This month has been a busy month in our battle against the bots. Since our last update just three weeks ago, we’ve ratcheted up our bot detection and banned over 585,000 more bots–including over half a million bots throughout this week! We hope they’re shaking in their circuits.
Cheaters are not welcome in our Tavern. You can continue to help in the ongoing battle against these botters by using the in-game reporting feature. While you do, we’ll continue fighting on your behalf, too.
This isn’t a couple of rogue hackers; this is an organized criminal operation.
Does this also include people who have clearly bought accounts in arena? Super unfun to play against every other game.
That’s amazing for the game.
Except whatever you’re new detection is, it gave me a false positive. I’m 50, I’m not good at computers, I couldn’t “bot” if I wanted to. I play on an old MacBook with no mods.
I’m glad you’re trying to clean up the game, wish I still got to be a part of it 
I’d like to think if I was cheating I’d win more, it’s definitely not that I win too much. Please take a look, I’m a person with no cyborg tendencies.
Can someone help me ? Why would someone employ bots to play heartstone? Not to mention over half million. What is there to gain by doing this? Surely they are not doing it to be ranked ? What is their gain?
‘Have you ever retired a Human by mistake?’ 
I’m not entirely sure how, but there has to be a way to report that and get your account back.
Well depending on the type of bot, getting ranked is part of it. If there is an OTK deck or some crazy combo that takes too long for a human to play out reliably there’s a spike in bots from people going that route. (Pretty much, any time you see an opponent still playing cards after their timer ran out.) It used to be the case that those were the only bots people encountered regularly.
Then came the big change from earning most of your gold from wins to earning XP from your quests to earn gold faster. That’s when the bots that sit there using their hero ability and nothing else comes along (or at least they became more common). The gold earned through advancement was then parleyed into Arena to build busted card pools and then sell the accounts off. This again was easy to spot happening.
There was some improvement when bot reporting was introduced to the game, but that didn’t last long. The bot farms began scripting some basic strategies. So now, at the lower end of the ladder, it’s impossible to tell whether you’re playing a bot or a human with a limited card pool. (With one exception I’ll mention in a minute.) And, at the higher end, there have been suspected bots reaching Legendary rank in a few formats. (Though, I’d wager those are the former bot accounts that got sold and are now piloted by humans.)
Adding to the problem, some years ago, Blizzard improved the matchmaking system so players would be more likely paired with someone of the equivalent skill level. This backfired and led to longer queue times. To address that problem, Blizzard introduced their own bots to the game that humans get paired with when no suitable human opponent is available, instead of making players wait several minutes for a match. (If you see an opponent’s name with two random words smashed together and both capitalized, it’s probably one of these.) Unfortunately, as with the solo adventures, Blizzard didn’t do a great job programming the strategies. So, now there are players equating inexperience with being a bot.
I seriously hope Blizzard’s test for whether or not a player is a bot goes beyond user reporting. (We will never know what metric is used, because that would give the bot farms info to avoid detection.) But to get to that 585K inside a week, I don’t see how. Based on comments elsewhere in the forum, I suspect the majority of reports are from people thinking “my opponent didn’t play good cards” or “my opponent didn’t play the way I expected so they must be a bot”, because people suck. The influx of people commenting that their accounts were erroneously banned may indicate improvements are required.
All that said… I’m happy to know that Blizzard is taking the problem seriously and wish them the best of luck in their effort.
What happens if you have proof of a botter/hacker? I reported in game, but also recorded it. Do i submit it somewhere?
What rank do i have to get to so I don’t have to play bots anymore?
Never going to happen. There will always be bots because BLizzard sucks.
Doesn’t Blizzard put bots in the game too?
Well we are back to where we were last April. Wild is once again all bots with random letter names. 
And it’s hilarious… there were those who use to claim that bots were not able to play in ladder. Well here it is folks… proof.
Launched the game and the first 15 queues were against this crap. Time to quit for the night. Zero chance of finding a real game.
You are right, that’s why you can find websties that sell Hearthstone accounts with a ton of gold and rewards already added to the accounts.
But the sad thing is… while they have banned all these accounts, I’m still facing mech rogue bots in wild, so I’m still waiting for this to actually have an impact. In wild.
I have seen a slight improvement in Standard, but there’s still a ton more accounts that need to be banned.
they did but they said they took those out
I got a bridge in brooklyn for sale, if you believe blizzard only used “official” bots.
…just learn to start reading patch notes this was months ago