heroes Heroes of the Storm AMA Recap: August 8th

[Stan 5,020]

The Heroes team answered your Qhira and Storm League Season 1 questions on Reddit yesterday and here are the most interesting highlights.

AMA Highlights

• The team would rather announce features and things that are in the works when their delivery is imminent because, in the past, they've shared something they had in the works only to never deliver it. There will not be a roadmap, but the community can expect frequent balance changes, requested features/improvements, reworks, the quarterly seasonal themed events, evolving Storm League seasons, and new Heroes going forward.
• They have no plans for a Mega Hero Bundle 2.0 at this time.
• The team is internally changing improvement to the game's AI in terms with the goal of improving fundamental decision making while more accurately establishing and validating different goals and threats.
• They all miss Kevin and are excited to see what he does next. They want to do better with providing information in the Hero trailers moving forward (Qhira's trailer was not narrated).
• They think of teasers as a fun way to build excitement and discussion about what's coming to the game next. They will continue with that in the future.
• The team is internally exploring a gifting system that they want to release in the future.
• Overwatch has received positive feedback for limiting queuing to solo and duo queues at high ranks which could also be a good solution for Heroes, but the game is intended to be played with friends, so limiting the queuing to solo and duo queues is against the game's core philosophy, but at the same time, they understand how unfun it is to play against a 5 stack in higher ranks, which is why they're exploring different approaches to the issue at hand.
• There are currently no plans to change the menu background in the foreseeable future.
• As much as they love Orphea and Qhira, they currently have no Nexus-born Heroes in development, but several Blizzard Heroes.
• The emote wheel may return in the future.
• One of the original intentions with Hanamura was to create a two-lane map, where the "third lane" were the camps in the middle of the map. It's fine if the map objective isn't as powerful as other objectives. They are still discussing some smaller tuning changes (like increased respawn timer on the Samurai camps).
• The designers are actively exploring ways to provide data gathered by performance-based matchmaking to players to help them improve gameplay.
• They've pulled away from death traits since Junkrat's release because they don't give any value when you are playing well and not dying.
• There are no plans for user-generated content right now, but they are paying attention to the highest-desired skin ideas from the community and would like to do another skin like Janitor Leoric and Azmodunk Azmodan.
• Gnoll camps on Alterac Pass are intentionally positioned safely compared to most Mercenary camp in the game and placing them elsewhere would require other layout changes.
• They like how the global movement speed increase turned . The biggest concerns are Li-Ming, and Kel'Thuzad.
• It would be awkward for Qhira to have a mobility ability on her W and E buttons, which is why they went for D.
• Due to limited space, they decided not to differentiate the season names for Storm League.
• Currently, there are no plans for another MMR squish, clamp or reset.
• There are no plans to revert the 5% global stat nerf to healers, they did it intentionally to limit the effectiveness of double healer comps.

You can find a list of all answered questions below.

Blizzard (Source)

Is it possible to get some sort of 2019/2020+ future road map for the direction of HotS so we can have SOMETHING, ANYTHING tangible to look forward to longevity wise?

Historically, we've shied away from roadmaps because game development is much more art than science, and best-laidplans often fall apart - sometimes because we change our minds on what we want to do, and other times because we can't do what we wanted to do when we wanted to do it. Still, we love to talk about the things we have coming so we can get your feedback, but we usually do this when these things are solidified enough that we feel confident in being able to deliver them. Even then, there have been many times over Heroes' lifespan that we've shared something we have in the works with the community only to never deliver it. That feels like crap to us, and to you. We don't like feeling like crap. Or for you to feel like crap. So we keep things close to the vest, and we try to surprise and delight by announcing things when their delivery imminent.

All of that said, I recognize that the industry has changed around us. Games as service has evolved and there are teams out there doing great work and being MUCH more communicative about what's coming. So we'll put some thought into this and see if there's a middle ground that can give you all something to look forward to and schedule your gaming time around while avoiding feeling like crap wherever possible.

In the meantime, the closest we'll get to a roadmap today is reiterating that we're really enjoying the groove we've been getting into with frequent, meaningful balance changes, oft-requested feature additions/improvements, lots of hero reworks, our quarterly seasonal themed events, and evolving Storm League seasons. Sprinkle new heroes in, and garnish with love, and that's Heroes of the Storm for the foreseeable future.

Let us see how much more roadmap-y we're comfortable going from there and give us your thoughts on what info is most important to you.

Any plans to bring back the free heroes packs (Mega Hero Bundles) from the 2.0 launch or something similar? A lot of newer players seemed to start playing when this was available.

