Blizzard’s free card game Hearthstone is cracked. Luckily, the culprit is one of the good guys.
Elie Bursztein is one of the leading members of Google’s Anti-Abuse Team (kind of like Google’s police) and is apparently also a top-notch hacker and an avid Hearthstone fan. Together with his wife Celine, he created a tool that would practically ruin Hearthstone because it takes the thinking out of the game for players. However, he refrained from releasing it because Blizzard was able to make him understand the consequences of his actions: Bursztein’s intellectual work would ruin the enjoyment of millions of players.
The tool could, among other things, provide a quite precise prediction of what the opponent will play in the next round. And it would then display this to the user of the tool. Such a live-analysis tool would – as anyone can imagine – be a huge advantage for the user. It would probably take Blizzard’s card game by storm and harm Hearthstone in the long run. It would be a bit like every player having their own chess computer in their pocket. And since Bursztein apparently still intended to refine the project further, it would have become tricky in the foreseeable future.
And Blizzard is like: Yeah, great job, but kind of dumb for Hearthstone, right?
The Burszteins, Elie and Celine, presented their program – with a noticeable French accent – then in English to hacker colleagues at Defcon 22 in Las Vegas, a kind of hacker convention. There or shortly thereafter, they were approached by Blizzard employees. They were, according to Elie Bursztein, enthusiastic about the work but convinced the top hacker not to release the tool because it would ruin the game.
Despite the time he and his wife invested in the program, Bursztein therefore wants to keep the program to himself.
There exists a video of the 42 minutes in which Bursztein presents his work on the program, most of which revolves around formulas, logic, and considerations to make the game explainable, and has very little to do with any exciting hacking actions:
