A big tournament-breaking flaw shook up the first Hearthstone Masters Tour, which took place in Las Vegas between June 14 and 16. Indeed, several hours before the tournament began, the classes submitted by the players were visible through the Battlefy API. Some players had real-time information about other decklists, meaning they could change and adapt their own just before starting a match. It all started when the stats of played classes were posted on Twitter...
Battlefy's Response
Again, any attempt to exploit games and platforms for unfair advantage is prohibited. We kindly ask the community to report any such behaviors to us. Thank you to members of the community that have helped us with this investigation.
We were wrong to assert that the competitive integrity of the event was not impacted. For this, we apologize. Shortly after the selected classes were exposed, we shut down the endpoint that was used to access them. On Friday, we formed a team to specifically assess and correct any potential vulnerabilities. We will work tirelessly over the coming weeks to ensure that this does not happen again. We will keep the community updated on our progress.
They knew it.
This story already seems a bit old, but new elements contradict Battlefy's response earlier this week. According to Invenglobal, Battlefy had been aware of this problem for months — notably thanks to feedback on Shadowverse — and would have done nothing to fix it. You'll find below some screenshots of a conversation between Battlefy staff and a player which happened in April — several months before the Masters Tour Las Vegas.
This conversation testifies that Battlefy was well aware of this major tournament-breaking bug long before Friiz's tweet. We should also highlight the intervention of Xzirez who states that even Blizzard was aware since HCT Oslo (Competition held at the end of April 2018).
We're still awaiting Blizzard's official response to this, and hoping that this controversy will actually make Battlefy do something about the flaw of its API.
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