I'll adress a few points here.
@Frotty
-The reason i advertise it as a PUBG/Fortnite clone is that it gets the concept across more easily. Everyone knows what these two games are all about. These brands have far more recognition then say Battle Royale or Hunger Games. So if i use PUBG as an example, the demographics are more likely to overlap because PUBG players and Warcraft players are usually 18 to 30 year old players. So if i tell people that it's a game of Warcraft with PUBG elements i get my message across in a matter of seconds. I have this game development philosophy where i always try to use familiar concepts, which means theres less explaining need to be done. Point in case, i rarely have to explain to new players what this game is all about. From watching multiple replays i've found that players usually have an intuitive grasp of how to play after only one game.
-You mention snowballing, but let me ask you this. If there's a player that's way better then everyone else, why shouldn't that player snowball? Think of it like this way, nearly all games that have resource management are snowball games. Why you might ask? well
because with less resources, the less options you have. That's just the nature of these games and you might think this is dumb from a balance perspective, but if you do you've misunderstood why these games are fun to begin with. Good players get rewarded and bad players get punished.
Getting good at snowball games are why it's fun to play them. It's all about the journey of becoming a better player and thats where the fun lies. You'll see lots of games have these mechanics: chess, dota, super smash bros. melee and yes even pubg. Yes even pubg snowballs! If you don't get good gear early in the game, you're honestly just fucked because it sets the premise for the rest of the game, where you get outgeared by players with more resources. Which means if you don't find gear early in the game, you just lose the game. To make that fact even worse, since gear spawns are random. It's basicly random wether you lose or win. Which is superbad from a competitive standpoint.
If anyone keeps asking for random placement of camps or shops i'll just refer to this ^. Because people don't know what the fuck they're talking about when they ask about randomness for the sake of randomness.
-The shrinking to be fair is a little drastic in v0.2, i've improved it a little over time in v0.25. So that shrinking lasts 30 seconds instead of 25. I feel like players should get caught off guard sometimes though. For example it's an important part of storylines, where players lose all their shit to the circle, but makes a comeback and proceeds to win the game. Getting caught off guard also indirectly adds an importance to carrying teleport scrolls, if the circle will mess you up. But to be fair, you do have a 30 second buffer every time, which is enough as long as the circle isn't in the opposite corner and/orr if you carry a TP scroll, it's basicly impossible to lose things to circle.
-The map really isn't that micro focused really. Most of the time you control units 12-16 food count and even then sloppy micromanagement can go a long way. But how army focused the game is, depends a bit on the playercount, if its a fullhouse game, it's basicly impossible to build up a decent army since every creep camp is contested and resources on the map are limited. In a 24 player game you usually cap at 16 food and in a 12 player game you tend to cap at 24 food. So basicly less players = more army focus, more players = more hero focus. It's a great balance, because the game always works no matter how many players you have. Even 4 player games are fun.
@Chaosy
I've designed the terrain around functionality as a priority. It's supposed to be rather minimalistic to prevent things from grabbing away too much attention from gameplay. Though i'm curious if you had something particular in mind when saying this.
I'm not going to add AI, since it's basicly a waste of development time and honestly it's not even hard to even get a full house game anymore with discord being a thing.