[2022] [Alec Dawson] "For full transparency we did want this patch to come out earlier for the playerbase at large, but had some issues on our side. You can expect future mid-season balance updates to happen about 4 weeks after a season start."

Thanks for the reasonable take, it's appreciated. Having these changes delayed is frustrating, for sure. We'll continue to work to do better in the future.

Gameplay data, including hero abilities, is compiled into game assets that exist on both the client and the server. When we change abilities, even simple numerical values, we need to have both the client and server updated to match. This may seem overly complicated, but I'd highly recommend watching a GDC session we did in 2017 that dives into this system in depth before making that assumption!

When we need to update both the client and server, the simplest way is to release a new version. We release new versions every few weeks, but given Cross Play and Cross Progression, these releases require scheduling. We can urgently add a release to fix issues, but this can (potentially) push back the next planned release, which isn't great.

Since we need to be able to adjust things like hero balance more quickly, we have tools that allow us to do "hotfix" updates of certain game data, without releasing a new version. The hotfix system is complex, and that's the system we had problems with when we tried to release these changes earlier. We're building additional automated tests to help ensure that the same type of problems we hit this time won't happen again, or will be caught more quickly.

I hope this additional detail helps, and I hope you all have a good weekend that's filled with wins.

Cheers