Now, I think the intention behind this change, at least on surface, is laudable. But we recently saw a change to weekly quests which seems very likely to be intended to drive player engagement up by making people play more for reduced increase in EXP. So I can't completely erase from my mind the possibility that this change was also made to increase the number of games players need to reach the same rank (and thus the same monthly rewards) than before.

No. This is purely to fight bots, and should have no impact on real players, apart from not running into many bots. Apart from bots, Peak Rank and MMR are highly correlated (which is why it was fine to work this way for so long).

People already ranked up all the time against equal-skill opponents, even in D5-1 where there were very few bots and no winstreaks.

Its_Big_Fungus

I'm a little confused on this. What do you mean by Peak Rank? I understand that while you have Bonus Stars, you get matched against people with the same Peak Rank.

The issue here is that after you use up your bonus stars (usually somewhere around mid Plat rank for me) you would previously be matched against people who were Plat rank, at least for me at 9 stars. This would make it easy to climb to your normal rank, as those people would be lower skilled.

But with the new system, the way it reads in the post is that at, say, Plat 5 (if your stars run out there), instead of fighting a mix of others who are climbing + people who are naturally at a Plat 5 skill level, you will ALWAYS be pitted against people of your MMR.

This means that the gap between bonus star climbing and competing against people at your natural rank will now take twice as long to get through as it did before.

It also sucks for people like me, whose main problem in leveling up is time, not winrate. I already play at ranks below where my MMR is because I don't like focusing on one mode, so this is going to result in a net negative experience for me.

The issue here is that after you use up your bonus stars (usually somewhere around mid Plat rank for me) you would previously be matched against people who were Plat rank, at least for me at 9 stars. This would make it easy to climb to your normal rank, as those people would be lower skilled.

I think this might be the misunderstanding. You think that the people in Plat were lower skill than you. They're not. They're other people just like you, in very similar situations. Those were fair matchups. They had roughly the same MMR as you. They're also people that had 9 stars and dropped off in mid-Plat, and are climbing too. Nothing has changed for you.

adanine

One criticism I can see is that you need to craft the legendary card corresponding to the exact name of the hero to unlock it, but some of these heroes have two to four different cards - and the art used often doesn't even correspond to the relevant card.

For example, there are four different Finley legendary cards in constructed, but from the wording in the article it appears only the League of Explorers version unlocks Finley as a hero in this twist season... but Finley's portrait in Twist appears to be art from a single player adventure store bundle and not the League of Explorers Finley card? Isn't that confusing?

N'Zoth is even worse! It's using the art from Madness at the Darkmoon Faire that's evocative of the Darkmoon Faire Nzoth card, but requires the Whispers of the Old Gods card. Same with Dr. Boom - using the art from the Hero card from Boom Labs, but seems to require the GvG legendary to unlock. Edit: Brann is using Uldum art, but seems to require League of Explorers Brann, not Uldum Brann. There's a ton more examples of this as well.

Can we just unlock these cards if we have any of their legendary cards, not the specific one in the name? I can easily see people crafting the wrong legendary by accident, when they're just trying to play a new hero.

Selecting a locked hero shows a Craft button to easily craft the required card.

deevee12

a huge new Twist season with several unique decks and new hero powers

Wait a goddamn second...

The vague teaser phrasing we used for this made it sound like Duels, when Duels is already on your mind. We didn't intend any similarity perception there. It nothing at all like Duels.

I'm super hyped for it, we've put a ton of work into it. It should feel real special, but nothing like Duels.

CheezCurls1230

Yeah, I have seen reports of this ever since March 19, so I kind of suspect that core rotation has broken the solution as it has in the past. I am sure u/HS_Celestalon will see to it that the new legacy version of Ysera the Dreamer will work in the future but maybe it will take some time.

Hey. Yeah, dang, missed fixing this one in time for the next major patch, sorry about that. Will try to have this fixed in 29.4.

ItsJamali

In what ways would you expect it to be communicated?

New players are far more likely to be facing bots, and far less likely to know about the report function.

