Let me first say I am not accusing anyone, nor am I fishing so I can cheat myself. I am genuinely curious. One of the reasons I’ve played this game for so long on and off, despite all its problems, is the feeling that if I am good, I get the rank I earn. That being said, there has been one particular class/deck that I have seen maybe 4 or 5 times that has made my brain itch.
The DH card “Bibliomite” 2 mana 5/4.
On paper, this card sucks in my opinion. It offers almost no value at all later on in the match and makes you discard a card. However, I was playing constant arena runs a couple months ago when DH was unplayable, and I ran into 3 different players who had 3+ of these in their starting hands, and then curved out perfectly, decimating me by turn 4/5. I thought it was weird at first; it just seemed highly unlikely. Then, I never saw it again. Until recently.
I played a standard match 10 minutes ago and the DH had 2 of these in their starting hand. Then, despite playing them and tossing their hand, curved out perfectly into Magatha on turn 5 and I was dead on turn 6. I looked at the deck via HS Deck Tracker replay/copied his deck and in all honesty it’s trash - if you don’t draw those cards (in this players case they ran Beaming Sidekick to buff them) then you theoretically should just lose. However, the player drew both of those including the sidekick and the weapon that lets you draw cards if you have none in your hand, and kicked my butt.
Again, I understand RNG and I am not saying these players are cheating, but is it possible? The arena runs are what really got me thinking because not only do you need to have those cards in your hand, you need to draft them too. And all these DH’s did.
For reference, my current rank is 4900 which I think would be considered mid tier legend this late in the month? At this rank, it’s odd someone would play this type of deck.
Without reading the 200 word essay and just answering based on the title of your post, yes it is possible to cheat otherwise there wouldn’t be a report option for hacking/cheating.
In terms of widespread Arena cheating there is a problem amongst the Chinese streamer community where they have a website that constantly creates new hearthstone accounts because new accounts get 3 free Arena runs and then it drafts as strong of a comp as possible, then the Chinese streamers buy the accounts for prices based on how strong of a comp it drafted but usually pretty cheap like $2 USD.
Supposedly there isn’t a way to cheat in Hearthstone but I get real suspicious when somebody reacts to a card I drew before I’ve even played it. It makes me think that they can detect what I’m drawing and I suspect that it’s not the game they’re hacking but the tracker somehow
Scenario: the game is wide open. It could go either way. I draw the game winner and before I’ve even played it, they emote and rage quit. This happens with enough regularity that it makes me think they must have a way of seeing what I’m drawing which means they know what’s in my hand
So in conclusion, I don’t think they’re hacking the game itself but they’re exploiting the trackers that we use somehow to not just be able to guess what’s in your hand but to know what’s in your hand
This is true for many things, but not all. Things like what cards you draw and the results of RNG, those things are indeed server-side. But other things like animation timing are not done on the server and are relatively easy to manipulate as a result — you don’t need to invade the servers to take a turn with multiple times more actions than should be possible, in the case of infinite combo decks for example.
While i understand why blizzard should ban things like that(alow 3rd party programs is a no no and bannable). I also not see going slighty faster in a combo deck as cheating to be fair.
Its worth noting that blizzard periodically and unwittingly introduces game-breaking bugs that affect gameplay when introducing patches or new content (usually the latter.)
A highly skilled and motivated team can abuse these to create exploits that would for example disconnect players from games or other effects.
One should always think about hacking/cracking like theft, and other crimes. Anything that claims to be theft/hack proof is just plain wrong. There is only prevention, you can never make anything 100% hack or theft proof. Usually, you can only make it hard enough that the level of skill required to perform the theft or hack simply outclasses the means/resources of the typical person who would be interested in doing so.