At the first major event of the Masters Tour 2019 for Hearthstone , there are serious doubts about whether everything was above board. A mishap with a third party jeopardizes the integrity of the tournament, as a leak apparently impacted the course of the tournament. Now Blizzard is under pressure to develop a tournament format themselves.
What kind of tournament was it? This was the first event of the “Masters Tours 2019” in Hearthstone: 287 players out of 300 qualifiers traveled to Las Vegas for the “largest Hearthstone event to date,” as inven reports.
It was about $500,000 in prize money, and numerous matches were played in Vegas until 8 finalists remained to determine the winner. It was truly a massive Hearthstone event, for which Blizzard also advertised in-game.
The tournament was played in the “Specialist” format. Players choose a class in advance and then submit a deck and two variants of that deck with minor changes.
They then play this class throughout the tournament.
Third-party allows secret data to be viewed
What went wrong? It was leaked before the tournament started which classes would be played. A “tournament interface” from the company Battlefy was accessed, and this information was circulated.
This meant it was already early known that the class “Warrior” would be dominant in the tournament.
The class distribution was publicly available before the submitted decks were “locked” and could no longer be changed.
Some players change their decks to “Anti-Warrior”
How did the players react? This tweet was discussed. Anyone who had the information that there would be so many Warriors in the tournament could adjust their deck.
And indeed there were changes: In the final tournament, 2 Warriors and 3 Paladins were suddenly less represented, but there were 2 more Mages and 8 more Hunters.
This change is attributed to the eventual winner, Dog. It is said that he had planned to play an “OTK” Paladin but then saw the data and switched to “Mage.” With that deck, he later won the tournament.
On reddit, some say that Dog deserved the victory and played excellently – but doubts have arisen about whether he would have won without this leak.
This is what the culprit says: Battlefy initially denied that the leak had impacted the tournament’s course. After the leak, there were only marginal changes to the decks.
Later, Battlefy admitted that accessing the Battlefy API did indeed affect the tournament.
(1/3) We were wrong to assert that the competitive integrity of the event was not impacted. For this, we apologize.
— Battlefy (@Battlefy) June 17, 2019
It is now uncertain whether everything was above board at the tournament in Las Vegas.
Now Battlefy wants to work on improving things.
What does Blizzard have to do with it? The criticism from many players is currently directed at Blizzard for having decided in 2018 not to develop a “proper tournament” mode for Hearthstone, which was originally planned. Instead, they rely on third parties like Battlefy.
At that time, Blizzard stated that they could not achieve a tournament mode that met the requirements of Hearthstone, and that it was only important for a small group of players.
The criticism on reddit now is: A huge company like Blizzard should offer a “tournament mode” and not rely on “semi-competent third parties”.
There has been no statement from Blizzard regarding the incident.
