Developer Update from Aaron Keller

news.blizzard.com:

Hi everyone!

This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about, but our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions.

So let’s get to it!

The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level, difficulty forming groups with friends, and a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). We will be implementing some changes in S3 and quite a few more in S4 all aimed at creating more clarity in the system. More details on short-term changes and long-term vision will be coming soonTM.

We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play and that players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time. We’ll be making a change in S3 that should address some of these complaints. This is a first step. We will have more details to share about this next week.

There are a fair number of changes to ult cost in S3. We’ll be lowering the ult refund when swapping heroes to 25% as part of this tuning pass.

Balance frequency is a big topic. Bug fixes to hot fixing should enable us to address balance faster and would have enabled us to tune Hog earlier in S2. We’re still planning an initial and midseason patch each season, but now