No plans to speak of right now, but if we did something like this again it would be aligned around a specific moment in time rather than something evergreen.

Any update on fixing AI? Having a player disconnect is almost a guaranteed loss due to AI trying to solo bosses or running behind enemy forts.

We are heavily invested in making improvements to our A.I. and one of our gameplay Engineers (Hi Jeff!) has been hard at work on them. We have some substantial changes that we are testing internally and with QA sign-off, plan to get to you ASAP.

This is very important to us, and I doubt we will ever be done trying to improve them. This coming round of changes are looking to improve their fundamental decision making while more accurately establishing and validating different goals and threats.

Thank you for your patience, I hope it will be well worth the wait!

Just 2 things. Please be honest and precise with us. I hope we will get something more this time than lots of PR talk. I think we, as the community, deserve more than this. Otherwise, I know most of your answers: "It is a very cool idea and we would like to do it in the future!" We don't have plans regarding it at the moment but everything is possible in the nexus!", "We are super excited about our upcoming content!" , "It does sound like a problem, we will look into it but I cannot share any dates when we gonna fix it". I could answer many of the questions in such a way. Give us something more, please.

Honesty is extremely important to us, but our level of precision can be gated by our desire to avoid overpromising and underdelivering. Sometimes we want to reply and acknowledge what someone's said without making any commitments. I prefer being able to acknowledge feedback in that manner over saying nothing at all because I think that acknowledgment is important even if we can't commit to anything at that time. If there's a general feeling that our answers are hollow and the community is unhappy with this approach, we can reconsider at the cost of having far less responses from our team. That sounds bad to me, and in a world where committing to more is not an option, I'd prefer to lean toward our current approach.

Thanks!

Are there any plans to get someone else to do the narration for the hero trailers? It's harder to follow what's happening in the trailer without someone explaining it. Kevin is great and those are big shoes to fill but having someone is better than nobody.

We all miss Kevin and are super excited to see what he does next. I agree that we can do better with relaying information in the Hero trailers moving forward and the team is actively discussing how we can improve.

While we haven't decided exactly how we want to do it yet, me know that the gameplay is extremely important and needs to be better explained. Thank you (and the rest of the community) for your feedback on this!

We saw that Qhira had the heads of characters not (yet) in our game. What's up with that?

Qhira is a huntress, so it made sense for her to have a collection of trophies from her adventures. Regarding who or what is displayed on her wall, well sometimes it's fun to have a little bit of mystery and intrigue. Sometimes artists just make really cool art, and sometimes really cool art inspires others to make new art or designs. Sometimes.

What do you think is "up" with those heads on her wall?

1. Vikings aren't getting a skin any time soon so I thought I'd make my own, The Lost Bikers! Not finished but would appreciate any quick feedback on what can improve the most.

2. Which is better for learning sculpting/modeling, a lot of small warm-up throwaway projects or larger projects? (while making vikings skin is fun, it feels a bit redundant like I'm not really learning anything new).

3. How many hours would you estimate goes into a completed skin on average?

4. If you had to pick only 1, who is your favorite artist?

1. First off, nice start! Did a quick paint over to show you where I would take this. https://imgur.com/a/M7WTB22. Generally things just need to get bigger. His Nose, Buckles, Goggles, Bracers, Belly, Beard, Belt loops. You have a lot of opportunity to really push the look of tight leather that doesn't quite fit on Olaf. Giving him a bracer on both arms will also allow the modeler to mirror the arms since there's no huge benefit to giving him a bare arm. Any interior details like the pockets and zippers need to be thicker. The beard could use more plumpness towards the lip. Have it bellow out so there's an arc from the side. The only thing that could go a bit smaller is the tire.

One of the harder part of sculpting is doing stylized folds. Remember your Diamonds, Zs and sideways Vs. Think about cloth folds like this. Where there's a pinch in the cloth you're going to get a taper out. This cascades and creates a diamond shape in parts where there's lots of folds. If it's a larger fold it will taper out in either a Z or V. You have to decide whether the pants are leather or denim because they have different behaviors. Always grab reference. We tend to favor thicker folds and exaggerate folds that would normally be smaller.

2. Both are beneficial. Small warm-up throwaway projects are good if you focus on learning one specific thing and are doing it knowing you might fail. Starting over on those projects can be important for artistic growth. Longer projects that you complete are good to show potential employers because that's the goal, complete an asset to put into some sort of media.

