While I am definitely not a part of the alpha tech testing, I did had a chance to see how the game works and where is blizzard going with it. Thanks to Hafu and TotalBiscuit for providing us with some gameplay and description of the mechanics. Now, let me sum up what I had found.
Heroes of the storm is an incoming free to play MOBA game. Something like League of legends or Dota. There is kind of a boom in these games so it shouldn't be a surprise everyone want a piece of the cake. While some are dying, some are flat out failures there are still attempts being made. Why I think this one might be different? To see why it might succeed I will focus a bit on the problems and weak points of the current kings of the genre and therefore where is a room to snatch some players.
Do something else
I've seen a lot of complaints in the spirit of "it has no items wtf..". People who believe they are the fans of genre are in a lot of cases actually fans of a specific game. They then proceed to go whine how that game has something and this game doesn't. In a bad case (think of Warhammer age of reckoning) the developers will actually fall for that and start to steer the game closer to the original one. When that happens, people who played and enjoyed the game will leave, because a lot of them actually play or played the original one and has no reason to play two identical games. Making an exact copy of something just flat out doesn't work in the game industry. This is something that Blizzard sees and I hope they will stick to the plan.
Complexity does not equal depth
Depth is defined as a number of meaningful choices player has available to solve the particular challenge. Complexity is about a number of elements player has to be aware of to actually make an informed choice. In other words, how obscure and complicated the rules are. Depth is fun, complexity isn't. Now there is another, often overlooked, value that is very important when trying to craft the best available player experience - pace of the game. Not on it's own but in relation to two mentioned aspects. The faster and more action packed game is, the less complexity will be players able to deal with. League with health, armour, magic resist, percentual penetration, flat penetration, true damage, mixed damage, runes, modifiers, critical chance, critical modifier, conversion ratio, percentual attack speed reductions (abilities affected by Ability power/ Attack damage), masteries, tenacity,... is too complex for basically anyone to be able to judge the effect of their actions precisely and Dota2 is definitely not better in this. It is a super complex excel table kind of thing to figure out what is actually a better choice. Most of the players use a specific build for their champions that they found crafted by someone else on sites specifically designed for that (mobafire.com, solomid.net) and few of those players actually make changes to those builds to reflect type of enemies they face. So in reality gold and item mechanics in League of legends or Dota2 adds no depth for most of the players that actually play it.
That is where I see one of the good choices Blizzard made - HotS don't have gold, or items at all. They obscure the gameplay and put a pressure on out of game preparation which is impossible to really make since the number of champions and possible combinations and builds. That is why flavour of the month champions are so strong within League ( I don't play actively dota2 so I can't tell) - people just go with whatever professional players think is the strongest as they trust their opinion. Less obscuring complexity also mean the game will be more accessible to people who would enjoy it but would be scared off by the sheer amount of information it looks like they would have to acquire - the biggest reason why a lot of people didn't pick up either of the biggest moba games. If you just read through the mechanics I mentioned earlier - when faced with it, many people just decide not to bother as it looks more complicated than it actually is.
Snowball is anti-fun
Experience is a snowball mechanics, who kills the other player is restricting him from gaining experience and therefore is building advantage and making it easier to defeat him again. Gold works in the same way and these mechanics are additive. Everyone can remember how much fun they had when they played an actually equally matched game of LoL. These are the best games we ever played, burnt into our memory. Snowball mechanics are here to disable this. Most of the league games are decided at minute 20. Sometimes it just takes another 20 to make it happen. And it is a stomp. If one side is getting absolutely destroyed it is not much fun for either side. Yeah, you can pump your ego but that is about it. There is no challenge in winning a game where you are 20.000+ gold ahead. By removing one of those mechanics HotS managed to keep mechanic rewarding the player for defeating his opponent without shutting enemy down entirely. This makes the game harder as you have to consistently outplay your opponent rather than just have a good pick and than press the advantage. It is much more fun for both sides.
No hard counters
So many games in existing popular mobas are decided in champion selection. Even the professional players, therefore the best, most available to judge the effect of their item builds, says often "we were outpicked". Gold therefore doesn't even add depth in this matter. While branching skill trees that allows you to redefine the role of your character within the game - now that is a meaningful mechanic. It allows player to just play whatever champion they like and tailor him during every match to deal with the tactics enemy is using. example - there is a support champion that can pick if his heal ability will as a secondary effect make ally invisible or shield him from incoming damage. Stealth can be a great utility tool if enemy has a long range artillery champion you have to deal with, while shield is important if they execute their play around picking one target from your team and assassinating him. That is a great way to deal with problem of missing variety that item builds brought to game without having to deal with it's downsides.
No farming
While some people like that, a lot of people don't care about minions when all they want to do is fight other people. With the heavy focus on farming in the two dominant moba games, a good way to distinguish yourself and open to the new segment of the market - is to entirely remove that part. It also makes sense considering there is no item mechanic in the game. Ability to defeat neutral monsters to make them join you for a time is a great way to deal with this problem as well. With heavy focus on champion fights, their choice to allow all core abilities at lvl.1 shows that Blizzard is very much aware of the differences they must adjust to.
So to sum it all up - Heroes of the Storm look great. Blizzard definitely went to a great lengths to identify the core problems of the current giants and avoid them while keeping as much fun as possible. From what I had seen, their observations were on the spot and a game itself will be a gaming experience comparable to few others and will be consistent about it.
I am sorry TB, but I have to disagree, there is a lot of reasons why would people who enjoy playing Dota2 or League switch to HotS - most of them, just like you, don't have any illusions about being a pro player and enjoying the game is frankly more important.
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