Travelling to HCT Event to watch live is a BIG FLOP

Community Discussion
1

I just wanted to share my experiences at the 2019 HCT Championships in Taiwan. I think it’s important that people be made aware of the lack of organisation of the event for foreigners.

As you know, the event took place in Taipei, Taiwan. I bought my tickets (for Saturday and Sunday), booked my flight and hotel, and was BEYOND excited to go to the event. I play a lot of Hearthstone and was eager to go learn and play with other avid players.

Much to my dismay, ALL the screens at the venue were in Chinese. In that, I mean that the game was in Chinese only, not a single screen was in English. The hosts were also Chinese (which I expected since the event was in Taiwan), however I did not expect that there was NO WAY of listening to the English broadcast. Kibler and Frodan were sitting on a stage and were completely drowned out by the blaring Chinese broadcast, there was no section to listen in English and there were no headsets available to listen to it either. There was no wifi to connect to Twitch (and being a foreigner, I did not have a data plan in Taiwan although hind-sight I should have bought one).

The next problem was the event to play the brawl for packs. There was a section where the audience could play against each other. For every win, they got a stamp on a card. For every 12 wins, they would win 40 free packs. Now the problem was, that if you did not have an account on the Asia server, you couldn’t play. Had I known that this event existed, I would have played the Asia server enough to open up the brawl so that I could participate.

Next was the art exhibit all being in Chinese as well. There were large portraits of a lot of the Hearthstone characters (Jaina, Deathwing, etc…) with what I image is the story behind the characters. All of the information was in Chinese only. Now we’re talking about pieces of paper/cardboard with printed text. What would it have cost to print it in English as well? 50 cents? To further add insult to injury, there was a raffle for these portraits and guess what? The entry tickets were all in Chinese so I had no idea what they were and did not enter the raffle. I only figured it out when I saw people in the audience holding the portraits.

Luckily the grand masters flew in for Sunday and there was a section that was set up in English that we could listen to. The audio had many problems and was really low compared to the Chinese broadcasters but at least we had 1 screen (42 inch TV) in English and if we sat right next to the speakers we could hear.

The funny part in all of this, is that I was approached by broadcasting crew to interview me for the event. I did not do it since I knew that if I shared my experiences about the event it would not be broadcast, and if I didn’t shared them, then I would be lying to the viewers by giving the impression that everything was fantastic.

All in all, this was a very bad experience. I highly recommend that no one ever go to a Blizzard event if it is not in a language that you understand. It was a giant waste of my time (multiple days to travel and watch the event) and money (we’re talking hundreds of dollars), and a regrettable experience. This was my first and probably my last Esport event ever.

30 Likes
2

Well it’s good that you’ve learned this lesson early.

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Thank you so much for sharing your experience with it. You should post this on the reddit.com/r/hearthstone so people could be more aware of events hosted in another country. I . It sucks that your experience ended up this way :frowning:

The website that talks about the site didn’t give much information on what to expect at the venue but they should have done better on what to expect.

2 Likes
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Thanks for the feedback. I signed up to Reddit and posted as suggested.

1 Like
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Were you able to at least enjoy the local scene while you were there? Hope you were able to savage some enjoyment. I heard alot of nice things about Taipei

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That’s basically e-sports in general.

7

well at least u didn’t get kidnapped

but still…

*points and laughs :laughing:

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Can you link to your Reddit post? Thanks!

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Ok, so this is the third time I try and post on Reddit. I didn’t understand the flair thing but hopefully I did it correctly this time:

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Mate is matter of few years till US will be overrun by China. You better start learning the language. They will not learn yours as they have the strength in numbers

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Im sorry for your experence. Thats one thing i would of checked to make sure there was some kind of speaker in a language that you woukd understand. I can only imagain the headaches you had during that event.

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Well, there was an english twitch stream, so they had english casters on site. I would’ve assumed you can listen to the english cast as well.
For example in SC2 GSL they always have headphones for the english cast on site…

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I feel Blizzard owe you a refund… and 40 packs at least :grin::joy:

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That was my thought as well… but they didn’t have headphones. I even asked the Blizzard staff :frowning:

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good…blizzard is a shhiituyy greedy and egoist company …just lile AE