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.
The menu is blurry. The text isn’t crisp or clean, and it’s fuzzy around the edges. You can’t tell from that small preview, but go ahead and click on the screenshot above for the full 1080p resolution. It looks like something in less than 720p was taken and stretched out, rather than rendered at true 1080p.
Now, take a look at this screenshot:
You’ll notice that the menu is slanted in the opposite direction. Do you know why? Because, for whatever reason, the panel swivels back and forth, depending on where your mouse is.
Sure, it’s some eye candy that makes the game a bit more flashy and fancy. But it’s probably the most irritating and annoying thing that I’ve ever seen done with a menu.
Usually, when you see an item, you move your mouse to it and expect it to still be there when you arrive and click. When the entire menu swings around and your destination is no longer at its former location, it can get pretty infuriating pretty quickly.
So what was I hovering over in that screenshot? The “PARTY PLAY!” section. Apparently, you’re only allowed to add Tetribots to your party, unless you connect to Tetris Live. But, in my experience, even if you turn on Tetris Live … you can still only add Tetribots to your party.
Let’s stop complaining about the menu and jump into the actual game. Surely, it will be better, right? Well, not so much.
The first thing I noticed is the complete lack of control features. There is no initial hold/rotate feature, so if you play too quickly, a good number of your inputs are going to be ignored by the game. The auto repeat sensitivity and rate is very limited, and the game sometimes doesn’t even register a key release quickly enough, so the piece keeps moving, even after you let go of your arrow key.
The ghost piece feature also clearly wasn’t thought through that well, because the game matrix is blue, and the J piece is blue. The ghost piece outline is an extraordinarily similar shade of blue as the matrix, so it’s very difficult to see where your J piece will end up.
Sure, if you’re looking straight at it, then you can tell the difference between the two shades of blue. But, when you’re playing at an extremely high level with great speed, you end up just barely glimpsing at all the elements on the screen, rather than focusing in on one thing, because you need to take in as much information as possible, as quickly as possible.
When doing that, it’s far too easy to not realize where your J piece ended up, especially because of the excessive number of inputs the game ignores. (Meaning, you press the keys and expect the piece to end up in one place, but because the first few key presses were ignored, it ends up somewhere completely different, and you don’t have a reliable ghost piece system to tell you that the piece will not drop where you expect it to.)
The profile and achievement system is also wildly mediocre. Not only can you not really tell what the achievements are, because they’re so poorly organized, but the clear achievement series that you can tell (because it’s right at the top) – the belt system – is very shallow.
You automatically get a green belt if you finish all the levels of Marathon mode. You get a black belt if you can complete Level 28 in Endless mode. (Also, since when is purple belt ever better than a red belt? Some martial arts even have red belt ranked higher than black belt.) There is absolutely no depth to it – you can literally become a black belt without ever really knowing how to play Tetris.
The other achievements are so hard to keep track because of how badly the panels are organized. It seems like this game was designed for console, then, when transferring it over to PC, instead of redesigning it to work well with computers, they just copied the controller-based menu over.
Grouped in with a bunch of random percentages that show up when you open your profile page (that represent the Tetribots’ achievements) (wait what?), it’s very difficult to actually build up a profile of Tetris credentials because none of it is very intuitive. Not to mention, if you do manage to get badges, they’re all very pixelated.
After playing Tetris Ultimate on Steam for a few hours, and thinking decently hard about it, I’ve concluded that this game is geared towards very casual players who are used to playing console games, but for whatever reason, want to play the PC version of Tetris.
There is no way high-level players can appreciate Tetris Ultimate because of how little it addresses competitive needs. People who play at the highest speeds simply cannot, because there is a forced delay between pieces where inputs are not accepted. Players who play at the highest levels against others worldwide, again, simply cannot … unless they are able to figure out the multiplayer settings better than I can.
This was Tetris’ chance to prove that they really do care, and that they really have been keeping up with the communities of players who love their game. Without a doubt, they failed.
In a quickly advancing and evolving era of gaming, where even near-perfect games still cannot become big, Tetris is eventually going to be buried as one of the classics that couldn’t break through into the modern industry.
After trying out this game, I’m glad that I left and moved on to games made by better companies with brighter, more innovative developers – instead of continuing to meddle with the struggling Tetris scene. 
You may already know that I used to be a diamond-level player in season 2, so yes, this isn’t exactly too impressive (and if anything, it’s expected), seeing as my account is currently in low gold rank.
But, the point here is, a champion like Zyra, who is extremely vulnerable to death (especially when every champion and their mom has a gap closer nowadays), can still work extremely well with the Dark Seal, simply because of how good of an item it is for an aggressive playstyle.
I’m an extremely calculated player, and I’ll constantly be running a ton of numbers through my head during the entire game. There have been times when the Dark Seal has given me so much of a damage bonus that I miscalculate my damage, throw out my abilities to apply Rylai’s and Flash away, only to realize that I could’ve just held my ground and gotten a 1v4 quadra kill.
Now, as we can see by my defeat, what the Dark Seal doesn’t do is make you invulnerable to Warwick’s Infinite Duress, comboed with Jarvan IV’s Demacian Standard, Dragon Strike, and Cataclysm.
… That was a rough game.
(This post isn’t endorsed by Riot Games and doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of Riot Games or anyone officially involved in producing or managing League of Legends. League of Legends and Riot Games are trademarks or registered trademarks of Riot Games, Inc. League of Legends © Riot Games, Inc.) 
The reason I never really liked snowfall is probably because it always held me back from doing something. It prevented me from driving safely to another location, it prevented the bus routes from continuing on schedule and made me walk back home during university, etc.
Yes, this snowfall did prevent me from driving – I ended up spending the night at our family business instead of making the half-hour drive back home. But, I regularly spend the night at our business anyway to save gas, and I actually prefer it there because I get to be alone and peaceful.
With all these concerns gone, it was actually soothing watching the snow fall and pile up in our parking lot.
Once it’s time for me to move on to the other city for the remaining 50% of my day, I would head on over to the warm environment. My car with ten inches of piled snow and frozen windshields/windows wouldn’t even matter, because it would probably instantly melt as it arrived in the hot sunlight.
So, not only would these two different cities be used to counteract the hassle that the winter brings, but it also satisfies my new appreciation for seasonal diversity – being able to enjoy great weather, as well as the interesting sights brought to us by snowfall.