Barcode Accounts, Explained: How Cheaters and Botters Ruin Classic and Arena

If you’re interested in exploring Hearthstone’s many alternate game modes, you have probably encountered your fair share of odd accounts lately. Depending on the format you encounter them in, they share a different set of characteristics. In Classic, they are blatant bots, playing poorly and slowly, making up a worringly significant portion of the ladder, farming gold as they ruin your games. Or you might find them in Arena, piloting a monstrously strong deck and sporting a 0.03 average on the leaderboards. Only one thing is common among them: the random string of characters that make up their usernames.

Barcode Accounts: A Definition

To start off our discussion, let’s take a look at the bottom of the Arena leaderboards. Yes, that’s right: not the top, where the best and most talented players reside, but the bottom. What kind of averages would you expect there from at least 30 runs played? You would expect those who played this much Arena in such a relatively short period of time to at least score the occasional win or two, right?

Well, you would be wrong:

Though we don’t know how many runs these accounts have accumulated in the season (since runs over thirty also count, with the originals taking on a weird weighting in the new Arena leaderboard system), a quick calculation shows that 0.06 average wins would amount to 1.8 wins in total over 30 runs, with 0.02 clocking in at 0.6. Their battletags are also weird, a random set of characters that seem to have been generated by an especially overcaffeinated cat running over the user’s keyboard.

So what’s going on here?

These are the exact same accounts you will encounter in Classic mode, with the original cardback, starting heroes, basic cards, and clearly automated, Innkeeper-like play. The bot swarm has been so egregious that it’s rendered the mode all but unplayable for the select few (like yours truly) who would otherwise be interested in revisiting that slice of Hearthstone history on occasion.

The point of all this is to accumulate a nonsensical amount of gold, then to sell the accounts off for real money. Of course, we’ve seen this before in Hearthstone’s history, but not to this extent and not with the specific goal that seems to currently impact the gameplay experience.

How to Ruin Arena in Five Easy Steps

What seems to be happening here is that people buy these accounts to repeatedly retire Arena drafts until they stumble into a super-powerful deck to take out for a spin. With such a large amount of accounts available (and with little work involved with the automated gold farming), the prices are, unsurprisingly, low.

Experienced Arena community members suggested that his phenomenon has originated from the recently shuttered Chinese server of the game, where streamers buying accounts like this and playing runs with ultra-highroll decks is seen as exciting content. Based on anecdotal evidence and a quick look at the bottom of their respective Arena leaderboards, the situation seems worse on the Americas server than on Europe, with more such accounts populating the lists – and indeed, this is where our screenshot was taken from as well. I myself play on Europe, albeit often at nightmarish hours, and while such accounts do cross my paths ever so often, the situation is nowhere near as bad as with some of the North American streamers I occasionally watch.

It should be fairly straightforward to see why these artificially boosted decks have a negative impact on the gameplay experience for casual and committed players alike. The average draft of your opponents is now statistically skewed above what you can reasonably expect from your own, and since these bought accounts are generally used by less committed, intellectually interested, or otherwise experienced players, you can easily run into a monster deck like this at a much lower bracket (say, 1-2) than you would reasonably expect to.

And if you are a tryhard player going for a strong leaderboard finish, these accounts introduce a ton of added variance to your attempt since it is the luck of the draw as to whether you queue into a legit player or a barcode account, and those more successful at dodging these cheaters will inevitably end up with a higher average than their less fortunate counterparts.

Let’s not forget that players pay for each Arena entry, either with in-game gold or real currency, making the months-long infestation of barcode accounts even less acceptable.

What Should Blizzard Do About the Barcode Accounts?

Ban them. It’s that simple on the surface: all activities involved are violating the terms of service. Using bots to pilot accounts is just as much against the rules as buying and selling them is – especially so when it is done in bulk.

We have seen excessive botting before in Hearthstone’s history, and Blizzard was able to stomp it out at that time. Now, the situation seems to be more widespread across multiple modes and has been going on for a worryingly long time. Though a lack of detailed communication is understandable in the short term so as to not alert those involved about an upcoming banhammer, but the situation has been worrisome for a long time and a serious detriment to those interested in either Arena or Classic mode – arguably significant enough for a WarGames scenario, where the only winning move is not to play.

The problem in this case, however, is that those accounts are expendable. Yes, doing regular rounds of bans will surely reduce the issue, but not completely eliminate it. If someone can create a new account, farm enough gold to get an insane Arena draft with bots, and sell it in the span of a few days, even weekly ban waves wouldn’t be enough.

Another solution would be to put some extra restrictions on the Arena format – because that’s the format the whole issue is centered around. Right now, all you need to do is unlock every class, which is very quick and easy for bots. But they could, for example, introduce a higher level cap – needing to hit level X with all of the Heroes before you can access Arena would mean that the accounts would need to be active for longer before they can start doing their drafts, giving Blizzard more time to react and ban them. Sadly, that would lead to some other problems – like legitimate new players not being able to play Arena. While I don’t think that it’s a common format for newcomers, they should still be able to enjoy it if they want to.

It’s something Blizzard has to figure out – and pretty soon. It’s ruining both the Arena and the Classic experience for just about anyone (but mostly competitive Arena players, who the issue affects most). And I probably don’t have to explain why it’s bad for the game.