Today I'll be writing about one game that is probably the most popular at the moment beside the GTA V. Of course it is Blizzard's trading card game, better known as Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. The game is currently in closed beta stage, which started on August 16 in the NA region, and on 4th of September in the EU. The game itself is pretty similar to Magic The Gathering, but obviously it revolves around Warcraft world. It is extremely hard to get your hands on the beta key at the moment, because Blizzard managed to create enourmous hype around the game, which sadly had some very bad consequences for the gamers.
The most recent event that caused a lot of rage on the internet was the giveaway by PC Gamer. They decided to give away their second batch of 350(!) beta keys away this Friday at 3PM UK time. What actually happened was that the keys were practically stolen by bots and users that managed to break into their beta key distribution system via Google cache and take away the keys. Shortly after you could find several keys being sold on eBay for over $200, as well as on some other forums for various amounts, most of them even higher, even though you are not allowed to sell beta keys. I was also in a position to grab a key from cached copy as you can see in the photos, but decided to play fair since I consider myself a gamer above just some random thief, so my main goal is to play, or in this case test the game which I acquired in a fair and honest way like I did with many betas before.
Before PC Gamer giveaway, rage was cause by BlizzardCS giveaway on Facebook in which they were giving different number of keys in several waves to, as they said, the fastest X users that send them private message. There probably would not be any problems, if people haven't started posting pictures where they sent messages several minutes after the start of the giveaway and got the key, while those who sent the message just seconds after the start remain short-handed.
Since there is still no sign of open beta, we can only expect that situations like this will happen again, because both Blizzard and PC Gamer in this case were quite ignorant on the subject. There are still many other scam sites and fake giveaways on Facebook/Twitter/Twitch so be careful about it. People are quite naive when they want to get something really hard, and there are quite a lot of others that will try to exploit that. My advice to you guys is to keep calm and just wait, I know it is annoying to see how others get the beta key and then decide to just sell the key rather than play the game, it is not fair in any way, but the problem is that Blizzard says that they are satisfied with the feedback they are receiving from the current beta testers. Maybe they thought about the amount of money people will be ready to spend on the game and additional card/decks, but let's not be negative around everything.
There are still fair and real giveaways, so don't despair. Things you can do to try to get your beta key are obviously to opt-in on Battle.net, watch some streams on Twitch.tv (from streamers that have partnership with Twitch, because there are a lot of fake giveaways going on around there too), go on Twitter and follow tweets with the keyword „Hearthstone“ where you will find probably the most of the giveaways since there are a lot of people sharing them. Stay strong, true gamers will prevail as we always do.Tell us your thoughts in our Forum