The buyout already happened. Now to wait and see when/if Microsoft does a house clean or lets the game continue to hemorrhage money. I’m hoping for the house cleaning and the shutting down of Hearthstone to be replaced with a better game.
The issue seems to be these bot accounts are trash accounts people are creating with fake emails so Blizzard can ban these users until you’re blue in the face, and they’ll just keep making new fake accounts. The bans aren’t working. Time for something more drastic.
Some thoughts…
Most bots seem to play continuously… (though some have features to auto-break) but this is one way you can easily catch botting accounts is if a user has been playing longer than say 2-3 hours it should be suspected they are botting and investigated as such. Most actual humans can’t play continuously for this long without a break or burnout.
Other options… game could ask randomly generated questions that only a human can answer every so often during play. Most gamers wouldn’t mind this, but most bots would have trouble or get frozen during such a process.
This is actually a pretty easy issue to fix, but will take some thought and of course coding by Blizzard, but you guys are pros at that so it shouldn’t be a big thing just a patch.
Please fix this though. Playing bots isn’t fun at all. Bots can’t make mistakes like humans can (though their play is fairly rigid) they don’t ever miss lethal like humans often do, they almost always play the same aggro or tempo based decks in the same sequences (another obvious tell someone is botting) and almost never play control decks. Bots can’t really “think” like humans can, but they’re almost perfect at repetitive tasks and in a game like Hearthstone this makes it really frustrating and not at all fun to play against because even though you might know you’re playing a bot and you’ll know exactly what cards to expect in what sequence you can’t stop it unless you get nearly perfect draws and board clear cards. That’s not fun, it’s just an exercise in futility at the minute.
You probably already know this, but most bots also seem to be used by Chinese or Russian players too. Not sure if that helps any, but it might. Maybe a US restricted IP check server would be useful?! Just spit balling ideas here. I just hate to see such a great game like Hearthstone ruined because of hackers, cheaters, and bots.
My compliments on a great fun game. I’ve played since launch, but I’m pretty quickly loosing interest in the game because of this issue. It’s just not fun to play against the same decks over-and-over because everybody is botting to get quick legend so they can get their end of month chests. What’s even the point? Okay, great you got another Legend chest, cool, I guess, but who cares if the game itself isn’t fun. It’s not like it once was when there was a human on the other side and people actually played control decks instead of these gimmicky aggro and tempo decks.
Legend used to actually mean something, now every 8 year old with their daddy’s credit card and a bot can claim their a Legendary players. Great! Awesome. Good for them… but it’s no fun for those of us who like to actually think when we play.