Hackers do Exist

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Listen…there’s hackers in everything. Can Hearthstone be completely unhackable? Is it?? I know I’m going to get trolled or called crazy, but just faced someone who literally predicted every Secret I had in my mage deck. Now, as I’ve complained in other posts before…the math doesn’t lie. No one is this perfect as this game makes A LOT of people out to be. In my experience, there is such thing as INSANE amounts of luck.

I’ve seen people predict secrets before to where I’m like…of course screaming…but I need to post. There’s no way.

Dude has a 1 in 14 chance to predict which secret I play. That’s a tad over 7%. And he guessed right every time. Really? He attacked the right minion when I played Splitting Image and then attacked my hero with the right choice of getting hit with Vaporize. 7%, twice.

The reason I’m also saying this is I set it up for Vaporize to come out so he would fall for it. But his/her play was too perfect. There’s gotta be a hack.

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Predicting secrets isn’t that hard given the context of the board and what turn you play secrets on. And some secrets are just plain not used. Trackers also help in showing what the secret most likely is.

I won’t say hearthstone is hacker free. There are hackers everywhere. But in this case I’d be inclined to believe your opponent had a mix of great luck and predictive action.

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It’s happened once before. All I’m saying is there are many instance in this game for things to just be coincidence or even “skill.”

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As you described them, neither one of these implies they knew which secret you had. They were playing carefully, and got rewarded for it.

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Since I’ve been maining secrets lately I’ve gotten a really good read on them but there are really only 3 approaches that people use against them.

Aproach 1. Pray for the best (which is honestly what a lot of people do)

Approach 2. Test for the most dangerous secrets process of elimination. Drop a 1 drop to test for snipe would be an example of this. Or by attacking to eliminate more, in worst always assume is hunter trap and don’t play to 3 cards unless you can viably nulify the rat or do something more powerful to compensate.

Approach 3. An odds approach. Determine which secret you can beat and play as if its that secret. Ignore those you can’t because thats already good game.

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Deck Tracker has a dynamic secret list that’s live. It auto grey’s out the secret’s it can’t possibly be and eliminates the possibility as the person plays on the fly.

Perhaps that’s another reason how they even the odds.

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Alternatively: Freeze up and do nothing. Which seems to be option #2 for those people.

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this happens to me every game.
they are out there tho.

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Or you can just remember which secrets the opponent played without the tracker

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There’s no way to tell if it’s hacked or he’s a good player. I work in the security industry and it’s common knowledge that no defenses are impenetrable.

It’s not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when.

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There’s also effort vs benefit.

If all you get out of “hacking” Blizzard’s servers is an advantage in a match that doesn’t even guarantee a win, I’d wager that no one would ever bother attempting it. Especially given the consequences of getting caught.

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you do realise that very often the best option is to do nothing ? If you know your opponent is very likely to have an explosive or freezing trap attacking into them would be a bad play depending on the situations.

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It is an interesting topic, there is hackers everywhere in other games… and we suppose (I don’t know why) that hearsthone is free of hackers…

So the question is… what can do a hacker in HS? anybody knows something?

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This became a good topic. I appreciate everyones feedback.

My continuous point is that this is going beyond GOOD playing. No one who acts (instead of doing nothing) continuously makes the right choice…over and over. There have been added Mage secrets to the game. It’s more likely now that Flame Ward is to be used, especially in the newer decks but this is still not the case. And in my other game. It’s too coincidental is all I’m saying.

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Not “very often”, “sometimes” would be more apropriate. Any secret that would impede your gameplan has to be tackled at some point, so getting them out of the way quicker is often more apropriate than holding back if you can deal with the consequences. Unless you expect the opponent having a second copy of that secret in their hand already.

The secrets that deal with attacking minions? Unless you can restore/buff the health of your minions, or you just have a single minion in play and fear Freezing Trap/Vaporize, getting rid of them asap is often better than letting them delay you from dealing damage for multiple turns. If you just play passively without good reason, that secret might just effectively counter 10+ damage over the course of its time in play.

Same with the spell focused secrets. If you don’t play any spells against a Mage secret out of fear of Counterspell, that secret has effectively countered all your spells instead of just potentially one.

Being passive around opposing secrets has a good chance of costing you the match.

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what’s the point of your essay ? trying to teach me the game ?

Obviously when I say sometimes being passive if the best option it means in the situations it’s actually GOOD to be passive. Dunno why you bothered with a huge explanation.

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You claim “very often” when that is most certainly not the case. Bad information like that needs to be rebutted.

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sure, should’ve said it’s not uncommon to have a ‘‘do nothing’’ best play against secrets when it’s obvious what the opponent’s secrets are.

I expected everybody to understand what I meant since it’s basic HS knowledge at this point

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I’m guessing your playing wild yeah? Otherwise it’s 1 in 7. But even in wild it’s not hard to get a good handle on what secret you have.

