Ideas and suggestions.

Property and mysticism in this form still remain practically useless.

In short: that's exactly how it was planned. The goal is not to make the skill good, but to increase its usefulness from practically zero to situational.

If the participants of the NBA All-Star game believe that they are playing basketball, and the rest are just playing with a ball, there is nothing surprising about it, it is normal.

The comparison is completely incorrect. Firstly, in basketball as a game in this example, everyone plays, some as professional athletes, and others as ordinary amateur players. In absolute numbers, the latter are the overwhelming majority. It is thanks to them that professional basketball exists and develops, and it is with their money that the budget of basketball as an industry is formed, because merchandise/balls/accessories are bought by ordinary players and fans. That is, a similar analogy in the Heroes context is an insult to ordinary players and your own viewers on streams. But, to be honest, I am not surprised by such rhetoric, I have already heard from the team and the lobby administration about the level of self-esteem of the player with the nickname Lizard. I thought it was a rumor, but now I see it in practice.

Secondly, online gameplay is not the only possible option in Heroes, and not the "best" of the possible ones. There is a large group of players who play for their own pleasure - both on random maps and on fixed ones, and in story Campaigns. And for some, the gameplay of Heroes is not very important, but the atmosphere or aesthetics are important. For HotA, all these groups of players are equally important and equally a priority. Just as they were important for NWC. They are all not some other Heroes from an alternate universe, they are parts of one common community. And statements in the spirit of "NBA stars" and "playing with a ball" certainly do not contribute to uniting the community.

Thirdly, no matter how much individual players from HW consider themselves an elite, no matter how much they consider themselves Olympic gods (fortunately, here you often find users with a much healthier attitude) - even within the framework of online gameplay (which, I repeat, is not the only possible one), they are not identical to the list of the best players in reality. A few years ago, the percentage was higher and, perhaps, about 90% of the really strong players were on this forum. But times are changing, there are many players in the top 100 lobby who don't even have an account on HW. At the same time, the trend in the top is precisely towards an increase in new participants, including from the Polish part of the community. How representative can the lobby rating be? This is a question for a separate discussion, but it is unlikely that anyone will argue that in the last two years it has gradually acquired the features of a clear reflection of the player's skill. The process is far from over, but here you need to look not at the current point in time, but at the statistics. HW is just one of many platforms on which a rather large group of online players has historically formed. Most of the others have closed and died, and, in general, the audience interested in online play simply had no other choice.

Again, I perfectly understand why some players find it difficult to see the game as a whole, to evaluate it impartially and without bias, together with the entire audience of all formats, and also taking into account the factor of time. This requires time, it requires collecting and analyzing statistics. I think many are just too lazy to spend the effort. But for developers, this is necessary in order to correctly prioritize.