Greetings, Heroes!

I wanted to check in and give everyone an update following our latest announcements.

First, the next few months will unfold much like we’d originally planned. In fact, our 85th hero will be announced soon before hitting the PTR the first week of January, and that hero will be followed by a string of cool events and hero reworks en route to our next hero release.

What we want to do beyond those releases is currently under discussion across the Heroes of the Storm team. The plans moving forward are going to be focused on the things that the Heroes team and all of you in our community are excited for. Our team has always thrived when we’re working on things we’re passionate about. While our team is smaller, we’re a fully functional group of developers who can create the features and content we all want, in time. I know everyone is eager to hear more, but we’re still in the early stages of these conversations, so we’ll share updates once the team has made some decisions.

And while I can’t give you all the details just yet, I will also say that we’re actively discussing not only the right cadence for our patches and content – we’re also reconsidering some very core areas of the game to identify more ways we can make Heroes even better for players.

Just a few of the many things we’re currently discussing include:

Finalizing the Hero Role overhaul

Timing for rolling out the Ranked Play consolidation and improvements we discussed at BlizzCon

Bringing back the ability to directly purchase individual skins with Gems

Adding the ability to get more content like skins and mounts with Gold

More immediately, we just had a balance patch on Wednesday which will be followed closely by additional matchmaking changes to both Quick Match’s queue times and to the division spread used for matching high-level players in Ranked modes. Please check out the patch notes for all the details on the balance changes and be on the lookout for our matchmaking forum post as those improvements roll out.

So, in summary: meaningful changes are here now, and more content and updates are on the way shortly. As we move into the new year, please be valiant with us as we take some time to evaluate our new approach to all the exciting things we want to do. And as always, please share your thoughts on what you would like to see in 2019 while letting us know how we can continue improving this game that we all love.

Lastly, the team has been having a ton of fun with the Most Amazingest Board Game Ever and we’ve decided to extend our Winter Toy Event into February to give everyone more chances to play. The game can be completed 50 times during the event for up to 50 free Rare Toy Chests, so have fun, and we hope you enjoy the event as much as we do!

Thanks,

Kaéo