3. Depending on the complexity of the skin it can take between 2 weeks and 5 weeks.

4. For some reason Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum has been coming up in conversation a lot for me and I've been looking at Dave McKean's art in that comic again. I love his style in that book and hands down is one of the coolest looking Joker's I've ever seen.

Why do a teaser for a hero that is impossible to guess the identity of? The fun of the teasers is trying to guess who the new hero would be but if the hero is someone with no buildup in either existing games or supplemental lore they become impossible to identify so why waste the resources making an elaborate teaser?

We think of teasers simply as a fun way to start building excitement and discussion about what's coming to the game next. Sometimes there are things the community can "solve" in teasers, and sometimes we're showing things that are out of left field. We love seeing the discussion, the guesses, the theories, and the passion that surrounds teasers and we intend to continue doing them. Hope you can share in the fun with us!

Would there be any chance to see some gifting system? I got tons of currency and wish to send some cool skin to my new player friend.

Juno has a working prototype internally and we are trying to get it to you as quick as we can! We'll keep you updated as we finish developing the feature ?

I guess I misunderstood. At blizzcon it was stated multiple times MMR would be visible. It stated recently that your rank would be MMR. Am I the only one confused about seeing people still having rank points and gaining and losing 200 per win and loss. Thats not how MMR normally works...

Are there any plans to make MMR more clear? I think most people expected to see a similar system to Overwatch MMR or Wow Arena MMR. (Or league, R6, Chess, Dota2, DBD, CoD, SF, SC2, BDO, Smite, and so many others...)

How is it going to handle teams where because of weird queues or groups your teams mmr is lower than the enemy teams mmr. With you get any sort of adjustment? How about when your personal mmr is just leagues ahead of everyone else. Will you get penalties?

I think in general this method will still be fine, more wins you move up, more losses you move down, I am just curious about some of the finer details, you know?

Edit: Seeing some people gaining 600 points and others gaining 30 points. I am guessing that it is more complex than +200 -200

With the new system, the MMR is effectively visible as your Rank (minus penalty adjustment). We could show total count of rank points (Bronze 5 = Rating 0, Bronze 4 = Rating 1000, Bronze 3 = Rating 2000, etc.), but that would just change the representation of the number and won't matter much in regards to the actual information visible to players.

The general idea of MMR value change calculation is as follows: we have a win rate prediction system, that tries to estimate the win/loss probablity in each match, depending on the team members' ranks, party sizes, our certainty in the ratings value for each team member, etc. MMR (and Rank) change post-game is calculated based on that estimate, plus or minus some adjustments. The MMR calculation hasn't changed much with the new season, it's just more visible, and, hopefully, more representative of player's actual skill now.

In an interview, one of you guys stated that you would like to limit Masters+ to solo queue or duo queue, have you decided on that matter yet and if so, when can we expect it to be implemented?

I think I speak for the majority of the high level playerbase when I say that this is much needed if a solo queue option isn't possible for the Storm League in general, as it ensures an as competitive as possible experience at the highest level of play.

We have been discussing this and it is something we are fully considering. There are two competing forces at play here that we'd like to strike a balance between: Overwatch has received positive feedback for limiting queuing to solo and duo queues at high ranks which could also be a feasible solution in Heroes of the Storm. However, Heroes is a game that has been heavily focused on playing with your friends and is when we feel the game is most fun. Limiting the queuing to solo and duo queues at high levels goes against that general philosophy, but we understand that it can be unfun to go against a 5 stack in higher ranks.

As a result, we are actively investigating other ways to make this experience better for everyone. Other options we're looking at include investigating what's happening with our win probability calculations. We are actively discussing solutions, so if you have suggestions or ways you would like to see this proceed, please let us know!

About Q'hira the new release:

Do you consider unbalance that her E ability only spins clock-wise and not player's choice? For example, if you are roaming from mid on curse hollow, if you are left team the engage will spin towards your side first and be more dodgable.

It is something we consider (and considered it for Fenix's Q as well) but we don't feel that it makes a significant enough impact on balance to change it. I think if it were to change directions based on starting side, it would definitely be something you'd have to get used to and would most likely throw you off for a while as you learned the hero. I also don't think there's a clean way for us to implement it. For example, if you're on the left side team and are approaching an enemy Hero from the North, the expected rotation direction would be towards the right side team (clockwise). However, if you're approaching from the south, suddenly the expected rotation direction would change to counter clockwise. So there's not really a silver bullet here that would make it feel good in all situations without giving you some way of controlling the rotation direction at execution, which would add a lot of user input complexity to the ability for what we feel would be very little gain for most players.

