To be clear, Blizzard has said deck trackers are OK “when they do what pen and paper can do.” This does more than that so it’s a violation of their rules.
I doubt they’ll do anything about it and HS Deck Tracker devs have said it is an error and will be removed. In the meantime anyone can turn off their tracker so as not to benefit from this particular bug.
No, it is an exploit regardless. YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE THAT INFO!
It is explicitly against the rules. Read the EULA on exploits.
Seriously, the mental gymnastics people do to say how it isn’t cheating… Seeing cards in your opponent’s hand you’re not supposed to see is like using a wallhack in a FPS game: it doesn’t matter the devs aren’t saying wallhacks specifically are forbidden: it’s still a cheat. Anything that isn’t regular gameplay that gives you information you’re not supposed to have is a cheat: no need for the devs to go into specifics “or it’s not a cheat if they don’t go into specifics”.
It’s not an unfair advantage. Blizzard should include a deck tracker themselves at this point. It’s not skill to write down what cards you have or your opponent has. It’s a convenience.
The amount of advantage it gives you unless it is functioning wrong is very minimal at high levels of play.
Next time you play versus cthun, look at the match history on the left side of the battlefield
Is it showing the card somewhere?
I remember a similar “bug” happened with augmented elekk, where decktracker revealed what cards were shuffled into the enemy deck, but that was because the cards were being revealed in the match history, so deck tracker was taking the information from there
Deck trackers, while theoretically can all be done on pen and paper, does do some work in that it allows you to not require mental or physical processing that a human may normally not have the capacity to keep up with.
Let’s take a tool assisted speedrun (TAS) for context. A machine executing near impossible moves to make the fastest possible game executions is in principle, not much different than a deck tracker. The only thing separating it is the difficulty of executing said moves. However, in the speed running community, the acknowledgement of using a TAS is important because it sets apart the flaw of being human as not being perfect even though in theory, a human could do everything a TAS script could do.
Jumping back to Deck Trackers. While theoretically I could keep track and write down every card my opponent plays, that would mean losing focus on the turn at hand. That also assumes I’m not someone with ADD who forgets easily. That also means I’m someone is in a place where I have pen and paper to begin with. The point here is that you can’t assume that just because a human theoretically can do something on their own means its feasible and/or negligible for a machine to do it for them.
Why not take it one step further and let the decktracker play the game for you…
It should be forbidden simply because it is an unfair advantage over everyone who is not using it
No one uses pencil and paper to do what deck tracker does unless they are in a live tournament where they only have that option.
No one uses pencil and paper to handle a thousand games, and to compile data on win rates, card use, and everything else deck tracker keeps track of.
To say “you can do it with pencil and paper” completely ignores the actual feasibility of actually doing the task.
Seriously. Go ahead and take off deck tracker and do everything manually for a week. No one will because it’s an actual insane thing to do manually.
I can predict which CThun card is in opponent hand if:
-he played all CTHun cards but one
-his deck is empty
Then maybe the problem is the game itself. Don’t blame people for taking a shortcut when literally everyone has access to it besides mobile users. Blizzard has even okay’d using simple deck trackers as well
It’s legit a quality of life feature that massively improves user experience. Most quality of life features are an advantage, but the point is that they make the game more simple and intuitive for the user.
My point is if we draw the line here, what’s next? Banning doing anything else while playing the game because it’s an unfair advantage that you can multi task and other people can’t.
Any PC player can spend 2 minutes to search HS Decktracker, download the tiny file size, and run it while they play. It’s not even that hard. If anything it’s their own fault for not using a resource that Blizzard has okay’d and the vast majority of players know about.
All the more reason it should be integrated into the game.
I play on pc and haven’t downloaded it. It’s not that I’m against 3rd party mods. I played WoW for 12 years and relied on 3rd party mods for raiding.
I just don’t care to. Especially since I mostly play casual/bgs. The info isn’t something I really need. I’m not looking to improve. I just want to play janky decks like nothing but Yogg druid.
I did that in my tryhard days, BRM - Old Gods, and that is despite deck tracker existing. Deck tracker was bad back then. Decks had to be manually entered back then. No auto-update when changing even a single card. Its not some mental feat to do it with pen and paper for the info that actually matters - cards drawn and opponents cards played, the latter of which only requires tracking the important cards of their deck.
Knowing the exact % to draw a card doesnt help me.
Knowing the global stats doesnt help me.
Replays help me, but only or future games. (could also be achieved with recording software).
The pen & paper thing is not far off the mark for the aspects of a deck tracker that actually matters while in a game.
But you’re curating what’s important based on knowledge and skill. It actually involves thinking. Deck tracker involves no thinking. It’s just done automatically for everything with a single glance to a concise UI.
The same glance I had to take at my notepad to tick off a card when drawn or write 2-3 letters when an important card was played by my opponent.
Convenience is all a tracker is for the important info.
And how do you determine the important information manually?
Cards drawn by me, cards played by my opponent. Thats it. Everything else is frills.
So you never had any errors in keeping track of things? Never felt like you ran out of time? Never had to worry about discovers discovering discovering generators? It was all just easy peasy the same as deck tracker?
Probably, it was 5 years ago. I have also missed things on deck tracker as well though, and I’m pretty sure everyone using it has. Moot point.
I have run out of time both with and without deck tracker, again a moot point.
How does a deck tracker help with discover effects exactly? It doesnt show you what was discovered or anything, unlike this exploit/cheat.
No, but it wasnt significantly hard either for the info that actually affects game play either. Just more effort than you are willing to put in , I guess?!?
I haven’t seen it but probably because Google f’d over the mobile version and I don’t play on pc.
TC is 100% correct, I have been saying the same thing for years.
HSDeckTracker is the cheater of all cheaters, and please stop the argument that it doesn’t giving information that you don’t have normally. B.S., there is a f***** time limit, what a normal players need to take their entire time to calculate, deck tracker can show cheaters instantly.