Patching quickly or slowly
We noticed a lot of discussion around whether it’s good to balance patch often or almost never do a balance patch. Interestingly, our community looked to be leaning towards the second option. Compared to say like last year, this is the opposite of what we’re seeing from the community side. We’ve also seen this go back and forth heavily among the pros. For example, when Kespa pros first came in, we were getting heavy feedback that we can never patch the game because pro players will always figure out everything on their own + there is no reason to ever patch the game. These days, we almost never hear this type of feedback from pro players.
Our stance on this definitely used to lean towards almost never patching the game back in wings or early days of HotS, but towards the end of HotS and start of LotV, this line of thought has changed due to more experience. The correct answer we believe to this question is that it really depends on the issue.
For example, if something is seen as overpowered but makes for fun games, we can wait longer to see if players find their own solutions. A good example of this is if things like Marine drops or Ravagers are seen as overpowered, we can wait a bit longer to see if players find their own solutions. The reason is that units or strategies that promote more action within the game can create more fun both in terms of playing and watching.
On the flip side, for the Brood Lord / Infestor situation we saw back in Wings, we believe we needed to act much quicker due to how stale each game becomes. The Swarm Host issue back in HotS was the same sort of issue, and that’s why we made a move to nerf the unit even when top Korean pro players at the time were saying there was no balance problem with Swarm Hosts (since we mostly only saw the stalemate games outside of KR).
And like we’ve discussed in the past couple weeks, we believe the current issues we are looking at such as the Ultralisk, Adept, Liberator, or Warp Prism are all issues within the first category. So while we definitely should work towards discussing or testing potential solutions in case they do turn out to be overpowered, these are definitely issues that we can take our time to evaluate while giving players the time they need to potentially figure out their own solutions.
So in this specific scenario we can wait for the pro feedback to confirm the list of changes, and then go through with the balance test map right away even if it means we’re not patching to the live game right away.
Pro feedback regarding proposed changes
Because Kespa is preparing for the Proleague finals in IEM Shanghai this weekend, they haven’t gotten around to pinging all of their players yet, but we will definitely let you guys know when this comes in next week. However, after having a brief conversation with them yesterday, they seem to have the most issues with Siege Tanks being dropped in Siege mode from Medivacs and the problems it causes for TvZ. We’ll definitely make sure to pay close attention to both the proleague finals as well as the IEM games this weekend.
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