After a short maintenance of only a few days, we are back with a brand-new website and a shining-new logo. This means we are well prepared for the future of Heroes Lounge and open the way to several new seasons of competitive Heroes of the Storm amateur matches.
The launch marks the opening of sign ups for Heroes Lounge season 4! The sign-ups will be open until the 9th of July at midnight. So make sure to press that button in time.
Every user has to create a new account on this website, teams have to be recreated as well.
Times changes
Some of you might remember the time almost one year ago when the first season of Heroes Lounge was running. At that time, the website players could find at HeroesLounge.gg consisted almost exclusively of the embed Heroes Lounge Season 1 Battlefy site.
Back then we already started to stream a huge portion of the matches live on our main Twitch.tv channel almost only casted by Heartless, MacDino, or Venom. For the streams on Twitch.tv and for the VODs and highlight clips on our YouTube channel we were using the Heroes Lounge logo you are familiar with and which was created by Blinke of the division 2 team Balance of Interest.
After a surprisingly successful first season with 58 teams playing in a round-robin format in five divisions, there was no doubt that there must be a new website for the second season. In only a couple of weeks, Epixors and Rikki set up the Heroes Lounge website you are used to in case you followed us throughout Season 2 and Season 3.
The website indeed helped us growing. The management of teams became easier and a look into the rankings of single divisions did not need as much of loading time as compared to when we used Battlefy.
A basic calendar was introduced which helped a lot in organizing the casting of matches. We could comfortably host our own basic blog which triggered the creation of article series like InsideLounge and the Weekly Recaps.
Besides that, the announcements via blog posts on the website improved the communication to players who are not frequently online on our discord server. Last but definitely not least, we programmed and maintained our own matchmaking algorithms as we moved away from a round-robin format which was needed to address the number of teams which grew to 95.
However, it was already during Season 2 of Heroes Lounge when we noticed there were several things which needed to be changed and that these changes would not come easy due to the hurry in which the old website had to be created. Thus, long before our WebDevs created the #website_requests channel on our discord – which was frequently abused for requests on the current website instead of the new one - the brainstorming for a new website had been already started.
Finally! After months of hard work of our WebDevs under the gentle guidance of our all beloved DevGod Rikki, we are proud to announce today the launch of the new website on a new server with plenty of new features.
A brand-new website
As being the guy in charge of creating the website it's my job to write some words to my fellow sloths - so here we go!
Development of Heroes Lounge 2.0 started mid-december when I was asked to implement a new feature to the website - as I was already tllted by the code Epixors and I made for the original website I started from scratch to build a new flexible thing. End january I had a very basic thing set up and working - and lost all my work due to a harddrive fail including my backups. So we started again early february, being as professional as we are using GitHub. Since then, many WebDevs joined and left us, contributing to the work of their dictator.
The website you see as of today has a total of 36.078 lines of code - splitted into 19.125 lines of code to match the special requirements Heroes Lounge has for a website and 16.953 lines of code to wrap all of that into a nice decent viewable experience for you.
Obviously we are just all the worst coders on earth, that's why we wrote a whole lot more lines of code, half of which weren't working why we had to delete most of them throughout development.
As you can clearly see, my job was mostly to delete all the stuff Epixors commited 
We are able to present you the following features with the launch of the website:
- Overhauled Frontpage with Twitchintegration for our main channel
- New Create/Manage & View Teampages
- New Create/Manage & View Userprofilepages
- A whole new subset of blog improvements like the sidebar, blogtags [...]
- A new primary contact form being our contact@heroeslounge.com mail adress (contact form comming soon™)
- Search form which currently supports following entities:
- Users
- Teams
- Blogposts
- Matches!
- And last but not least, maybe one of the biggest features being our Timeline.
The Timeline will autogenerate messages for certain events - like when a team changes their logo or reported the score of a match. You'll find the timeline with different settings all over our website.
We have many more features waiting for you, the next big things hitting as early as with the start of season 4.
Stay tuned for our new category Tech News for more insight about the work of DevSloths and new features for the website.
Before I give the word back to Balabub I'd like to use the oppertunity to thank all WebDevs who made this launch possible - some passed, some stayed.
Special thanks goes to:
Ace of War, Riggixors, Astraeus, Bdemirel, Mist, ZalzDecay
..and whomever I might have forgot.
Heroes Lounge Season 4
While the Playoffs of Heroes Lounge Season 3 are still running and only have concluded the first round of games, we are already preparing for the next Season. In Season 3, in total 125 teams were playing almost 500 matches of competitive Heroes of the Storm amateur games. With the feedback we got from you and with the launch of the new website of HeroesLounge.gg, we feel like this is the start of a new era for Heroes Lounge.
We wanted to emphasize this in some way and therefore decided us to say goodbye to our beloved old logo and set up the path to something new.
During the last couple of weeks, Quietman put in a lot of work and nerves to fulfill the wishes of the guys in the organization to rebrand Heroes Lounge. Some of you might know Quietman as a caster or the former captain of the Season 2 Division 3 team Oranje Head. We are really thankful for his work.
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