Will there be an opportunity to change menu background, as it was during The Dark Nexus or Echoes of Alterac? Bloody-red colored background was awesome.

I agree! Those events were a lot of fun and the team had a great time adding atmosphere to spaces that aren't usually updated with new art. We don't currently have any plans for another background takeover but if there is an opportunity in the future I think it's something we could consider.

With the unexpected release of Qhira so soon after announcing at Blizzcon last year we would not see another OC nexus hero for awhile, Should we expect Nexus OC heroes WAY more frequently than you initially lead us to believe last blizzcon? (I.e. within 3 hero releases of eachother)

Orphea and Qhira are unique in the way they came about, driven by the Heroes team being excited about fresh gameplay elements and visual concepts that were pitched last year. It was the team's way of bringing something new and unique to Heroes – both development-wise, and in-game. That kind of exploration is one of my favorite things about this game – whether it’s a new skin, or the reimagining a hero’s kit for our game, or creating an entirely new hero from the ether - we get to explore and try new things while having fun as developers and players. So as much as we love Qhira and Orphea and we had a ton of fun making them, we currently don't have any other Nexus-born heroes in development. We do have several Blizzard heroes that you know and love in active development, and we can't wait to share more on them soon!

Can we get the emote wheel back? Programmer art and all. We did get the rest of the game, so I think it's time.

As one of Heroes players, this is the feature that I miss the most. I like how heroes in game interact with each other. Using voice lines to communicate with team members could be a good way to add humor and break the tension in game. As I mentioned in other thread, using voice lines to make character feel live is one of the features that I am personally very passionate about. There are other items that I need to work on, but I am hoping that I can find some time to make this happen.

https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/cmf25v/heroes_of_the_storm_ama_august_8_2019/ewckijv?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x

You did well with the new map system for storm league. A great decision, so thank you very much for that. But, what do you think about Hanamura right now? I spoke with many players from esport, and they dont like the map (even if it's better than the old one).

And i guess if you let it in the rotation, you think it's competitive. But as i say in my own stream. You can just ignore the objective on this map too hard to have for so low dmg. Instead farm Samurai (Hard Camp) and pressure the keep all time. And i understand you creative position. You wanted to swap the boss map with a low boss in fusion with hard camp. And it's cool to see innovation like that. But the obj is pointless and the 2 map lanes create a snowball race for the structures.

So i guess you are aware about this situation, what is your position about that ?

One of the original intentions with Hanamura was to create a 2 lane map, where the "third lane" were the camps in the middle of the map. So it's intended that there's a greater emphasis on them than most other maps.

It's also probably okay if the map objective isn't as powerful as other objectives. It shouldn't be ignored, and it shouldn't be more valuable to take camps over and over instead, but it's okay if it isn't a "drop everything you're doing and come here immediately" type objective.

We're still having discussions on what changes to make going forward. We agree that it isn't playing out exactly the way we want. There might be some smaller tuning changes (like the increased respawn timer on the Samurai camps), or even slightly more creative ones.

Why is the missing ping hero's quote is gone?

Thank you for bringing this up. We're aware of the issue and looking to find the best way to bring it back. While researching, I also noticed that heroes don't play their voice-over lines when you use individual pings. We'll also look at how to bring the voices back for those moments so that our beloved heroes feel lively again.

Since this fix will take us time to review all the voice line data for all Heroes in 12 languages, I cannot promise the date. However, this is one of the features that I am personally very passionate about and am doing my best to make it happen!

Whatever happened to performance-based matchmaking? Is it being shelved forever or are there plans for it?

We still don't have any plans to use the data to influence MMR or Rank; however, the designers are actively exploring ways to surface more of this data to players. Changes to the in-game score and recap screens are currently being iterated on but there's no concrete timeline for when or if these would be released.

What are your thoughts on traits that only occur when your character dies?

I find this to be rather frustrating/unfair as it doesn’t give much value if you’re playing well and you aren't constantly dying.

Junkrat’s trait as an example can be valuable in select situations where someone can’t avoid it, but with the 0.75 second delay, most of the time it goes off without any damage done to the other team. This is even more true now with the movement speed increase.

You are absolutely correct in that if you are playing well and not dying, your trait doesn't give you very much value and that's why we've mostly pulled away from doing death traits since Junkrat's release. In the future, if we were to do another death trait it would only be done in a situation where it truly made sense for the hero fantasy and there would most likely be extra bonuses attached to it while alive.

Do you plan to have a workshop for user created skins? Are you making tools for that?

