Blizzard has apologized for issues that plagued the HCT Summer Playoffs and hopes to improve on things in the future.
Appa recently addressed the need for a Tournament Mode that could alleviate some of the issues Blizzard has been having.
Thank you to our players and viewers who participated in and watched the Hearthstone Championship Tour Americas Summer Playoffs on Sept. 16 and 17.
Over the course of the event, playoff venues experienced multiple DDoS attacks and equipment malfunctions that disrupted the tournament. As a result, affected players were unfortunately required to restart games due to disconnections. This also caused extended wait times between games. While we made efforts to address the issues as they were occurring, we want to be clear that the resulting experience this past weekend was not acceptable, and we sincerely apologize to the competitors who were adversely affected. There is still much we can do to improve the overall competitive experience, and to reduce the number of issues that can occur.
We are currently discussing several improvements that we would like to implement as early as the start of the next Hearthstone Championship Tour season. We are also going to reevaluate equipment requirements and venue capabilities to make sure we deliver a better competitive experience for our players, as well as design additional fallbacks in case of disconnects. The Hearthstone Championship Tour has grown over the years into a circuit with high expectations, and we are continually striving to deliver a better experience. We would not have been able to build this program without your participation, both as players and viewers, and your feedback is valuable as we build out our plans for Hearthstone Championship Tour 2018.
Please keep in mind that this is not the end of the conversation—we’re going to do better and we’ll fill you in on our progress as we move forward. Reach out to us on Facebook or Twitter if you have any feedback about #HCT to share. We look forward to hearing from you, now and into the future of competitive Hearthstone.