At Blizzcon today, the next expansion for Hearthstone was announced, although it seems that it’s not going to be whatever piece of gaming software they registered the “Eye of Azshara” trademark for earlier this week.

The name of the expansion is Goblins vs. Gnomes which ties into the goblinesque card back that’s recently been revealed. We already knew that this next expansion was due to bring over 100 new cards to the game, and now we’ve been told that the number is going to be 120 new cards and one of those will be an explosive sheep. Finally they’ll have use outside a Hunter deck!

Watch the trailer fresh from the event below:

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.

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.

Seems Watch_Dogs was a big success for Ubisoft. They’re currently doing quite well financially according to their earning report of the first half of their financial year. They’ve made €484 million in sales and Watch_Dogs’s 9 million copies sold since launch as a very big hand in that.

Back in May Ubisoft revealed that it’d already broken records for first day sales in Europe and this has helped the report to show a ‘higher-than-expected’ performance. Digital revenue also leapt up 90% more from the previous year, and that brought in €134.7 million worth of sales for them.

They’re not estimating that they’ll get to close the year with “sales of at least €1,400 million.” This is largely down to the release of a few big titles, Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity among them as well as there still being the big selling time of Christmas to look forward to.

An investor call that came with the press release reveals that the hoped for sales figures for the Crew is 2 million copies and Far Cry 4, 6 million

Seems that Blizzard weren’t done with dealing with cheaters in Hearthstone when they banned a large number of accounts suspected of using auto-play bots earlier this week. Now they’re aiming to tackle another form of cheating or rather an exploit of the system: Win Trading.

To explain, win trading is when players have agreements to purposely forfeit matches to artificially push up player ranks in the ranked play ladder. This is done most often at the higher ranks when there are fewer players in that rank bracket and therefore the chances of facing the same opponent are higher. In other words, it’s an exploit of the system and Blizzard aren’t going to stand for it.

“Fair play is at the heart of Hearthstone,” Blizzard community manager Wirthun writes. “The Ranked Play ladder is a place where players have the opportunity to duel and gauge their card-slinging prowess while climbing the ranks. Participating in Ranked Play should be fun, exciting, competitive, and fair.”

The exploit had already been brought to light some ten months ago in a Reddit thread by high ranked player Specialist, and another player zRusher also has admitted to using win trading to climb to legendary status. They claim to have been exploit testing though and say that they were left with a bad taste in their mouth after using the method.

Blizzard are now handing down permanent bans and disqualification from tournaments for all players caught engaging in this behaviour. Specialist has already confirmed his account has been banned.

Reddit thread “Major flaw in the Ladder system”: [x]