There are no current plans for user generated content. However, there are many avenues to getting your concepts seen by us. Just recently u/Jackice1714 created a poll with a bunch of community ideas for skins that they ran on reddit. We are paying attention to the highest desired skin ideas from the community and would like to do another community skin like Janitor Leoric and Azmodunk Azmodan.

Will we see the lore for Qhira expanded upon?

I am interested in her as a character, but it feels like there was to be more build up for her that we never got. Will we learn more as time goes on?

Also, because I ask this every time: Whimsyshire invasion/Event / Tyrande Announcers when? ❤️

I think it's totally possible that we will expand and evolve the lore of not only Qhira but the Nexus and all of it's inhabitants in the future. Our goal is always to provide awesome gameplay, which was our primary focus with with her design, but we've heard the call to reveal more of her story and is something we would really like to do if the right opportunity arises. However, we don't have any specific plans or details to share at this time.

As for Whimsyshire, I can only speak for myself here, but I am totally on board for adding more rainbow tinted mayhem. I am the artist who created the Whimsyshire cloud mount after all... I just have to find a way to convince everyone else first!

Can you guys consider adding a Taunt showcase button for the MVP screen?

And also a dance one, if possible. It will make Mastery Taunts much move visible and also make MVP screens more unique. Not to mention how awesome will be to see those animations on the big screen!

I think it's not a herculean task and it might be a great side project for a hots developer, maybe.

This is a good suggestion. It has a lot lot of ramifications that I'm unaware of at the moment. For example, Taunt animations are usually a little more unconstrained in the hands of our animators. So, what does that mean for a hero that steps out of frame of the normal camera? Does that mean they step in front of another player? The next steps would be to go through our 86+ heroes and figure out where it breaks. This is the kind of thing that we need to explore before we're able to implement something. I'll poke around and see if this is an option.

Do you have plans to make keybind settings bound to heroes instead of profiles?

"Empowering players so that they can enjoy game in a way they like it." is one of my goals. This has been requested time to time. The easiest work around would be creating a separate profile for the hero and switch to the profile everytime game starts. I can look into if switching profile automatically is easy if client detects that profile under the same hero name exists. However, this will add some maintenance for players since some common settings should be copied over to all hero specific profiles as well. I won't promise if I can deliver anything, but I'll review how easy it would be.

Alterac Pass has a design flaw imo that I think could be easily solved.

The Gnoll camps are very powerful, I like this, as they are unique to Alterac pass, and between objective's being active there isn't much else to do on the map, This is also why I like their quick respawn time.

However, they are positioned EXTREMELY safely compared to almost every other mercenary camp in the game on all other maps. They are closer to the keep than the fort, are extremely protected by the walls and mud pits. If a team wanted to invade the opposing side's camp, they put themselves extremely deep into the opposing teams side of the map to do so, and the camp going straight onto the keep wall rather than the fort from the back/side (Like invading the Siege Giants on Dragon Shire/ Sky Temple for example will do) makes them get little value even if you do successfully invade them until the fort has been destroyed and minions are able to push alongside them.

My suggestion is to move the camp to the opposite side of the wall that they are now, this makes them a bit easier to invade, and should promote more interaction in the map as a whole when the objectives are not active.

Perhaps the Objective Capture locations themselves may need to be moved slightly to accommodate.

This is a cool idea and one that would be interesting to test. I think that you are correct in that the Gnoll camps are relatively safe to take, but part of this is intentional.

We like to have a variety of Mercenary camps, and having a mix of some that are easier and some that are harder to take is important. That being said, it doesn't mean that any camp should be unable to be challenged, and the gnoll camps might be too far in that territory.

The complication is that we like to keep objective locations relatively isolated from one another. Now turning the camp around in those locations might be enough, but the thing to test would be if that area begins to feel a bit claustrophobic.

It would likely require a few other layout changes, which aren't really easy to do. Our art team pours a ton of attention into Battlegrounds, and changing the layout around can require a lot more cleanup and polish that you'd think. Not that it isn't do-able, but it's a matter of priorities and cost/benefit here.

It's a cool idea though! Would be interesting to see how that would play out.

Will the rank adjustments in SL Season 1 reduce the rank ascent time of smurf accounts, now that it is going to make your rank and MMR synonymous? I would assume that smurf MMRs skyrocket pretty quickly, and that as a result, this change will make lower MMRs more balanced and fair to play in, as smurfs won't dwell there for as long of a time.

