Blizzard Cancels the Year of the Raven Livestream Due to Ranked Play Issues
RANKED PLAY HAS RETURNED! Check out the update Blizzard posted in this post.
Due to ongoing issues with the ranked ladder, Blizzard has cancelled tomorrow's Year of the Raven Q&A Stream. There is no note of a rescheduled date at this time. We've been updating our original post with updates as they come out here.
To see the Year of the Raven announcement, check it out here.
Quote from Jesse HillGreetings,
Currently, the Hearthstone team’s primary focus is working to resolve the issues with Ranked Play as soon as possible. You can view the updates on this issue here.
To focus on these issues, we will be cancelling the Year of the Raven developer livestream that was originally scheduled to take place on Friday, March 2. Your questions are very important to the team, and we would still like the chance to address them. If you have any additional questions you would like answered, please still definitely send them our way. You can do so by posting on the Year of the Raven announcement blog found here.
Thank you for your understanding, and we look forward to speaking more with our community soon.
We have implemented a hotfix which should resolve the issues we were seeing with Ranked Play. With this fix in place, we are now working on addressing the accounts of players affected. Once that is completed, we will be able to bring Ranked Play back online.
We will continue to provide updates until Ranked Play is back up. [Source]
I guess everyone noticed already, but maybe someone didn't see that Blizz answer from the link above:
"We have implemented a hotfix for the issue that was affecting Ranked Play in all Hearthstone regions. To properly assess the scope of the issue, we had to temporarily disable Ranked Play while we worked on the hotfix. As part of the restoration process, some accounts may have received additional stars.
We understand this kind of downtime is disappointing for our community, and we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. As a token of our appreciation for your patience, we’d like to offer everyone three Kobolds and Catacombs card packs. These card packs will be distributed next week and can be redeemed via the Gifting function either on the Battle.net Desktop App or by logging into your Battle.net account on your mobile device.
Everything should be working properly now and you can once again resume climbing the ladder in Ranked Play. We’re sorry for the disruption to your play experience and greatly appreciate your patience while we sorted it out!"
Just think it should be there
3 days ago:
http://i66.tinypic.com/2cy33a1.png
It's nice when one of your trolls becomes reality!
Obviously, I feel sad for the cancel, would've loved to see the new announcement, since their past announcement have been entertaining and quite fun at times.
It's also sad that they had a major issue with the recent changes, and I feel bad for all the devs working overtime while some youngsters are complaining they lost ranks.
Things like these happen, even with their budgets' - nobody's perfect.
Looking forward to the announcement ASAP and I hope this doesn't delay the arrival date of the new expansion.
Guys since it's fixed now, do you think they will undo the cancel of the stream? or will we have to wait anyways?
Still wait. Lots of reasons but they announced cancellation so people would miss it now if they did it anyway, and there's been a lot of disruption to the teams activities/workload + working lots of overtime with less sleep etc. These are assumptions but I'd also wager they are focused on watching live ladder to make sure things are working as intended.
All fixed now - and we get 3 free K&C packs.
"We have implemented a hotfix for the issue that was affecting Ranked Play in all Hearthstone regions. To properly assess the scope of the issue, we had to temporarily disable Ranked Play while we worked on the hotfix. As part of the restoration process, some accounts may have received additional stars.
We understand this kind of downtime is disappointing for our community, and we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused. As a token of our appreciation for your patience, we’d like to offer everyone three Kobolds and Catacombs card packs. These card packs will be distributed next week and can be redeemed via the Gifting function either on the Battle.net Desktop App or by logging into your Battle.net account on your mobile device.
Everything should be working properly now and you can once again resume climbing the ladder in Ranked Play. We’re sorry for the disruption to your play experience and greatly appreciate your patience while we sorted it out! "
I think that's about what the community is expecting as a compensation. I hosted a Fireside Gathering last night and people came out of the woodwork so they could actually play the game. The conversations I had with other players were almost entirely positive.
Would prefer it to be awarded outside of game, so you get it on each region. This way will have to pick single region from gift shop but I just like opening free packs dammit :)
Typical Blizzard Profesionalism: Delays, Bugs, Crashes..
use this https://www.google.com/chrome/
trust me it is faster.
I am pretty disappointed that I won't see new announcement because ranked is disabled. They should think a bit about maturity of their audience if they really think that few days without ranked play is so big drama... and unfortunately they are right. So I can understand why they postponed announcement, but I would still want to hear it more, than playing ranked. There are enough other mods to experience in HS right now. And this week brawl is not shit as most of the time.
And stop spamming this bull shit theory that because ranked is disabled, now people will spend gold on arena and brawl. I like playing arena and without disabling ranked. And you can play your dumb paladin/mages/locks in casual as well. It is not like they made some critical bug, where you can't play your decks, you just don't earn stars (like they give you anything anyway).
On other hand I don't really understand what Devs Q&A should mean for HS. What is so complex which we want to ask developers. If they made some hotfixes on cards weekly/monthly , ok. But the only new feature which is coming is tournament mode, and I doubt that it will be so complex that we need stream for it. More likely I hope to hear for news expansion. But why than it would be called devs Q&A.
No crap they canceled the stream if they're going to cancel the whole year of the Raven and all of it's expansions because of this stupid indie mistake of theirs which will take a whole year for them to fix since Blizzard likes to sit back and do nothing when they're any issues with ranked mode.
LoL do you know how much hate and how many enraged players there would be hammering Ben Brode in that Q&A because of this???!!!
It would be a complete Blood Bath.
The positive thing I see is that the decks I'm facing right now are not those few ones build for climbing, (even casual mode used to be full of them due to practicing), but another experimental decks that bring more fun to game.
I am a bit disappointed they cancelled the stream, though I understand why. Just hope it won't also delay the expansion for some reason. Also, a shockingly large number of people still seems confused about rotation and HoF refunds, so at least half the stream would probably just address questions that technically have been answered before.
As for "compensation" people are hoping for: Some extra pack or gold would be nice, but I really don't expect anything. They have been very stingy about these kind of things in the past, and 2-3 days less on ladder won't affect anybody to a point they actually lost anything. They didn't compensate anybody for the Nemsy-fiasco, and that was a whole lot more severe. I know some people want to play ranked and miss out on that, but the rest of the game works as it should. I don't think Blizzard/Team 5 sees a need to hand out something just for that.
EDIT: Wow, they actually do compensate. It's hard to believe, but I am happy I they proved me wrong.
Always issues, delay or cancellation. Did they remember they have to release a new expansion the first week of April as usual?
'Cause I'm afraid we we'll get delay even on it...
Same here. I also got 2 ranks up and I am also annoyed with the progress. Now seeing how people's ranks are changing it's hard for me to think that we are close to a solution.
I like that they focus on the issues, questions can be answered later