Ways to promote the game are desperately needed

Honestly, while I am still a little saddened about the cancellation of HGC and the deceleration of the content releases, I have been amazed by the changes that have been integrated into the game this year. Both new heroes, Imperius and Anduin are insanely fun to play and add interesting new mechanics. We’ve also seen a decent amount of creative skins and mounts, alongside other nice cosmetics. Balance wise I am rather happy to see bigger Balance Patches, just recently bringing back heroes that have been forgotten for quite a while. Also the long-awaited role revamp was a fantastic addition, finally giving unexperienced players an easier way to determine the role of heroes more specifically, alongside tons of other great changes.
I feel like the game is in an amazing state overall, yet I think it desperately lacks forms of promotion. Why not bring back Mega-Bundles or Cross-Promos? What about small Twitch rewards like lootchests? We need ways to recruit new players and to let old players know, that the game is still growing strong.
Shoutouts to the Developers who continue to pour their hearts in, no matter how challenging the whole situation seems. Cheers!

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nah it’s better to ban people with 5-year accounts for “noob” and “succ” in the chat, which they are actively doing.

Hmm, did you get an active response of a Blizzard employee? You can contact the customer service if you feel like you’ve been suspended for no reason. Some people tend to report others for no reason - I once was silenced for 3 days even though I didn’t flame whatsoever. I feel like that is a general flaw of the Report-system. The problem is that there is way too many reports to have “actual” people checking every one of them…

I filed the appellation where I told I never used any strong language after last suspention and that’s the response:

Your Heroes of the Storm account has been permantly closed due to reapeated incidents of breaching of our policies. Based on our review of the evidence, we will not overturn the penalty.

The following chat lines were sent from your account: “u pathetic noob”, “we all succ”, “naz noob”, “tyrande idiot”, “wtf u doing”, “u succ”, “u noob”, “u noob”.

This action has been taken in accordance with our Code of Conduct

Right, I just saw your post and responded there to it.

The lower frequency of content releases has been the best thing that happened to the game in a long time. I agree in particular that balance patches now seem to be less rushed and well thought through (there will always be disagreement on single changes whatever they do).

However, they also “messed-up” the rank placements/storm league merger this year, without ever adressing the issue (at least in-game or here in the forums).
The solutions to attracting new (or old) players are solutions for the same issues that have persisted for a very long time and no type of promotion will help there (unless you want to loose new players again after 2 weeks):

(Un)Fairness of Ranking/Placements
The ranked systems is in dire need of a complete overhaul with higher transparency of MMR, some kind of performance-based point system instead of arbitrary “adjustments” and better placement-system (or no placement system at all). Ranking should be “fun”, “competitive” and “rewarding”. It is none of those things unless you play 5 vs. 5 premades.

Reporting/Silencing/Banning
Although I am not much affected by the automated system myself, feedback from the different channels alone should provide sufficient information on how annoyed a lot of people are (and probably also quit the game). This needs to be adressed before going on “promo-tour”.

Professional/Amateur Leagues
People that take ranking a bit more seriously want to see how the best players are achieving their results. Even if the publisher does not want to put money directly in the hands of pro-players/moderators, it could do more to support semi-professional leaques and cups (such herous-lounge). Just promote dates, casters, players and provide direct links to “validated” twitch channels.

Re-Joining Games
A minor, but very annoying issue: It should be possible to rejoin games in a quick and convenient manner.

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I think it was the right step to merge HL and TL, since the wait time within minor regions was just too high for HL - almost everyone started to play TL anyways, even if they wanted to solo queue. It will take a lot of time and effort until the quality starts to increase again. Some sort of loss-forgiveness has been promised for a while, and I hope they finally implement such a feature. I agree that the developers should consider making a closer connection between MMR and rank; placement matches - at least in the way they are currently existing in the game - definitely need some revision as well.

To be honest I am uncertain about this. Some of the people I play with occasionally complain about them getting silenced while they state that they never flamed whatsoever. Yet often enough I’ve seen (some of ) them flame other players for no real reason (while not viewing their insults as inappropriate flame).

I also agree on your statement regarding the inofficial tournament advertising. Khaldor is doing such a fantastic job at casting really enjoyable games (alongside many other streamers) and Blizzard does not use the opportunity to advertise it in any way - updating the client regularily with a preview of the streamed matches connected to a link can’t be that much of a hassle.

Yes. Yes! I have no clue why this hasn’t been fixed yet, have you ever read about any statement of Blizzard regarding it? Every few weeks my provider does some sort of a hard reset, which sometimes leads to my Internet connection being gone for a few seconds until it reconnects. And what happens in Hots is, ofcourse, that it takes me at least 4-5 minutes to rejoin, while I ultimately only lose connection for 30 seconds at max, which is a complete joke.

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