Great question and yes, it should! There are mechanisms in place to accelerate MMR gains for smurfs. These have actually always been around; however, in the past, rank and MMR were updated separately which would result in smurfs "dwelling" in lower ranks despite having higher MMRs. Not only did this make the experience worse for other players but it also made the matchmaker's job much harder.

Now that rank is updated based on MMR this should no longer be the case and MMR and rank should rarely diverge. That isn't to say that smurf accounts will instantly rank up but it should be a bit quicker and they will have less of a negative impact on the matchmaker. ?

I'm a Korean user who really loves StarCraft and Diablo Universe.

I'd like to give some feedback on a few heroes. Can I get these?

First one is Raynor. He has an add-on to D Skill, it has 30 seconds cooldown but Take out the revolver and shoot free D to the enemy. Motion's like Starcraft2 heart of the swarm ending. and can we get his COOL visor close when he casts W?

Next is Tychus. I want to see his visor close when he casts Q skill and I hope the smoke will be coming out from his suit after it is done. like Wings of liberty ending.

Blaze is a very cool Hero but his Normal attack feeling is something boring Can you change it? I think it's a sound problem. I personally miss the sound of SC1.

Last is Imperius. His wings were better than at the time of release but it's still weird. Compare with Link's concept art https://twitter.com/blizzheroes/status/1088159017514364928 Part of Wing armor is more sharper and bigger than the in-game model. And it stretches on both sides. not back side. He is a name of ARCHANGEL OF VALOR. his Q motion is strange it looks like hard to maintain with both hands. I hope it's changed to another badass pose.

Thanks for the feedback qortkddj90! These are all cool flavor hits! Best I can do is look into what is required to do these things and weigh it against our current backlog. If it is something that we can justify doing next to some other things that are there then it sounds good. If we can't I hope there won't be any hard feelings. Also, we have a lot of things we would like to do and time is always a big factor. If you can figure out how to add more hours in a day I'm game to explore everything.

What are your thoughts on the global movement speed buff now that’s been out for a while? Any hero specific changes to skill shots/ projectile speed in mind?

So far so good! We didn't think there would be too many huge swings in win rates with this change and so far that has been the case. I still want some more data before pulling the trigger on anything, but the biggest concerns that I have are Li-Ming and Kel'Thuzad, and to a lesser extent some other heroes like Ana and Chromie since those heroes rely on their skillshots a lot to be effective.

There are a lot of ways to buff a hero outside of their skillshot speeds, so I wouldn't expect them all to suddenly get skillshot speed increases due to the movement speed increase. After all, the point of the increase was to change the game a bit, not to make it the same as it always has been.

Why does Qhira have an active skillshot D and a stackable passive W? Shouldn't we swap them?

The primary reasoning for Grappling Hook being on the D button is two-fold. It has a relatively long cooldown for a basic ability (25 seconds) and it feels a little awkward to have a mobility skill on your W and E buttons. During Qhira's design process, Grappling Hook was actually a level 16 talent and the Passive portion of [W] Blood Rage was her trait. Over the course of our iterations we were having so much fun with Grappling Hook (and it was considered such a must pick) that we decided to merge the passive portion of Blood Rage (at the time her trait) into the W and put Grappling Hook on her trait.

I was playing Storm League with friends, and after we've done our placements, we noticed something weird. My friend (diamond2) and I (plat5) were winning/losing 500 points every match. My other 2 friends (another plat5 and a gold1) were getting only 200 points every match.

After reading reddit and the official forums, I've seen a bunch of people saying they are getting really different numbers every game. 500, 300, 200, 150, 100 and even there was a 26 point game (a bronze player shared this one with a picture to prove). At first we thought the system was trying to put people at the right ranks, but then it doesn't make sense that we were getting the SAME points for wins or losses. Can you explain how the point system works?

One of the ways the matchmaker modifies your MMR after a game is through a system called Game Density - Essentially, the longer you go without playing a game, the less confident the matchmaker is that your MMR is correct, so the more it will change after a game. I took a break from Starcraft 2 for a bit one time and I dropped from Gold to Bronze as I forgot how to 4 gate properly, but I slowly cheesed my way back up. As you play more games its confidence returns as the amount you change after a game starts dropping again. Previously your rank points changes hid this, which could lead to rank/MMR disparity. Now the rank points changes accurately reflect this, so you will notice more rank points change if you come back from a break, or a win streak. Hope this helps!

Is there any clarification as to why the statistics tab seasons were renamed to "Preseason" and "2019 Season 2".

