The start of the latest ranked season for Heroes of the Storm saw a number of issues crop up regarding matchmaking and player rankings. Hotfixes came soon after, but these created their own issues which Blizzard are now apologising for. In a new update on the official site, the developers address the problems that have plagued the latest season and promise to make things right.
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“We realize these issues made ranked play a frustrating and chaotic experience for many, and while the situation has now been addressed, it took far longer than it should have—and it frankly should not have happened to begin with. Please accept our sincerest apologies.”
As part of the make good, anyone who played a ranked match in Hero or Team League between the start of the season and January 31 will receive a free Legendary Loot Chest. These will be distributed “within the next few days.”
The initial problems were attributed to “incorrect player seeding and overly-aggressive MMR adjustments.” More recently, highly ranked players have reported that they’d been consistently receiving negative adjustment points at the end of matches, and Blizzard say this was because the system was overcorrecting for the flatter curve the new matchmaking system provided. It did fix the initial problem, but the frustration of unclear penalties became a whole new issue, and Blizzard are disabling the correction behaviour in favor of fixing distribution at the start of the next season, where extra Bronze players left behind in the curve will place into Silver, and the same for extra Master players placing into Diamond.
“We also apologize for our radio silence over the past few weeks,” the developers continue in the official blog post. “We wanted to take the time to properly assess the system so we could be sure we had addressed those matchmaking bugs appropriately before commenting further on the topic. That said, we also understand how frustrating the apparent lack of new information has been to our players.”