isn't it cheating, when big streamers always disconnect on purpose in bgs?

i find that very annoying...

As someone who doesn't watch streamers could you elaborate?

What if small streamers or non-streamers do it? Is it still cheating?

Quote From MenacingBagel

As someone who doesn't watch streamers could you elaborate?

If you disconnect you skip the combat (the animations) and have more time for your turn.  So they have a shortcut which enables and disables a firewall. 

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Quote From MenacingBagel

As someone who doesn't watch streamers could you elaborate?

If you disconnect you skip the combat (the animations) and have more time for your turn.  So they have a shortcut which enables and disables a firewall. 

Ah alright, that does seem a bit cheaty then but I guess if Blizz hasn't said anything about it it's cool. Although if everyone breaks windows that doesn't mean breaking windows is legal.

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What if small streamers or non-streamers do it? Is it still cheating?

you're right of course. but i have whitnessed this now on multiple big streamers, hence the title. 

I think that is an unfair advantage. Not sure if i would call it cheating but it certainly is close to it. Blizzard should crack down on this. But hey that is just my opinion.

It's clearly an exploit. An oversight by the developers led to an opening in how the game operates certain things which can then be abused for an unfair advantage. It's something that tends to be fixed even in single player games because it leads to the game being played in a totally unintended way. It's cheating in a competitive game like this. It doesn't matter if it's something big streamers or regular players do commonly. It's still a way to get an unfair advantage over the players that don't do that kinda thing. This is not how the game is supposed to be played and it's not allowed in an actual official competition. 

Has there been any intentional cheating ever aired on stream? Not that this is a phenomenon that's unknown to the devs.

Quote From dapperdog

Has there been any intentional cheating ever aired on stream? Not that this is a phenomenon that's unknown to the devs.

that depends what you call cheating. the described phenomenon is even used by sjow, who is one of the largest bg-streamers, live on stream.

Honestly, I'd say that's more so Hearthstone devs at fault rather than the players.

Same sort of thing applies with the new wild OTK with Hysteria Deathspeaker and Wretched Tiller.
If you somehow manage to survive the 60 damage OTK you have to disconnect from the game and reconnect again, otherwise the animation takes up so long that it skips your entire turn. 

It's just stupid.

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Has there been any intentional cheating ever aired on stream? Not that this is a phenomenon that's unknown to the devs.

that depends what you call cheating. the described phenomenon is even used by sjow, who is one of the largest bg-streamers, live on stream.

I'm surprised that they would actually do something like this in a way that can be recorded forever. I know its not really their fault that the game has a loophole in it, but its kinda scummy either way. It basically gives the player an insurmountable advantage with the infinite gold and khadgar combo.

I guess if the entire high legend, for lack of a better term, is doing it, then it makes no sense not to. But it does make the game less playable to those that just want to play normally. I thought BG was supposed to be a more casual laid back experience.

It should definitely be addressed bc people like me who are playing on a 4 year old laptop can't employ that- if I tried my dumbass machine would end up costing me more time...

For some builds it's the only way you can actually get enough time (the reconnect thing anyway, the firewall bit seems a bit much imo). Best way to fix it would be to give everyone the full turn time, then there would be no reason to use it

Is that what Dog Dog is doing all the time? I thought he just had a shitty computer, lol.

If it is an exploit that Blizz knows about, then all's fair if they have not addressed it. It's not like the players created a program to circumvent the timer. It's a bugwith a benefit. And high level streamers will employ any means to secure a win.

Quote From sinti

I wouldnt call it cheating, since the bad coding allows it, but i would soon look for if it hurts their viewership, i would not watch a streamer who constantly skips the combat, the tavern turn is not that exciting.

I wouldn't call it cheating either, but that's more for pragmatic reasons (I wouldn't want Blizzard to start banning people who often disconnect) than out of principle (the players are doing something outside of the game interface that gives them an advantage). On the other hand, players could just close and restart the client instead, which would save a bit less time, but still skips the battle without using any outside help.

One thing that Hearthstone got right is that the server makes all the decisions and the client only displays them. This makes actual cheating near impossible: someone would either have to crack the server or find some sequence of plays that makes the game unplayable on the opponent's client. The latter did happen a few times, but not often and the problems were fixed quickly.

