Honestly, soliciting feedback after the patch is live instead of during the 1.5ish ptr cycles we had is sufficient to demonstrate the issue with sc2 right now, which is nonexistant communication between the dev team and 99.9% of the community. I’m not going to derail into conspiracy theories about who was responsible for what change, but I know that many people were asked prior to the first ptr and were ignored when the response wasn’t enthusiastic agreement with the changes.
This whole saga has shown that whoever is ultimately responsible for patching the game has a very poor understanding of it. The starting number of workers has no bearing on the way economies scale and tend to skip directly to the late game. Ever since the change to 12 workers at the start of LotV, there have been tons of small changes as a consequence. Those changes are largely not being done now, and when they are they are fairly hamfisted.
After the first iteration of PTR, there was a great post from Lorimbo about zerg cheeses being significantly weaker due to larva timings. As compensation, larva spawn rate was increased. The problem with doing is that now zerg has a much greater ability to produce random ling floods in the early-mid game and either win or be safe to drone hard behind it. Prior to LotV, larva inject would make 4 larva instead of 3. This lets you scale in pace with the rest of the game and requires both more resources and a moderate skill check to maintain injects.
The likely worst part of the patch long term is one that I haven’t really seen discussed yet, but is increasing the amount of resources per base. The ability to quickly saturate 3+ bases do to macro chores for each race just means that we will still quickly reach a late game, and that late game is going to be very turtly. I remember WoL and HotS and I am honestly pretty confused by the nostalgia for hour long games where players fight over inches of the map. The one time I’ve mentioned this on reddit, a certain someone who has been at least communicating with Blizzard about changes mentioned increasing the cost of static defense to compensate if the game got too turtle-y. I’m sorry but that is a genuinely clueless change, turtle games are caused by units much more than static defense, which are more critical for holding early aggression and mid game run bys. Yes we all see late game terrans in a castle of planetaries and missile turrets, but the real power behind them is tanks and spell casters. This is similar for both protoss and zerg as well.
I think the goals behind the patch are interesting but the implementation is lacking. If you were serious about slowing the game down and opening up space for strategy, you would need to commit serious dev resources again. Metal league players aren’t losing games because they need 40 seconds at the start to think about building a barracks, they are losing because their units die in half a second and any attempt to micro them is usually detrimental to an inexperience player. Who cares about a theoretical midgame when your T1 units all die before you can even split them up for surrounds or to minimize the massive amounts of aoe spells available now.
But even if you slowed down the fights in this game, we would be right back in this same position. There would need to be lots of small tweaks needed to compensate for the big change as problems get discovered. One half cocked patch launched in silence every year is simply not compatible with the goal of big shake ups.
tldr: Either commit more resources to the game if you want to make big changes to renew interest and actually listen to the community if you are going to solicit feedback from them. The sc2 community is fairly resistant to change at this point and for good reason, but you still need that dialogue to navigate big changes to a complex game