April 2024 Bot Ban Update

Hey everyone, we have another bot ban update to share with you.

Since our last post, we’ve continued our regular cadence of anti-bot detection and actions. In that time, we’ve actioned over 240,000 additional accounts.

In Patch 29.2, we also made an update to Arena matchmaking as a proactive step against extreme play patterns specific to that Mode, sometimes referred to as “barcode accounts.” Now, if you repeatedly retire runs early, you will be put into a separate matchmaking pool for your run. Being able to retire an Arena run early is an important feature for when you want to play a different deck. But, for a small percentage of players, it’s used to repeatedly draft new decks until they get one they consider extremely strong. This change preserves the ability for those players to find and play with those extremely strong decks if they want to, but they’ll have to play against each other if they do so, for a fairer overall play experience for all players.

Initial feedback on this change has been good, but it’s still early on in this experiment. We’ll continue to monitor the data and listen to your feedback on how our changes affect your experience in-game, and make whatever changes are needed to make Hearthstone better for all our players.

Thanks and we’ll see you in the Tavern!