At first it was labeled "2018, Season 5", a month later renamed to "2019, Season 1" now suddenly it's Preseason? Wasn't the "2019 Season 2" the real preseason?

And are you aware that "2019, Season 1"(Preseason in stats tab) has missing stats?

Thank you for bringing this up. It looks like a bug. Like you mentioned, 2019, Season 2 should be called "Preseason". Original plan was to update the season names for Storm League. But due to limited space, we decided not to differentiate the season names for Storm League. Regarding missing stats issue, can you leave a report on our official bug forum with more details?

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/heroes/c/bug-report

Will you compress the whole Storm League population with a really soft reset for next/each Season in the future?

As a note, I must clarify that I'm not asking for another hard reset for high Ranks like the one that happened at the start of the recent Preseason.

A lot of players have been misplaced too high in Storm League due to the Hero League and Team League merge not taking into account that most of the players were higher Rank in Team League and lower Rank in Hero League and that the Rank in Team League had less value than the Rank in Team League.

A similar thing happened at the end of 2017 when you changed the Placement Matches cap from Diamond 3 to Master 1000 while the MMR Uncertainty being boosted at the start of a new Season was still a (bad) thing.

I think the only way to make Mater a valuable Rank again is to push everyone down for some Divisions each time a new Season starts and see what happens.

The misplaced players won't fall back to their Rank because they are too many misplaced people who basically feed each other Rank Points and can remain stable for hundreds of games, if not even forever.

There are no plans for another MMR squish, clamp or reset as of now. We believe those measures should only be taken under extraordinary circumstances, such as significant MMR or Ranked play system revamps. The best way to ensure people's rank is on par with their skill is to have them play ranked games, the more the better, especially at the higher-ranked tiers. The reason being is that having a bigger game data sample makes matchmaking system's player skill estimates much more reliable. This is why we have set up a more robust rank decay system, and also why we introduced the new seasonal questline. To secure their skill and rank, one must play consistently.

What was the most important step for each of you to get into the game design industry? I'm graduating in a few months and looking for tips on where to start/what to do.

I think everyone has a unique experience for how we got into the positions that we currently have. The most actionable things that I would consider would be:

1. Create your own game. The two most powerful things that I know of that can be on a resume for a Game Designer are prior experience (which most people asking this question won't have), or people who have actually created something and can show it. There are plenty of game creation engines out there that are cheap or free, just go to google or youtube and you will find that there's a whole world out there for game creators. It's seriously never been easier to do this, but most people don't want to take the time to. The experience of going through the iterative process of creating something and learning from your mistakes is incredibly humbling and will teach you more about being a designer than a million years doing paper design of cool stuff based on games that already exist.

2. (2222 to too two. I don't know why Reddit won't let me put a 2 here asdf) A lot of people start in Quality Assurance and move into Game Design because they are related fields. Getting experience working on games doing QA work and making your own stuff in your free time is the best way that I know of to reliably get into the industry.

It also helps a lot if you have a reputation for having a strong work ethic. Don't let others tell you that you can't do it, and always bring your A-game and you will stand out among your peers.

Again though, this is just my experience and opinion on it. Everyone has a pretty unique story as far as how they got to where they are. However, I think that this advice would be useful for anyone to have a better chance when trying to get the job.

Have you considered reverting the 5% global stat nerf to healers?

Double healer comps have not been perceived as effective ever since this round of changes. Many healer mains have told me that they loved when double healer comps were viable because it allowed damage-healer playstyles to shine like Water Dragon Lili and battle Uther. However, the bigger reason why these compositions were successful was because of very specific talents like Lightning Bond that gave healers legitimate wave clear and/or camp clear which is supposed to be the biggest weakness of such comps. They are supposed to have very weak wave clear and macro presence. These old talents like Lightning bond mitigated that issue and were abused at high level play, but with them gone, the 5% stat nerf could be reverted. This would potentially make double healer comps viable again, but they would have the glaring weakness of wave clear and macro pressure which introduces counterplay.

We don't have any plans to revert the nerf to healers in the past. This was done intentionally to drastically limit the effectiveness of double healer compositions so that they are exceptionally niche for a variety of reasons.

When healing becomes prevalent, a variety of "good plays" are wiped away. If a Li-Ming lands a great Magic Missile+Arcane Orb combo, healers can remove that. Mana is a limitation here, but it's difficult to run a double healer team out of Mana in any reasonable amount of time.

If double healer is the norm, we need to start balancing healing around it. That means that people that play a healer solo will likely start to feel less powerful.