I've played through the new NPE a few times, at some stage you can face other players also playing through the NPE.

After your first match against another human would seem the appropriate time to have a short pop up tutorial showing players how to add other players as friends, and also how to use the report function.

This way the focus can be on encouraging the social aspect of the game, instead of the report feature itself.

For everyone else they could be shown the same pop up tutorial on logging in like other announcements.

Any less and you're talking about social media posts which just don't reach a wide enough audience.

Solid ideas, thanks!

ItsJamali

Appreciate the response, and that there are limited resources.

The most meaningful feedback I could give you is:

1. The existence of the report feature is not communicated to players, it's something you have to figure out yourself or learn about from forums.

2. The Botting option should be top level, cheating is synonymous with hacking to a large number of players, so leaves room for confusion. People say it's buried because you don't see the Botting option until you've already selected Cheating.

1. In what ways would you expect it to be communicated?
2. Cheating, botting, hacking, etc., all fall into a general category of "this person is doing something unfair", and all the user-testing we've done has shown that the most-recognizable umbrella term for that is 'cheating', but I'm happy to hear feedback on different opinions on that.

ItsDominare

Appreciate you're not going to go into details on detection methods here, but do the in-game reports actually help? I try to remember to do one if I see an obvious bot, but you never get any feedback so it's hard to know if one is screaming into the wind or not.

Yes, the in-game reports absolutely matter. We agree that it'd be great to give you the sort of "someone you reported got banned" feedback that other games do, but we haven't had the time to build that yet. Please just trust us that it does help though.

ItsJamali

1. Can you confirm if reporting bots in game is useful?

A lot of players feel that reporting bots is a waste of time, especially when the option is buried under "cheating".

1. If it's helpful are there any plans to give players an incentive to report bots?

In some games you receive a notification if someone was banned with your help, in others there are actual rewards. For Hearthstone there's simply no feedback.

1. Are there any plans to combat the bots besides banning them more frequently? Is banning them actually reducing the number of bots over time?

People have suggested things like PvE puzzles as in game captchas, separate ques for accounts receiving many bot reports, and changes to arena to deincentives bot owners farming for runs.

Is there anything you can share with the community?

1. Yes, the in-game reports absolutely are useful. It's not a waste of time. I'm not sure how it's "buried" though; it is cheating.
2. We agree that it'd be great to give you the sort of "someone you reported got banned" feedback that other games do, but we haven't had the time to build that yet. Please just trust us that it does help though.
3. Talking about specifics would help the bots, but yes, we are combatting bots in different ways, and will continue to expand our bot-fighting tactics. We take the problem very seriously.

badimojo

Does anybody spend the extra time reporting bot accounts? And following up to that, does anybody think that reporting is a worthwhile thing to do?

(I do report if I can remember to but I'm not very sure that it's worth the trouble).

Yes, Reporting does matter, a lot. Please continue to do so!

The botters are fighting us pretty hard, but we're fighting back. We're continuing to ban bots, it just needs to be done in waves. (Though we are planning to increase the frequency of those waves soon too.)

tokzik_

no idea. i accidentally spent over an hour trying to find both of them, and theres a huge discord full of people looking. theres still not even a hint at the entrance, let alone the solution, so it might not be available yet. something to do eith the upcoming event maybe

No waiting needed. It's solvable.

I fell for this at first too. Bravo.

I love you, Clay.

Bacon was the codename for Battlegrounds during initial development.

Mass Opening your Catch-Up Packs works out the same as individually opening them. (It opens them sequentially under the hood)

So neither way is optimal (but opening them individually might be more fun!)

It's live now!

This is not a collectible card. It's the Legendary Excavation Reward for Death Knight. (So you'll get it after Excavating 4 times in a game as a DK).

Megadarth

"ever" as in "ever since you've opened the first pack 8 years ago" or "ever since legendary duplicate protection was implemented"?

Ever since duplicate protection was implemented, back in... Early 2020, I think? Long before these cards were released.