The following is being posted on behalf of Aleco Pors, Final Design Lead.
Hey everyone!
We’ve got a really big balance patch planned for later this week, with changes to around 30 cards, including buffs and nerfs—and a few Wild changes. Since this patch has different goals from most other patches, I’d like to provide you all with some more context as to what we’re thinking and how we got here.
In this patch, we are attempting to address issues which have cropped up with the overall health of Standard, as opposed to correcting issues with the health of the specific meta like we normally do. Alarm bells started to go off within the design team when we noticed that the power level of Hearthstone didn’t seem to drop much (if at all) after the recent annual rotation. This sparked a lot of internal discussion about certain gameplay patterns in the current meta – particularly hyper-efficient AoE board clears, “OTK” style decks that la...
Read moreNice!! Congrats :)
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 chan...
Read morePatch 29.2.1 is a server-side hotfix rolling out now with the following game updates and bug fixes.
Weekly Quest Update
The Weekly Quest requirements are now as follows:
XP granted by the Weekly Quests is not changing from the new higher amount.
Dev Comment: To get these changes out as fast as we could, we’ve put them into this server-only hotfix. That means there will be some weirdness where the numbers look unchanged in the client, but function as described above (so your rank...
Read moreYesterday, Patch 29.2 went live with some changes to Weekly Quests, making them harder to complete but grant more XP. We had seen that many players routinely completed their Weekly Quests through their regular play, without even really engaging with the Weekly Quest system. Our aim with the adjustments was to give all our players goals to play towards, and to reward our most engaged players (who would likely still complete the Weekly Quests without too much difficulty) for their commitment to the game.
But we’ve heard your feedback and it's clear that we pushed too far.
We want to reward players for their additional efforts, not make those rewards outside of their reach. That’s why we’re putting together an unscheduled hotfix patch scaling most of the Weekly Quest requirements back down to a number between what they were before and what they are now. We’ll keep the additional XP where it is. We’ll have more information on the timing of this unscheduled hotfix soon,...
Read moreThat’s not a bug: paying health isn’t taking damage.
Thanks to everyone reporting the Death Knight weapon freezing thing. The team’s looking into it.
Patch 29.2 is here, bringing with it Battlegrounds Season 7, Battlegrounds Duos, and much more! This is a big patch, so there are a few known issues we’re tracking. Refer to this post for updates throughout this patch.
The known issues we’re tracking this patch include:
devtrackers.gg