ey man,

I watched your recent interview at HotD (the one conducted by Team Liquid) and I just have a few words I'd like you to hear.

You started this project 5 years ago when you created the mod, Blizzard DotA, and it has evolved into the Heroes of the Storm that we are all playing today. You wanted to make a game that was fun, regardless of what genre it fit into and what lines it had to cross to get there. As long as it is fun, you've done your job.

However, you have a problem. You've decided you don't want to limit the game to any particular audience, and therefore you have a wide swath of people who are going to play this game. What is fun for one player is not necessarily fun for another.

Your current approach to this problem is to attempt to create a game that is fun for both groups of casual and hardcore gamers, and while that is commendable, I think you aren't making the necessary sacrifices to achieve this widespread appeal.

What sacrifices am I talking about? Namely, the entirety of the matchmaker and the queue times. I started playing back in Alpha, and no one really cared about appropriate team compositions because it was Alpha. We were having a blast with a new game. Then Beta hit and a lot of people who had been around for a long time started to get frustrated that they couldn't get appropriately balanced matches. The game wasn't new for them anymore, and it no longer felt good to just throw 10 random players against one another.

Now, launch is around the corner and you've stated the game will largely be the same game we are playing today with some QoL changes and bug fixes. You aren't adding much content, and you aren't making any widespread changes. This concerns me because that doesn't exactly translate into "our matchmaker will be creating balanced games at launch".

So, your new players will have a great time because they've never experienced this game before, and their infatuation levels will outweigh their dissatisfaction with other glaring issues. But what about your maturing playerbase? What about the ones who have played 500 games? 1000 games? 5000 games? You know as well as I do that Blizzard games are revered for their incredible replayability factors. How do you expect to retain this core playerbase if you aren't taking measures to prevent them from burning out once they reach a critical mass of frustration.

I think you need to make a pretty drastic decision in the coming weeks. Do you really want to favor queue times being low in lieu of creating more balanced matches? Do you really only want to ensure that both teams have a support instead of ensuring balanced compositions for all games? Surely, you realize that percentages don't tell the entire story (especially considering some supports aren't even healers).

So don't you think it is a reasonable sacrifice to make these players wait slightly longer to get into a match and ensure that the match is balanced and fun for all players? You have to keep in mind that these newer players will eventually become your saturated playerbase, and issues that don't bother them as they are beginning their journey may push them away when they realize what they've been subjected to over a long period of time.

I've seen posters comment on these issues before, and they were often met with the ever popular "it's a beta" excuse, but less and less people are saying that now. The same threads that were downvoted and laughed at are now being upvoted and acquiesced to by the very same people who used to take no issues with your system.

Will you not heed the complaints of these posters? You said in that interview that you listen to everything, and while you obviously cannot respond to everything, you have given little to no indication that you recognize this issue in the gravity with which the situation dictates. If this game launches with a matchmaker in this condition, or even a slightly improved version of this condition, you're going to have a revolving door for a playerbase, instead of the casual and hardcore fans you're trying to retain.

That brings me to my next point. You mentioned that game directors need to make decisions on how to roll out patches. Do you take a piecemeal approach to it and roll patches out as items are ready or do you wait for massive content patches to be ready before making any changes? We all know which option you've chosen, and I think you need to humble yourself and recognize that MOBAs (or Team Brawlers) are too volatile and alive for this approach to work.

You said whatever will make the game better needs to be the right course of action. Well, I'm loathe to say it, but your approach isn't improving your game. It is making it worse. You have been consistently slowing down progress on each patch over the last few months, and it is compounding the issues I addressed earlier regarding the matchmaker, ...