It often feels like Hearthstone’s esports scene is akin to a neglected stepchild, both from the perspective of the developer and the wider pro gaming fanbase, many of whom sneer at the very idea of putting these virtual card-slingers on the same pedestal as a FalleN or a birdring, treating their gameplay experience very much like a high stakes coin-flipping exercise. Like so many cases of naïve criticism, this one misses the mark, but there is still a grain of truth to it; however, the real gambling on part of a pro Hearthstone player has a lot more to do with qualifier registration, third-party support stability, bad tournament formats and unexpected patches.  

Hitting the jackpot

Famously, Hearthstone was not meant to have any sort of competitive presence at all initially, with events like the ESL King of the Hill springing up to clench the thirst of the grassroots players who wanted to get rewarded for their excellence in the game. Most of these early events were marred by an invite-only nature, mostly featuring already popular streamer personalities over and over again, making it fairly difficult to break into their circle.   It wasn’t a great situation as it valued exposure over skill, meaning it initially seemed like a positive development when Blizzard stepped in and opened up the official circuit called the Hearthstone Championship Tour (HCT) to a wider playerbase – however, the changes since then have brought along most of the company’s usual missteps from their other esport properties from elbowing out organizers like they did with StarCraft 2 to valuing a viewer-friendly experience above all else as it’s sometimes the case with the Overwatch League. The Hearthstone Championship Tour’s format has been completely reworked every single year so far, meaning there isn’t much value in looking at its previous iterations. The system introduced in 2014 was obviously meant as an interim solution, especially considering the lack of in-game tournament client and a lack of wider infrastructure at the time. It is a major indictment of those behind the scenes that the same problems remain to this day – a few of them exacerbated even further than they used to be – and the game still has no tournament mode. There is one in the works, but even that is meant for casual fun rather than a tool for serious events as it’s been already announced that it will be lacking such functionality on release.  

Single-target removal

  Blizzard has swiftly monopolized the Hearthstone tournament scene, to such an extent that it is close to impossible to break even without good performances in the HCT or the World Cup-like Global Games. Support for most third-party events dried up and external sites that ran small cash tournaments alongside official qualifiers generally suffer from a lack of support or playerbase – StriveWire’s recent shutdown being one of the more unexpected developments in this particular market. Last February, all ten of the highest-earning Hearthstone players have received an overwhelming portion of their winnings from HCT events: it’s either that or nothing, which is a problem considering how unrewarding those opportunities are for almost every participant.  

Credit: Blizzard Entertainment

The road to the finals is long and arduous: a combination of ladder grinding and tournament finishes net you a place at the seasonal preliminaries, a 64-man field which is eventually whittled down to just two players. The four regions delegate eight to the seasonal championship, the winners of which make it to the world championship alongside the overall regional top earners. The devil is in the details: the competition is so swift that players regularly play on multiple servers at the same time with their best result counting towards their point total regardless of which region they’ve achieved it in. It’s a fairly prohibitive barrier – especially in Europe, widely considered to be the most competitive region other than China, which has its own unique system, supposedly under heavy strain and neglect – since your collection is locked to whichever server you’re playing on, you are to maintain separate ones everywhere if you want to keep up with the hardcore grinders. It was nine months ago that n0blord posted an excellent treatise on the Hearthstone subreddit about the state of the HCT preliminaries, being one of the few players who have qualified for every single one of them up until that point. Those events feature the 64 highest point-earners per region based on ladder finishes and tournament performances in a given three- or four-month period: he concluded that only two-thirds of them would break even at all, despite making such a strict cut-off.

Bad luck

"If you ever ask a seasoned competitive Hearthstone player how to get into the scene, most will reply with a short answer: “Don’t do it”.”

These playoff events are purposefully held in an offline environment at multiple third-party venues at the same time, leading to a whole host of infamous issues ranging from admin incompetence or the establishment closing down before the qualifier finished. As per n0blord, their locations can be surprisingly sparse, forcing an eight-hour drive from a Washington native to the nearest venue under the best of circumstances. Since there is no disconnection protection in the game, the current standing protocol forces a rematch in case of such incidents unless one of the players had a guaranteed winning board state at the time, leading to many suspicious momentary disappearances by losing players at these events. As for the offline events, Blizzard has really tried to step up this year with regularly organized tour stops, events which were meant to reward consistent tournament performers but were considered by most pros to be a -EV proposition due to the side of the field, the issue with the formats and the difficulty of qualification. The latter has nothing to do with the challenge: the online tour stop qualifiers are on a first-come-first-served basis with a limited bracket size, meaning any random low-rank ladder player can just take up one of the limited slots over a professional player – and the larger ones fill up only a few seconds after registration is opened. These events usually feature a Swiss-style bracket to separate the top eight from the rest and then double-elimination playoffs afterward with best-of-five series all along the way. Since there aren’t enough series played in the Swiss portion, the playoff participants are almost always decided by tie-breakers, which are in turn largely determined by the performances of your randomly assigned opponents throughout the tournament (some of whom may just drop out entirely once it’s clear they won’t be making it through) and how early you dropped your first series. Apart from not rewarding enough points and making it very difficult to perform consistently, many of these tour stops are marred by amateurish organizational issues. HCT Italy’s broadcast looped a 30-second ad for half an hour among other issues while HCT Seoul’s participants were forced to unlock their own cards before the event due to a lack of tournament-ready super accounts. The same event was also infamously marred by controversy over a patch that broke a certain archetype (Quest Druid) which was announced and brought live after the deck submission process ended. Initially, the organizers stated that no one was allowed to change their line-up, then eventually relented and allowed the affected players to change that one particular deck – a decision made after everyone’s submissions were already made public, giving those players a hefty advantage. Traveling to these offline events would be a burden even if you were rewarded for consistent performances – which is why it’s especially galling that Team 5 are planning to increase their numbers in the future, creating even more nameless throwaway winners along the way. It’s a jarring contrast with the fact that not one of Hearthstone’s world champions even managed to make it back to next year’s event, let alone defend their title. On top of it all, competitive events feature the widely criticized Conquest format where you bring four different decks and then ban one of your opponents’ before a best-of-five series where your goal is to win one game with each. The optimal strategy is to “target” a specific deck and hope like hell it can’t squeak past on a 75-25% match-up – rinse and repeat until the end of the tournament. Crucially, no in-game tools or options exist for newcomers to try out such a format, only having the single-game ladder available to them in the client.  

A path dimly lit

It’s tough to formulate a potential fix for such a mountain of issues in a small paragraph or two. For starters, the insistence on offline-only events make it way too big a commitment to pursue HCT glory without streaming income—or having a team which will then likely lead you down the same path—ironically re-creating the old issues from the early days of Hearthstone where only established content creators featured regularly. Having longer seasons, a transparent ranking system and a league instead of one tournament with a massive bracket would all be a positive change. Of course, all of this seems far-fetched and optimistic for a game that still doesn’t have a dedicated tournament mode or disconnection protection despite fielding four different world champions, none of whom even got the chance to defend their title. That one could perhaps be similar to chess, pitting them against the winner of a candidates’ tournament for a set amount of best-of-five series, allowing for long-term storylines and mindgames. Unfortunately, it seems like Hearthstone’s esport scene is more of a glorified marketing ploy than anything else for Blizzard. This could be understandable, if sad—they are a business after all with a fairly bad track record when it comes to the maintenance of their competitive gaming properties—but if that’s the case, why make it so complicated? ______ Enjoyed this piece? Follow the author for more Hearthstone content at @luci_kelemen.