Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Abusing of Hearthstone World Championship Points is being done at the moment

TL;DR Somebody organised a tournament that got accepted as HWC point giving by Blizzard, but he didnt let anyone register, made up all the participants and the results, probably for his own benefit.

Hello kind people of reddit, Im Skyythe, and Im one of the tryhards that are grinding HWC points in order to secure a spot in the Winter Regional Qualifiers for HWC 2016. In order to that, I have been following all blizzard approved tournaments on their site, and participating in most of them. Here is the site if you are interested.

Now if you check out todays date, you can see, that in Europe there is a tournament called "Hearthstone Christmas Brawl #1". I have not only checked out all the tournaments, i also sign-ed up for most of them as early as possible, because room for participants in these tournaments get filled up really quick (you can see 500-600 pepople on the waiting list on other HWC point giving tournaments). But the strange thing is, that not only for the 3-4 weeks this tournament was announced, i couldnt register for this cup, but also, today, before 5 minutes the tournament should have started, it was still inpossible to sign up for the event.

And before you ask, no, I wasnt the only one, who couldnt sign up for the tournament, if you check out the dsicussion log, other bunch of people have been also asking the same question. Furthermore, I did take part in past tournaments that were organised on challonge, so im well aware of the fact, how you can sign up for a tournament there.

But somehow, after checking back on it a couple hours later, the tournament was running with 32 participants, to my surpsire...

So I got curious, and started to randomly add some people from the bracket, maybe they can explain me how they registered for the cup. One of them accepted my friend request, and you can see our discussion here.

Basically he has no idea, that there was a tournament like this, he didnt register, or play any games in this tournament, and the actual tournament, that he mantioned, is a real one on strivewire, being held at the same time, where several other players from that tournament also participating in this suspicious cup...

What Im thinking, is that the organiser of Hearthstone Christmas Brawl #1 made up a tournament, got it to be accepted as an official Blizzard approved tournament, then he copyed some battletags from an other tournament, then made up all the matches, and probably put himself in the finals to get those precious HWC points, that some of us have to work hard for.

I did contact blizzard, but havent gotten a response yet, and I hope that by giving it publicity this might help to get the problem solved.

Edit: Please dont call out Blizzard yet, from participating in other tournaments, I got the impression they actually do check the tournaments afterwards too, and take it pretty seriously, and they might have just done the same thing even if I dont point out to them, I just wanted to make sure It doesnt go unnoticed.

Edit2: Seems like the creator of the Challogne tournament deleted the previous bracket, and made a new one, where the participants arent the same, and you cant see the discussion where around ~10 people were asking how to sign-up.

Tweet