Lately I’ve been constantly fighting bots that waste my time
I don’t enjoy the game like that!
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They got rid of 300,000 bots like a month ago, and they just got rid of their own official bots with the miniset patch. Do you mean to tell me they’re back? How is it even possible?
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Played some rank a few days ago to clear quests, got 7 games in a row against Chinese bots all running the same base aggro deck. About 1/3 of my Arena games are Chinese barcodes. Blizzard has completely failed to do anything effective against them.
Hell now you even see NA streamers like Redbeard who bounces around like 10 different accounts to avoid paying for arena runs. The whole lack of account verification system is a joke.
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I’ve been having this too. Almost nothing but bots running the same decks in ranked for the past 24 hours.
Stormwind Champion, Lifedrinker, Chillwind Yeti, Raid Leader etc.
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Seeing the same. The chillwind yeti, the 2/1 murloc that spawns a 1/1, Argonian shield guy, the wolf that gives adjacent minions +attach. Soon as I see any of those I know it’s game over, just a matter of time. Weird thing is I’m working my way through gold ranks, and I don’t know how a bot with those basic cards ever made it that far. Playing other bots, I guess?
Edit: I don’t exactly mind, really. I’m mostly just trying new builds and working toward achievements right now, so it’s almost nice to have some breathing room to fiddle with stupid combos and not lose too much rank.
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Yeah they all run base cards. Farmers make thousands of accounts farm them for awhile with quests and build up gold. Then they sell those accounts to Chinese streamers for a few bucks. Then they buy arena entries and retire decks until they get insane broken decks and stream the runs. It’s a whole weird meta in China.
They have effectively ruined ranked and Arena on the NA server. It’s an issue on EU as well but they mostly have decided to hose ours instead.
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Yeah tbh it’s free rating and a like you said a chance to try out decks, i’m just salty because at first i thought i’d made a really good deck because i kept winning. Then the realization dawned upon me, and i became a sad death knight.
I play Wild plat 5 to plat 1, and yes, it’s worse than it has ever been. It’s gotten to the point where I know the bots by name. They come in all varieties. Rope bots are less common now, but they have been replaced with an unending sea of hyperagro pirate rogue and secret mage bots. Even though they aren’t nearly as annoying as rope bots, it’s still really really annoying when you want to play versus a real person and instead have to slog through another boring game just mindlessly emptying your hand.
One time I added one of them (after versing him literally 5 times in one day) and asked him why he bots. His response was “reaching level 400 is impossible”.
Reporting does nothing. Literally nothing. It’s a joke.
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It’s funny too because I complained about this over a year ago on reddit and got downvoted into oblivion for it. The responses ranged from “bots? what bots? I’ve never seen a bot in this game ever” (clearly these people never played Wild ranked before) to “Boohoo, whining about free wins? Get over it”
Thankfully since then people appear to be taking it more seriously, as the infestation has only festered with time.
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What’s weird is I was facing one of these bots (random raid leaders, etc) but what was weird is it emoted greetings twice at the beginning of the match. I don’t know if I had seen a bot do that before.
Yeah, some emote. I’ve seen some emote twice at the beginning. Some will emote only if you emote them. The strangest one I came across so far was vs a druid with the Hamuul Runeblade skin who would emote Well Played at the start of every single turn.
“You are mighty”
“You are mighty”
“You are mighty”
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Not many people play this game. The bots at least give the few who still do something to play against.
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Ehhh, I mean. I don’t disagree that Hearthstone has had a steady decline. That’s natural for any game. Especially one that’s a decade old…that being said: the playerbase isn’t THAT low. It doesn’t NEED bots. It would literally be an extra 30 seconds to a minute in queue if all bots were banned at this very moment.
No one enjoys playing versus them. I certainly don’t anyways. Besides, they are doing it to gold/xp farm which is why it’s technically bannable. But as you said - dying game well past its prime in terms of revenue, so of couirse Blizzard doesn’t care. Point is moot.
I’ve found that if I’m matched immediately, it’s usually a bot (I guess the bots are constantly queuing/waiting so they become a quick match). But if the time it takes to find a game is like 30 seconds or whatever, it’s usually a real person. No clue if that’s actually real thing or just my perception or what.
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I’m coming back to this game after about 10 months. I have played 50 or so games. Every single one has been against bots, mostly non-Blizzard bots. Not one real person. This game is officially dead, which is too bad.
No they did not. In late December they announced their end of year total for deleting bot accounts. That’s a year long number not a one time number.
They averaged around 36,000 bans per month August through December. It was lower in the first half of 2023.
don’t worry hearthstone is canceling entire game modes every month, and microsoft has just fired 1600 people, many of them internal to blizzard, within one or two years you will no longer have to deal with bots or real users, you will say goodbye to every investment made in hearthstone both over time that’s like money 
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The problem is that though bot accounts are removed; the botters simply make another account with a different email address and start all over again. Perhaps Activision should ban IPs from a certain region where the bots seem to spawn from or shut down access from that region entirely.
ORRRRRRR
Add a captcha before each match to prove you’re a human. Fail to do so or time runs out; you don’t get to play. If you’re human, >30 secs to solve a captcha won’t be a problem.
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Or, you know, remove the problem bots are trying to “solve”.
All those suggestions are just pumping the water out of the whip instead of patching the hole.
A cure worse than the disease.