The most recent Hearthstone patch brought Blizzard's autobattler contestant Hearthstone Battlegrounds into early access, but it also introduced some bugs. A lot of bugs, so I'm told. Fortunately, Blizzard is aware of the problems, and it hopes to have a fixer-upper patch rolled out next week.
Blizzard said on Reddit that some problems have already been addressed by a server-side patch:
- Spells now trigger Overkill effects
- Sathrovarr can now no longer target enemy minions with its Battlecry
- New Daily Quests can be obtained
- Big Boss Battle Quest can now be completed by just playing two matches and should only be accessible by players with Battlegrounds access
That's quite a list of fixes (and some of them, like Sathrovarr targeting enemy minions, are kind of astonishing—how did that go unnoticed?) but there's still an awful lot left to do. The 15.6.2 patch, which Blizzard expects will go live Monday or Tuesday next week, will (hopefully) fix:
- Squelch working as intended + no longer causing crashes under certain circumstances
- Daily Quests can now be rerolled
- Hallow’s End Arena Daily Quest can now be completed
- A variety of Android crashes have been fixed
- Memory optimization for Battlegrounds for devices with less than 2GB of RAM
On top of all that, Blizzard is also looking into login issues, Friends Lists appearing empty, decks that are missing cards or appear incomplete, the S-Pen stylus not working with the game on Samsung Galaxy S device, and the inability to re-add cards back into a deck.
"If you encounter other problems, please let us know in the comments below. We appreciate you bearing with us and we’re sorry for the rockiness," Blizzard said. "Once we have info on the remaining issues, we’ll be sure to update this thread."
Despite the apology, the mood in the comments does not seem especially forgiving. There's speculation that the bugs are the result of rushing the latest patch in order to have the Battlegrounds mode ready in time for BlizzCon, no small amount of upset that it's going to take a week to fix the game, at least one "This is fine" meme, and whatever this is.
To be fair to Blizzard, Battlegrounds is currently in a pre-beta early access period, which is traditionally a time for some last-minute bug stomping. Even so, this really seems excessive, and it's a shame because it sounds really promising.
"It's unreasonably satisfying," Tyler wrote in his BlizzCon preview. "Something about knowing what's going to happen before it does—a massive resummoning of my minions, maybe—is terribly seductive. And the slow building of power over the course of a game makes me feel like an evil mastermind."
