The Open Division is the absolute pinnacle of amateur Heroes of the Storm, promising a chance at making it into the HGC for those who are skilled enough. In seasons past, there have been Heroes Lounge teams that have joined, but this HGC Phase, they have both joined more than ever, and have had more success than ever. Time for us to digitally sit down and ask some questions of several of the more successful Lounge teams in the Open Division.
For this article, four teams currently playing in both Heroes Lounge and the Open Division were interviewed, as well as a fifth team made up of several of the Lounge's more memorable members. They are, in order of points in the Open Division: SFD Gaming (175 points, tied 5th, Division 1, current Lounge Champions), EPG Frozen (160 points, 7th, Division 1), Ryzing Gaming (60 points, Division 1), Minion Genocide (60 points), and Coinflip (30 points, Division 1).
Question 1: Why did you choose to participate in the Open Division?
SFD Gaming: Just get that extra drive to be competitive and find out where we stand on a larger scale.
EPG Frozen: As the biggest tournament that you can reach out as an amateur this is our chance to show that we cannot only play Hero League or go high in Heroes Lounge. To show that we can go higher than this and possibly contest the Spot in HGC.
Ryzing Gaming: It is very good practice especially because you can be sure to face strong teams who play their best compositions every single week! And well, every team wants to reach the play-offs for sure, but that would have been more the topping for a good season.
Minion Genocide: Rozmex has been playing in OD for a few seasons, and wanted to make his own team for this one in case he didn’t get good offers. He approached Froge and Epixors, and Cascon was suggested as the support. We briefly played with Ravatar, but he was let go and Undead joined because “why not”.
Coinflip: We play in OD in order to gain more practice in a tournament environment where we are exposed to all kinds of pressure. Also it gives us the opportunity to compare ourselves against the top non-HGC teams which are not playing in Heroeslounge. So for now the goal is not to get through OD and end up in crucibles (because we are not on that level yet), but prepare for the next seasons as our team in this composition is still relatively fresh.
Question 2: What are some of the main differences between the Lounge and the Open Division?
SFD: Heroes Lounge is really good for building up a team, get some good scrimpartners on your level and just experience Heroes as it is meant to be played. If you compare it directly to OD the first thing that come to mind is the atmosphere. People mainly play Lounge for fun whereas almost everybody is tryharding in OD games, so usually OD games tend to get way more tense.
EPG: In Open Division after the first or second Round you usually face teams that are better than in Heroes Lounge, they try hard to get to the top 8 and than to have a chance and face the Pros. Apart from that OD is organised by Blizzard and you have also a little price pool, that rewards good teams and players for their work.
RG: First of all, heroes lounge has a great community which upvalue the pleasure of playing Hots alot! Additionally, Heroes Lounge is not as strict as OD. In division 1 there is still a huge skill range between the teams. But this is fine, because even the best team can struggle against another team, when they have to play with a sub. Or face a weird “yolo” composition, or have a bad day. And this makes Heroes Lounge a little bit more casual and entertaining during the season. Playing try-hard mode is still enough in play-offs.
For us it is a very different situation in OD. First of all, you have to play several Bo3’s at a single evening which is really exhausting. But more importantly, if we don’t play at our best, we can be sure to be eliminated at round of 16. There is no space for being tired or having a bad day.
MG: Heroes Lounge is more carefree, casual and in general easier to get into. Open Division is a lot more tryhard, but lacks the great community that Lounge has.
CF: The biggest difference is of course the level of play. You will not find a team like the Lauberboys in Heroes Lounge. Additionally, the whole format is very different. You can play your HL season match by match (at least at the beginning), while you have to perform well in the OD cups for a whole evening with multiple series in order to get further. It demands a bigger amount of consistency from the get go.
Question 3: How do you prepare for Open Division? How much time per week do you spend on OD outside of playing in the Cups?
SFD: As a team we are aiming to scrim 5 days a week. Replays depend on the actual scrim results, but we try to get at least one replay analysis per week. Out of that all of us are grinding Hero League to get the mechanics down.
EPG: Scrims are usually done by our Team 4 times a week, sometimes 5. We usually scrim 2 - 3 hours which leads to about 11 hours of scrim timing per week. Replay analysis is included in our time we spend in scrims or we do check it ourselves. We also watch HGC to have a look at the meta and develop more strategies which leads to about +2 hours a week. A lot of freetime goes into Hero League or anything like that so we spent a lot of time :)
RG: I guess we do very little compared to other teams. We try to play at least two times a week (counting Heroes Lounge as once a week already :-D). It is not easy to getting together as 5 that often. There are only few things we keep doing since we play together:
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Warm up games before every event
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Playing in our comfort zone
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Keeping honest with ourselves, when we faced a strong opponent and lost. It’s not worth to being depressed after losing against ePunks Black.
