In the free online card game Hearthstone , some Win-Traders have now been caught after several botters. Their accounts have been banned. Forever, as Blizzard communicates.
Blizzard has no sense of humor when it comes to win trading, as seen from the current action. By logging in simultaneously at relatively high ranks, players were apparently able to play against each other with some degree of probability. This was exploited. Blizzard has been aware of these problems from the Arena mode in World of Warcraft and is taking a hard stance against such corruption of the eSports idea.
Blizzard responds by banning all affected accounts that took advantage of this. A few weeks ago, a longer ban until 2015 was only issued for the bots.
As PCGamer reports, “win trading” may have also influenced the composition of some tournaments. Invitations to these are sometimes based on ranking. Those who gained access to a tournament through such methods will be disqualified.
Reportedly, some more well-known names (like Specialist) are also affected by the bans. Among them is Gabe Walls, a player who made the win trading method public about a year ago to draw Blizzard’s attention to this flaw in Hearthstone to have it fixed.
While Gabe Walls protests against the ban, Specialist, as reported by liquidhearth, agrees with the ban. He openly admits that he was engaged in win trading because he finds it ridiculous that the participant field at BlizzCon is composed of such an easily manipulable system. Specialist finds something good in the ban. Now he has time to focus on his studies.
