Is this a common bug? The game played fine when I first installed it, but when I tried last night it was completely unplayable. I'm pretty sure it was due to a latency issue because my mouse cursor wasn't freezing up in game.

I get this pretty often, their servers for this game are terrible.

Yep, I get this, apparently it's network related and just due to how the client/server stuff works.

Far more irritating is the graphics card crashes I can't seem to fix 1-2 times every single game.

For the first 3 minutes of every match my game stutters and lags like a early 90's internet connection. Been like that since closed beta a long time back when I started playing. So I suspect it's the servers. (No other game, console or whatever lags on my connection)

Really? I may have this problem as well! The game makes my monitor black out or randomly or turns my monitor into a pixelated mess resembling a blown up Star Craft 1 map. I took some time off playing thinking my video card was crapping out... but maybe not... (Because no other game is freaking out) This requires further investigation!

Played yesterday on a laptop where I had to bust all the settings down as low as possible, but the game ran smoothly

If this is a network related problem, I wonder if the region one is playing from has anything to do with it? I've never experienced any kind of stuttering or problems at all with HoTS, even back in early Beta. I've got some friends in this area who play as well, and none of them have ever mentioned any issues to me at all. I've even played on my laptop from other locations and not had any issues.

In beta I constantly had issue with this. It was either stuttering or a horrific input delay. It's a huge bummer as it seems server side.

I've not ran into any issue here. NA est

The way the Starcraft 2 engine deals with latency is horrid, and this game runs off the same engine, so you will run into the same issues, more so considering it's not just 1v1 every time.

@therealmoot: Yeah, I've had the same problem with this, Diablo 3, and World of Warcraft (yeah, I've dipped my toe more than once in Blizzard's dark miasma).

In the case of Diablo 3, offsetting my graphic card's GPU by -15 Megahertz took it to a harmless momentary flicker every half hour. With WoW, shifting down to Direct 9 instead of Direct 11 took my "black screen followed by crashing my whole freaking computer" down to "a gray screen of nothing pops up for 10 seconds every other hour and then goes away."

I contacted Blizzard customer support and they recommended that I check in with my graphics card manufacturer. EVGA read what my problem was, looked at my dxdiag, and said they'd do an advanced RMA to resolve the issue since it sounded related to my GTX980. Still waiting on that RMA, though... so I don't know if they take two plus weeks to process that or what the heck is going on. Going to contact them later on this week and see where we're at on that front.

The weird thing is that aside from Blizzard games and Elder Scrolls Online (which I played through to level 50 and quit), I don't usually have any problems. It's a very selective "black screen graphic driver crash" issue, haha. Annoying as hell, and my GTX 670 before this card had the same problem. Hang in there. :-P

A few weeks ago I cleaned the dust out of my PC, took the card out and put it back in. I was hoping that was the problem back when it was really bad. It did not solve the problem. A few days ago I uninstalled the video cards drivers and installed them again. Got some error message that was gibberish but it's been working better since then. I just chock it all up to my PC being hell of old and everything is bound to be breaking down by now.

It was weird because no other game on my PC was freaking out the same way. Completely random black outs, pixelation, no way to tell when it was going to happen. It's sorted itself out for now. Computers are dumb.

Posted this in another thread as well hopefully this helps:

https://www.reddit.com/r/heroesofthestorm/comments/3c530e/why_your_game_stutters_and_what_you_can_do_about/