Barcodes in Arena

Multiplayer Discussion
1

I have played a lot of Arena in the last two months and it’s my opinion that there are more “Barcode” players in Arena these days than there are regular-non-cheating players.

Barcode players buy botted accounts that have a lot of farmed gold so they can buy and repeatedly retire Arena drafts until they get a super-powerful deck—the kind of deck that a player may only see 1:10, 1:20, or 1:30 of their draft attempts. Then these players use their god-drafts to stomp other players.

These barcode players tend have names like:

1). A long stream of random characters, like Qeof6oYFcWlhnc. This is by far the most common name type for bot accounts.

https://imgur.com/a/qx1Yc82

2). Some bot accounts follow the official Blizzard bot naming conventions of two capitalized words written as one word, such as MightyBeast, MagicTurtle, PlumThief, etc…

3). Some bot account names are just a string of 3-5 random lowercase letters, like pgi, ewkc, or wkbld.

4). A name made up of Chinese characters, which makes sense, since most bot accounts are farmed and bought by Chinese players.

I recently completed the Apprentice Track three times, when I started playing against real player accounts, most of them had a name of a long stream of random characters or a name of two capitalized words written as one word.

For the last year, Arena streamers have been downplaying the prevalence and impact of Barcodes in Arena, which makes sense, since highlighting rampant cheating in Arena only drives players away from both Arena and the streamer’s content.

If one looks at the Arena leader boards, some of the impacts of barcodes are revealed:

1). There is only one partial page of players that average 7 wins or more per draft—these few are the true “infinite” players. By page 6, there are no players who average above 6 wins or higher.

https://imgur.com/a/y7bKiyV

On the bottom pages of the board, you will find barcoders with their 30 best runs averaging out to only about a .03 percent win rate —that’s from retiring so many runs. You will also recognize most of the barcoders by their naming conventions. I have encountered one of these player names on the Americas server about 7 or 8 times over the last 6 months.

https://imgur.com/a/mCcaHm9

Both Kolst and Zeddy have posted videos about how Blizzard plans on dealing with barcoders in Arena. Basically, they plan to create a “Barcode Jail,” a separate Arena Queue where barcoders only face other barcoders, which will separate the super-drafters from playing against those who do not engage in this practice.

https://youtu.be/0XW4Y5K02C0?si=PoWqdT-BxKuAgM6T

https://youtu.be/R4kSKhZrhBo?si=Cvtd6va0woKCUUtJ

Despite all the god-drafts, I have still been having a lot fun with the current Arena format, but I am looking forward to seeing a lot less super-drafts.

Meanwhile, I play a few Arena games to get quests done, before moving on to one of my other collections to get a few more quests done, while keeping notes about each draft’s progress across all my collections:

https://imgur.com/a/Ei0iT72

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2

Keep in mind that yes Barcode decks exist but they are also curating the pool now. That means they have basically removed most of the bad cards and given players access to drafts that you can basically make a constructed deck from and not be a barcode player. I have done this a couple of times and i am sure i was reported as a bot. Arena is nothing like it used to be and i think it’s kind of sad for new players since this is a great spot for learning how to play the game from.

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3

Nonsense. They don’t need a separate Arena queue for barcode accounts, they just need to ban them via automatic script. If they can be detected, then they shouldn’t be suffered to exist.

4 Likes
4

So the official patch notes for the “Barcode Jail”
in Arena were released today:

https://www.hearthpwn.com/news/10841-unauthorized-bot-ban-update-april-2024-arena-queue

I have done a lot of Arena runs since Patch 29.2 came out, and around 60 to 70 percent of my opponent’s were bot accounts— you can tell from the naming conventions of the accounts.

I have already played against a lot of ridiculously powerful, super-super-draft quality decks. This could be for a couple reasons:

1). It may take awhile or several repeated periods of abuse before a super-drafter finds themselves quarantined to a special queue.

2). The draft pool may have become curated to point where powerful decks will just be common thing—with each player hoping that their deck “goes off” first.

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5

I love how in arena I almost never get decent starting legendary and almost never get a win con to becomes preset in the draft sequence. Trash mode that is more rng that standard/wild.

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6

Botters will figure out the standards Blizzard uses to separate queues and game them hard. If the standard is getting moved to the different queue after 5 retirements, botters will retire 4 times. If they make the standard literally 1 retirement it still won’t matter, botters will just run more bots and retire zero times, and if the deck isn’t high quality they’ll just throw it away and sell the high quality ones.

This is a stupid attempt at a solution that will solve nothing.

2 Likes
7

When this doesn’t work they will just do what they did in Diablo 3 and delete Arena like they deleted the D3 AH.

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8

After this “bot queue” change the bot life cycle is going to become so short that there’ll be no way Blizzard could ban them before it completes. I think they’ll just make it so new accounts can’t Arena but they gotta do something.

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9

I don’t know enough about the bot life cycle to know if it will work or not. If not, it seems like making it harder for bots make accounts would be the first step, then.

But also, if it was that easy to open a ton of accounts, it seems like they would just do that instead of gave them actually play the game.

10

Hilarious ^, but probably true.

That’s an idea, I wonder what it would be.

2 Likes
11

Always wondered why arena doesnt have its own separate ladder. Yes, ranked arena seasons. Do well and climb through the ranks, mass concede and get stuck at the bottom even if you get the 1 god draft.

People who play arena seriously deserve a better ranking system and i think especially people who play nothing but arena all day (insert favorite streamer) would appreciate something like that.

12

No shortage of barcodes in Arena today.

I just against played against 6 barcoders in Arena. It’s a bit unusual to face so many in a row like that. Six of them had names with Chinese characters and one had a name like EbonShark (there’s probably over 30,000 accounts with a name like that).

I got smashed by the first two players, but I crushed the next 4, bringing my Shaman-DK draft to 4-2 so far.