It goes without saying that the current patch is unsatisfactory both at the pro level and on the ladder, and rumor has it that there will be another big patch coming after BlizzCon.
The prize pool is surprisingly low, even with the RSL offline finals happening at the same time (~$10k USD in 2025). How does this qualify as an S-tier patch if the prize pool is this low?
Also, if the legacy team/PiG/OmniSkeptic (idk, name your own conspiracy theory) knows that things are bad and is trying to do something about it, trivial effort as it may be, why not do so ASAP? Isn’t that the whole point of damage control? Also, why even bother doing a balance patch at all when the best tournament Blizzard can offer has only a $20k prize pool and the pro scene is pretty much in the toilet?
I have no doubt that the next patch is going to wreck protoss again, while giving the race some “buffs” to units nobody even uses.
Shame on whoever’s responsible for this hot mess.
Have a nice day.
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Every patch that comes out and affects gameflow and game mechanics, chips away a small speck (or a bigger chunk) from the life of this game. Because people, humans, actually most everything that lives, doesn’t enjoy ripples in the water, doesn’t enjoy changes that remove comfort away - especially when this comfort has come after some sort of effort to obtain it. Creating game habits, building muscle memory, the hours and hours that one puts in the game… all these get invalidated to a certain degree when modifications happen that change the game flow and game mechanics. Some people accept and carry on, some other ones yell in anger and carry on, some people sigh and decide they’ve had enough and leave. That’s the “chip away”. Do this once, it’s small and it doesn’t matter. Do this twice, it’s small and doesn’t matter. Do this ten times, still remains relatively small and all is ok. But when you’ve done it 50 or 100 times, it’s naive to look back and wonder “where did all the followers go?”
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This is quite common after a patch actually.
People complain, they rage, threaten to quit…
It’s pretty standard.
Yup, whole heartedly agree 
That’s why, if you’re a developer and publisher who cares for a game’s success in long term and who intends to increase the userbase, or at least not loose it, updates that change game mechanics should happen as less as possible, ideally never (but we know nothing is ideal, but that’s the goal to aim for, to get as close as possible to). A patch is a patch when it fixes bugs of the game: crashes, map glitches, some animation problem, some untended glitch that doesn’t make sense and produces bogus behaviour (like that bug that Lowko found where you could load 8 siege tanks in siege mode onto a dropship and perform literally a doomdrop on the enemy base) and so on. But anything else that intentionally changes the game mechanics, it will almost always chip away and wither the userbase. For some the radical changes are “Yey, something new, I was so bored with how it was”. But for most the reaction is “Oh no, not again!”