아직 한국어 홈페이지에는 올라오지 않았습니다만 올라온 중점을 번역해보았습니다.

  • MMR 과 대전 상대 검색
    • 큐 타임 vs. 매치 퀄리티
      • 원래 대기 시간은 상황에 따라 유연하게 바뀌었으나 대기 시간을 줄이면 매치 퀄리티가 악화되는 현상을 인지함. 특히 고랭크 유저일수록 이런 문제가 심했음. 피드백을 받아 분석한 결과 지금까지 너무 큐 타임을 너무 짧게 잡고있음을 인지해 이제 고랭크 플레이어들은 더 좋은 경기를 위해 큐 타임이 길어질 예정임. 
    • MMR 과 랭크 디케이 (자동 하락)
      • 게임을 장기간 하지 않는 유저들의 숙련도가 MMR과 맞지 않는점을 인지해 MMR과 랭크 디케이 (자동 하락)을 적용할 예정. 
      • 하지만 자동 하락의 정도가 지나치면 그것도 문제가 될수 있어서 피드백을 들으면서 조정할 예정임
    • 성과 기반 대전 상대 검색 시스템
      • 성과 기반 시스템이 돌아오면 너무 소수여서 데이터를 수집하기 힘든 마스터와 그마 유저들이게는 적용되지 않을 예정임.
      • 다른 유저들은 지금까지 충분한 데이터를 수집하였다고 판단하여서 조만간 성과 기반 시스템이 복귀할 예정이고 나중에 더 자세한 사항을 알려드릴 예정임.
  • 랭크 플레이
    • 배치 경기
      • 랭크 경기수가 많을 수록 배치 경기의 필요성이 줄어들게 됨. 그래서 현 시즌에서 충분한 랭크 경기를 한다면 최소 한 배치경기만으로 다른 시즌을 시작할수 있도록 할 예정임. 배치 경기 후 저번 시즌 MMR을 기반으로 배치가 될 예정임.
    • 새로운 유저와 복귀 유저 시딩
      • 현재 새로운 유저가 다이아 3까지 배치가 될수 있었는데 게임 지식이 부족하면 다른 유저들에게 안좋은 영향이 있을수 있는 문제가 있었음. 그래서 새로운 유저는 이제 플레 5보다 높게 배치가 되지 않을 예정임.
      • 그리고 복귀 유저는 더 이상 다른 게임모드의 MMR을 기반으로 배치가 되지 않을 예정임
    • 영웅 밴과 스왑
      • 세번째 밴을 추가할 예정임. 지금까지는 영웅폭이 좁아서 보류하고 있었는데 이제는 적당한 시기라고 판단함. 세번째 밴은 중간 밴때 추가할 예정
      • 영웅 스왑은 아직 커뮤니티의 반응이 다양하고 픽 시간 증가, 복잡함, 유져 충돌 등 여러가지 문제들이 생길수 있어서 다른 변경 사항에 비해서 우선 순위가 낮음
      • 하지만 픽 순서를 스왑하거나 현재 팀 리그나 커스텀 게임에서 사용되고 있는 선착순 픽 시스템도 고려중임. 언랭에서 이러한 시스템을 테스트 할 가능성이 있음.
  • 신영웅 밸런스
    • 신영웅 밸런스 변화
      • 피닉스와 마이에브 출시때 너무 강하다는 피드백을 많이 받았음. 신영웅이 약해서 랭크전에서 잘 나오지 않게 되면 데이터를 수집하기가 힘들고 메타게임에 변화를 주기 힘듬. 지금까지 신영웅들이 유저들에게 매력적으로 보이게 하고 싶었으나 이제부터는 히오스의 게임플레이 밸런스를 유지할수 있도록 주의할 예정임.
      • 지금까지 신영웅 출시후 데이터를 충분히 수집하기 위한 시간이 필요하므로 보통 2주후에 밸런스 업데이트를 내놓았음. 
      • 마이에브나 예전 자리야의 경우 예외었지만 유저들이 신 영웅들에 대해서 배우고 적응하기전에 성급하게 반응을 하는것을 피하는걸 목표로 하고있다는걸 알리고 싶음.
    • 랭크에서의 신영웅
      • 랭크전에서 신영웅을 몇주간 밴을 하자는 의견에 대해서는 어느정도 공감이 되고 사내에서도 토론된적이 있었음. 하지만 영웅리그는 새로운 영웅의 밸런스를 조정하는데 필요한 데이터를 얻는데 필수적임. 조만간 적용할 세번째 밴이 신영웅을 대처하는데 도움이 될꺼라고 예상함.
  • 불량유져와 신고 기능
    • 더욱 더 적극적인 처벌
      • 머신 러닝을 이용해서 플레이어 신고를 확인하는 시스템을 개발중이고 내부 테스트에 인하면 신고에 대해서 더욱더 적극적이고 정확하게 대응할수 있을것으로 보여짐. 아직 세부조정중이지만 이 새로운 시스팀이 조만간 내놓을수 있을거라고 예상됨.
    • 반복가해자 처벌
      • 예전에는 반복가해자에게 더욱더 긴 기간의 침묵을 부여하였으나 이제 부터는 반복 불량 유저들에게 침묵 부터 일시정지, 심지어 밴까지 강화되는 처벌을 부여할 예정임.
    • 게임불참과 고의적 죽음
      • 팀원들의 게임불참으로 인한 패배에 대해서는 랭크 포인트 차감을 약화할 예정임. 경기를 떠난 유저들에게는 반복할수록 더욱더 엄격한 처벌을 부여할 예정임. 이러한 시스템을 추후 잠수 유저나 고의적으로 죽는 유저들에게 적용할 예정.
    • 유저와의 소통
      • 불량 유저들을 상대로 일어나는일들이 공개되지 않아서 유저들에게는 아무것도 일어나지 않는것 처럼 보여짐. 몇달전 유저들에게 신고로 인해서 타 유저의 처벌이 이루어지면 그것을 공지하는 이메일을 보내기 시작했음. 이러한 공지를 게임내에서도 볼수 있도록 만들 예정이고 계정 정지와 밴을 더욱 더 유저들에게 잘 보이게 만들어서 좀 더 소통을 늘리고자 함.
  • 레딧 AMA (무엇이든지 물어보세요)
    • 4월 13일 태평양 연안 표준시 오전 10시 (한국 시간 토요일 새벽 2시
    • 2시간 동안 진행할 예정