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Watching replays of close games until the turning point for open discussions
MG: We’ll usually try for 3-4 evenings of 2x 2 hour blocks. After those we’ll do up to an hour of replay review if they’re worth looking at. Then there’s some draft prep, everyone’s individual Hero League grind and watching/studying HGC.
CF: We were a bit unlucky this phase to be honest. We missed the first cup because of hardware problems and a break which lead to a slight rosterchange (Robin → Maangar). Then it happened a few times that we were not able to practice the 3 days before the cups.
Usually we aim to practice like 4-5 times a week, but we are not doing special practice for OD. This phase we try to get the best training from it and focus a bit more on Heroes Lounge.
Question 4: What, if anything, would you change about how the Open Division works?
SFD: A big problem we see with OD is that it doesn’t actually help to prepare a team for HGC at all. At the end of the season it is 5 talented casuals against 5 pro players that play the game for a living and OD doesn’t help to prepare the team for the crucible at all. Blizzard should aim to prepare the Crucible teams for the Crucible, organize a 1 week bootcamp, organize a professional coach. Just look at how much Leftovers improved after they got 1 player with experience and game knowledge.
Also a little more prize money from the OD Cups wouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t have to be HGC salary, but if they advertise OD with prize money a it should be more than just Pizza money.
EPG: We think that there should be more Cups / Events where you are actually able to play vs HGC teams. The difference between amateur and pro lvl is way to big currently and really hard to reach because you just have the lack of experience.
RG: Casters should show more underdog games in the beginning of the tournaments. The most streams just follow one single team from top 4 of the standings, which ends up in showing boring stomps in round of 32 and 16 with huge breaks between. This is totally pointless!
MG: Make sure that there’s a clear patch schedule ahead of time so teams don’t have to waste scrim blocks. Fix seeding issues by either playing seeding rounds beforehand and locking who can play in the OD season at the start, or by giving every team who participates “shadow” seeding points for every cup that make sure you can’t repeatedly get matched against the top teams every round.
CF: Bracket should be up like one day in advance because of freewins and better scheduling.
Question 5: What is your goal for OD with two Cups left?
SFD: Firstly we want to finish out on our pre season goal of top 8. After that it’s Crucible of course.
EPG: First of all we want to get into the top 8 and than have a great battle in the playoffs to have the chance to play vs the hgc teams. Also to show our Player names to the world out there.
RG: Playing our best, have a lot of fun while try-harding and maybe earn another amount of points. Unfortunately, play-offs seem to be out of range for us already.
MG: Cabbage enough for playoffs, hopefully beat ePunks Black.
CF: Getting more experience, getting into semifinals (and maybe into playoffs? No idea if that is still possible.)
Question 6: What was your favourite moment in this Phase's Open Division so far?
SFD:
- Enabler: Butter triple kill junkrat period.
- Butters: When we didn’t loose a series on the first Monday despite going 2 to 1 every time. We came from Lounge, didn’t really know where we are and finished in the top 4 after the first day.
- Meneldor: Not losing my limbs when playing.
- bLaDe: Cup 3 was the first cup with SFD and winning versus Team Go in that cup after being down a game felt pretty good.
- Kupschi: The smile on Grubbys face when we drafted Nazeebo.
EPG: For us it was the moment to be on Stream vs Epunks Black where we did play top favorite players and gave them a pretty good series which improves the teams spirit that witch more practise we eventually defeat them.
RG: We started with the second cup this phase and we messed up to inform all of our members to download the tournament realm in time. So the admin gave us 15mins to join the match lounge of the first game and our last member joined 1min to late. Luckily, the head admin decided to overvote the 15min delay rule and so we could play and eventually earn 40 points (round of 8) in our first cup already!
MG:
- Epixors: Not going out in round 1.
- Cascon: The casters calling Rozmex Arzeemex.
- Rozmex: Cup 5 where we made it to semis.
- Froge: Actually getting points.
- Undead: Yes.
CF:
- Scav going in 1v9.
- Losing against murky 2-0
- Murky solokilling Dehaka (Talibo)
- Thrall (Talibo) knocking everyone out of ring
- Zervas saving everybody (enemies) with Junkrat.
Varying answers, but an overarching theme that you need to put in the time if you want to go pro, as is to be expected. Huge thanks to all the teams for taking the time to answer these questions, and hopefully, points will be plentiful in the coming two Cups, which take place tomorrow (August 20th/21st) and next week (August 27th/28th).
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