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But what personally bothers me the most is the presence of various minor changes that don't immediately catch the eye, but ignorance or failure to account for them will affect the outcome. Like removing the immunity of birds to fire, like accumulating creatures in hiding places; the most striking example is the change in the flight mechanic. Seeing such small things that can decide the game, I realize that this may be just the tip of the iceberg among such small things, and I don't want to deal with all of this.

And why don't I want to? Precisely because Hota was not made for me, not for online play.

To learn all these things, it is enough to read the brief documentation a couple of times, noting such moments for yourself. It was specifically structured so that it would be easy for online players to navigate. This takes less than an hour. And no surprises. The evil developers are not going to hide anything from the players. Changes to entrenched original elements (like the immunity of birds and the flight mechanic) are the most difficult to pass through the filters of new features and are only made in cases of absolute necessity. The accumulation in hiding places was made a long time ago simply as a feature that does not particularly affect anything and has since taken root and really does not particularly affect the game.

The Hota developers decided to listen to experienced players when everything was already done, the outlines of the game were defined, and any significant changes in the game became impossible. Offering dialogue six months after release is just a joke. And at the creation stage, only Vic represented the interests of online play, and he obviously represented them in his own way.

Approximately from version 1.3, two paths emerged. Either go online right now as is and try to use feedback to figure out how to structure this imbalance further, or build some understandable gameplay based on individual selected opinions, which will then be refined only in a targeted manner.

The first method may be more appealing, but it has its drawbacks. First, the online community has repeatedly shown its total disunity of views on the game and its inability to form any unified opinion on at least one issue. There is little help from this in the absence of existing guidelines in the gameplay. Secondly, if Hota had gone online before the appearance of guilds and clans, their appearance (although it would have been delayed by at least another six months in this case) would have been perceived as a radical change in the gameplay of Hota itself. And there would be no need to create the illusion of being thrown from side to side. Therefore, all the main changes were carried out first, which in any case were planned in some form, and only then are we ready to ask what people like and dislike in the resulting gameplay.

If a significant number of players spoke out in favor of any changes, then they might have happened, but so far it seems that everyone, with rare exceptions, doesn't care.