News Realms Remove Ads - Go Premium! Sign In or Register

Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Our developers actually listen to the community.

I wanted to give a humble shoutout to the developers and community managers of this game.

They’re not just sitting in an office posting generic marketing slogans on Facebook. They’re not sending scapegoat envoys to quell community unrest with false promises.

They’re listening to us and addressing the issues.

I’ve never played ANY competitive game where the online presence of the developer is so evident and so responsive. These devs are doing what so so so few in the industry are doing: listening to our problems as we report them. I don’t know everything the community managers look at, but I’d wager they read at minimum 60-75% of all posts made on this sub, even if it’s only a single read through (we may not be the biggest sub, but that’s still a TON of posts to read through.)

Do they fix everything we want right when we want it? No. (And thank god, otherwise we would probably just have half the hero pool removed from the game at this point instead of rebalanced heroes.)

Do they always fix things in the way we want? No. (And thank god, otherwise TL wouldn’t exist and you’d be banned for talking about drafting a specialist in the pregame lobby.)

So, thanks to all you Blue Box’ers who put up with our outlandish reactions to wonderful gameplay experiments and are genuinely concerned with what your fans think of the game, day in and day out.

EN TARO HOTS

EDIT: Phrasing (“...never played ANY competitive game...)

EDIT2: Removed initial statement about this post only getting 3 upvotes and fading after an hour, because it got more than 3 upvotes and it’s been more than an hour.

  • Neyman
    Posted 6 years, 10 months ago (Source)

    We're always watching...

    I appreciate that we have a community that allows us to have back and forth conversations.

  • Neyman
    Posted 6 years, 10 months ago (Source)

    Me, too. So... let's talk about Chen...

    We've talked about Chen a lot! His winrate is looking pretty good though, at 50% winrate in the last month. We're not seeing him played a ton, but he's probably one of the heroes that we're okay with not being a common pick.

  • Neyman
    Posted 6 years, 10 months ago (Source)

    Why is win rate used as the perfect metric of a heroes design being healthy? It seems flawed especially when the sample size is so small to begin with in this example. You could easily say raynors winrate is fine when his kit is lagging behind so many modern heroes being introduced. Also you get what I would call a downward spiral, where when a character is perceived as weak (or is actually weak) and as a result only weaker players continue playing that character resulting in a even weaker skilled population of players playing the already weak character and thus getting a lower win rate than potentially possible just from public perception.

    I didn’t mean to imply it’s a metric of perfect design, sorry. It’s just the metric I quoted. Most of the major complaints I hear are about how weak he is, so I was responding to that.

  • Neyman
    Posted 6 years, 10 months ago (Source)

    Data... lots and lots of data. If people say X is overpowered, Blizz will check the actual data from in game to confirm/deny.

    Data, playing the game a lot, theorycrafting, feedback, trying a chance and seeing how it feels in internal playtesting. Feedback is just a single aspect.

    In terms of making sure our feedback doesn't get skewed toward a single player base, we check out streams, pro player feedback, social media, our forums, I think there's even focus group surveys for certain things (though we don't leverage that for balance, so I'm not positive on that one).

  • Neyman
    Posted 6 years, 10 months ago (Source)

    Is that a purely naive win rate, or does it take in to account the skill/average performance of the player?

    I ask because on sites like Hotslogs, heroes that are selected more regularly in "upper" MMR brackets have inflated overall win rates, by those higher pick rates at upper brackets dragging the hero up.

    Sometimes comparing the hero's relative performance in each bracket (ie, its ranking in upper / mid / lower MMR brackets) can reveal a lot more than just the overall win rate, as to whether that hero is over or underperforming. But perhaps your system already takes this in to account ?

    I'm actually on holiday now, so I can't look up more statistics, but the default data set we use (about 75% of the time) is comparing Hero Level 10+, Hero League, and roughly the top third MMR. Over time, we've found it's the best indication of what the true potential of a Hero is, and tries to separate mitigating factors like learning curve and flavor of the month Heroes that people don't have a lot of experience on.

    It does skew the percentages about 1 or 2% (because people playing familiar Heroes win more), and we keep that in mind.

Tweet