Heroes of the Storm testing continues but there’s a week long break coming up as servers go down before the final phase.
Blizzard must be happy with their MOBA’s progress because they’ve announced that the final testing phase of the tech alpha will start some time in early October.
On the 22 September the game’s shop is being taken offline and no purchases can be made for gold or real money. The good news is that while the shop is down Blizzard will make all 29 heroes available to play.
On the 27th the alpha will be closed down for more than a week for what Blizzard are calling “extended maintenance”. When it returns some time in early October players will be starting their accounts fresh and will also be locked into their own geographical regions.
The week after we shut down the shop, we’ll bring the Technical Alpha service offline for more than a week of extended maintenance. During this time, you’ll be unable to login or play Heroes of the Storm and we’ll reset everyone’s Heroes accounts. Once the Nexus is brought back online, it will be as though you’re starting fresh with a brand new account. This means that any leveling progression you’ve made, rewards you’ve unlocked, in-game Gold you’ve earned, and any purchases you’ve made with real-money or Gold prior to the wipe will be reset.
However, kindly keep in mind that following the account wipe, any real money you spent thus far during play testing has not been lost and will be refunded to your Battle.net Balance. Even though you’ll be starting fresh at level one, you’ll still be able to use the refunded money to pick up that shiny Bundle Pack, Mount, or Skin you might have had your eye on over the last few weeks. As an added bonus, anyone who made a real-money purchase using real money during the Technical Alpha will receive an exclusive Wonder Billie Mount!
This is the final planned Heroes of the Storm account wipe and monetary refund. Our goal is to avoid future player and hero progression wipes after we come back online, but we may still need to adjust or wipe player progression with future updates. Don’t worry, though, because we’ll give you ample warning if that ever becomes necessary. What we do know is that from the moment we bring Heroes back online after this wipe, purchases you make in the Shop will be permanent. So get those Heroes, Bundles, Skins, and Mounts with the confidence that you won’t need to reacquire them again.
Once Heroes is back online, all current players will be moved to their home Battle.net region. When this occurs, a number of things will happen:
- You will lose access to the friends list you built in the Heroes Technical Alpha thus far. But you will regain access to your normal Battle.net friends list that you share with all other Blizzard games, including Diablo® III, Hearthstone®, StarCraft II, and World of Warcraft®.
- Your friends in other Blizzard games will now see you as playing Heroes of the Storm and be able to communicate with you across games.
- If you wish to remain in contact with friends you made to this point in the Heroes of the Storm Technical Alpha, take down their BattleTags (both the account name and unique ID number) now, and add them to your friends list after the wipe. Please note however, that some of the friends you made in the Alpha may have a different home Battle.net region than you do, so it will not be possible to friend them unless you are in the same home region.
This final phase of alpha testing is a real migration over the regular BattleNet service and there’s obviously lots of work going on behind the scenes to make that happen. Losing friends lists and progress is always a pain but that’s the joys of alpha testing.