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HEROES OF THE STORM DEVELOPMENT UPDATES – APRIL 12, 2018

As many of you are aware, there’s been a lot of feedback and community conversation about topics like matchmaking, ranked play, new Hero balance, and player toxicity. It’s clear to us that some players in the Heroes community are unsure if their concerns are being heard. We take your feedback seriously, and we definitely haven’t done enough lately to acknowledge and respond to it. We can do better, so we’d like to shed some more light on a few of these topics today, starting with Matchmaking.

MMR and Matchmaking

Our goal with matchmaking is to ensure your Heroes of the Storm games are fun, fair, and challenging. While we’ve made progress in some areas, we don’t think we’ve hit that goal in all of them. We’re working on some matchmaking improvements that will bring us closer to our objective and hopefully give players more positive gameplay experiences.

Queue Time vs. Match Quality

Matchmaking in Heroes boils down to striking a balance between creating the best possible matches in terms of player skill, and initiating games in a reasonable amount of time. Currently, the matchmaker is always seeking to make the best possible matches it can based on a set of criteria it uses to find equally skilled allies and opponents. The longer players wait in the queue, the looser these restrictions become in order to get players into a match as quickly as possible. We originally set up these somewhat elastic matchmaking rules to speed up wait times. Unfortunately, decreasing wait times sometimes comes at the expense of match quality. This can be especially noticeable at the highest skill levels, where there are fewer players in the queue at any given time. When this situation occurs, players can find themselves in games that include allies and enemies outside of their skill range.

Given all your feedback, it’s clear we’ve been favoring reducing queue times a little too much. Moving forward, we’re going to harden these rules in order to enforce higher quality matches. As a result of the changes we plan to implement, higher-skilled players may see longer queue times in exchange for higher quality matches. 

MMR and Rank Decay

Your matchmaking rating (MMR) is an internal numerical representation of your skill that is adjusted based on the outcome of the games you play. This value is most accurate when you regularly play within the current meta against other active members of the player base. When players take an extended break from the game, or only play a few ranked games each season, it can create situations where a player’s current skill no longer matches their MMR (if only temporarily). We’ve heard from those of you who feel it’s unfair to be matched with players who are in this situation.

