Goodbye Hearthstone

20 Jan, 2023

Hearthstone is a digital card game made by Blizzard. It's celebrating its 10th birthday this year and to celebrate Blizzard is killing off the competitive scene. This tweet lays out the changes they are making (tournament qualification only from ladder, a tiny number of participants, and the tournaments don't have a prize pool unless you make it all the way to the world championship). It also has some heartfelt thoughts from the community, many of which are losing professional careers (either fledgling or well-established).

I do appreciate the community response to this tweet by the Product Manager for Hearthstone Esports. In general people are understanding that developers and other community managers didn't make these choices and aren't any happier with them than they are.

I started playing Hearthstone just about 10 years ago at the very beginning when one of my World of Warcraft friends introduced me to it. A few years later I hit legend for the first time and started learning about the tournament scene. After winning a few tournaments I found myself 2 qualification points short from qualifying from the professional HCT tournament - while only gathering points for half of the qualification cycle. The next cycle I won more tournaments, had 2 top 10 finishes¹ and qualified for HCT Summer 2017. I was in the middle of college, had just turned 20, and went to play my first in-person event in California. My mom road tripped with me and we had a great time of it. I went with some vastly different decks, not bringing Raza Priest when it was the most dominant deck in the game, and finished 1-3 (I think). The performance was disappointing, but I was really glad I brought the decks I wanted to play and that I was good at rather than trying to follow the meta. After my mom and I took a mini vacation at Disney and had some good laughs.

The rest of these recollections are roughly how I remember them, but some of the corroborating links are hard to find.

In January of 2017 I went to my first international tournament: I signed up for an open cup in Toronto. This was my first time taking a plane out of the country (if only to Canada). I performed okay, but didn't qualify for the playoffs. I remember one memorable series against Purple where it seemed to me all the other players were gathered behind him in support and I let my nerves get the better of me.

I got one series away from going to the Hearthstone Tour Stop Copa America in Rio de Janeiro in April of 2018. My only claim to fame here was someone (maybe LanguageHacker, although if I'm wrong I apologize) getting rather salty at me when I had eliminated them the round prior.

When they started doing tour stops instead of online open-cups, it became a lot harder for me to gather the points I needed. Winning a few 64-person open cups online was a lot easier for me than qualifying purely through ladder points which takes an enormous time and skill investment. I did have one other HCT I was close to qualifying for from ladder points.

Fall 2018 I had essentially locked in a spot for the upcoming HCT. I had some nice finishes and whatever other qualifying points I could gather, and I was securely in the top 25 for the ladder finish (maybe around 10 or so). In these days some twitch streamer would do a stream of the final hours of the season, spectating various high legend players. I volunteered to play a game of one of my favorite decks, topsy turvy priest, which is not what I had been climbing with (some control warrior variant). I ended up losing two games horribly, losing my rating. I tried to gain it back but backslid instead and ended up missing the HCT because of this, including the $1000 minimum prize for attending (and up to hundreds of thousands of dollars if you win and make it to the world championship). Looking back on this, I can only laugh at my silliness, although at the time I was pretty devastated. A learning experience for sure.

This signaled the end of my attempts to qualify for the professional circuit as my composure was shattered. I still played hearthstone casually and played the collegiate league with a couple friends. We finished top 8 in the playoffs (I believe top 4 went to the live studio in Florida to playout the last of the series. Whatever the cutoff was, we were just before it). Sometime after this, I fully quit hearthstone's ranked mode although I still followed a few streams and would play the occasional battle grounds.

Fast forward to the fall of 2022 and I decided I wanted to get back into the game. I had a blast learning new decks and although the tournament scene for the year was over (that is qualification was no longer possible), I was looking forward to playing some master's qualifiers and maybe qualifying further. So this announcement, which was supposedly coming in December only to be delayed to now is a kick in the pants.

There are a lot of things to point to: low viewership numbers from the Youtube partnership, current lockage of the Chinese market via Netease issues, Microsoft's acquisition that is currently blocked, or general tech downsizing in a bear market. Whatever it is, I'm sad to see one of my favorite hobbies end this way. I thank all the friends in the community for the good times we've had. And even Blizzard too, because even though now sucks and even though they'd bungled their way through Hearthstone as an esport, I still had an amazing time playing the game. We'll just have to see what games the future brings.