  1. Did you or have you made an attempt to put multiple minions to 3hp - If yes then hit with the highest damage minion with 3hp or less. Otherwise just put the smallest minion face to check for vaporise.

  2. If I only have 1 big minion on board - Do not attack face until I can get something smaller to check for vaporise.

  3. If you have multiple minions on board, attack/kill the smallest thing first. Checks for splitting/duplicate/effigy

  4. Drop a small minion to check for mirror/sheep/clone

  5. Play a un-needed spell before the actual spell I want to check for counterspell/mana bind (or just hope for the best if you HAVE you cast your board clear and have no way to check for it).

Playing around ice block and barrier isn’t worth it. Just try to pop their block at 1hp if possible.

Sometimes it’s just so easy to know what secret has been played by what the mage has been doing in previous rounds.

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I don’t know anything, but I do have enough generic knowledge that I can speculate a bit.

To understand what is and is not possible, let’s start with how the game is played. A game server keeps track of the game. A program on your device (“client”) connects to it, and so does your opponent’s client.
The server sends important game data to the client. This data is received by the client, and logged in a file (hs deck tracker uses this file to track what is going on). The client receives the data and provides the animations. And on your turn, it sends data about your actions to the server, then waits for the response to know what the effect is.

Reading the data sent between client and server is very easy (even if it were not stored in a file, someone could just use a simple network sniffer). So I assume that Blizzard designed it so that reading this does not give you an advantage. I have never actually looked at the content of this file, but I assume that for instance on a card draw, the data is “opponent draws a card” … “opponent plays left most card, which is Fireball”, and not “opponent draws Acolyte of Pain” … “opponent plays left most card”. So even reading and decoding this info doesn’t help to know what they have in hand, the actual card is just “a card” until it is played.
Likewise, for secrets I expect the data sent to the client to merely be “opponent plays a secret”, and nothing in the data received by the client can deduce which secret it is, until it triggers (at which point the server would send data about the type of secret exposed, and the effect it has on the board … e.g. “reveal secret #1 as Wandering Monster” … “summon Bearshark” … “Elven archer hits Bearshark” … “Bearshark now at 2/3 health; elven archer at -2 health” … “Remove Elven archer”)

Now this system is not 100% perfect. I think a little over a year ago, there were bug reports on hsdecktracker that it sometimes (under very specific circumstances) revealed information the player could not know. I don’t recall the details. But since decktracker gets its info from the data sent from server to client, this was apparently a case where data was sent that was not displayed immediately.
This was fixed later. Perhaps by Blizzard no longer sending that data. Or perhaps by decktracker no longer revealing that data. In the latter case, a hacker can still read the data and get it for him- or herself.

So what does this mean for a hacker? Well, several options.

#1 - easiest: intercept and decode the data sent between client and server and use it to get an information advantage. Possible, but as explained above probably not very effective (unless all my speculation is wrong and the data sent to the client actually includes many details the player doesn’t see).

#2 - relatively easy for a good hacker: hack the client program. This can enable them to show the extra info (if any) on the same screen instead of in a separate window. They could also use it to send fake data to the server (like playing a card you don’t have in hand), but I would be really surprised if that would work. Most likely, the Blizzard servers will tell the client they are confused and send a fresh set of game data so it can reset; or the developers may even have added code to log this as a potential hacking attempt.

#3 - very hard: actually gain access to the game server and change the game state or get extra information from there. I am sure that nothing is 100% unhackable. Just as every home, no matter how secure, can be broken into if a thief is dedicated enough. And yes, once this level of access has been found, you can do whatever you want and modify the game however you please. But getting there will be extremely hard, and the reward is just some free wins in a children’s card game. People able to pull off this type of hacking are much more likely to focus on more rewarding targets … either to benefit themselves, or to warn the owners of their vulnerability (in the case of ethical hackers).

You mention that there are hackers in other games as well. And that is true. And yes, there probably are hackers in HS as well. But there is one important difference.
Look at games such as League of Legends, Fortnite, Starcraft, Heroes of the Storm, etc. All games with a similar design (game server, and clients on the gamers’ computer). But unlike HS, these games are reaction-speed based. A computer can respond much faster than a human. If you hack the League of Legends client, you can make your summoner flash to safety a millisecond after a danger comes out of fog of war. That gives you an unfair advantage. So in that type of game, hacking the client already gives a rather big advantage.

In HS, response time hardly ever matters. Yes, there are a few edge cases. Playing a lot of cards when Nozdormu is in play. Playing cards that are generated during the turn before the generation animation plays. If you can hack a HS client to skip the animations and show the end result immediately, you’d have an advantage in those cases. But they are rare, and the effort to do this would be huge. Plus, you’d have to repeat it after every update.
Worth it?
I’m leaning towards no.

So bottom line: Yes, hacking HS is possible. And if something is possible, it’s safe to assume that it happens.
But hacking the client side has very limited benefits. And hacking the server side is so hard that it’s unlikely to be done on a large scale for a target that is as unimportant as a card game.

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