The Mid-Season Brawl Returns to DreamHack Summer
The HGC Mid-Season Brawl is returning to DreamHack Summer in Sweden! This is one of the few events of the year where all the regions get to play against one another and try to settle once and for all who is truly better than the others. This event is one that should not be missed.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker)

Fnatic triumphed over Team Dignitas on their home turf at last year’s Mid-Season Brawl (MSB). The final series stretched late into the night with the audience balancing on the edge of their seats. We’re excited to announce that MSB will return to Sweden at DreamHack Summer again this year, with another $250,000 reserved for only the fiercest of competitors. In the running for the cup will be the top two teams from HGC North America, the top two teams from HGC China, the top three teams from HGC Europe, the top three teams from Korea, and the winners of both the Intercontinental Clash (between Latin America and Australia/New Zealand) and Horizon Clash (between Taiwan and Southeast Asia). The additional spots were awarded to Europe and Korea for their respective wins at the Western Clash and Eastern Clash in the spring.

Location: Stockholm for group stages, Jönköping (DreamHack Summer) for playoffs

Dates: June 9-13 for group stages, June 16-18 for playoffs

Prize pool: $250,000 USD

Format: Two groups of six teams will play round-robin matches (two-game sets) within each group, earning points to qualify for a double elimination bracket

Streaming details:

Keep it tuned to playheroes.com/esports for more information regarding the Mid-Season Brawl.

Developer AMA Follow-up
Following Friday's AMA on reddit, Travis McGeathy (Lead Game Designer) stuck around to answer a few additional questions from the community.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
A lot of the answers the devs have to a lot of questions were "the people who would be working on x are already working on y and its about prioritization" Do you think the higher ups at blizz are not giving the hots team the resources it needs to make the big improvements the game needs? If things take too long to do players leave and move on to new games and by time those improvements come they are already invested in a new/different game.
A global truth of development is that you will always have more you want to do than the resources to do it all immediately. It doesn't matter if you're a solo developer working on an indie game or part of a 1,000 developer time. If you want to get anything done, you have to prioritize some items over others. Trying to do everything at once means you're not going to get any of them done.

That's part of the 'sausage making' behind development. It's not pretty, but its how anything gets done. (BlizzTravis)

Most people are armchair developers who have no idea how things work. I hope the Blizz team does not feel bad about all the negativity and hate. You guys are doing a great job with all the content. Once the matchmaking is fixed the rest will fall in line soon. I wish somebody would make a thread about the great things about Hots and puts that on the front page.
Not at all! The simple truth is that almost every post on the AMA and on here come from a place of caring. People care about the game.

But, this is part of the reason why we don't generally like to share the sausage making. (BlizzTravis)

Can you give us some insight into reasoning for QM seeding into your HL MMR? In several people's minds from the community, QM is a completely different game from HL and doesnt correctly teach people how to play the game. With QM MMR seeding into HL we now have people being placed in higher ranks for HL but do not understand the basics of the game. This leads to a poor game experience for those players who are at the correct HL ranking. If QM seeding for HL is going to continue, what are the plans for providing the correct knowledge on how to play the game so we can close that gap?
The knowledge question was answered elsewhere, but I wanted to use your question as a jumping off point to talk about the seeding into ranked as it comes up pretty frequently.

Basically, some knowledge of a player is better than no knowledge of a player when setting their initial seed into a new mode. While the intricacies of Hero League might not be there for someone coming over from Unranked Draft or Quick Match, a lot of other things, such as mechanic ability, do apply.

With that in mind, a highly skilled QM player can be expected to do comparably well in HL up to a certain point. They would not be expected to be able to hold up as well at the highest ranks, but at lower ranks, they can hold their own. That's where the seed and placement caps come in.

The change we're making is to lower the MMR seed cap from Unranked Draft and Quick Match to Gold 5. A good QM player should easily be able to hold their own at Gold 5. From there, the cap on movement during placements means that even the best players coming in for the first time are limited to Plat 5 and need to work their way up from there. (BlizzTravis)

[regarding players of different ranks being matched together]
I want to jump in here to clarify. What you're talking about isn't caused by either MMR or the feeling that some players' MMRs aren't set correctly.

When you're matched with people of different ranks, that's because the matchmaking system has to find a balance between queue time and match quality and, in that case, it failed to make a match quickly enough. When that happens, it expands the search range of viable players in order to get a match started. It doesn't happen frequently and you'll usually see this come up in particular circumstances that don't have a lot of other players to make matches with: GM tier, smaller regions during off hours, etc.

As Joe noted earlier, one of the changes we're making is shifting that balance point so the system will allow longer before it expands the search criteria so it happens even less frequently. (BlizzTravis)