Blizzard has just published another bot ban update. It seems like they aren’t slowing down – we just had another massive ban wave. Since the last post they made 3 weeks ago, they banned another 240k accounts.
On top of that, they finally took some proactive steps for the current Arena situation. To reduce the number of so-called “barcode accounts” people encounter (bot accounts that farmed gold for perfect Arena drafts), people who retire run early multiple times will get put in a separate pool for that run. This won’t completely prevent this kind of tactic, but it will make it much harder for bot accounts with lots of gold to just retire dozens of runs until they get a perfect one. Or rather – they will still be able to do it no problem, but there’s a high chance that run will be logged and put into a separate matchmaking pool, so normal players won’t have to worry about it.
It’s just an experiment, but apparently, the feedback so far has been good. The problem has been plaguing Arena for quite some time now, so I hope that the solution works in the long run
Read more in the official post below:
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!
Well, this is a really good improvement. Nice solution!