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Quite the opposite. New ideas should be introduced one at a time to avoid scaring away the target audience. It would have been wiser to first introduce the TE-Lite version, then the "SOD-style" mirror matches, and only then gradually add the extra features.

My opinion is that Heroes players are not nervous individuals (well, at least not all of them), so you can introduce changes almost however you want, and time will tell which things will be in demand.

But here, people just couldn't handle it.

Which people are you talking about? I can list the names of those who were offended in that tournament: Lebron, Sticky, and Volland, and the latter was offended by the old, one-sided maps that quickly died out naturally. Otherwise, the Baev Cups on the mirror matches went about as well as the previous cups on the classic maps.

And as for Anarchy, it's a shame to even mention it here; it turned out to be one of the most successful experimental tournaments in history, both in terms of the number and composition of participants, and in terms of its consequences – as a result, Anarchy was declared by HP as a home map for inter-portal play. I don't know where it would have gone with your "little by little" approach. It's still unclear what will come of Diamond.

How do you think it would have been if you had run Chaos on full-WOG, and Diamond on HotA – the new version with the new tenth castle? Where would the participants have sent you?

Don't you notice that 90% of what I suggest is eventually implemented in tournament practice? Probably because I suggest reasonable things, and not what was quoted above.

It's clear that the SOD players, for whom this was new, played almost all the games, but the WoG players refused to play at all (although maybe the table just wasn't updated?). The reason is probably that strong players are very afraid of losing in a mirror match, because their ego will suffer, and they clearly won't be able to blame the map for the loss.

The tournament stalled shortly after the start, and the organizer is more to blame for that. I probably wouldn't have finished it either if I had participated. The ego thing is just your erotic fantasy :)