14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that apart from bots farming gold portraits, the makers of Hearthstone now have another thing to worry about: an anti-hacking expert at Google developed a tool that could potentially be utilized to exploit the card-battling game.
Blizzard's collectible card game is a popular pastime for many, but a lead member of Google's anti-abuse research created a tool that is able to predict what cards your opponent is using in order to make winning easier.
At the recent Defcon 22 hacking conference in Las Vegas in August, Elie Bursztein revealed a tool he had created, that can be used to "hack" Hearthstone and increase the chances for players to defeat their opponents.
The tool "uses data analysis to find undervalued cards and exploits game structure using machine learning to predict your opponent's deck," and all about it is detailed on his blog and in the presentation available below.
"Following Defcon we had a series of conversations with the Hearthstone team about our research. They like our research on game/cards balance and are very enthusiastic and supportive about it," Bursztein started.
"On the other hand, they were very concerned that our real time dashboard that can predict your opponent's deck will break the game balance by giving that person (that is, whoever has the tool) an unfair advantage. They also expressed concern that such a tool makes the game less fun by taking away some of the decision-making from the player," he explained.
This led him to refrain from making the tool available for other gamers to use, due to concerns that it would ruin the fun for many of the free-to-play game's players.
"It was a difficult decision - I invested a lot of our time building our real-time dashboard tool with [my wife] Celine - but we agree with the Hearthstone team and will not release the tool publicly," Bursztein concluded.
Bursztein's tool uses machine learning to analyze undervalued cards, exploiting Hearthstone's complex structure by attempting to create optimal choice scenarios based on previous experience.
Employing such a tool can potentially predict a game's outcome based on your own and your opponent's deck, and would remove some of the choice-making from playing the game, which is pretty much where all the actual fun and satisfaction lie.
The fact that the Blizzard staff members persuaded him to keep the work private is a good thing, but mostly for PR reasons, because there already are many people complaining that they are seeing a large number of bots farming the Hearthstone ladder for gold.
