EPT
nobody else made a thread so if someone who normally does these wants to hijack it idc
Hey everyone. We wanted to issue a community feedback update early this week after seeing your feedback around the planned patch we were going to apply today. After reading your feedback, it seemed pretty clear that there is not much support for the proposed changes, so we decided to cancel this week’s balance update and get into more details of what’s happening because community feedback around the changes seems to have changed completely this week. Just a couple weeks ago when we started testing the latest changes, the perception seemed very positive. However, this week, what we’re seeing is completely different. We have some guesses as to why this happened as well as some proposals on how to improve our process going forward, but let’s talk about the specific changes.
Protoss Buff vs. Mutalisks
Previously, this topic seemed to be clearly important to the community, but it seems to have completely changed the other way. Even though Mutalisks are clearly not an issue at the top of pro level, we believed it was a heavy community issue, so we located a change that would have minimal impact at the pro lvl, while looking to help the average skilled player.
We’re not exactly sure why the major switch happened here, but we wonder if a lot of it is the meta game having shifted from Protoss being underpowered against Zerg to the matchup being a lot more even than we initially believed.
Other changes
The other changes we believe are more straight forward. Like many of you point out, we probably didn’t have enough testing time on the other changes and we should gather more feedback over the next week or two before committing to these changes.
Also, there seemed to be less of an understanding as to why we have been moving the way we have with testing out different changes. We wonder if many players out there are getting left behind or stuck in an old line of thinking while another group has moved on. We believe this creates a lot of confusion, and we believe this is a major flaw in our current process which we would like to improve going forward.
Communication Process Improvements
There are a few things that we think we can improve.
First, we believe we can be more proactive about gauging the community’s stance on specific topics. At regular intervals, we would like to begin asking you guys if we are hearing you correctly. This will allow us to double check and make sure there hasn’t been a major change in what the community wants, or that we’re not misunderstanding you.
Second, we can do better on providing a “post-mortem” for our Balance Test Map changes to analyze which changes were effective or not effective. This should also help us keep moving at a similar pace in terms of reasoning.
Third, we will try to be more concise with our messaging to be as clear as possible. Because we tried to get into every detail of every reasoning, we believe this caused some confusion due to how much information we were giving in such short time periods. Instead, we would like to do more updates every week, but each update will be smaller with less details to help with this issue.
If there are more suggestions here, we can definitely look into further improvements to our current process. Thanks for your thoughts and feedback, we’ll have more to discuss as the week continues.
Next Balance Patch
We will have more details coming later this week, and a new test map up early the week after. We are definitely aiming for around 5/22 ~ 5/23 to solidify many of the changes to patch to the live game so let's stay focused both on discussions as well as playtesting as soon as the test map is up early next week. We're pushing very hard on this front not just on the community side but working very heavily with the pro players as well to nail this down.
Besides the issues we're currently working through, the other issues we're currently thinking on are: potential immortal nerfs due to heavy pro player feedback around this being an absolute necessity, potential colossus buffs, and Cyclone changes.
Protoss Buff vs. Mutalisks
Previously, this topic seemed to be clearly important to the community, but it seems to have completely changed the other way. Even though Mutalisks are clearly not an issue at the top of pro level, we believed it was a heavy community issue, so we located a change that would have minimal impact at the pro lvl, while looking to help the average skilled player.
We’re not exactly sure why the major switch happened here, but we wonder if a lot of it is the meta game having shifted from Protoss being underpowered against Zerg to the matchup being a lot more even than we initially believed.
Other changes
The other changes we believe are more straight forward. Like many of you point out, we probably didn’t have enough testing time on the other changes and we should gather more feedback over the next week or two before committing to these changes.
Also, there seemed to be less of an understanding as to why we have been moving the way we have with testing out different changes. We wonder if many players out there are getting left behind or stuck in an old line of thinking while another group has moved on. We believe this creates a lot of confusion, and we believe this is a major flaw in our current process which we would like to improve going forward.
Communication Process Improvements
There are a few things that we think we can improve.
First, we believe we can be more proactive about gauging the community’s stance on specific topics. At regular intervals, we would like to begin asking you guys if we are hearing you correctly. This will allow us to double check and make sure there hasn’t been a major change in what the community wants, or that we’re not misunderstanding you.
Second, we can do better on providing a “post-mortem” for our Balance Test Map changes to analyze which changes were effective or not effective. This should also help us keep moving at a similar pace in terms of reasoning.
Third, we will try to be more concise with our messaging to be as clear as possible. Because we tried to get into every detail of every reasoning, we believe this caused some confusion due to how much information we were giving in such short time periods. Instead, we would like to do more updates every week, but each update will be smaller with less details to help with this issue.
If there are more suggestions here, we can definitely look into further improvements to our current process. Thanks for your thoughts and feedback, we’ll have more to discuss as the week continues.
Next Balance Patch
We will have more details coming later this week, and a new test map up early the week after. We are definitely aiming for around 5/22 ~ 5/23 to solidify many of the changes to patch to the live game so let's stay focused both on discussions as well as playtesting as soon as the test map is up early next week. We're pushing very hard on this front not just on the community side but working very heavily with the pro players as well to nail this down.
Besides the issues we're currently working through, the other issues we're currently thinking on are: potential immortal nerfs due to heavy pro player feedback around this being an absolute necessity, potential colossus buffs, and Cyclone changes.
). Of course pro gamers, they know better, so changes will occur. 
