You may remember that last month Blizzard detailed an Artifact progression system for its cross-IP MOBA Heroes of the Storm. Turns out that the community wasn’t too impressed with the concept or execution.
Those disgruntled fans will be happy to hear that Blizzard has listened to concerns and decided to scrap the system entirely.
Artifacts were intended to be an answer to League of Legend’s Runes, a way to customise and enhance your heroes by spending in-game gold. Due to balancing issues and various other fan concerns, Blizzard lost faith in the concept.
“Artifacts were designed to provide you with a meaningful way to spend gold, while also providing additional options to customize your heroes,” the developers wrote on Battle.net. ”We wanted to test artifacts in the Alpha to find out if the system fulfilled those goals. As testing began, many of you voiced concerns around fairness issues, “correct build” issues, balance, new player tension, and other issues that made it clear that artifacts weren’t working as intended. We agree’”those issues started to outweigh the benefits of the system.”
”As a result, we have decided to remove the artifact system from Heroes of the Storm with a patch scheduled for later today. We will explore different ways to give you fun and compelling options for spending gold, while avoiding the problems that the initial artifact system created. We don’t have any updates on what our future systems may be, but we’ll be sure to keep you informed and look forward to getting your feedback on alternate systems.”
It’s easy to snigger at the idea of a developer scrapping an idea barely two weeks after revealing it, but kudos to Blizzard for actually listening to its players this time. The developer has also made it easier for players to level up their heroes, reducing the amount of game time need to reach Hero Level 4.
Heroes of the Storm is currently in a closed Alpha testing period.
