Blizzard prepares for the final phase of the Heroes of the Storm Technical Alpha.

Since March of this year, players fortunate enough to be chosen to participate in the Heroes of the Storm Technical Alpha have spent hours participating in epic battles, striking deals with ghostly pirates, and summoning horrific golems to lay waste to enemy strongholds. In preparation for the next stage of the game's development, Blizzard has announced that the final phase of the Heroes Tech Alpha is arriving.

As we approach the final stretch of the Technical Alpha testing phase, The Heroes of the Storm shop will be temporarily shutting down on September 22nd. While players will be unable to make any gold or real money purchases during this time, all Heroes of the Storm playable Heroes will be available to play for free. The following week after the shop is turned off, the game will undergo a week of extended maintenance, preventing players from logging into the game entirely. Additionally, all players will have an account reset and will start fresh when the maintenance is completed.

It's important to note that, while this means all progress made on your account will be reset, any real money purchases made during the Tech Alpha will be refunded to your Battle.net account for you to use again. Once the game comes back online, players will be moved to their home region and will be recognized as playing Heroes of The Storm on their Battle.net friends list.

"This is the final planned Heroes of the Storm account wipe and monetary refund. Our goal is to avoid future player and hero progression wipes after we come back online, but we may still need to adjust or wipe player progression with future updates. Don’t worry, though, because we’ll give you ample warning if that ever becomes necessary. What we do know is that from the moment we bring Heroes back online after this wipe, purchases you make in the Shop will be permanent. So get those Heroes, Bundles, Skins, and Mounts with the confidence that you won't need to reacquire them again."

For more information regarding the final phase of the Heroes Technical Alpha, follow this link to the full news post. As always, for more Heroes news, updates and information, keep it locked to ZAM!

Corey "Cyglaive" Jenkins

Follow Corey on Twitter @Cyglaive