#Heros of the storm Patch#
Since mid-2015, I've obsessively devoured patch notes, posted several despairing notes on Reddit wondering why I always seem to find myself partnered with imbeciles (surprise: the team imbecile is often me), and even found myself watching tournaments played by men and boys 10 years my junior with frightening dedication to the game and faster fingers than I'll ever have-e-sports being something I'd never expected to find pleasure in.
By my calculations, that's exactly 830 hours of furious mouse-clicks and grimaces of anguish or just over 34-and-a-half full days of gaming. Each game takes an average of 20 minutes, though a game can last anywhere from about 12 minutes during an outright stomp to upwards of half an hour, if both sides consist of woeful morons. I've played Heroes of the Storm for two years, starting just after it left beta.
But there's a precipitous learning curve at every level of skill, and it can just as easily become an exercise in frustration and self-flagellation, especially if your teammates aren't up to snuff-or if you're the rube but you don't know it. It's a simple concept that allows for a huge amount of depth, and when two teams are in full flow, firing on every cylinder, it's a joy to watch and play. Two teams of five players duke it out to destroy each other's base with the assistance of computer-controlled units that march forward along set paths, or lanes, as the terminology has it. Not quite an RPG, not quite an RTS, MOBAs are fierce, fast games that combine swift fingers, strategic thinking, and uproarious bursts of skill.