28.4 - Account Bans for Duels Exploiting

Multiplayer Discussion
42

Blizzard actually communicate with your playerbase challenge (impossible)

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43

You do realise that people will rarely check the OP for updates unless the thread title specifies an update, right?

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44

This is who Blizzard is deceiving, they sat and broke the duels themselves, and now they say that they cannot fix it !!! That is, there are no cheaters in other modes, but there are cheaters in duels !!! Do you feel that somewhere there is a smell of lies ?

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45

This is not necessarily true. It depends on how Blizzard programs the game.

Real life example: Itā€™s been a few years since Iā€™ve played on PC, these days Iā€™m mobile only, but I know back in the day the game would get the information from the server about what card you drew slightly before the animation began to say it was your turn. The tracker would read this data and update faster than the animation in game, so you could see what card you drew about 1 second sooner on the tracker than you could see in game. 1 second faster isnā€™t a huge edge but it is a very tiny one.

Ultimately what information the Hearthstone servers decide to share with the client, how much of that information is displayed for the user, and when itā€™s displayed is a programming choice. The smart way to do that is basically to never send information to the client except for immediate display to the user, under the assumption that a third party program could reveal anything you wish to remain hidden. But it is also possible to program things stupid.

The entire reason that Duels is messed up is that accepting the deck construction going from client to server was programmed stupid. Instead of checking to make sure that the submission was legal, it just assumed that players would use the Hearthstone client to submit their decklist information instead of a third party program. (By the way, I strongly suspect that the reason why itā€™s taking a while to fix Duels is because there was essentially zero security on this front, so they have to code a decklist checking system from scratch.) This is a very similar security error to the one described above.

In other words, if they messed up Duels, I donā€™t see why they couldnā€™t mess up in a way that trackers can reveal information that they shouldnā€™t. Before this I would have assumed they couldnā€™t mess up so badly but now I donā€™t know.

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46

This is still true, 100%

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47

Which proves that Blizzard could get sloppy and provide info it shouldnā€™t. In this case itā€™s just providing it one second before it should, which is in the whoop de doo / who cares level of impact, but theoretically it could be any particular information and more than one second before it should. Itā€™s all programmer choice.

48

On more than one occasion there have been data leaks that allowed trackers to show which secrets your opponent played. Multiple times, and fairly recently (IIRC). There have been even more egregious examples as well.

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49

And thatā€™s a prime example because there actually is a benefit to sharing this with the client before it should be revealed to the player ā€” if the client knows in advance what secrets could interrupt play, then it can interrupt those actions cleanly in the game without lag from potential network latency from having to check with the server. It legitimately creates a smoother experience, but the drawback is creating an information security weakness.

50

Any news? Duels and battlegrounds are the only modes i play. Gutted we are losing duels. Want to play it as much as i can till it goes. Its already getting boring without it. Why csnt you give us an update pls?

1 Like
51

From the looks of it, Duels had absolutely no validation process for the decklist that was sent from client to server. People are hacking the game to send illegitimate card IDs and theyā€™re getting Battlegrounds cards or dozens of passives. They didnā€™t anticipate this at all and had no system to prevent it whatsoever.

This means that itā€™s a significant programming challenge on Blizzardā€™s end. The task would be not to upgrade deck validation, but to create a system for it from scratch and tie that system into the pre-existing Duels framework. There is no way that such a thing can be a quick fix.

Iā€™ll be honest, if I was Blizzard, I wouldnā€™t fix it at all. Blizzard has already announced the end of the mode and weā€™re talking about a lot of hours of work here. Itā€™s like having an expensive repair to a cheap car, the rational thing is to not repair and write it off as a total loss. I would brace yourself for disappointment.

52

i do understand this absolutely and i does make sence,but if we are giving the examples then i rented a car from blizzard and later on found out it is broken,now my days of rent are passing and i cant drive it nor are they fixing it or providing me with answer,so if u are gona abandone fixing it tell me and give me money back so i can rent elswere,sory for english not my main!

2 Likes
53

Seems to be working again this morning.

At last!!

54

i know for a fact that the game trackers are able to get info that a normal person could never see

it is my personal opinion that anyone that uses a tracker is cheating

2 Likes
55

staying on top of third-party software and bots are two of the most needed things and nice job taking action. i hope youā€™ll do more to stop bots. then the elephant in the room called card balance can be a more exclusive focus hopefully.

56

Players who lose a Heroic Duel due to an illegal deck will receive 10 Tavern Tickets. This ticket will be awarded to the affected player, but I did not receive it. I played the game at 12:48 on January 19th and there are also pictures I captured.

57

Players who lose a Heroic Duel due to an illegal deck will receive 10 Tavern Tickets. This ticket will be awarded to the affected player, but I did not receive it. I played the game at on January 31th and there are also pictures I captured.

58

i need to report a player using an illegal deck. i just started a heroic duels run and a player with the name Ged used staff of disintegration and 2 books of the dead in the same turn in the very first game. how is anyone suppose to have those at 20 health and the base deck?

59

I have had the same problem for almost 1 month, and I canā€™t find any solution.