Blizzard released a set of patch notes yesterday for the Heroes of the Storm Public Test Realm as a pre­view of what’s to come in the next patch:

Heroes of the Storm PTR Patch Notes – August 10, 2015 (via Battle.net)

There’s a lot of content in those patch notes, but I decided to go over the items that I liked or particularly caught my attention.

Items may now be purchased from the PTR Shop using real money.

I’m glad that Blizzard is including store purchases in their test realm, and compensating testers for their purchases by providing the same items for free on the live servers. This hints at the fact that this test realm is actually there for testing as many things about the game as possible.

This, of course, contradicts what I discussed yesterday about the League of Legends Public Beta En­vi­ron­ment – how bugs are often reported but rarely fixed, and make it to the live servers anyway, which sug­gests that the PBE exists as a showcase environment rather than a bug testing environment.

Add Diablo to Your Hero Collection

Something I heard about in a previous patch notes release is that bundles will become dynamic bundles, and you will be refunded for any heroes that you purchased twice as a result of purchasing a bundle.

Small things like this that are essentially insignificant to Blizzard (it’s probably irrelevant to them if they reward you with 10,000 gold so you can purchase another hero) can mean a lot to players.

I qualify for a few heroes in the dynamic bundle refund system, and I’m hoping that they do something similar to this Diablo update, where if you own Diablo III and Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, you earn Diablo for free. I’m looking forward to getting several thousand gold back so I can get closer to completing my entire collection.

Malthael’s Phantom

If you’ve read some of my previous blog posts regarding Blizzard games, you probably know that one thing I absolutely love about Blizzard games is how they’re all intertwined. For example, I played World of War­craft recently because I was able to get a free mount in Heroes of the Storm once I reached Level 100 on a character in WoW (again, not really a mount I would use, but as I said, it’s all about completing the col­lec­tion).

Malthael’s Phantom is another mount you can get by reaching Level 70 with a character on Diablo III dur­ing Season 4. This is probably the one update I’m most excited about, because this mount actually looks pretty amazing and I will most likely use it on a lot of heroes.

This also brings exposure to their other games and encourages players to try them out. Although I have a level-capped character on Diablo III with over 250ish Paragon levels, I still have no clue how the Season system works. Because of this in-game promotion, Blizzard has successfully given me enough motivation to try out that aspect of Diablo III when the next season rolls around.

New Portrait Rewards

These new portrait rewards are all about the goals. Sure, just playing the game is fun, but having these rewards as external motivators makes it even better.

These portraits take quite a bit of time to achieve. For example, playing 50 games will take quite some time and dedication, especially when it has to be done within the Eternal Conflict period. Getting Level 10 on two or three heroes will also take a substantial amount of time, and aren’t easy rewards.

I like that this increases the range of difficulty of rewards. Those who like short-term and easy rewards can just level heroes and get small gold rewards and skin color unlocks, while veterans and advanced players have these big goals to which they can look forward.

Versus A.I.

Finally, the last thing I’m somewhat excited about is the improvements to the Versus A.I. mode.

When I first started playing League of Legends, I played almost exclusively with Ed (who you might know better as Grainyrice), and he was particularly fond of playing bot games. Unfortunately, back then, bots were very basic in League of Legends, and it got pretty boring, pretty quickly.

I like that Blizzard is implementing A.I. improvements to HotS because it shows they recognize that some people just don’t really like PvP, and would rather work together as a team to take down a computerized opponent.

There is also a Versus A.I. section on the profile that is supposedly coming soon, so I like that they’re adding more diversity into the game with different game modes, and no matter what you choose to do in Heroes of the Storm, you can show off your achievements in your profile.

A few days ago, I was playing some Hero League on Heroes of the Storm when my Internet became unstable and I lost connection to the Battle.net servers. This happened while my team was in hero select.

Leaving during character selection is generally called “dodging” because you dodge the game that’s about to come up. It’s a strategy in League of Legends to avoid games you are sure you’re going to lose (such as having an illegitimate team composition or a player who claims they are going to intentionally feed in-game).

In League of Legends, dodging gives you a small penalty of losing a few league points (which is nothing compared to how much you would actually lose if you were to go on to play that game and be defeated). Regardless, I’m not really much of a dodger, as I like experiencing the game in different ways, and love to take on challenges.

I have a similar mindset in Heroes of the Storm, and never dodge during character selection. I was sure there was some sort of penalty for dodging, but I didn’t really care too much about it and didn’t look into it much because I never really planned on ever dodging.

Unfortunately, getting disconnected from Heroes of the Storm means you have a guaranteed forced dodge.

I signed back in after my Internet connection was restored … and saw that I was down to Rank 2.

Apparently, the penalty for dodging a game during hero select is around 300-400 points. Of course, I hadn’t played enough games in Rank 1 to collect up a lot of points, so that penalty was enough to send me right back to Rank 2.

The worst part is that, in Rank 1, your point gains get severely stunted. Up until Rank 2, you gain a base of 100 points per game, plus an additional skill bonus if your matchmaking rating is high, so the dodge penalty is about one or two games’ worth of losses.

But it’s a completely different story in Rank 1.

In Rank 1, each game means you gain or earn around 12 points, based on my experiences. So, by losing a couple hundred points, it was basically the same as getting defeated for about 30 games straight.

