Heroes of the Storm Forums

Greetings, all! I was fortunate enough to get to chat with developers Kent-Eric Hagman and Kaeo Milker, along with PR Editor Gerald Villoria during BlizzCon this year! We’re happy to bring you this interview and are looking forward to many more!

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Q. What kind of functionality is in the pipeline for additional eSports features? Old Version Replays, for example, break upon new patch releases.

[Kaeo] So the old replays, we actually just did something, and we talked about this recently where the last couple of releases we broke replays with out patches, there’s certain types of patches that are version breaking. We started putting the previous build on our PTR so that content creators could go back to that and use that to watch replays. In test right now we have old version replay viewing. It’s in validation right now so assuming that goes well, it will be coming out soon. We know that’s an important thing for people, we’ve obviously supported that before with StarCraft II, so it’s important to us to get it in and working for Heroes. I think once we pass the testing cycle it will be in there.

Q. Stat tracking functionality does not seem to exist in Heroes of the Storm outside of the in-game calculations. Is this something Blizzard plans to expand upon?

[Kaeo] Right now when you look at the profile, it’s a very limited amount of information that’s on there. it’s not really flexible, you don’t have a lot of knobs and dials you can tune to get cool stuff out of it. So it’s definitely a goal for us to expose more of those stats in the client. A big area of focus for us is this idea that you need to have some gauge for your personal achievement and “what am I doing well on? what can I improve on?” and the game’s not doing a great job of telegraphing that stuff right now. So we have a pretty big push that we’re going to be doing into next year, we’re trying to front more of that information to players and give more experienced, veteran players the kind of information they want but we also want new players to have exposure to things that let them go “okay, here’s where I’m good, here’s where I need to improve” and stats is a huge opportunity to do that.

Q. Blizzard has released intent on map editors and improved reconnect functionality, but as of yet, players seem to be mostly in the dark, and frustration is building due to the reconnect as it currently is. Any updates on these timelines?

[Kaeo] We’ve made some improvements that have made it a little better but we totally understand there are certain situations that you can get in where you’ve been disconnected for long enough that the catch-up mechanic takes a really long time. So, we are aware of that. It’s something that our game systems team has actually spent a bunch of time on. It is something that I think we’ll be able to make improvements on in the future. I don’t have a timeline for that right now but they should know we totally feel their pain, we understand. I think in general cases that it’s a perfectly reasonable experience but there’s extreme cases where it totally sucks and I get it. We want to make that better it’s just a question of how soon we get to it. But they are actively working on it.

Q. Outside of Team League, there is no recourse into an unranked Draft mode. Playing as five is fun, but often frustrating for players in Quick Match. Is there any plans to release an unranked Draft mode sometime soon?

[Kaeo] So Dustin [Browder] has tweeted about this. Dustin is a pretty prolific tweeter at this point. He’s said that we’re talking about it which is totally true, we’ve talked about it. I think we’re trying to figure out how that fits in with our current landscape of our current matchmaking situation. We’re trying to do a lot of improvements to matchmaking as-is. There’s certainly some fears that if we pull out a whole other queue for unranked draft mode that we’re further splintering the matchmaking pool and that we’re creating additional problems there. We want to fully navigate all those things and make a decision that helps us all. We value that unranked draft is something that people want and we want to do that without hurting the overall health of the game and the competitive scene.

[Veiled] That’s fair enough.

[Kaeo] Yeah, we’ve definitely talked about it.

Q. Releasing the top X players per month has noticeably helped some players out when it comes to recognition. Is there any plans to do an up-to-date ladder listing that refreshes daily or weekly, for example?

[Kent] Do you have thoughts on that or are people asking for more that you’re hearing?

[Veiled] I don’t really even know how many people play Heroes.

[Kent] Millions and millions.

[Veiled] I could see maybe 500, but out of millions and millions, that’s just a drop in the bucket. At the same time, having it limited will make people work harder to achieve that type level of prestige.

[Kent] Definitely.

Q. Are there any plans for a random mount option?

[Kent] Like an auto-select feature for your mount?

[Veiled] Yes, similar to random hero except for your available mounts.

[Kent] That sounds cool, I think we’ve talked about that. There are some improvements that are coming to the lobby system so that might be a cool place for us to incorporate something like that.

Q. We haven’t had a themed meta release since the Eternal Conflict. Is this something that may come back in the future?

[Kent] In terms of doing a special event?

