Braden Madsen

I've been playing this game for a couple of years and reached platinum 4 rank in ranked mode, to demonstrate how much I played it in those two years. This game is fun. It has a lot of interesting ideas like mounts, fighting over objectives, a total level for the team instead of individual levels for each player, and stronger minion wave camps you can capture. The good ideas also become the bad ideas at times. Since coordination is key is to getting the dynamic of the map to work in your favor, it can be highly frustrating when others do not pull their weight. Carrying your team to victory is about 10x more difficult in this game than in LoL, especially with certain heroes. And that's the other problem. The heroes that are the most popular, ie the most fun to play, are the least relevant in most compositions and in terms of their ability to carry the team. On top of that, the worst thing about this game is Blizzard has an incessant need to completely break or completely drown out of relevance a large portion of the heroes they work on in the "balance patches". It frequently leaves me wondering if they even care about the game or if they test any heroes they attempt to balance before updating. In ranked game play, your team has the opportunity to ban three heroes of your choosing. The sad part is there should be around 10 bans because of balance issues, but the ones that are banned are banned every single game, regardless of your team's strategy or the map you are playing because of how over the top broken they are. I was forgiving for awhile, understanding that it is not easy to balance a game like this, but it has got to the point where it is too frustrating to play. Even attempting a nice chill game in quick match is flooded with unbalanced heroes and/or awful compositions because of how fun certain heroes are in comparison to the rest, ie. you will have many games with no tanks or healers. This makes it feel very unrewarding to play many heroes you love and requires either endless hours training weak yet fun heroes or spending a fraction of the time with broken heroes to win in the most disgraceful of ways by picking one of the broken ones. This game is addictive, but only until you get good enough to realize that it wasn't hard to win for so long because you needed more practice, it was hard for so long because you were working on the wrong heroes.