Hello,
EDIT: The condition is resolved as of the US morning of Wed, Sept 18. Whether the condition below was normal or not, I have now found that my Standard Ranked multiplayer games suddenly include human players who play through until the end of the games. Thanks to all who read this and who looked into it!
This is my very first forum post on any Blizzard forum ever (that I recall), although I have been a happy Blizzard customer since the earliest days of WoW.
I have been away from playing Hearthstone for many years. In the past 48 hours, I updated my client and game and began playing again and built my own deck to play in Ranked Standard multiplayer Hearthstone. At first, everything went as expected. On Monday Sept 16, I would play others and sometimes I would win, sometimes lose, and sometimes experience others conceding early, as usual.
However, starting in the late afternoon (US times, US server) on Tuesday, Sept 17, I discovered that all my opponents in ranked standard appeared to concede all games at the beginning of my 2nd trurn. And that has continued now for over 18 hours. I have literally rocketed up the ranks from low Bronze rank to (now) Gold level 2 in a matter of only a few gameplay hours (interupted with some pauses away from the game) with no defeats whatsoever. On several occasions, I exited the game and restartd. At one point I completely powered down the PC and restarted it some time later. But the automatic concessions by my opponents at the moment when my second round of play began still continued.
Description of problem: When I initiate a new ranked standard game, the multiplayer game begins as usual. We go through the initial discard period and then the normal game rounds begin. Whether I am first to play or second, I always get my first turn. The opponent takes his turn (or second turn) just fine. However – without fail – as soon as my second turn begins, I see the animation of my card being drawn and then suddently the game shows me that my opponent has conceded. This has been 100% repeatable for over 25 games in a row. (I did not keep an accurate count, this is a conservative guess at the number of games)
During the first few games, I thought maybe I just had bad luck with opponents who decided to concede early. But I consider it to be highly unlikely that I have now been randomly matched with opponents dozens of times who ALL decided to concede at EXACTLY the same instant, which is always the beginning of my second turn (again, regardless of who went first at the beginning of the game).
Here is a screenshot of my most recent Ranked Standard multiplayer game at exectly the moment when the opponent concedes: https://imgur.com/a/gBh7Nn9 You can see that my mana crystals are at 2/2. The card draw animation has just begin for the start of my second turn. In the lower left of the screenshot, you can see that I had already attained Gold level 3 and this “victory” (due to automatic opponent concession) is what pushed me into Gold level 2 afterward.
Other details: I am playing the game on a standard Windows 10 PC. My Battle dot net client updated itself successfully a few days ago and the game also updated fine. I ran the option in the Battle dot net client to scan the game files (in case of need of repair) and this option completed (status bar reached 100% then disappeared on its own) without reporting any problems. I followed the advice on an old forum post to close my clients and delete the Hearthstone sub-directory found under my %AppData%\Blizzard\ directory. After I did this, the game took extra time (as expected) when it started the next time before opening the home User Interface. The game operated fine in every other respect, but the anomolous behaviour of 100% victory in ranked standard persisted. This shouldn’t matter BUT: around the time I began playing Ranked Standard on Tuesday, Sept 17, I went through my friends list and began deleting ALL of them, since I had not been in any Blizzard multiplayer games for many years (I had never chatted with any of the former friends in the Battle dot net client either, that I recall). I simply felt I wanted to start afresh, building new decks from recent seasons from scratch and meeting new people.
Any Blizzard employee/contractor looking into this issue in an official capacity may feel free to look up my account and my gameplay history to verify the situation I have specified above.