Community Feedback Update - November 20

Dayvie wrote:
Hello everyone, and welcome to Legacy of the Void! Before we get started, we wanted to let you guys know that we’re thinking of pushing out our new league distribution percentages sometime in December before people go on vacation, and doing a season roll to get the percentages working correctly. This way, we can play during the break on a fresh season with the updated league distributions. Please keep in mind that this will not initiate a reset to your MMR (hidden skill rating), so the quality of matches should not be negatively impacted.

Moving on, this week we would like to share topics that came up at our recent community summit, which happened a few days before Blizzcon, as well as in our sessions with the WCS finalists.


Barcode issue

There were many discussions on this side, and the conclusion from both the summit and the current top players in the world was that there was little we could change directly within the game to resolve this issue. With that in mind, we may collaborate with our Blizzard Esports team to tackle this issue going forward . We probably don’t need to go into every detail that we talked about here, but the general consensus (especially from the top end pro players who currently use barcodes) was that even if we went so far as to show “anonymous” instead of player names on the loading screen, removed match history, and more, players still felt it would be safer to barcode even if the advantage is less pronounced.

However, if we were to integrate the top of the ladder with Esports (such as with WCS points, for example) it might be possible to incentivize players to use their correct IDs on ladder. We have begun discussing the possibilities on our development team in an effort to create the most accurate/transparent ladder, especially at the top. With our current ladder system however, changes doesn’t seem possible due to issues we’ve discussed at BlizzCon. So, as we work to redesign the ladder, we’ll also be in discussions with our Esports team to see what can be done here.


KR top pro feedback in general

There was a misconception among some of the top-tier Korean pro players that if a pro player communicated that something should be changed, then we were expected to make that change. If we did not make that change, some players felt it was pointless to give feedback because we were not listening.

We discussed this concept, and realized that it is impossible to just do everything that any pro player says. For example, even in our discussion sessions it was clear that people had completely opposing views. For example, our design team’s perspective was that Terran was the weakest race at the end of HotS, some of the pro players agreed, and others completely disagreed saying Terran was by far the strongest and needed to be nerfed. Examples such as these clearly showed that it’s just impossible and completely unreasonable to expect the game to change if a pro player said one thing.

However, what we did get out of this type of misconception was that we can definitely do better in terms of involving more top end players in regular discussions. In order to do so, some ideas were brought up not by just the players, but also by the coaches and managers that were at the event, and we’re currently having internal discussions with both the esports team and the community team to start trying out some of these ideas. We currently don’t have amazing ideas here yet, but the plan is to try out different suggestions and improve upon the process as we go. If you have good ideas on this front, please let us know.


Terran weakness in HotS

We had many discussions regarding if Terran needed a patch in HotS or not. The opinions of influencers and pro players ranged heavily from Terran was surely OP to Terran can’t do much + needed to be patched. However, the general consensus was that because Terran weakness towards the end of HotS was only by a small margin, and both pro feedback and community feedback pointed towards the game being well balanced, we believe it was correct to not make a move in terms of patching the game.

We just wanted to talk about this a little bit, because it’s important for us to look back at what we have done or what we have not done well in order to learn going forward. And in this scenario, we believe not changing the game was correct, and in similar situations in the future we will try our best to make a similar sort of a call.


LotV balance

We also had discussions both at the summit and with the current top players regarding where we are at in terms of balance changes in LotV. As a whole, there seemed to be a consensus that quick patching could be applied to unstoppable all-ins that many players can easily execute, rather than new units/strategies that will require more time for players to learn to how to react against. We will most likely stick to this concept as we go forward initially with balance updates in LotV.

We also wanted to point out that we saw the ShoutCraft games last weekend, and even though it’s still very early to gauge balance, it’s pretty awesome to see high level games starting up. We’ve also been paying close attention to high level streamers, and wanted to thank everyone who’s been hard at work on playing LotV!

Here are the items we’re currently discussing, but would like to see more examples of actual games:

• Liberator strength
  
  • Here, we’re noticing that players could definitely use more time in terms of learning when and where to engage against liberators.
    
  • Currently, it appears that even the best players in the world don’t quite have this nailed down yet, and while we hope this unit settles in a good place soon, we’ll keep a close watch.
  
  
• PvZ – Slight Protoss weakness
  
  • We’ve seen games and received feedback from pros regarding this, and we’re currently looking at ways to tune the game in a fun way while helping out Protoss a little bit.
  
  
• Photon Overcharge being too spammable
  
  • We would like to nerf this eventually, but right now doesn’t seem to be a good timing due to the fact that Protoss doesn’t need nerfs, especially in PvZ.
    
  • Once we’re in a better place with Protoss, we can take a look at nerfing this ability so that offensive tactics against Protoss are more effective versus players who are lacking any defenses.
  
  
• Nydus All ins
  
  • We are definitely seeing some games with them. Whether or not they’re completely broken or are at an acceptable state we can determine as we go forward.

With all of that said, it’s still so early to be making judgments on the state of balance, especially since even the highest level players don’t seem to have the game figured out to a high enough degree yet, so please take these things with a grain of salt. We’re very excited that the first major tournament of LotV will happen next week, and I’m sure we will have more to discuss on this front after that. Thank you everyone!


Splitting out Burrow and unburrow abilities to 2 different slots/hotkeys

We heard your suggestion and initially believe this could definitely be better for the game, especially now that the Lurker is added to the game. We will try to prepare a test map to test out this change, but we don’t expect we would need a long time to test out a change like this before committing to it.