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On October 01 2026 19:44 ProTech wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2026 18:50 Legan wrote:
For the future, they need to establish what the process for changes will be. They can't make new big changes with this mess being remembered. Any bigger change needs people to trust the process. Have regular PTR updates. One every two weeks at least. Be conservative with releasing the patch from PTR.
They also need to have and communicate a vision for the future if they want to make any bigger changes. Without vision, it is hard to evaluate if they are moving in the right direction at all. Especially, Protoss needs this vision for gameplay in each matchup. They should also be somewhat confident in the vision so that they are willing to make new changes on top of previous ones to achieve the overall vision instead of repeatedly backtracking. The mess was created because there were not enough people testing the PTR so they pushed it to the ladder. The playerbase was at an all time low at the time of changes so there's no real way to get feedback from players unless they actually force it on the ladder, which is a terrible idea for obvious reasons, but due to the overall lack of a player base it wasn't a choice. Blizzard is trying to bring players back to the game, but the ship has sailed, high eco destroyed any chance of that, so now they're stuck with the high-eco player base that remains. The reason the majority of the players left back when they made the original changes to the game was because the skill of the game dropped from the ceiling to the floor, StarCraft in a high-eco settings is a super low expression of skill. So high-eco was the absolute #1 killer of the game. Skirmishes are lame, positioning is lame, and overall strategies are one-dimensional and boring. Not enough time was given to this current state of the game, and the developers are just freaking out because they don't have that player base buffer that they used to have. The other collosal mistake that happened with this transition is that the map pool never changed from high-eco concept. Players all feel like they're playing a watered-down high eco setting because the maps really didnt adjust for the eco settings. IMO this is one of the main reasons it was met with negative feedback.
We heard this argument that fast eco destroyed the game and that patch would somehow revive StarCraft. It didn't. The opposite happened, 4400-4500 MMR players got promoted to grandmasters as recently as 1-2 weeks ago and grandmasters had around 165 players out of 200 expected.
Community was split into co-op, patches mod, people quitting and some like me who continued to play despite the patch. I've never seen so divided community since StarCraft 2 beta and I've played for that long. Yes, there were bad patches but this was making something like multiverse of StarCraft which never happened before.
After this revert, StarCraft will probably not get a sudden influx of new players but some of players will return. Also, I disagree there wasn't enough community feedback. You can go back to the initial poll on TL and see that the vote for liking and disliking the patch was evenly split. That was before people tried the patch. Now people overwhelmingly support reverting the patch, you can check the new poll.
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On October 01 2026 19:44 ProTech wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2026 18:50 Legan wrote:
For the future, they need to establish what the process for changes will be. They can't make new big changes with this mess being remembered. Any bigger change needs people to trust the process. Have regular PTR updates. One every two weeks at least. Be conservative with releasing the patch from PTR.
They also need to have and communicate a vision for the future if they want to make any bigger changes. Without vision, it is hard to evaluate if they are moving in the right direction at all. Especially, Protoss needs this vision for gameplay in each matchup. They should also be somewhat confident in the vision so that they are willing to make new changes on top of previous ones to achieve the overall vision instead of repeatedly backtracking. The mess was created because there were not enough people testing the PTR so they pushed it to the ladder. The playerbase was at an all time low at the time of changes so there's no real way to get feedback from players unless they actually force it on the ladder, which is a terrible idea for obvious reasons, but due to the overall lack of a player base it wasn't a choice. Blizzard is trying to bring players back to the game, but the ship has sailed, high eco destroyed any chance of that, so now they're stuck with the high-eco player base that remains. The reason the majority of the players left back when they made the original changes to the game was because the skill of the game dropped from the ceiling to the floor, StarCraft in a high-eco settings is a super low expression of skill. So high-eco was the absolute #1 killer of the game. Skirmishes are lame, positioning is lame, and overall strategies are one-dimensional and boring. Not enough time was given to this current state of the game, and the developers are just freaking out because they don't have that player base buffer that they used to have. The other collosal mistake that happened with this transition is that the map pool never changed from high-eco concept. Players all feel like they're playing a watered-down high eco setting because the maps really didnt adjust for the eco settings. IMO this is one of the main reasons it was met with negative feedback.