Now of course, I’m sure that your true hidden matchmaking rating is unaffected by the dodge penalty (and I know it wasn’t, because after I started playing games again at Rank 2, they weren’t any easier than my regular games).

But this brings me to my main point of not really liking these rating systems (Ranks in Heroes of the Storm and leagues/divisions in League of Legends).

League of Legends used to go off a pure elo system, where you had a four-digit number (or three digits if you were really bad) that represented your position on the ladder, with higher elo values indicating higher levels of skill.

I don’t fully agree with the fact that this was changed into a system where the ranking system listed on your profile rarely accurately reflects your true skill.

It’s almost like receiving “Excellent,” “Good,” “Satisfactory,” and “Poor” in school, rather than your exact percentage as a grade.

Imagine if a kid got a 98% on his exam and was told he received an “Excellent, Tier II.”

On the other hand, another student received an 82% on his exam, but because his past exam scores were 20%, 59%, and 70%, he was told he received an “Excellent, Tier III” because the fast improvement put little confidence in the rating system and it needed to adjust.

I don’t see that as being much different than people getting +300 point skill bonuses in Heroes of the Storm (which I got), or people skipping tons of divisions in League of Legends (which I did).

Now, with that conversation done and put aside, something like that obviously didn’t discourage me from playing more Heroes of the Storm. I quickly and easily made it right back to Rank 1, and I’ve been continuing to play since then.

And finally, a preview of my next gaming project – Blizzard has offered me seven more free days of game time in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor to try out the changes introduced with Patch 6.2. I didn’t manage to finish leveling the last time they gave me this gift, so I’ll definitely make sure to finish it this time. Those stream VODs will be coming up in the next few days.

The Battlefield of Eternity was released today as part of the Heroes of the Storm Eternal Conflict patch, and it’s amazing.

Back in June, the official Blizzard Heroes of the Storm account tweeted concept art for the Battlefield of Eternity, which I promptly favorited.

Source: https://twitter.com/BlizzHeroes/status/607286408617664512

After the patch got released today, I quickly queued up for a game and was lucky enough to get Battlefield of Eternity as my first map in my first game.

As it was loading up, I took a screenshot of the loading screen:

I also took a screenshot of the Immortal fight in the center of the map, when they clashed with each other during relocation.

I play on minimum graphics settings because I have a laptop with a mobility graphics processor, overall not designed for high-intensity gaming. I also prefer to keep my FPS as high as possible, particularly when I’m streaming and a lot of my processing power is being put towards that.

Even then, the map still looked nice, and met my expectation of satisfaction. I can’t wait to see it being played at maximum quality on professional/full-time streamers’ broadcasts who have high-end computers.

There are two primary incentives for purchasing skins. One of them is to satisfy yourself – if you like a skin, you will most likely buy it because you’ll enjoy looking at your character while you’re playing.

The second incentive is that it’s a way of showing off to others; you want to show off your…

• Style. You want other people to see what you like.
• Financial status. Having a skin shows that you are financially comfortable to be spending money on cosmetic content in a game.
• Generosity. You want other people to enjoy looking at the skin as well. (Or, from a different per­spec­tive, you’re generously giving back to Blizzard for making a free game that you like.)

Heroes of the Storm does a great job satisfying people’s desire to show off by including skins in player pro­files. Using mine as an example, you can see that I own Ranger-General Sylvanas, Angelic Valla, and Mas­ter Zagara.

This is a very nice touch to the game, and I appreciate the fact that the HotS development team is atten­tive enough to details that they would include this feature.

However, in my opinion, they didn’t take it all the way.

If you click on the Hero Collection tab, you’ll come across this screen:

From here, you can click on each hero to zoom in to progression details.

Unfortunately, even though each individual hero’s skins appears on the Profile Summary tab, it does not appear in the Hero Collection tab. As you can see from the screenshots, the three skins featured in my sum­ma­ry are not featured in my collection.

My feature suggestion is to add skins to the Hero Collection screens as well.

Not only will this allow players to feature their favorite skins, but it also lets them do it for all heroes they own, and not just the three most played that show up in the Profile Summary.

Seeing as skin featuring is already in the Profile Summary, it’s obvious that the technology is already there. I think it would be a nice touch if its implementation was extended to the Hero Collection tab.

This will also allow Blizzard to increase skin sales, as they’re giving another outlet for players to show off what they own.

I’m proud to announce that, through my commitment to climbing the Hero League ranked ladder on Heroes of the Storm in the past two weeks, I have reached my goal and hit Rank 1 today.

It seems like once you reach Rank 1, you go off a different point system, where you can collect up to 1,000 points. The point progress bar also disappears, so you’ll have to hover over your rank in order to see how many points you have left until you max out.

I’m eager to set my new goal at 1,000 points into Rank 1, but I’m also a little hesitant, as I don’t want to overwork myself.

As you might have suspected, I tend to get burnt out pretty easily, especially if I’m doing something by myself, and I don’t want this same thing to happen to Heroes of the Storm. Because of all the dedication and focus I’ve been putting into this, as well as the fact that I am solo queueing all my games, I feel as if it’s even more susceptible to burning me out.

So, for now, I’m going to mix in some different games into my schedule for a little while as I cool down from Heroes of the Storm, and only play it casually for a bit. From there, I’ll decide if I’ll go for the ultimate goal of 1,000 points before the Grandmaster system gets introduced (the gold border that was asset-farmed from a recent patch).