There's also typically less people that want to play a support type role than not (to each their own), so expecting about 40% of the players to play it isn't ideal. We try to match what's fun with what's effective.

[Valhalen 1,484]

3 hours ago, Stan said:

They've pulled away from death traits since Junkrat's release because they don't give any value when you are playing well and not dying.

They seriously need to rework Tyrael's trait based on that. Give him some sort of passive bonus much like Uther has his Devotion with armor-boosting heals.

3 hours ago, Stan said:

They like how the global movement speed increase turned . The biggest concerns are Li-Ming, and Kel'Thuzad.

In my opinion Brightwing is of somewhat concern too. Arcane Flare is ridiculously telegraphed and easy to avoid, and given that you only get the bonus healing from Soothing Mist when you hit with the center, the recent movement speed changes made the ability even harder to hit. I think they should rework Arcane Flare by increasing the projectile speed, and allowing it to always trigger the heal when you hit enemy heroes with (but maybe make that it heals 50% if you hit in the outer area, and 100% in the inner area).

4 hours ago, Stan said:

The team is internally exploring a gifting system that they want to release in the future.

Now this is something I really wanna see. I have over 7k shards sitting there because I have most of the stuff I want. Would be great to be able to gift them to a new friend joining the game.

[Arcling 877]

Orphea has also been affected by movement speed changes. Her abilities have slight delay, with how they are telegraphed it's now much easier to dodge them. Perhaps they should reduce delay by small amount on skillshot based heroes, some low value like 0.25 sec. For those without it, they should buff projectile speed accordingly (like Li-Ming's orb).

I wonder which hero we are going to get next time, looks like there won't be anything new until Blizzcon. With how hyped some people are for Deathwing, it might be impossible to make community happy, like which role he should be and so on.

Edited August 10, 2019 by Arcling

[Enryu 12]

On 8/10/2019 at 3:53 AM, Arcling said:

Orphea has also been affected by movement speed changes. Her abilities have slight delay, with how they are telegraphed it's now much easier to dodge them. Perhaps they should reduce delay by small amount on skillshot based heroes, some low value like 0.25 sec. For those without it, they should buff projectile speed accordingly (like Li-Ming's orb).

I wonder which hero we are going to get next time, looks like there won't be anything new until Blizzcon. With how hyped some people are for Deathwing, it might be impossible to make community happy, like which role he should be and so on.

I personally not sure if I want to see Deathwing as a playable hero because of the balance. His dragon form is too massive and too destructive and shouldn't be less scary than Molten Core and I wonder how can they balance the power of it while staying true to a massive cataclysmic force fantasy.

I'd be satisfied to see his as powerfull as Cho'gall which I doubt can happen 

Edited August 12, 2019 by Enryu

[Arcling 877]

4 hours ago, Enryu said:

I personally not sure if I want to see Deathwing as a playable hero because of the balance. His dragon form is too massive and too destructive and shouldn't be less scary than Molten Core and I wonder how can they balance the power of it while staying true to a massive cataclysmic force fantasy.

I imagine he would walk around in humanoid form most of the time, which many might find underwhelming. Dragon form could be either as his trait, similar to Alexstrasza and/or his heroics would transform him. Of course question remains whether his model should be smaller, walking on the ground or something like - he transforms into gigantic form and takes to the skies, bombarding enemies, and all they see is a massive shadow. Might feel too similar to existing abilities though. 

[Valhalen 1,484]

5 hours ago, Enryu said:

I personally not sure if I want to see Deathwing as a playable hero because of the balance. His dragon form is too massive and too destructive and shouldn't be less scary than Molten Core and I wonder how can they balance the power of it while staying true to a massive cataclysmic force fantasy.

I'd be satisfied to see his as powerfull as Cho'gall which I doubt can happen 

 

29 minutes ago, Arcling said:

I imagine he would walk around in humanoid form most of the time, which many might find underwhelming. Dragon form could be either as his trait, similar to Alexstrasza and/or his heroics would transform him. Of course question remains whether his model should be smaller, walking on the ground or something like - he transforms into gigantic form and takes to the skies, bombarding enemies, and all they see is a massive shadow. Might feel too similar to existing abilities though. 

Deathwing could work really well with proper balance. Maybe have him get decreased movement speed in his dragon form or something. He can be a powerhouse, but with glaring weaknesses for the sake of game balance.

I honestly couldn't care less about Deathwing, but I feel that he is needed to bring back player's attention to this game, and he has always been one of the most requested characters alongside Kel'Thuzad and Imperius, which we eventually got in the game.