Actually the first couple of days were probably some of the highest action the PTR has ever seen across all leagues. The problem is that after that point, a lot of people kinda went "ew", returned to the main server, and kind of assumed a bunch of that stuff is not gonna make it to the game.
But Blizzard apparently didn't attribute that dropoff to the changes not being popular. This whole ordeal is just a big disconnect between the players and the devs.
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United States1963 Posts
On October 01 2026 19:44 ProTech wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2026 18:50 Legan wrote:
For the future, they need to establish what the process for changes will be. They can't make new big changes with this mess being remembered. Any bigger change needs people to trust the process. Have regular PTR updates. One every two weeks at least. Be conservative with releasing the patch from PTR.
They also need to have and communicate a vision for the future if they want to make any bigger changes. Without vision, it is hard to evaluate if they are moving in the right direction at all. Especially, Protoss needs this vision for gameplay in each matchup. They should also be somewhat confident in the vision so that they are willing to make new changes on top of previous ones to achieve the overall vision instead of repeatedly backtracking. The mess was created because there were not enough people testing the PTR so they pushed it to the ladder. The playerbase was at an all time low at the time of changes so there's no real way to get feedback from players unless they actually force it on the ladder, which is a terrible idea for obvious reasons, but due to the overall lack of a player base it wasn't a choice. Blizzard is trying to bring players back to the game, but the ship has sailed, high eco destroyed any chance of that, so now they're stuck with the high-eco player base that remains. The reason the majority of the players left back when they made the original changes to the game was because the skill of the game dropped from the ceiling to the floor, StarCraft in a high-eco settings is a super low expression of skill. So high-eco was the absolute #1 killer of the game. Skirmishes are lame, positioning is lame, and overall strategies are one-dimensional and boring. Not enough time was given to this current state of the game, and the developers are just freaking out because they don't have that player base buffer that they used to have. The other collosal mistake that happened with this transition is that the map pool never changed from high-eco concept. Players all feel like they're playing a watered-down high eco setting because the maps really didnt adjust for the eco settings. IMO this is one of the main reasons it was met with negative feedback.
Blizz's biggest fault was negligence—not the patch itself. If they had routinely updated the patch on an aggressively regular schedule (i would have suggested biweekly) with player feedback, they might have actually come out with a really solid product after a few months. The fact that they never committed to the patch is why it failed.
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Imo this patch was doomed from the start. Such big changes would require a lot of work to test, tweak and fine tune so we can have a balanced game. Perceived balance is very important and ultimately I think players realized this version of the game would always be an unbalanced mess.
Thinking of all the different eco tweaks and upgrade timing changes over the years that changed during the lotv worker change it always seemed a big ask to recalibrate the game to accommodate 8 workers.
Also fwiw I don't even think worker count changes are worth all the eco fallout. I'd rather a new unit or two even if theyre broken for a bit. Feel like that would be a lot more fun anyways.
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On October 01 2026 21:48 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2026 19:44 ProTech wrote:On October 01 2026 18:50 Legan wrote:
For the future, they need to establish what the process for changes will be. They can't make new big changes with this mess being remembered. Any bigger change needs people to trust the process. Have regular PTR updates. One every two weeks at least. Be conservative with releasing the patch from PTR.
They also need to have and communicate a vision for the future if they want to make any bigger changes. Without vision, it is hard to evaluate if they are moving in the right direction at all. Especially, Protoss needs this vision for gameplay in each matchup. They should also be somewhat confident in the vision so that they are willing to make new changes on top of previous ones to achieve the overall vision instead of repeatedly backtracking. The mess was created because there were not enough people testing the PTR so they pushed it to the ladder. The playerbase was at an all time low at the time of changes so there's no real way to get feedback from players unless they actually force it on the ladder, which is a terrible idea for obvious reasons, but due to the overall lack of a player base it wasn't a choice. Blizzard is trying to bring players back to the game, but the ship has sailed, high eco destroyed any chance of that, so now they're stuck with the high-eco player base that remains. The reason the majority of the players left back when they made the original changes to the game was because the skill of the game dropped from the ceiling to the floor, StarCraft in a high-eco settings is a super low expression of skill. So high-eco was the absolute #1 killer of the game. Skirmishes are lame, positioning is lame, and overall strategies are one-dimensional and boring. Not enough time was given to this current state of the game, and the developers are just freaking out because they don't have that player base buffer that they used to have. The other collosal mistake that happened with this transition is that the map pool never changed from high-eco concept. Players all feel like they're playing a watered-down high eco setting because the maps really didnt adjust for the eco settings. IMO this is one of the main reasons it was met with negative feedback. Blizz's biggest fault was negligence—not the patch itself. If they had routinely updated the patch on an aggressively regular schedule (i would have suggested biweekly) with player feedback, they might have actually come out with a really solid product after a few months. The fact that they never committed to the patch is why it failed.
