The Roll20 Team
In October Blizzard announced to teams a new structure for the 2018 Heroes Global Championship, and part of that new structure was ownership of team slots. Organizations that had partnered with Blizzard ahead of the 2017 season were grandfathered into slot ownership, and those of us who came in later were not, with the ownership going directly to a single player decided on by the current roster.
Since October we’ve talked at length with our roster about a way to gradually gain ownership of their HGC slot, but conversations never got even so far as a true method or numbers. There were a great many factors involved: players wanted locked future job security, but of their own choices this roster only contains two of the initial five people we signed with in May; the fact that HGC is a relegation-style league so there are no full franchising guarantees; and simply the many organizations in esports that currently operate on bad faith principles and as such make any and all negotiations (understandably) difficult.
As such, Roll20® esports will not be part of HGC in the start of the 2018 year. We love Heroes of the Storm, and know that we were good ambassadors for the sport last year. As it stands, we feel our former players have absolutely earned their spot in HGC, and we are simply trying to figure out how we as Roll20 esports can earn our own slot going forth. That figuring is going to take a little time, but we want to come back and hope you all want us back as well. We’d also add that Roll20 the Virtual Tabletop has a really, really big year ahead and we hope you’ll stay tuned for what all that entails.
Many thanks to everyone who worked with us last year– Charles for playing go-between, our brief runs with Orie, Dane, and Yusuf. Extra thanks to Daniel and Nevin for their work on graphics and videos, Chad for the banner, Raven for the sweet threads. A huge amount of gratitude towards the many folks at Blizzard who were a joy to work with, in particular Angela, Matt, and Kyle, as well as Troy from the documentary team. And finally the very best wishes to the daring Phase 2 / Blizzcon roster that really made this thing a success: Chandler, Francisco, Justin, Kyle, and Mike... we really enjoyed watching you all evolve.
