Used to be a HS player and stopped playing after Un’Goro and came back recently.
My only game mode I would play is Arena, it’s the only fun game mode for me, or well used to be.
On Asia and Americas the Arena mode is overrun with bought accounts with decks that are just completely insane.
Barcode, ColorAnimal and Chinese names are always the ones with these insanely drafted decks. I report every single “person” that has such a name. It’s taken all the joy out of a game mode that used to be fun. I often go 0/3 to 3/3 never higher because I keep running into decks that should not exist.
On EU the issue is much less prevalent, I come across actual human made names and decks that seem more the norm. Resulting is a result I’m more used to with 3/3 to 6/3 on average.
How is anyone supposed to enjoy a mode ruined by Chinese farmed bots? Apparently they “fixed” the issue by putting them into a separate queue, which obviously doesn’t work at all.
It’s just another game ruined by cheaters/botters, besides the incredibly bad balancing of cards.
TLDR; Americas/Asian servers are plagues with botted accounts, EU is kinda fine. Returning player experience ruined because of incompetence from Blizzard.
They are only put into a separate pool once the account is flagged. In the meantime you can enjoy stacked decks destroying your runs.
The cancellation of the blizzard rights to operate in china and the flood of their bot armies must be the reward for surpressing FREE HONG KONG sentiments by players.
It’s crazy how the whole of china just operates on cheating everything, cheating in games, cheating with contracts, cheating by stealing IP, copying everything in sight and it’s encouraged by their broken communist system.
They ruined their own rep by having the most cheaters in China vs other places. Every Chinese player I’ve faced has been a cheater in this game, what a coincidence.
Its an absolute joke mate. Its destroying standard ladder. Cheating out on arena for god decks and selling them to streamers and numptys to ruin your run. Its pretty much every other game now. Didnt see much of it till i hit platinum then game after game. Joke shop is hearthstone at moment for the casual player. Managed to hit diamond five by putting in hours and hours but its destroying my soul now as i only get one star per win. 1 step forward two back. Quick search of their tags tells ya what you need to know.
Ya, the number of barcode decks in Arena may be higher on the Asia and Americas servers, but barcodes are still plentiful on the EU servers. The time of the day that one plays can really make a big difference for how many barcodes one faces.
I played on the EU server yesterday for several hours and 8 out of 10 of my opponents were barcodes. That’s unusual, but it happens. If you are finding the EU server to be less of a hassle to play on, then maybe you should stick to playing just on that server.
Yesterday, I had a strong Mage-DK deck—the kind you might see 1 out of 10 drafts with a nice excavate package—but it went 2-3. Getting only 2 wins with that deck was a bit shocking. 7 wins tends to be about the best that I can do, lately.
Having an excavate package of about 6 cards can be quite good, but it hardly compares to a barcode deck with a excavate package of a dozen cards, which is also stacked with a lot of other goodies.
With 9 different active HS collections, I always have 9 different Arena drafts to play, and right now, my best incomplete ongoing runs are: 6-0, 5-2, 3-1, and 2-0. I would not be surprised if that 6-0 run ends with only 6 or 7 wins.
Every time someone whines about barcodes, they should give us the list of names. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve heard only “well… because… they’re chinese!” which is borderline racist.
I’m not sure what your point is here or what you are looking for, but just because some players are pointing out that most of the producers and consumers of barcode decks are Chinese does not make them racist.
If this ^ was the only criteria for labeling an Arena player as a barcoder, I would agree, but there are quite often other important clues as to whether your opponent is playing a barcode deck or not:
1). Since most barcode accounts are disposable, they tend to use lazy naming conventions. Using the new account suggested names like OliveYeti is probably among the laziest of used options. I can’t read Chinese characters or names, so I am left to wonder if some of the Chinese names are also game suggested names.
2). The majority of barcode accounts often do not have access non-stock hero portraits, golden hero portraits, or older card backs (unless they spend gold to buy one).
