Hello all,
We have another quick update on our continued fight against botting in Hearthstone. Since last month’s bans, we’ve continued to refine our bot-detection systems. This week, we actioned nearly 85,000 accounts for botting. We’re continuing our efforts against these cheaters, and you can continue helping by using the in-game reporting function to report suspected bots.
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!
Appreciate the response, and that there are limited resources.
The most meaningful feedback I could give you is:
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.
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.
- 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".
- 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.
- 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?
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.
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.)
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!
Me and my friend think this looks really like AI art. And I thought this already with several other cards this expansion, anyone else? It's very off-putting.
Hi! Want to chime in here because I've been seeing more and more comments like this recently. Our outsourcing process for card art includes feedback from many qualified individuals (some of them also contributing card artists!) and significant iteration. We see these images being created from the sketch phase to the final product and everything in between. As someone else already said in the replies, the artists are credited on each card, and I encourage you to go check out their other work. :)
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