To alleviate this, and to help improve the accuracy of a player’s MMR and rank, we’re working to institute both MMR and rank decay. Players who have not played any games for a while will have their MMR slowly adjusted to compensate. Likewise, players who do not regularly participate in a given season will see a decline in their rank points over time.

All of this said, it’s also very important to us that the decay rate is not overly punishing. We’re still working on the specifics of this decay system, and we’re interested in hearing any feedback you might have.

Performance-Based Matchmaking

Performance-Based Matchmaking is a system we introduced late last year, which aimed to improve MMR accuracy by taking your individual performance into account when adjusting your MMR. Its release unfortunately coincided with some unrelated issues that occurred during the new ranked season. As a result, we disabled performance-based matchmaking so that we could focus on addressing those issues. While it was active, we absorbed your feedback and took note of additional improvements we wanted to make.

When we bring this feature back, we intend to add additional context about how point adjustments are determined. This should help you better understand how you’re performing and where you can improve in the future. Keep an eye out for those details in the near future.

We also received feedback that performance-based matchmaking isn’t as effective at the highest levels of ranked play. This subset of players is relatively small, which can result in too few players setting the standard for in-game performance in specific situations. As a result, when performance-based matchmaking returns, it will no longer adjust point totals for Grandmaster and Master league players.

Though we had disabled the performance-based matchmaking system’s ability to adjust players’ ranked points, it has continued to gather live player data and improve upon itself over time. We believe it is ready to be turned back on soon, and we’ll have more details to share with you in the coming future.


Ranked Play

We know that many of our most dedicated players have been curious to hear about any updates we might have in store for ranked play. We are working on several improvements for ranked, and we’d like to share a few of them with you today.

Placement Matches

Placement matches were primarily intended as a way for us to gain more information about your skill level in the absence of previous match history. However, the more games you play during a season, the less necessary it becomes to reassess you at the start of the next. Going forward, those who play enough ranked games during the current season will only need to complete as little as one placement match when the next season begins. After completing your placement, you will be placed based on your MMR at the end of the previous season.

New and Returning Player Seeding

The first time a player steps into ranked play, we use the knowledge we have about their performance in other game modes as a general starting point for assessing their skill. We also do this if a player hasn’t played ranked in a long time, and their MMR in other modes is now significantly different than their existing ranked MMR. Currently, players who enter ranked play for the first time, or after a long absence, can place as high as Diamond 3 after completing their placements.

We recognize that being placed highly when a player is new to ranked can lead to some less than positive experiences if they lack some of the more nuanced game knowledge necessary for success in that league. As a result, new players can no longer place higher than Platinum 5 at the end of their placement matches going forward.

Additionally, we believe the introduction of MMR and rank decay will help account for players who take long breaks from ranked play. As such, these returning players will no longer be re-seeded into placements based on their skill in other game modes.

Hero Bans and Swaps

We’re going to add a third ban for each team during drafts. We’ve been considering this addition for some time, but we wanted to wait until our Hero roster grew to an appropriate size. We believe we’ve now reached that threshold, and adding a third ban should provide teams with another layer of strategy when choosing their Heroes for a given match. We’re currently planning to add this ban to the existing mid-ban phase rather than create an entirely new third phase. This will enable us to keep drafts moving quickly, so that players can get to the action. It also allows teams to use that additional mid-ban to react to the draft as it unfolds.

Second, and more nebulous, is the addition of a Hero swap feature. We’ve seen a lot of mixed discussion on this topic in the community, and there are many things to consider when introducing this system to Hero League, including increased draft time, complexity, and player conflict during the draft. Because of these complexities, Hero Swaps are lower on our priority list compared with some of the other improvements we’re discussing today.

Despite these concerns, we’re still exploring a few options. We’ve considered alterative ideas like position swaps, in which players could rearrange their team’s pick order. We’ve also considered simply using the same “first come, first served” pick method that exists in Team League and Custom Games, and we may bring some of these ideas to Unranked Draft as a test.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this topic, so let us know what you think!


New Hero Balance

We do our best to provide fun and satisfying experiences with every new Hero we release. This goal can take many forms, from offering exciting new abilities, to bringing the fantasy of a character to life, and making sure they’re fun to play as, with, and against. It’s also important that each new Hero feels impactful in players’ hands and has the potential to shift the meta. We’d like to share how we look after our new Heroes in the days following release.

