Esports
Blizzard banning Hearthstone bots is a big mistake
Last week’s crackdown on bots in Hearthstone is a bad move, according to card wizard Kripparrian.
On May 11, 1997 IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Since then, the relentless progress of technology has spawned machines, programs and algorithms so advanced that few intellectual pursuits are safe from the cold, silicon logic of a bot. Not even the most honourable of games, Hearthstone, is free from their artificial clutches.
So, in a bid to rid the world of the robotic scourge, Blizzard banned several thousand accounts found to be using automated software last week. After the purge, the company said: “These accounts will be banned until 2015. As we’ve stated, fair play is at the core of the Hearthstone experience, and cheating and botting will not be tolerated. We’re committed to creating a fun and rewarding environment for our players.”
As a result, makers of the popular Hearthcrawler software announced their immediate closure following talking with Blizzard. “After discussing this with Blizzard, it’s clear we have to take off our services/products now. Please note that we’re not going to be commenting further on this,” the group posted on their website. “Thank you all for being part of our community. We are very sad about this but you also know botting is against the rules and we all knew that the day when our products doesn't work anymore would come.”
But what if Blizzard were wrong? Hearthstone’s top streamer, Octavian “Kripparrian” Morosan, believes there is more value to botting than cheating, and Blizzard may have been a bit quick on the draw with the banhammer. Red Bull spoke with the Canadian card-slinger to see what bots could mean for Hearthstone, and why they can be fun.
Kripparrian has spoken out many times on the subject of bots, on stream and in his regular YouTube vlogs, confessing to trying them out a few times himself. Mostly, he is a curious party, interested in how they work and discovering more about the game through watching a computer approach plays from a solely logical standpoint. The tactic most bots employ is one of min-maxing, weighing the mana cost against the potential damage output. It is a relatively crude method, but one that achieves end goals easily enough.
“Some people play just to get their golden portraits, or get all the cards,” Kripp told Red Bull. “Those that don't find it fun to play all day run bots to achieve their goal.” Running a bot overnight, by virtue of sheer volume of matches and brute-force tactics, can net a botter their 500 wins for a prestigious golden hero portrait, or the gold from their daily quests. Some of the more sophisticated programs can even fake their way to Rank 4 or 5, and set the account up with enough gold for all the expert cards in their deck. This is where the harm to Blizzard’s economy comes in.
Hearthstone, by nature of being a free-to-play game, lives off impatience. Expert cards are more powerful than basic, and though you can scrub your way through a few challenges for some gold early on, filling out a deck to compete quickly is most likely going to involve a purchase. Leaving a loophole past this point could be quite damaging to Blizzard who, three weeks before their mass banning, reported $114 million revenue in 2014 to date. But for 2013’s BlizzCon Innkeeper Invitational runner-up, the money isn’t the reason.
“In Hearthstone I feel that an occasional bot game does not really ruin the experience of a player,” Kripp says. “The problem comes up when almost half of the 'people' you queue into end up being bots because you expect to play players, not AI when queuing up. It generally feels less of an accomplishment to defeat a bot than an actual player.”
He’s right, of course. There is a reason people play in the Arena rather than the Practice mode, and that’s to test themselves against another person. The thrill of outsmarting a human who is trying to do the same to you is what makes even non-professional games so exciting. And it’s easy to tell when you’re being botted, as the video of PC Gamer’s Tim Clark shows below. The steady, unwavering rhythm of moves, the eery lack of targeting, the deafening silence that meets your constant “Sorry!” spam. But worse still is the knowledge that someone somewhere is sleeping through your futile battle against the machine, so what’s even the point?
Well, some people aren’t sleeping. They’re watching. And learning. Just like Kripp. “Botting is pretty fun because it’s a completely different way of learning and improving in a game. Fine tuning the bot and seeing it beat players at a higher rate each time,” Kripp told Red Bull. “Also some people just find it fun to benchmark their decks through decision algorithms.”
These algorithms, as Kripp explains, can be remarkably complex. Throwing a newly crafted deck into the hands of one can be a good way of removing all other factors that could affect its performance in a player’s hands. For instance, say you’re very used to playing Priest, but you want to test out a new Zoolock deck. Plug it into your bot and see how the cards play out – especially as Warlock is one of the classes bots are particularly good at pretending to be.
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Ideally, Kripp would like these sorts of bots to be incorporated into a ladder system of their own, so players can benchmark their decks and perhaps be used as a sort of “timeout” to dump shadowbanned players into. Bots are somewhat limited by their programming, very complex behaviours like taking death rattles into account and judging the possible cards your opponent can play are hard to teach them. But Kripp believes bots can be made better, and that this is not the death of the digital Hearthstoner.
“I think with enough effort and work, a bot can be made to replicate a very good Hearthstone player exactly,” Kripp says. “There are still bots and while they may not grow much for a while, they'll still be around. I also think that because there isn't anything you can sell through RMT [Real Money Trading] from botting in Hearthstone, that not that many botting organisations make much of an effort.”
Perhaps now is the time for botters to up their game and aim for the Deep Blue skies.
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