>>13723943
That isn't really why it failed hard.
The game has a fairly small amount of different characters to play as, about 15-20 or so, which is abysmal for these types of games that rely heavily on character variety.
Worse yet is that the characters are all locked and you have to unlock them with an in-game currency you must farm for.
They give you 6 or so characters that rotate every week or so that you can pick and play as, however this had a terrible effect:
When you start the game you will only have those 6 characters to pick from. You'll be partnered with young players who also have the same characters since nobody unlocked anything yet.
You can't pick the same character twice, so getting to play the character you want might not actually be possible if someone else already chose it.
Worst of all is that the same thing will be happening in the other team for much of the same reasons.
The result is that you'll have constant mirror matches against the very same characters playing a character you might not want to try anymore, making you get bored of it really, really fast.
This will keep happening until you grind enough currency that you can buy a newer hero, something that can take a fuckload of time, and you'll get tired of it before you've grinded enough for yet another hero.
It's especially terrible when the way they found to "fix" this was giving you Cards that act as objectives you can strive for to get rewards, mostly said in-game currency.
The Cards are simple objectives like "Win 3 games" or "Deal 5000 damage", however the ones that give the best rewards are tied to specific characters, "Use X ability of Y hero 5 times", and you might get Cards for heroes you don't have and aren't in the current rotation.
Even more insulting is that you can actually buy those cards with real money and even have to pay to hold more than 5 at a time.
This whole gigantic problem (pun intended), coupled with the bullshit amount of cosmetics shows the contempt they have for the userbase. There was no need to lock heroes like this and they screwed themselves in the process, when they could have made their money back on cosmetics alone or even an actual price tag on the game.
The gameplay needed refining but it was innovative enough that it deserved a spot in the market. Certainly much fucking better than any MOBA, actually well designed for the most part (except for minions and area effects) and it could have been an amazing game. They just had to fuck it up because everyone thinks he's hotshit.