to be confident and rebellious, so they can also be cool by association; your grand­mother expects you to be studious and ethical so you can grow up to be a great man. As a result, you change how you act based on their expectations.

 
At this point, you’re over 500 words into this article and probably wondering how this is related to Heroes of the Storm. It turns out, a lot of everyday psychology concepts, like social expectations, play an important role in games as well.

Before Heroes of the Storm (HotS) came out, I played a lot of League of Legends (LoL). In LoL, the general consensus (at least among lower-leveled players) is that you are too good to belong at your current rank, and everyone else is terrible and only got that high out of luck. Thus, the expectation of every player was to carry the game.

This expectation caused people to make selfish plays in order to get ahead – if everyone else is worse than you, who is there to carry the game better than you? You secure every kill, you farm every minion, and you deal the most damage to single-handedly win every fight, and ultimately, the game.

This expectation was thrown out the window in HotS, where everything relied on your team. Leveling was done as a team, earning takedowns was done as a team, and winning the game was done as a team. Thus, people came into the game with the expectation that, without cooperation, they were not going to single-handedly carry the game.

The disparity between the two expectations of the players of LoL and HotS is what made the games so different. If someone took your kill in LoL, they were actively trying to anti-carry you, preventing you from winning the game. As you can imagine, this made it very easy for people to lash out – why be nice to someone who is clearly trying to make you lose?

On the other hand, if someone took your kill in HotS, it didn’t matter, because everyone plays as a single unit, and all rewards are shared by the whole team. This environment that HotS created was conducive to teamwork. HotS was framed as such a team game, that there was very little left to argue about in terms of individual performance.

In summary, when entering a game of LoL, everyone has their own expectation of them­selves that they are the carry, while everyone else is terrible at the game. This dissonance of expectations between yourself and others creates an unfriendly (and some­times hostile) environ­ment. On the other hand, when entering a game of HotS, everyone knows teamwork is the only way to win the game, and every­one expects it from every­one else – this harmony makes it easy to start the game on a positive note.

 
So, if kills and assists being lumped into takedowns was one of the contributing factors for making HotS a hospitable game, why change it? What’s the point of removing a facet of HotS that caused it to be considered by many as being uncharacteristically welcoming for a MOBA?

It’s all about the esports.

The best way to get people passionate about a game is to support it as an esport. Nothing charges up fans more than watching a game being played at the highest level on a grand stage by the ones they idolize. After watching the world champions receiving their hefty lump of prize money, there’s nothing more fans want to do than to jump on HotS and rank up to be the next big thing.

Unfortunately, in the state of the game prior to the most recent patch, that was a little bit difficult to do for two primary reasons.

First, HotS is too much about the team. In LoL, if you see SKT T1 win a game, you can go into ranked solo queue, call mid, and be just like Faker by solo-killing your laning opponent at level 2. In HotS, if you see Tempo Storm win a game, you can go into … team league with four of your friends.

The thrill of LoL is in the epic plays individual players make; the thrill of HotS is pulling off the perfect team-synergy move. Imitating a successful LoL player is very accessible; imitating a successful HotS team is much more difficult.

Second, even if HotS fans were to want to idolize a player, they don’t know who to idolize. Again, this branches off HotS being too much about the team, in the sense that individual players have very little unique identity. When you hear “pentakill” in LoL, you think, “WOW FAKER IS A GOD!” When you hear “enemy team dominated” in HotS, you think, “nice, Tempo Storm won a fight.”

A huge part about marketing is how you frame the product. Blizzard realized that the way they were framing HotS was not optimal when trying to turn it into a viral eSport. Everything is a balancing act, and they decided that downgrading the commoners’ experience was worth improving the hype around eSports.

By breaking down takedowns into kills and assists, not only is Blizzard using a more “universal” metric for performance, but they are also allowing players to shine and build up their personal brands as competitive athletes. Kaeyoh can now be known as the carry who puts Tempo Storm on his back with massive kill streaks; Dreadnaught can now be known as the support who is always there to assist his allies.

 
Is this the right choice? That depends on Blizzard’s vision.

If their vision is to make the game as pleasant as possible, then no, it’s not. The community outrage clearly demonstrates that splitting takedowns into kills and assists is not the way to go.

If their vision is to turn Heroes of the Storm into the premier competitive multiplayer online battle area, then yes, this change puts them one small step closer to their goal.

Making people like the players, in addition to the teams – making people like Dreadnaught for being a great support, in addition to liking Tempo Storm for being a great team – creates more discussion, develops more bonds between the players and the community, and keeps people coming back for more.