Hearthstone bots overwhelm Goblins vs Gnomes twitter contest

Over the last month, Blizzard has laid down the law by banning thousands of Hearthstone accounts for botting. Perhaps in a weird act of revenge we may never truly understand, the bots have returned to Hearthstone—and this time they're rigging the Twitter voting that's being used to reveal new cards from the game’s Goblins vs Gnomes expansion.

The last contest had over 40,000 votes cast, and saw the blue side receive a surge of votes towards the end to win by less than 200, but within minutes of the next vote going live, the same side had nearly 1,200 votes while the other sat at a few dozen. Users on the Hearthstone subreddit started crying foul, and the discovery of a twitter user who voted for the blue side hundreds of times in a matter of minutes provided a convincing argument against the legitimacy of the contest.

Credit to reddit user /u/Nulligon for the well timed screenshot.

With only two votes left to run, it’s unlikely Blizzard will adjust the voting system. Senior game designer Ben Brode light-heartedly acknowledged the situation and has already stated that all the cards will be revealed before Goblins vs Gnomes launches next month anyway. So, no harm done really, although it sucks some of the joy out of an otherwise fun idea (but does oddly play into the misbehaving mechs theme). Meanwhile, we've been reviewing each of the recent cards as they've been announced, which you can take a look at here.

Tom is PC Gamer’s Associate Editor. He enjoys platformers, puzzles and puzzle-platformers. He also enjoys talking about PC games, which he now no longer does alone. Tune in every Wednesday at 1pm Pacific on Twitch.tv/pcgamer to see Tom host The PC Gamer Show.