Was in the Tavern Brawl, spent 150 coins, had 2 wins, and was up against a rogue who bugged the game by playing two Auctioneers and drawing and playing too fast. I quit, but when I came back instead of reconnecting to the game, I was back at start, with no record of my playing and winning any games, and out 150 gold.
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Please read the relevant sticky.
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The exact same thing has just happened to me. Up against a rogue called General, they played 2 Auctioneers v quickly and it froze with just a card hovering. It looked like they were moving about and they actually used the emote well played! That made me suspicious as they were able to do that while disconnected? ![:thinking:](https://dacy5cilkxabf.cloudfront.net/en/hearthstone/images/emoji/twitter/thinking.png?v=6" ":thinking:")
I don’t think you read the link properly. You were the one who disconnected, not your opponent.
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On top of what Zombiemaster said, if you checked the link, you would realize there are more than one connection. As long as your internet connection is fine, your opponent may be able to emote you and whatnot as the yellow connection is still stable. It’s the red connection that’s the problem. And in this case, it was you that was disconnected from HS server.
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This has happened to me a total of 3 times since i started playing at launch.
There was once where i figured it was a bug or disconnect issue due to the circumstances of the game.
Curiously, the other two times were somewhat similar in nature.
The first was a blatant cheater in arena. I had lethal Within two turns, after holding out against a mage who had the better opener and fighting back(couple years ago when mage was arena standard). The mage had no board and a couple cards in hand. He had been quiet all game. His turn starts, he emotes thank you twice and hovers his card, then proceeded to do some other interaction while the card appeared to hover.
I was then stuck with this punk who emoted thank you and well played over and over, hovering that fn card. i knew what happened, and was so pissed bc it was in arena, that i remembered every little detail i just posted.
The third time i encountered this cheat was just now, playing on mobile. Things have been fine all day, and connected to a game with an aggro hunter that was going his way until i turned it around on him. what do you know, the second ive built a powerful mech boardof taunts and stealths after his little weenie dogs had run out, he card hovers. i am wary, but see him flicking thru his cards and selecting another. i figure its just a visual bug. He pulls off a flanking shot (i see the card get played and the animation but my minion doesnt die and his woof doesnt appear - but the sound is made). After about 3 minutes, i know whats happened. He emotes well played, and i shut the game off.
Blizzard and their knights will gaslight anyone who brings up these “bugs”, and im sure one, if not 2(the hunter i just played and a druid card hover way back) have been actual disconnects. But att least one of my experiences was a cheater. Blizzard acknowleges there are programs that can exploit the game and do this then in the same post will tell someone they were definitively experiencing disconnect. its less work for them to blame connection gremlins than to hunt down and ban those using this software and to reimburse those who waste money on arenas compromised by these people.
so if its random, tell me why it never happens in my favor or at times other than when im about to win?
How do you know it never has happened in your favor?
To the opponent, it appears like you simply got up from your computer and never came back.
You’ve never had an opponent start letting their turns expire for no apparent reason?
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It’s not a bug. Flaky connections are simply a matter of life when you use an online game. The root cause is (almost) always at the players’ end: bad devices, outage at their internet provider, bad configuration of their device, wifi signal in the house not strong enough, etc etc.
Cheaters already can’t exploit it. Unless they know a way to find out who you are and then tamper with your internet connection.
In the cases where the game is able to detect a loss of connection (based on my personal experience, that is when it happens on your turn, probably because the game sends your actions and doesn’t get through), it already automatically tries to reconnect you.
In the cases where the game is NOT able to detect the loss of connection (and, again based on personal observation only, this appears to be when it happens during the opponent’s turn when your game is simply waiting for the server to send data) … well, if the game cannot detect it then there is not much it can do about it.
Now that WOULD be very easily abused by cheaters. “Oh, it looks like my opponent is going to win this game. Better yank the network cable so the game will disconnect us both and we’ll get a tie and I don’t lose a star”.
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BigHugger is right that this is not a cheat. The bug report posted by tech support linked by BrknSoul above shows that Blizzard doesn’t even consider this to be a bug at all. The report explains that this is simply a networking issue resulting from flaky internet connections. However, as a thirty-year programmer of networked applications, I can tell you that it should be considered a bug. More specifically, the problem is the result of an avoidable flaw in Hearthstone’s network architecture. The root of the issue is that their architecture unnecessarily introduces single points of failure which subject every game to possible ruination.
From the diagram posted with the bug report, we know that each client has three different network connections to maintain. That alone should serve as a red flag. The fact that at least one of those connections, the one to the Hearthstone Game Server (the red line) is persistent, and apparently has very limited abilities to recover the connection in case of an outage, is a very big red flag.
Why? Because this is a turn-based game. Building a turn-based game with even one mandatorily persistent connection, much less one which has a very unreliable reconnection ability, is just asking for trouble. One of the advantages of programming turn-based games over real-time games is the potential simplicity of the networking code, and how easy it makes providing a consistently high-quality user experience. The inherent lack of a need for low-latency, real-time server interaction makes that possible, and has the potential to provide a very reliable gaming experience.
But Blizzard has somehow overlooked that opportunity, and by doing so, has introduced a single point of failure that has ruined countless games for their users. Every time I encounter the hovering card bug, I’m just shocked at how poorly it speaks of their engineering efforts in this area. But then, their choice of using Unity for Hearthstone’s rendering engine, with its awful multi-threading issues, also reflects a similarly short-sighted choice. Witness the stuttering animation upon finding an opponent that has been there since the game launched in 2014. There’s no way they can fix that. They opted for the convenience of a pre-packaged rendering engine, and they paid the price.
Lots of game developers made that same mistake in going with Unity, because it just looks so darn good on paper to have a turnkey cross-platform rendering engine. But the networking issue discussed in this thread is something that, from my experience, smacks of corporate dumb-f***ery, and brings into question their ability to prioritize user experience over convenince and CYA measures so common to the corporate grind.
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I was at 11 wins in Duels on my last life in the final match… and I lose bc of this… AHHHHH!!! @#@#@#@#@#@**** !!! Blizzard, pay me for this. You must make this right somehow. I was robbed for so much. This is absolute BS. PLEASE DO SOMETHING FOR ME DDD:
A long Duels run is like the worst time to get screwed by crap like this.
Internet connections disconnect. It’s the risk you take when playing ANY online game. Compensation is not warranted.
The disconnect itself is not the problem.
The problem is that the client can be disconnected but not realize it. Surely this bug can be fixed.
You say It’s not a bug but never had this problem until last patch now its every other game. I doubt anyone will look into it because they assume its connection issues. If there is a problem with a card or update freezing the game how will we ever know?