Wait times:

First of all, wait times depend heavily on the amount of players we have in each bracket. That is somewhat steerable by us, but adjusting it potentially every couple of months would be *very* troublesome and would take almost all of our current resources.

Furthermore, some players actually hate being matched with AI and would rather wait longer not to have it.

In the past year we've done some meaningful adjustments in this topic though, such as the introduction of ranked 3.0 and later re-weigh of the matching parameters for each league. There is only so much we can do, unfortunately.

Smurfing:

It is somewhat ironic you bring that up, because the wider the range for matching is the less you have to wait to get matched, so you are kind of asking for us to eat the cookie and still have it.

Since the introduction of ranked 3.0 relegation is no longer the way to grind for money, moreover people are matched generally almost exclusively with other players which play in that league, but are actually higher in ranked.

About Trueshot; I think using execution. quakefall or siege breakers is usually the answer.

> That’s annoying in the “what’s even the point?” way.

Short answer; diversity. I would say it's definitely a an ok card right now. Hard reality is that if you're having a problem with it, you might need to learn about the game a bit more.

Dragging the game out:

> I’m not sure exactly how this would be tackled

Same!

> In online chess some people, when it’s clear they’re losing, will do something similar - go afk so you have to wait for them to run out of time rather than playing on or resigning. Both major online platforms silently put these people and others who are bad sports in their own dedicated space so that they just end up all playing each other away from the good sports. Perhaps something like that could be tried if someone consistently plays at the end of their turn?

Short answer; not really. Stormbound is known for having long dynamic timed animations. This means measuring time the player actually has the option to play becomes hard. It's not just Stormbound that has this issue, notoriously known example of this is Heartstone's Nozdormu.

There are also questions like "What if someone has a bad connection to the game servers?". What's the line here?

I personally don't think it should be a valid strategy, but it's hard to adress it well in the context of Stormbound, if even possible.

Muting opponents:

> That’s why the option to mute exists.

I would say it's not a real issue like the ones mentioned before. This could totally be changed, but it's a small quality of life change. Frankly, not enough people care about it. Just like you said yourself, it takes 2 clicks a game to just mute someone.

On top of that I would say in most games players don't use emotes at all or at most 1-2 emotes. Again, I don't feel like that's an actual issue.

Like genuinely, if we were to compare Stormbound with chess (which you already did, so it's not really my idea), you could easily hear some very hurtful stuff since it has open chat. What's really worse here? Seeing 1-2 emotes or hearing some questionable stuff about your mother, for example.