Most communities shudder at the thought of maintenance mode, but Heroes still shines in its underserved niche.
In last month’s cinematic teaser for BlizzCon, a few seconds of icy visuals and generic text about “legendary heroes banding together” promote the convention’s return in 2026. It’s nifty and all, but the real fun is in the comment section, where you’ll find a chorus of outcries: Dozens upon dozens of comments shouting into the void for Heroes of the Storm to make its righteous return.
“HOTS 3.0 Please!!”
“Who up Heroing they Storm”
“Heroes of the Storm is THRIVING”
After the teaser aired, the Heroes of the Storm subreddit spawned several threads at war over whether it’s even remotely reasonable to speculate about the game’s return. As CollinthePoodle put it, “HotS reddit probably the biggest community hopped up on hopium I know XD. If the burn marks in your morning toast looked even remotely like a HotS symbol, you’d believe a HotS revival was confirmed.”
MostPutridSmell tried to put the discussion to rest, saying “I’m from the future. They’ll announce expansions to WoW, Diablo 4, and Hearthstone. Some other stuff barely worth mentioning. HotS won’t be mentioned at all.” Not to be outdone, users like object_on_my_desk had only one thing to say:
“Fuck the naysayers. We’re so back.”
Whether the BlizzCon trailer is secretly a major announcement masquerading as a hint-laden cipher or if it features a big blizzard because that’s the name of the company, one thing is certain about Heroes of the Storm: enthusiasm among its players is in remarkable supply. And that didn’t just start in the last few weeks.
Always from r/heroesofthestorm
The game hasn’t received a sizable addition since Hogger was added in 2020, with the company formally announcing a move to maintenance mode two years later. It didn’t come as a shock to its playerbase, but while Blizzard’s MOBA didn’t make the industry-wide shockwaves Dota 2 or League of Legends did, there’s a few things it has over belly-up contemporaries like Heroes of Newerth, Battleborn, and Battlerite—a sizable niche that arguably no other game in the genre is serving, and regular small-scale updates that keep it ticking.
It’s impossible to know just how active the game is sequestered on Battle.net, but when I’m struck by the urge to revisit my old haunts polymorphing Overwatch characters as a Warcraft 3 faerie dragon, queuing up for a quick match still takes me less than a minute. It’s still the only lunch break-compatible MOBA, and when it comes to immediacy, no game is doing it like Heroes of the Storm.
Though I have some affection for League, Dota 2, and Heroes in their own respects, there’s a reason I have over 2,000 matches in Heroes and fewer than a thousand in the others. It unmoors itself from the more complex holdovers from the original Defense of the Ancients mod—last hitting, item builds, etc—to emphasize map-specific objectives and constant teamfights. If you’re looking for a MOBA that favors accessibility and action over strategically dense, hour-long matches, Heroes of the Storm is still the biggest one taking that angle.
While the game doesn’t have constant news to draw in new players, reworks of many of its weakest heroes like Gazlowe and Chen from before entering maintenance mode lead to a relatively stable and diverse meta. You’ll still find players on social media shouting out the game’s quality and recommending it to MOBA newcomers, which can’t be said for the alternatives like Infinite Crisis or Dawngate when MOBA hype was at its peak.
“Game state is the most balanced it’s been in awhile IMO since it ‘died’ at a solid spot and the patches since have made adjustments to fix outliers (which have had a decent frequency of late),” Reddit user clancemj posted a few months ago.
Fans online have spun HotS’s slow but sure development pace into an inside joke, saying they owe the game’s continued life to a theoretical hero: the nameless “janitor” who keeps the lights on and does an occasional balance pass. Currently these patches come around nearly once a month; not bad, as far as maintenance goes.
In fact, when the game received an updated main menu screen in March featuring the Janitor Leoric skin, players on Reddit took it as tribute, with user neurotekk saying “Microsoft had janitors before the acquisition… so maybe now we have a second janitor in the dev team.” Akirashantogen retorted, “Looks good on paper. ‘We have increased the HOTS staff by 100%!’”
You might think this ribbing masks some indignance within the community, but feedback is implemented faster than you might expect. In February, WC3 mogul and occasional HotS streamer Grubby noted that the draft phase was pretty long and that made queuing for ranked a bit of a chore. In the next patch, the draft timer was cut in half after a surge of concurrent player feedback.
User LittleLeaf_MTG got at the bigger picture in saying: “We joke that HotS is unsupported, and while that is true in terms of the development resources that would be required to create new heroes and maps and so on, it is certainly not the case that the maintainers of the game are inattentive or dispassionate. They definitely deserve our thanks for doing what they can as efficiently as they do with the resources they’re given.”
Dota 2 and League of Legends still impress me with their constant new hero releases, map overhauls, new modes, and loyal player numbers in the millions. But there’s something about Heroes of the Storm’s resilience, its refusal to sink despite players having every reason to abandon ship and find a more active game, that brings me back with as much enthusiasm. Whether that’ll ever amount to a revival or if the game will slowly fade into obscurity, a relic of when MOBAs were the new hotness, I have a feeling it’ll be fine for a very long time.
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