However, Hearthstone also has a history of detailed and long animations. While detailed is good, the length can be a problem. In Constructed, clicking a played card on the left of the screen dismisses it, speeding up that part of the animation a bit, but animations on the board can still be agonizingly slow. In Battlegrounds, the entire battle is essentially a chain of animations, since determining the outcome is done in a fraction of a second.

Quote From sinti

With that said, it, and the achievements, kinda showed the "flaw" in the system, or rather the way it works: when the combat starts, before you can even see the board, the game already decided on all the moves and who wins or loses that fight. You can only watch the motions. It can still give you that rush of pulling off a lucky victory, but if you know everything has been already predetermined, that feeling gets quite sour.

Im not a developer, so cant speak for if and how it could be changed, but having the combat phase be literally irrelevant, that does not bring me much enjoyment from player perspective. With that said, i still like to play BG, but i would enjoy it more, if the combat phase mattered at all. I still get angry/happy about the result, so i guess the brain can be fooled even if you know what is going on, oh well.

I am a developer and the problem is more fundamental than you might think. Actually, there are two separate things going on here:

• whether the battle outcome is predetermined
• whether the client knows the battle outcome before the player does

Despite their name, Random Number Generators aren't actually random, they just create a sequence of unpredictable numbers. But given the same initial state, the seed, the RNG will produce the same sequence of numbers every time it runs. It's possible to re-seed an RNG from actually random sources, like timestamps from user inputs and network packets arriving, but since those sources of true randomness are limited, they're usually only tapped for generating secure random numbers, used in encryption keys for example.

But even if they re-seeded the RNG with a true random seed, that wouldn't change the game in any way from the player's perspective: if the server can run the battle in milliseconds, the outcome is still fixed long before the player knows the result. If you can't tell the difference between a predetermined outcome and a truly random one, does that difference even matter?

I think the solution would be in addressing the second problem: the mismatch between the time that the client knows the outcome and the time the player knows it. One way would be to have a fast forward and/or skip button in the client during the battle. That way, every player would have the option to have more turn time by not watching the animations, not only the tech savvy. I think this is also more fair, because different players are paired up in each round and one battle can take a lot longer to animate than another.

Alternatively, the server could drip-feed the RNG outcomes to the client, so reconnecting would not skip any part of the battle. But that's a lot harder to implement, since the server would have to be able to predict all the animation times, so it knows when to send which part of the battle report. Given the history of bugs caused by server and client state being out of sync (minions changing position on the board, spellburst icon missing), I think it's safer if they avoid this approach.

Quote From sinti

I wouldnt call it cheating, since the bad coding allows it,

this bit though, and I've seen a few people say that it's fine as it's coded this way

I'm pretty sure this should be considered an exploit, as in if something is considered an unintended behaviour, and you find it, you're supposed to report it and stop using it, otherwise you might get banned, that's how it usually is written in ToS and that's what happened to people in other blizz games

A few years ago, during World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion, the titular raid boss got defeated for the first time by a guild which employed a certain unintended interaction. The boss broke the edges off his platform, making positioning-based mechanics more difficult. This guild discovered that using a specific bomb-type item would bring these edges back, making the boss a lot easier. Blizzard, who was very unhappy with this, banned them for exploiting. The guild defended itself citing it was "clever use of game mechanics".

The reason I bring this up, is because you could make the same arguments for the firewall skip. Clearly, this was not intended by the developers and you need to actively turn the firewall on and off for the cheat, which point towards it being an exploit. On the other hand, they did code it this way, and certain strategies go from practically unplayable to very strong by using this method, which might point to it being clever use of game mechanics. Personally, I think it's exploiting, but I can't blame people for using it. At very high MMRs you put yourself at a serious disadvantage if you don't use it, and in a competitive game-mode I understand people doing anything legal to win. And since Blizzard does not take any measures against it, you'd be a fool not to utilise it.

You just need to decide whether this bothers you enough -- or whether you care enough about ranking in a game mode with no other rewards -- to quit playing until Blizzard fixes it.

If enough players stop playing due to this exploit, they'll have no choice but to address it.