Update: Well, Kripp finally pressed the button, and 660,620 dust later with over 60k viewers watching...nothing happened. I wasn't even sure he had pressed it at all, as his game froze up and became unresponsive. After a minute or so, the game crashed and Kripp restarted it. It seems the servers themselves stayed standing (even if his client didn't) and when he restarted the game, all the promised dust had been successfully delivered—just with none of the theatrics that usually come with mass disenchants. An anti-climactic moment, but that's live TV, I suppose! You can watch the moment of truth in the clip above.
Original story: The end of Hearthstone may be upon us. At midnight EDT tonight, Hearthstone streamer (and Arena king) Octavian "Kripparrian" Morosan will "hit the button," disenchanting any extra copies of cards he has all at once—an act game director Ben Brode said at one point "would have brought down Hearthstone." While Brode followed up by saying it's "probably ok now," that hint of hesitance has got fans excited to see what actually happens.
Kripp has famously been hoarding duplicate cards for three years, and the dust gained from that exercise has now reached over 660k (for reference, our in-house Hearthstone expert Tim Clark rarely has more than 1k dust).
Kripp had been hoping to accumulate enough dust to craft a full collection of golden cards in one go, but changed his plans earlier this year to just crafting gold cards in the Standard rotation upon reaching one million followers on Twitch.
"With three card expansions per year, even buying over 1k packs each time, and constantly getting Arena packs won't come close to having the full collection golden," Kripp told us over Skype. His original target was simply not attainable anymore, and also not as necessary thanks to Arena's switch to Standard. "It's kind of a measure of compromise with the fact that Arena is now standard format," he said.
Button. Tonight. Midnight EDT. pic.twitter.com/iydIWHCCBXJune 2, 2017
As for the servers crashing, Kripp says he's not worried about breaking the game. We asked Blizzard if it had any concerns—and why a player dusting cards could even threaten server stability—but the company declined to comment on either matter. Blizzard did however have the following message for Kripp:
"The Hearthstone team want to congratulate Kripparrian on this impressive milestone! He has done incredible and unique things with the game and we’ll definitely be watching as he presses the button tonight."
Whether they're watching excitedly or anxiously I'm not sure, but we'll see soon enough. Kripp hit one million Twitch followers earlier today, and lo, the prophecy has been fulfilled and the harrowing begun. Let all who build server infrastructure or manage packet delivery quake and tremble with fear as the wrath of a single streamer is wrought upon them. Or, you know, nothing will happen. It's a toss up.
Whether or not the end of Hearthstone does come, you'll be able to watch it live on Kripp's Twitch channel at midnight EDT tonight.