New Hero Balance Changes

We received a lot of feedback from players who felt that both Maiev and Fenix were too powerful on release, and we agree. In the past, many of our Hero releases have been considered balanced, or even weaker than they should be. When a new Hero is weak, it tends to see minimal competitive and ranked play, which limits how much live Hero data we’re able to quickly gather and doesn’t evolve the metagame. We want new Heroes to feel compelling for players at launch, but we also want to do that while maintaining the core gameplay balance of Heroes of the Storm. We’ll continue to work toward improving on this going forward.

Over time, we’ve developed a cadence of releasing balance updates for new Heroes every two weeks. This gives us enough time to collect data and allows players to learn how to play with and against the latest additions to the Nexus.

Occasionally, we’ll release a balance update for a new Hero outside of this time frame, as we recently did with Maiev (and Zarya even further back). This isn’t ideal, as it doesn’t give the community enough time to actually explore a character’s strengths and weaknesses aside from initial gut reactions. It also means we have to make these decisions with very little data and live play experience. Our goals are to avoid knee-jerk reactions, to give players enough time to learn new Heroes, and to gather data before we make any balance adjustments.

New Heroes in Ranked

We understand that some players in the community would like us to lock new Heroes out of ranked modes for a couple of weeks following release, and we’ve discussed this internally. Despite this concern, Hero League data is critical for us to fine-tune a new Hero and hit their two-week patch timing. We hope the addition of a third ban in ranked play will help relieve the pressure when expending a ban on any new or reworked Hero that may be considered too strong.

Toxicity and Reporting

A competitive game of Heroes can really get the blood pumping, but we understand that just one player’s negative behavior can ruin the fun for all 10 players in a match. We want to make this clear: Toxic behavior will not be tolerated. We’ve been working on improvements to the ways we detect negative behavior, mitigate detrimental effects on others when it occurs, and message when we take corrective action.

Ramping Up Actions

We’ve been working on a new system that uses machine learning to help improve the validation of player reports. Our internal testing shows the new system allows us to take action against many times the number of reports than we could using our previous methods, while also maintaining an even higher level of confidence in those actions. We’re still doing some additional tuning, but we expect to be able to roll this new system out in the very near future.

Repeat Offender Penalties

Along with the improvements around detecting toxic behavior, we’re also revisiting punishments for repeat offenders. Currently, repeated abusive chat penalties result in an escalating silence duration. This has proven to be enough for most players to get the message, but a subset of players continually return to their toxic behavior, continuing to ruin games for everyone around them. Rather than simply issue them even longer silences, we’re going to start escalating penalties from silences, to suspensions, and even bans as repeat offenses stack up.

Non-Participation and Intentionally Dying

Going AFK during a match, leaving matches early, and dying intentionally are all behaviors that harm the game and compromise a match. We’ve been working on ways to address these behaviors while limiting the negative impact they have on others. As part of this endeavor, we’re deep into development of a loss forgiveness feature, which will mitigate ranked point deductions for players who lose a game due another’s failure to participate. The leaver will be penalized for the loss and repeated offenses will result in harsher penalties. The system will initially only forgive losses caused by leavers, but we plan to expand it to include AFK players and intentional dying in the future.

Communication

One of the challenging parts about combating toxicity is that most of the action happens behind the scenes, so it can seem like nothing is being done. A few months ago, we started sending e-mails to players when their reports on non-participating or intentionally dying players lead to action being taken against the offender’s account. We eventually want to bring those notifications in-game where they’ll be more visible. In the meantime, we’re going to increase visibility for the suspension and ban waves we issue by bolstering our broader communications. This is something we’ve done sporadically in the past, but we’ll be moving to a more consistent cadence going forward.

We recognize that we haven’t been as communicative with the community recently as we could have been, and going forward, we want to increase our presence and share more of our thoughts and plans with you. We hope our post today has addressed some of your questions about our plans for Heroes of the Storm in the near future. If not, several members of the Heroes development team will be available to answer more of your questions in an AMA thread on the Heroes of the Storm SubredditThe AMA begins at 10 a.m. PDT on Friday, April 13, and we’re planning to answer questions for about two hours. Until then, we’ll see you in the Nexus!