Heroes devs testing longer death timers and snowball prevention

New heroes and maps aren’t the only things that get tested on Heroes of the Storm‘s PTR. The Heroes devs are looking for players willing to brave a custom battleground that has longer death timers and level gains flattened to address the snowballing issue in matches.

The first big issue they want to tweak deals with how quickly players can get back into the game after being killed early in the match. While dying does feed experience to the enemy team, players are often likely to take bad risks that get them killed right from the start because the “time out” penalty for death is very short. The new death timer gets bumped up from 9 to 15 seconds at level 1 and then gradually the difference diminishes until level 11 where it remains the same to what it is now.

The second issue is snowballing. Once a team gets ahead in experience and levels, the opposing team tends to fall further and further behind as the winning team takes objectives faster and gains new talents sooner. This is because some levels see big stat gains for heroes while other levels see smaller jumps. The devs are smoothing out the stat boost between levels 1 – 20 so one team just a level or two ahead of another isn’t exponentially more powerful.

These changes are available for testing right now on the PTR if you go into the custom maps option and choose the Cursed Hollow – Scaling Test battleground. With tomorrow’s October 6 patch, the Live servers will also be hosting this custom map for a short time for additional testing. As you can imagine, these changes will have a major impact on the game and the official Heroes Twitter account has confirmed that they won’t be rolled out into the live game until after the World Championships at BlizzCon in early Novemeber.