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In a hat trick of Blizzard’s crackdown on Hearthstone botting in the last week or so, the most popular Hearthstone botting program out there – Hearthcrawler – has been shut down by the tool’s creators.
Apparently the creators contacted Blizzard themselves according to the goodbye message which is now all that remains of the site at warcrawler.com; and have chosen to willingly shut down the tool before they get into big trouble with the game developer themselves.
“This is our last official announcement. The recent ban wave in Hearthstone hit a lot of users.
After discussing this with Blizzard, it’s clear we have to take off our services/products now. Please note that we’re not going to be commenting further on this.
Thank you all for being part of our community. We are very sad about this but you also know botting is against the rules and we all knew that the day when our products doesn’t work anymore would come.”
The recent bans come after the cheating and using third-party programs to automate play was revealed to have penetrated all the way to the top of the ranking ladder with at least two users having admitted to win trading as well to reach Legendary rankings. Thousands of accounts have either had temporary or permanent bans from the TCG already and Blizzard have said that any further culprits caught will have harshly punished as a result.
In very recent news (so recent it’s only an hour old) the makers of free-to-play MOBA game Dawngate have announced that they are no longer planning on continuing the development of the game.
A post from Matt Bromberg, Group General Manager that was put up on the game’s website, and quickly reposted to the game’s sub-Reddit announced this to the game’s community saying that while Keystone Games had entered into the project with “great hopes and expectations” about Dawngate they ultimately weren’t seeing the progress they’d hoped for.
Dawngate was a new genre for Electronic Arts for whom Keystone is a part of, and the game has been in beta for around 18 months, with 6 of those being an open beta. Feedback from the players had resulted in some growth for the game but not enough for Keystone to justify continuing further with it.
The game will continue to run for another 90 days now, with refunds being given to all players who spent money during the beta period – most should be processed and done within the next 10 days.
They finished the post by thanking the community for their support and recognised the skills and talents of the team who had worked on the game, calling it a “labour of love”.
Dawngate site“An important announcement about the future of Dawngate”: [x]
A new bundle is going up on Humble Bundle soon and it’s a little bit different.
Crowdfunding is a very popular way to fund new games now it seems, but recently a number of titles have either not made their targets in time or have been pulled before their end because they hadn’t picked up enough momentum to justify carrying on. People are becoming more and more picky about where they place their money for crowdfunding, as there’s no guarantee that a funded project will get finished and you’ll get the items you backed for.
Croteam though are offering a bundle that will allow them to finance their next game and you’ll get what you pay for immediately. Sounds good. The game they’re trying to fund is Serious Sam 4 and for that they’re offering 6 Serious Sam games – Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter, Serious Sam HD: The Second Encounter, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, Serious Sam Double D,Serious Sam: Kamikaze Attack!, and Serious Sam Public Test 2. And there’s a chance to grab Serious Sam 3: BFE Deluxe Edition and Serious Sam 2 if you beat the average price paid.
Humble allows you to split your money between a few different places (Humble, the developers, charities etc.) but all the money Croteam receive is going to be put into the development of Serious Sam 4. So they’re selling you games, to fund the making of new games.
… Wait, that sounds familiar. Haven’t we done this already?
Blizzard have recently registered for a “computer game software” trademark in Benelux under the title of ‘Eye of Azshara’. Since Azshara is a name from their WoW universe the chances are we’re looking at the title for a new expansion in a game from that universe – but which one?
Azshara is both the name of an ancient elven queen and a region in World of Warcraft that hasn’t been touched since the Cataclysm expansion years ago. The queen is responsible for using the Well of Eternity to summon the Burning Legion to Azeroth, before the Night Elves destroyed the well, splitting the continent into two and sinking the old Elven Capital. A large storm raged afterwards and it’s possible that a game could be set within it, if Azshara refers to the character rather than the region. The region by the way is located North Eastern Kalimdor, at the site of the old Elven capital – just above Orgrimmar on WoW’s map – and was redesigned for Cataclysm with speculation being that the ‘Eye’ refers to a large island in Bilgewater Bay that resembles an eye from above.
Chances are if not the next expansion to WoW after Draenor that it is to be the title of the next Hearthstone expansion which Blizzard say will add 100 new cards to the game. After all, there’s recently been a new card back added to the game and robot blueprints mailed out to Hearthstone community members, and the island in Bilgewater is help by goblins who often experiment with mechanical things.
Blizzcon 2014 will be soon though, so hopefully details will emerge there on just what Eye of Azshara is to be.
