Last December, we released several hotfixes to address bugs that were affecting matchmaking and placement matches near the start of the latest ranked Season. The issues stemmed from a combination of incorrect player seeding and overly-aggressive MMR adjustments. More recently, a number of highly-ranked players reported that they were consistently receiving negative personal rank adjustments at the end of their matches. We’ve investigated and identified the cause, and have already begun to address it.

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.

We also apologize for our radio silence over the past few weeks. 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.

The quality and integrity of Heroes of the Storm’s ranked experience is hugely important to us, and we’ve added additional measures and safeguards to prevent these issues from occurring in the future. We’ve also been closely monitoring ranked matchmaking and believe it has returned to a stable state.

A Token of Our Gratitude

As a small token of our appreciation for bearing with us through these challenges, we’re going to grant a free Legendary Loot Chest to players who completed any ranked matches in Hero or Team League between the start of the current season and January 31, 2018. We don’t have an exact date to share just yet, but you should receive your Legendary Loot Chest within the next few days.

On Performance-Based Matchmaking

As a side note, we still plan to re-introduce Performance-Based Matchmaking (PBM) in a future season as part of our continued quest to better reflect and recognize player skill. We made many big changes to the metagame with the 2018 Gameplay Update, and since the system learns from live data, we wanted the meta to solidify a little more before re-enabling PBM. We’re now seeing a fair amount of stability, and the system has been gathering solid information. We’ll have more details to share about the return of Performance-Based Matchmaking soon. In the meantime, we will continue to keep watch over the matchmaking system to ensure the rest of the season is fun and fair for everyone.

We truly appreciate your patience and understanding, and we’ll see you in Nexus!