Twist Update – Cheaters, Balance and Bugs

A new Twist format was launched yesterday, and it’s already been full of surprises. On the one hand, players are generally enjoying it, but on the other hand, it has a lot of issues so far. Hearthstone’s Community Manager RidiculousHat has addressed the most important ones in a reddit post.

The first, and biggest issue is cheaters. Some people have found a way to abuse the mode by modifying the client and using custom decks containing cards letting them win the game on Turn 1. Good news is that the issue is already being dealt with. The cheaters are getting banned in waves and the devs are working on a hotfix.

The second issue is balance. Arfus has been dominating the format so far, seeing ~10% higher win rate than the second-best Hero according to the early stats. Luckily, it won’t be left this way – the mode will have weekly changes for Heroes Health total, and they will also get bigger changes during regular balance patches. The first round of HP changes should happen early next week, but there’s no exact date. One important note is that Legendary cards used to unlock Twist Heroes won’t get their Dust refunded in case of Twist nerfs. Keep that in mind if you want to craft something.

And last – bugs. The team has already identified some of them (such as Arfus not getting Paladin and Shaman Excavate Legendaries, which funnily enough makes him stronger overall) and they will be updating the Known Issues post as they’re discovered and fixed.

You can read the original post below:

Hi all – Hat here. Making this post to give you all a quick update on a few concerns around Twist. I’m posting from mobile, so forgive both the brevity of this message and the capital letters.

1. Cheaters. We have both identified the root issue of how cheaters can use an unauthorized modified client to submit illegal decks as well as which accounts have been exploiting. Our first wave of bans for cheaters just went out and we’re going to do multiple bans today and every day this week. In addition, we’re working on a server side hotfix that we’re going to implement as soon as we can – a bunch of us worked on it late last night and early this morning, so hopefully it should be ready to go soon. Please monitor https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/hearthstone/t/294-known-issues/128459 for further updates.
2. Balance. Arfus is a good boy but wins too much. Like we said in the twist article, we’re going to do weekly changes for starting health totals and we’re also going to do regular changes with our normally scheduled balance patches. The intention is to do rapid adjustments to mitigate balance outliers and more thorough changes when we can to make sure the format stays fresh and dynamic. Since the twist decks are pre constructed, we have a wide variety of balance options available to us when we get to those scheduled balance patches down the line, including, possibly passives, decklists, and hero powers. We’re currently targeting early this week for the first round of health changes, but we don’t have confirmation on an exact date. Also, to clarify, because I’ve been asked a few times: we’ll continue to generally offer dust refunds when cards are changed. We don’t intended to expand dust refunds to cover changes to hero health, passives, hero powers, or decklists for the Whizbang’s Heroes Twist season.
3. Bugs. We’ve got a few bugs identified and I can confirm that Arfus is supposed to see both Paladin and Shaman treasures along with the other excavates he currently sees. Known issues will be the best place to monitor for both checking bugs and updates on their resolution.

Thanks for bearing with us here. We appreciate your patience and I’m sorry for some of the rough edges – I hope that you have still been able to enjoy the mode as it is now, but we’re going to keep working to make it better as quickly as we can.

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