Despite plans to open a major new tournament facility in California's Burbank studios in just a few weeks' time, Blizzards latest Hearthstone tournament, the Championship Tour Americas Summer Playoff, had a myriad of problems. From DDOS attacks to game restarts, players were robbed of near-guaranteed victories, spectators found it hard to get into stuttering games and overall the experience wasn't pleasant for anyone involved.
To counter that, Blizzard has now promised to make big changes to the way it runs tournaments in the future, to make sure that this sort of incident doesn't happen again.
"We want to be clear that the resulting experience this past weekend was not acceptable, and we sincerely apologize to the competitors who were adversely affected," Blizzard said in a statement. "There is still much we can do to improve the overall competitive experience, and to reduce the number of issues that can occur."
Moving forward it has pledged to make some key changes to the way the tournaments operate. For starters, it will improve hardware and evaluate tournament locations to make sure they have the technological infrastructure to handle any future attacks. It will also implement safeguards and fallback options should disconnects occur, so that games do not need to be scrapped and restarted.
"We’re going to do better and we’ll fill you in on our progress as we move forward," Blizzard said, asking that anyone with feedback about changes they feel should be made to Hearthstone and other Blizzard tournaments moving forward, should let it know on the Blizzard forums or on any of its relevant social media accounts.
Image source: Sergey Galyonkin/Flickr
