Dear beloved community members,

We have some news we would like to share with you about changes to our seeding process. Besides this we want to share changes we have coming up for our support and feedback process.

Changes to seeding 

Seeding of our divisions is an important part of Heroes Lounge and is something we are always looking to improve. As such we are happy to be able to share some of the steps we are taking for the upcoming season. We hope this will bring some immediate improvements to everyone’s experience. Especially for those in the lower divisions. 

These changes will be implemented and used for season 13 EU and season 5 for NA. We will monitor how these changes affect the competitiveness in each of the divisions, listen to any additional feedback our players might have and will make further changes, if necessary, in consecutive seasons.  

Individual MMR calculations

As we have continued to use HeroesProfile since the middle of Season 10, it has become more and more clear that our requirement for games uploaded is insufficient as these were based on Hotslogs “active” data. As such we have increased our requirement for games uploaded to HeroesProfile for a game mode’s MMR to be included in our league MMR calculation from 25, 20, 10 in Quick Match, Unranked and Storm League respectively, to 150 games per game mode. We feel that this should reduce the likeliness of a player's less played game mode, and less reliable data, influencing their league MMR negatively. As per our current rules, MMR will still be weighted 70/30 Storm League to Unranked or use Quick Match only if Storm League and Unranked do not have enough games. If a player does not have 150 games uploaded in any game mode, they shall receive a default league MMR of 3000. 

Upload your games today with help from our handy guide: Uploading Replays.

Average Team MMR calculations

As used in our North American League, for Season 13 EU we shall be only using the top 5 players MMR  to calculate the teams average MMR. Once again the change to Heroes Profile showed difficulties as numerically a large proportion of the player base became closer in MMR and so our anti-anchor rules became less effective. This change will reduce the possibility for teams to be placed lower than intended.  
Some teams may find themselves placed higher than expected because of this, so please remember that if you do feel you are seeded higher or lower than you feel is fair, protest your seeding to a moderator in the two weeks of preseason.

Upcoming changes to support

As well as the changes to seeding, we are also looking to change up the way we deal with feedback and support. League management has always been the most challenging part of running Heroes Lounge and there has been a lot of growth and changes to our competitions over the past few years. The way we handle feedback and league moderation has been lagging behind these changes a bit, so we are looking to change things up there as well and hopefully create a better environment for both participants and the volunteers that are responsible for moderation and for league management.

• The League Management team will be expanded to be able to help each other out more and allow for breaks or takeover of responsibility for decision making where necessary.

• The feedback channel and way we handle the more regular support requests will receive a revamp. More details are coming this month as we are currently in the process of testing and fleshing out functionality.  

• Within the next two months we are also looking to hold an open forum session via discord voice. In order to discuss ideas and questions coming from the community. Details on that will be shared later as well. This is something we want to try out and potentially do more of when appropriate. 

• Besides these changes we would like to give a heads up to all players of our upcoming survey to hear about your experiences with participation in Season 12. This survey will be compiled and shared in the first half of August.

Thank you for caring enough to read all this and helping us improve by staying involved. We wish you happy and competitive games! And a great new season in both NA and EU!