Ah Blizzard, you never manage to have a trouble-free launch of an expansion to a game do you?

Earlier today the long awaited next expansion to the popular online free-to-play card game Hearthstone went live. The Grand Tournament adds over 130 new cards to the game, all of which I’ve revealed in previous articles. There was also the option to pre-purchase a bundle of 50 of the new card packs as well as an exclusive cardback for pre-purchase for around £34.99, which is an offer a number of us in the station took up.

Unfortunately no big release is without its hiccups and from around fifteen minutes before the scheduled time of release, Hearthstone’s servers were being flooded with players eager to begin getting to grips with the new cards and open their pre-purchased 50 packs. This led to a lot of players being unable to log on with some even reporting the queue numbers being blank or reading in excess of 3 hours. Eventually Hearthstone was taken down for maintenance about an hour ago to try and get things running again and as of time of writing is still down, although it is estimated that it should be back up any time now.

At least this time it’s just server issues and nothing more severe. Just an annoying thing and so a lot of us will have to open their 50 packs tomorrow. I’ll be one of them, so join me on stream tomorrow at 6pm BST as I open them up!

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