Throughout last year, we shared several updates with you about our ongoing fight against unauthorized bots in Hearthstone. This year, we plan to keep the fight, and the updates, coming.
Yesterday, we dropped the largest banhammer the Tavern has ever seen, several times the size of our previous banwaves. Over 135,000 accounts were actioned—targeting bot accounts that real players are most likely to run into on the ladder.
In addition to this latest action, we actioned about 60,000 accounts throughout the month of January for botting. We also banned some bad actors who were using malicious third-party software to cheat in Heroic Duels.
We remain committed to ejecting these disorderly patrons from our friendly tavern and we’re going to keep taking these types of actions throughout the year and beyond.
We’ll see you (real players) in the tavern! And if you think about botting, we’ll see you, too.
16 Likes
But what about the players who did not use third-party programs and bots, just farmed exp in adventures, for which they were banned? without warning you banned so many honest people who did not bother anyone. How can we trust you after this? apparently you can get banned for anything at any time.
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Thank you, how about steam release? when is it coming out on steam?
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True. I just want to hear is such farming illegal now and what to expect next.
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afk farming is also prohibited in ToS. you should have known this.
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have you read ToS? AFK farming was officially banned 2 years ago
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Thank you for your continued efforts. Botting accounts with effectively unlimited gold from letting constructed run 24/7 will re-draft Arena over and over until they get 12-0 quality drafts. Their goal is to have fun ruining the mode for genuine players, considering they have no stake or investment into their throwaway account or its resources.
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But what about the players who did not use third-party programs and bots, just farmed exp in adventures, for which they were banned? without warning you banned so many honest people who did not bother anyone. How can we trust you after this? apparently you can get banned for anything at any time.
So your question is what about the players who just used third party programs and bots to gain an unfair advantage by farming xp in adventures?
Really?
I think you can figure this out out.
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ithought we had a ban wave the moment i startd to see people complaining about being banned on here and reddit
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Just love to see the ban on my account for “botting” while I wasn’t doing that at all and was farming with my own bloody hands.
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Created a new account.
From Bronze 10 to Gold 9 all bot games, your efforts are in vain.
Reopen the Chinese Server already.
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Banning bot accounts at the end of their life cycle accomplishes nothing. They’ve already made their money for the botter and provided their Arena run to the buyer. The entire way that Blizzard is trying to measure success is inaccurate if they don’t factor in life cycle.
Good job (unironically) on the Old Guardian subscribers who were naive enough to think AFK PvE farming was okay though.
“honest” 
I was also permanently baned due to afk farming. I heard that the reason is the use of external programs, but I sent an inquiry because I never used any external programs, and I got an answer that it was confirmed that I used external programs. It’s so unfair. Without any warning, permanent van is too harsh. I’m also curious about the difference between users who use afk farming in a similar way to me in the community getting a 7-day suspension and someone getting a permanent suspension. Please understand that the grammar is uneven because it’s a translator
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how do you afk farm without an external program?
I remembered the timer or the time and did it by hand. Even that is less than 10 times a day. Sometimes it exceeds 30 minutes, so it’s only 800xp in experience
I don’t suppose it’s possible to restore lost ranks/gold that were lost to the actions of these bots ?
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It’s a translator, so I don’t know if my opinion will be communicated properly, but let me criticize Blizzard’s banned system.
This account only plays arena.
However, I received a permanent banned yesterday due to the use of the macro program. I guess I also rode a rope a few times when I played the arena game, and the Blizzard banned system recklessly judged me to be a Macro user due to the accumulation of reports after the other users reported me.
I have six accounts that only play arena like this account, and 2 of them received a banned for using the macro. I swear I never played a grade match, only played the arena, and never used any external programs.
From this, you can see that Blizzard does not use any program to judge banned, but only applies banned to innocent people based on the accumulation of reports from other users.
It’s sad news, but according to a report from the community in our country, macro also designates a reverse report as macro for each person we meet. There must be more unfair victims like me and there will be more in the future.
And if we had any real idea of the size of the problem (let’s say there was only a couple hundred thousand botters)…maybe we could celebrate. But if, let’s say there’s 2 million bot accounts, not so much.
Are you sure?
I’ve encountered 3 bots today already. All with chinese character names and just playing vanilla cards in no particular order, just throwing them out every turn.
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