[Veiled] Yeah, exactly.

[Kent] That’s something we’re talking about.

[Veiled] Okay, good! Maybe don’t do it too often so that it feels special, you know?

[Kaeo] We did that, and it’s the first time we’ve ever done something like that. We had what was basically a four month period of time, we did four Heroes from the Diablo universe, we did two battlegrounds, it was all Diablo for this huge period of time! I think we all kind of came away from it going “is that too much?”

[Veiled] Oh no, it was awesome!

[Kaeo] Well, something that we all value is that sense of variety and that ability to bounce around between all these game worlds. I think if we do it in the future, it’ll be a little more condensed than that. But we definitely want to go visit all the Blizzard IPs and now, of course, we’ve got Tracer coming into the game.

[Veiled] Yes, perfect first choice for Overwatch. Everyone loves her!

[Gerald] What did you like most about the [Eternal Conflict] event?

[Veiled] Oh my gosh, that’s not fair! There’s so much!

(everyone laughing)

[Gerald] it the goblins?

[Veiled] Well, see, you just kind of ripped off a bandaid there. I missed my Goblin Portrait by four games!

(everyone laughing)

[Veiled] Treasure Goblin anything is winning. I love it!

[Veiled] Moving on. How did the experiment of releasing Artanis early due to pre-ordering Legacy of the Void work out internally? Was Blizzard happy with the cross promotion, or was the negative feedback from users who felt cheated too great?

[Kent] I think it went well. I saw a lot of excitement from people who were playing him. There’s something about when a new hero comes out there’s a giant rush to that hero. I think it kind of spread that out a little bit, which in a way was nice. In terms of solo queueing Artanis on launch day it kind of creates some havoc with matchmaking and that did spread it out a little bit. So I think it was a really cool reward for people who were really interested in Starcraft and that got this cool tie-in hero while giving us a side benefit.

Q. Was the backlash from the community really strong over that?

[Kaeo] I definitely heard people who were concerned about it and most of that I heard before it actually came out. Once it was out, I saw just a ton of excitement about playing Artanis and I really didn’t hear much again.

[Kent] Yeah, I feel like the tone just completely switched to “let’s talk about Artanis!”

Q. In-game guilds, or clans, or communities, has also been hinted at in the past. Can we expect to see this functionality in the future?

[Kent] Yes! We want them. We had some really cool, crazy ideas that were probably too far out there a few years ago. We’re still excited about them but we just don’t have anything to talk about yet.

[Veiled] Yeah, I know right now a lot of people use custom channels, which brings me to my next question...

Q. User-rated channels have proven difficult to use for popular users, since there’s a limit on the number of users allowed to participate in a channel. Any plans to increase user limit?

[Kaeo] As we start tackling some of those big social improvements, we will do a big chat improvement like we have in [Starcraft II] Legacy of the Void. They’ve added in a revamped chat system, so we want to bring that to Heroes hopefully well be able to do that really soon. Next year we definitely have a bunch of initiatives for social that includes things like clans and groups, or whatever we call that system. The hope is that we give you those places where you can make your channel, and if you’re someone who has a big following there could be hundreds or thousands of people potentially in those channels with you or in that group or clan or whatever construct it is.

Q. Any word on a publicly accessible Heroes API?

[Kaeo] I hear that internally because we have our own web team because they’re looking for that and I hear it externally. I think it’s something that we definitely want to support. There’s a lot of things that we need to work out between what exactly we are exposing, how are we exposing it. We don’t have people dedicated to that right now but we’re definitely talking about how we can get people there working on that. So, we will get it. The question is when, but we hear you! I totally understand the need.

[Veiled] Our guy, Shaun (Four Court Jester) has a parser.

[Kaeo] Yeah, our own web team users a parser! We need something like this.

[Veiled] He’s perfecting his every patch, but it’s great, it saves us so much time!

Q. Okay, last one! Are there any plans for a Heroes of the Storm armory, similar to WoW or Diablo III?

[Kaeo] I think we definitely want to do that. To me, the in-game profile is not doing what we want it to do. So I think you can expect us to round out the in-game profile and get it to a place where we feel like it’s really conveying all the information that it needs to and that it should be. And then I think that with a data API would let us expose that stuff to our web page and to be able to let sites like HeroesFire do similar things to expose it.

Great interview! I hope they sort the profile system out sooner rather than later!