Lack of Ranked Rewards for Season 3 AND Lack of Communication From The HOTS Team

only played for the mounts. no mounts = no reason to play ranked

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i didnt read any infos of this official. You always has to GOOGLE for such infos. WHY??? I am sorry to say, but you are not even trying to save this game…!!!

Doesn’t look like they’re even going to acknowledge this.

This was the 3rd highest upvoted question for the Reddit AMA today… and they just skipped right over it.

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Not surprised at all.

So disappointing to not get any feedback. Just screams they are running extremely low on development resources.

I saw an idea voiced I believe in that reddit AMA that was an interesting idea.

You get a type of currency depending on where you place at the end of the season, that currency can go towards buying unique “ranked” rewards.

Good players get their stuff sooner but those who dabble will eventually get the things they want.

Obviously this could be adjusted. I’m not against rewards but anything that encourages people to play ranked without taking it at least somewhat seriously really needs to be discouraged.

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I don’t know if it’s a lack of resources per se. It may be a small team, but development is happening. We continue to get updates, characters, skins, and… things like “Nexus Anomalies.”

My concern is how development is prioritized, and how changes are communicated. It feels like there’s a lack of a plan. If that’s true, I’d ask the HOTS dev team to focus on the why they’re spending their time on one feature over another, and the how they should be communicating with players. If there actually is a plan it just doesn’t feel like it, because there are very few things being communicated proactively and clearly to players.

Let’s use 2019 Ranked Season 3 as the example (since that’s the topic of the thread). Development was spent on an updated “Ranked Seasonal Quest” system. Encouraging players to play (and actually try to win) ranked games is probably a move in the right direction for the health of ranked play. We got one article on this with plenty of lead time, with the promise to share more information on ranked. Then… they just went silent on this.

Since the rewards for ranked were intentional, as was verified by QA here, the problem is the team didn’t try to proactively communicate any of this or make any attempt to explain the “why.” WHY spend development time to build a new structure for ranked and qualify for ranked rewards, if you weren’t going to use that system to deliver something meaningful to players? It feels like there’s a significant lack of planning, or understanding of what matters to players.

Since it seems that rewards for ranked were an intentional plan, I’d like to compare this to previous Brawl rewards. We used to get 1000 gold and a portrait for playing 3 Brawl matches in a week. I know this got reworked around the launch HOTS 2.0, but offering a portrait and 2000 gold as a reward for playing approximately 100 matches over 4 months feels like a mistake. Choosing to move forward with this reward structure shows a gross misunderstanding of what rewards would be meaningful incentives to retain players, and a real lack of care for your player base, since “updated” rewards weren’t communicated anywhere during the ranked season, before players spent at minimum 50 hours participating in 2019 Ranked Season 3.

I understand that development priorities can shift and change over the course of months, and that’s why I want to emphasize that this seems to be a COMMUNICATION ISSUE, and an issue where the HOTS development team seems disconnected from players.

Rewards should remain consistent during the period of time that players are working towards things. If you’re making significant changes to the ways that players come to your game, and participate as they work towards rewards, someone should tell players.

On the other side, I don’t think the development team is getting good communication FROM players. If they were, I don’t believe we’d have this disconnect between understanding what’s meaningful to players, and the prioritization of development building things that are meaningful to players.

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why i didn’t get 2020 portrait? i guess they don’t give a mount but why no portrait? some of my friends got the portrait, but i couldn’t get. my rank Plat

Good point. Totally agree I would like better communication. For me I mentioned that it feels like they are running low on resources because we didn’t get a mount for ranked (Which has happened for as long as I have been playing). It seems to me they are giving out much less stuff and trying to use things they already have more efficiently.
For example the spectral crab mount that was given at blizcon this year. It seems like this was meant to be the next reward for purchasing gems but they didn’t have time to make something unique for blizcon. Normally you would get a robot animal or something like that.
Then for ranked we would get some form of mount for these. Even if it’s just a reskin. So I am wondering if they are running out of pre-done skins etcs prior to the great HOTS developer purge. Or they might have spent longer designing deathwing and couldn’t reskins some mounts etc.

Did you win 50 ranked matches? It was not enough to just do placement games this season.