100% agree, there was so much excitement and engagement on PTR with these new changes, that could have continued and been snowballed into something really cool had they kept up with it right up to Blizzcon... instead of just getting to maybe a quarter a way through the process, pushing it to live, and then giving up..
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Northern Ireland27436 Posts
On October 01 2026 21:48 Mizenhauer wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2026 19:44 ProTech wrote:On October 01 2026 18:50 Legan wrote:
For the future, they need to establish what the process for changes will be. They can't make new big changes with this mess being remembered. Any bigger change needs people to trust the process. Have regular PTR updates. One every two weeks at least. Be conservative with releasing the patch from PTR.
They also need to have and communicate a vision for the future if they want to make any bigger changes. Without vision, it is hard to evaluate if they are moving in the right direction at all. Especially, Protoss needs this vision for gameplay in each matchup. They should also be somewhat confident in the vision so that they are willing to make new changes on top of previous ones to achieve the overall vision instead of repeatedly backtracking. The mess was created because there were not enough people testing the PTR so they pushed it to the ladder. The playerbase was at an all time low at the time of changes so there's no real way to get feedback from players unless they actually force it on the ladder, which is a terrible idea for obvious reasons, but due to the overall lack of a player base it wasn't a choice. Blizzard is trying to bring players back to the game, but the ship has sailed, high eco destroyed any chance of that, so now they're stuck with the high-eco player base that remains. The reason the majority of the players left back when they made the original changes to the game was because the skill of the game dropped from the ceiling to the floor, StarCraft in a high-eco settings is a super low expression of skill. So high-eco was the absolute #1 killer of the game. Skirmishes are lame, positioning is lame, and overall strategies are one-dimensional and boring. Not enough time was given to this current state of the game, and the developers are just freaking out because they don't have that player base buffer that they used to have. The other collosal mistake that happened with this transition is that the map pool never changed from high-eco concept. Players all feel like they're playing a watered-down high eco setting because the maps really didnt adjust for the eco settings. IMO this is one of the main reasons it was met with negative feedback. Blizz's biggest fault was negligence—not the patch itself. If they had routinely updated the patch on an aggressively regular schedule (i would have suggested biweekly) with player feedback, they might have actually come out with a really solid product after a few months. The fact that they never committed to the patch is why it failed.
Yeah agreed with this 100%. Too many radical changes at once to not tweak subsequently on a pretty high cadence
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I am officially declaring victory in the battle I have waged since 2009 in defense of the Warp Gate mechanic and against all the terrible suggestions to neuter it. It was implemented, it was not fun, people did not like it, and I win. So there.
On the other hand, it is somewhat remarkable that Blizzard decided to straight-up revert. Previous patch was not perfect balance-wise so hopefully we can tune that a little bit going forward.
But yes, like everyone else I look forward to laddering again.
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On October 02 2026 00:31 Captain Peabody wrote:
On the other hand, it is somewhat remarkable that Blizzard decided to straight-up revert. Previous patch was not perfect balance-wise so hopefully we can tune that a little bit going forward
Since they made it clear that they are working on a new patch, I imagine this is what happened:
They took a large risk in 5.0.16
--> they saw it play out --> player decline was in a different direction than what they expected
--> !!they want to stop this decline in some way!! (Feels worth pointing out)
--> they don't know in which direction they want to go OR --> they don't have enough time to risk a further decline in player base
--> they revert to the last acceptable state for many to stop decline
--> they gain more time to tweak the game, which they should use to decide whether the changes they want go into the direction of patches mod or keep the lower number of upgrades
Feels worth pointing out that using some patches mod inputs would be a low risk high reward move.
Honestly they should put in some work on the interface and PvE which I think would get a lot more people to play the game and be introduced to the eco system.
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EPT
