Dead on Turn 0 in Twist?

I played against a Warlock who played three 20/20 Highkeeper Ra (deal 20 damage to all enemies) minions and he went first and I instantly died and the game ended in 30 seconds… is this a glitch or is this just an insane high roll?

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Those are actual hackers who are apparently using mods to change the Twist decks.

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Oh ok thank you, yeah something seemed off I was even laughing when it happened because I’ve never seen anything like that in HS. Hopefully they get banned because if this keeps happening no one will want to play the mode.

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Looks like they are aware of it and are working on a fix.

https://x.com/RidiculousHat/status/1797125822429475071

And it is mentioned in the Known Issues now:

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I don’t get it

When people abuse a DK weapon freezing bug for days, it’s OK

When people abuse some other bug in Twist, they get banned

What is this? Why double standards? If anything, I’d prefer stricter punishments in standard, as that mode actually has professional competitions

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You can’t compare the two.

The weapon bug was an actual bug inside the game which any player could use just by playing the right cards. Players used the weapons bug either by accident or then on purpose.

The Twist bug requires a 3rd party program and actual hacking of the game. You can’t build and play a deck with 4 Fanottems by accident.

One is a bug and the other is actual cheating and it is a good thing those cheater got/get banned.

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So hacking the game through Blizz is possible…that is what that means, correct?

Theoretically, if they can hack the game for that reason they could also hack it to do other things we don’t know about, correct?

Also, how do you know the specifics like that? What is your source?

There’s often more info about this type of thing on Reddit

Essentially, from what I remember, there was something particular to the duels and now twist decks that allows for this that is not present in the ranked deck builder. Someone else can probably explain it better if they have a better memory or want to do more internet searching than I wanna do at the moment

Thanks but let’s also be clear that just because it is on Reddit, doesn’t make it factual. When the duels bug first came out, everyone was saying it was a blizz side hack that had previous been considered “impossible.” Now he is saying that it wasn’t a hack.

The only place the factual info for that could come from is Blizz and that seems like NDA stuff to me.

I may speak without knowing but Blizz employees can also talk on media other than the official website
If one of them use their own official account on reddit or X or Y to talk about something then it becomes an official source, even if it can be incorrect

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Yes this is true. I understand.

I am not making any specific point just that if there is actual hacking of blizz side going on, that seems like a really big deal. Consider the money put into that. That has far bigger implications.

Without really talking about hacking, there’s an explanation on how one can cheat their deck while not being able to do something else

I’ve seen a video about League of Legends explaining how people were able to play multi-player training practice mode (which is solo player). In short they created a multi player lobby, queued, intercepted the message sent from their launchers to the server, changed the game mode, then sent the message back to the server

It could be the same thing for Hearthstone : Since decks work in a different way for duels and standard, just as for the current twist and standard, maybe they can intercept the decklist that your game sends to the server and replace it by a fake one.
They may have managed to find a hole in the safety checks that verify the validity of the decklist and change the list at that precise moment. Since duels/twist use effects that do not exist in the collection, the validity check may be a bit more permissive than the standard one that only needs to check that the cards actually come from the available collection

I haven’t read about either the duels or twist hacks but if this is roughly the kind of hack they are using, it explains why they can’t do more than that

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It depends what you mean by “hacking.”

The core of the current bug is that the validation is client side. Essentially a normal player would make their deck within the Hearthstone client, and then the server just takes whatever it gets sent with almost full trust, with the reasoning that the client can’t send certain things. The problem is that people are modifying the client so that it does send those things. It’s very poor programming and very poor security.

I don’t actually consider that hacking. I consider it an exploit by mod, but there’s functionally zero security so it’s not really hacking IMHO. These cheaters are getting the Hearthstone client to tell the server “this is my deck” and the server is just immediately saying “okay” because the check to see if the deck is invalid is (supposed to be) in the client.

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Imagine doing this when Arfus/Al Akir exists as a legit playable deck. That is pretty sad.

Oh sounds like a vulnerability that should be patched up soon for sure. I think some other games like Pvz heros had problems with it. Someone opened up a input/output inspector and realized with some weird info reading protocol you could see the players stats, deck, hand.

And lots of info that didn’t even make sense to be included there. Such as the total of how many cards they’ve opened and owned. And random gameplay details.

When i worked a little (briefly) in a smaller 10-50k player idle mobile game. We had a couple of those trackers for moderation /monetizing purposes. So it could have been possible the piror popcap employees added them to scan hackers and collect data. But didnt autoban them yet.

I think pvz heros stopped at like only ever 1-2(?) Years of development and became floatware. Its fun to play but 20$ will get you as much as 100 daily 30 minute check ins in packs.

I guess on the flip end its a kinda weird model. Theres protected rank brackets for every 5 wins but no matchmaking either. So the new player experience can literally be fodder for the whales until you’ve opened enough packs to make a semi decent deck.

I wonder if they could borrow some things from there as well and maybe had some hidden trackers. Maybe server side validations. Even runescape classic had that problem where bank tellers still had a attack option hacker clients could use, which may or may not have inspired the draynor bank robbery of osrs.

double standard ? what do you mean ?the freezing bug could happen to anyone using the dk weapon…

why did you think people were doing sometihng to the game client on purpose for it to happen?

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Yet, I personally know people in high ranks abusing it for days and not getting punished, during the MT qualification season

It’s just not right. It’s very wrong.

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There’s a huge difference between a hack, an exploit, and a game bug. A hack is a third party software tool that uses a security vulnerability in the hearthstone software to make the game client do some kind of behavior that was never intended by the devs (in this case inserting illegal cards into twist decks that were never intended to be there in the first place). It’s intentional sabotage. An exploit is a play pattern or vulnerability that allows you to do similar things as a hack, but doesn’t rely on third party software but instead some kind of vulnerability the devs programmed into the game itself by mistake. And a bug is just that… something the game does that was never intended by the devs.

If a card is glitched where the animation you get from playing it crashes the client, that’s not something the devs can fault players for. There is no way for them to know if the person playing the card is even aware its bugged. Bugs are their own fault, so they can only ever fix them and move on. Hacks and exploits however are a bannable offense.

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