Blizzard Addresses Issues During the 2017 Americas Summer Playoffs
Aratil has made a post on the official Hearthstone forums which addresses issues that plagued this past weekend's HCT Americas Summer Playoffs event.
- Venues experienced DDoS attacks and equipment problems.
- The experience was not acceptable.
- They are discussing improvements they can make before the start of the next HCT Season.
- Additional fallbacks are needed in the case of disconnects.
- Equipment requirements and venue capabilities will be reevaluated.
Quote from AratilThank you to our players and viewers who participated in and watched the Hearthstone Championship Tour Americas Summer Playoffs on Sept. 16 and 17.
Over the course of the event, playoff venues experienced multiple DDoS attacks and equipment malfunctions that disrupted the tournament. As a result, affected players were unfortunately required to restart games due to disconnections. This also caused extended wait times between games. While we made efforts to address the issues as they were occurring, we want to be clear that the resulting experience this past weekend was not acceptable, and we sincerely apologize to the competitors who were adversely affected. There is still much we can do to improve the overall competitive experience, and to reduce the number of issues that can occur.
We are currently discussing several improvements that we would like to implement as early as the start of the next Hearthstone Championship Tour season. We are also going to reevaluate equipment requirements and venue capabilities to make sure we deliver a better competitive experience for our players, as well as design additional fallbacks in case of disconnects. The Hearthstone Championship Tour has grown over the years into a circuit with high expectations, and we are continually striving to deliver a better experience. We would not have been able to build this program without your participation, both as players and viewers, and your feedback is valuable as we build out our plans for Hearthstone Championship Tour 2018.
Please keep in mind that this is not the end of the conversation—we’re going to do better and we’ll fill you in on our progress as we move forward. Reach out to us on the forums, Facebook or Twitter if you have any feedback about #HCT to share. We look forward to hearing from you, now and into the future of competitive Hearthstone.
So if you begin to lose a match just have your pals waiting to launch a DDOS attack on you and you get to start over!
15 years ago Online Poker software already implemented Tournament pause / Disconnection Timebank / fall-back server down functions. Hearthstone is still struggling implementation for very basic online game features. Hearthstone server programmers are definitaly below average skills.
Everyone talks about disconnect and such .
But the real problem is tournaments aren't enjoyable because the decks played 99 % of the time win or lose based entirely on RNG .
Drawing patches or getting good spells from Lyra decided much more games than carefully executing a game plan .
Also there is absolutely 0 skill in building the decks . Every single one is a net deck with 1 or 2 tech cards in it .
So that's why I think tournaments aren't as enjoyable as before and not because of some disconnect.
We've all known that for the past years. Lowest point was the Yogg meta. People complain about it every day, nothing is going to change.
Just accept that winning a single professional HS game is not much of an achievement, but consistently having a high win rate is. Besides, to me it's more about the occasional crazy plays / games than who actually wins.
Tell that to someone like Muzzy.
If 99% of games were decided by random elements then you wouldn't be seeing the same crop of players at these tournaments. Yes, Hearthstone has randomness but you are negating all of the calculated decisions, deck building, and meta analysis that led to a certain point in the game. When a Mage top-decks a Fireball for exact lethal you might think that they were just incredibly lucky but there were undoubtedly a large number of decisions that put them in a position that allowed them to win with that draw.
You mention drawing Patches the Pirate as an example, but players drew it in this very tournament and still won games.
Lastly, saying that deck-building requires no scale shows that you don't really understand the process. High-level players experiment with new and varied decks all the time, but a major tournament is not the place to try your Murloc Warlock out against all of the refined decks that are known to be successful. As for tech cards, they can drastically change a deck's success rate when you're attempting to anticipate the tournament meta and considering Conquest bans.
To all the people suggesting they should have a feature to resume a dropped game session at the point it dropped: how do you account for the competitive advantage gained by the player whose turn it was? That player has effectively had their rope extended for the entire length of time it takes for the game to resume, giving them a much higher chance of making the optimal play. I'm not saying that's a game-breaking problem, but in the razor-thin margins of a professional Hearthstone control mirror match, for example, neither is it insignificant.
I don't think there is a perfect solution. But even if it's not 100% fair, resuming the game at the start of the interrupted turn would be a lot fairer than restarting it.
Lul professional child card's game players
I think you are grossly overestimating any competitive advantage you would gain from resuming a game at the state it was in after a disconnect.
For starters, the majority of turns can be fully evaluated and executed comfortably within the length of a turn. Second, the players aren't going to be able to see the board state during the downtime so their ability to analyze is reduced to what they can mentally recall. Lastly, both players will have the time to consider the ongoing game so any advantage the current player might have from being the one playing cards is reduced even further.
And even if you think that there are some minor advantages it is still a far better solution than completing restarting the game regardless of whether or not one of the players is in a strictly better position. There was a disconnect during a game at a previous HCT event where one player was clearly in the lead (I'd estimate 75%+ chance to win) and they had to restart completely. I believe that same player wound up winning the rematch, but there is absolutely no way that their opponent would have gained enough magical insight during the downtime to properly resume the match that they would have overcome their on-board disadvantage.
I've watched a lot of Hearthstone, and that does not appear to be the case. As for "overestimating the problem" - we can only speculate without data from thousands of matches to work from, but like I said: it's not a significant problem, but it's not negligible either.
I agree with you insofar as it is certainly only a situational problem. There are plenty of matches where it would be a negligible advantage.
I've never seen a pro basketball game get DDoS'd. And even if it somehow was, they'd just restart the game from the same clock and score.
One does not simply see DDoS
I've seen a lot of people ask why there's no snapshop system set up and I have to echo that. Blizzard should know by now that disconnects and DDoS attacks can happen, and having periodic snapshots of each match to restore to could be wildly beneficial. Far more fair than allowing these disconnects to go on without a counteraction to keep a momentary DC to result in a loss. This isn't an at-home tourney between 5 friends for bragging rights on their personal group chat. A DC there doesn't affect the enjoyment of thousands of paying audience members, and none of the players have thousands of dollars in prize money at stake, and those connections aren't being offered and monitored by a multi-billion dollar company.
Blizzards needs to do better. They have a great game and are taking big strides to listen to the community, but the tournament scene needs more love.
And when will Blizzard offer a comprehensive solution for following all the tournaments and pro players outside of individually tracking players and digging for tourney results?
More like baby steps , they show themselves like they care about it but in reality they do nothing ...
No excuses for this to happen. The Hearthstone profits are through the roof. Stop counting your $$$ and be a little proactive, god forbid. For example, the whole interface is obsolete and hasn't changed much since beta. Vulnerabilities in both software and hardware are continually evolving and will always try to be ahead of counter-measures in place, so spend some of that cash on a little innovation and be proactive with your product Bli$$ard.
First: how on Earth is the interface "obsolete"? And it has been updated many times over the game's history.
Second: what does the interface have to do with the security of the game? And what does the security of the game client have to do with the susceptibility of venues to DDOS attacks? Please ask yourself: is it possible you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about and are just making shit up?