After more than a week of extended maintenance, the Heroes of the Storm Technical Alpha is back online for North America, Latin America, South East Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. We anticipate that Heroes will be live in Europe on October 9, and that Korea, Taiwan, and China will be available again for play in the weeks thereafter.



Those of you who had access to the game before the downtime can jump straight back into the Nexus and continue battling, and we will continue to increase the pool of invited players over the coming weeks and months!



Several changes have been made in the last couple of weeks—you can check out our summary below.

As we shared with you before the maintenance, we have now moved to our production hardware. This means that you’ll be connected to your home region and your existing regional Battle.net friend list.



In addition to the infrastructure changes, a new patch has been deployed! We’ve reintroduced custom games, allowing you to face off against your friends or other pre-selected opponents; added a new replay system, so that you can relive your best moments; and introduced an observer mode, meaning you can watch the action from any custom game you’ve been invited to view as it’s played. To top it off, two more playable characters have entered the brawl: Anub’arak and Azmodan. For a full list of updates, check out our latest patch notes.



Every player’s MMR (their hidden matchmaking rating) has been reset. This means that you may initially face players with a different skill level than your own, but our rating system will quickly kick in and match you against suitable opponents after a few games.



Finally, for one week following today’s patch, games played in any matchmaking mode (Practice, Cooperative, and Versus) will award double the normal amount of experience points! Also, there are no more planned wipes, so any XP and gold you earn from this point on will remain in your account for good.

Remember that we’re still in a testing phase, so we encourage you to continue sharing your feedback on the following discussion forums:

We’ll have more news soon, so keep an eye on our website as well as our Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and YouTube pages to keep up to date.



See you in the Nexus!