3). The most important sign is the card quality. If your opponent’s card and deck quality is of the kind that you tend to see about 1 out of 20 drafts, 1 out of 30 drafts, or 1 out of 100 drafts then they might be using a barcode deck.
Barcoders can make bad play mistakes and crush you anyways, because the card quality between the opposing decks is so lopsided.
BTW, a lot of barcode accounts do contain Latin characters in their name. Here are screenshots of ten of my recent Arena opponents. Do any of them look like they could be using a barcode account?
BTW, while I was typing my above response, the new patch went live for mobile devices, which then forced retired the Arena run that I had been working on today, so it ended at 7-2.
The patch probably explains why I encountered sooooo many barcode accounts yesterday—they were probably just trying to use up their bought drafts before they expired.
With the recent announcement about how they are going to rollout more frequent new Arena seasons, it’s going to impact the barcode sellers business model somewhat.
https://imgur.com/a/N306bPv
So the OP might have a less frustrating experience in Arena tonight.
I came back to HS too, left it for 2-3 years, been playing a lot since the beginning of august. I ve been seing a lot of asian nicknames on EU server on really high arena wins. I though they are just good players (every1 knows most of them are good at videogames). But I didnt even know the bot problem existed before this post. That explains a lot. Yesterday I had an 11-0 run at arena and met a bot with insane deck. Bro had a wishing well on turn 5 with 2 coins and highrolled the hell out of me. I add a screenshot (https://imgur.com/a/FVIzOM8)
About the furthest that your argument goes, Carnivore, is that Zee actually played against 6 barcodes that day, instead of the 8 that he thinks, because two of them were 1 in 20 lucky. And that’s a stretch, it’s probably more like 7 barcodes.
I mean, I really don’t think it was the full 8, one does need to factor in that non-barcode opponents get legitimately lucky decks sometimes. But the only way to believe that barcodes don’t exist is if you don’t seriously play the mode.
This isn’t like the stupid “it’s rigged” conspiracy theories. There is evidence that Ranked is botted, there is evidence of barcodes in the Arena leaderboards, there is evidence everywhere. Real evidence, not the BS fallacies that rigging believers call “evidence.”
If you retire a dozen of draft until you get a very good one, it should have tanked your MMR, and you shouldn’t face regular players.
Regular player, should have a win average of between 2-3 wins per arena, newer players may only get 1-2
But a bot account will get a 0 win rate for it’s first arena. Beside, it certain is possible to automate a detection for new account that have retire multiple draft in a row without playing games. They don’t have to be flagged manually, the criteria are specific enough.
We live in a world with self driving car, neural network and deep fake, yet hearthstone can’t detect multiple draft retired in a row on a new account? give me break.
In arena, matchmaking works based on a number of wins in that run
I’m not sure if there’s a hidden MMR in the background to sort out the details of the matchmaking when there’s plenty of options available, but I’m 100% confident that, when you’re on 10 wins, you’re only going to get matched against someone with 10 wins
They implemented “barcode queue” in arena, which was intended to work sort of like what you described, but it failed because it only counts the “Retire” clicks - it doesn’t register when bots lose 3 in a row on purpose to dodge being placed in the barcode queue.
It is quite sad how late they are with implementing machine learning in this game, especially considering they’re under Microsoft now.
I haven’t played Arena recently, but back from when I used to play it (at a high level), I think there is an MMR component on the tiebreaker level. That is, I think it’s by record first, and then among people with the same record MMR is applied.
I don’t have proof, it’s just that I’d find myself playing against the same usernames more than I reckon was statistically likely — that is, against the other very good players of the time.
This doesn’t sound to me like an argument in favor of MMR, honestly, because it might just be that only those players hit the same record as you consistently back in the days
But yeah, it still makes sense to me that they have to choose SOMEHOW who to match you against when there are tens of thousands of players with 0/0 or 1/0 or 1/1 or something along those lines
But maybe there isn’t, maybe it’s just totally random