While Tavern Brawl is easily one of the best features ever added to Hearthstone and a great way to earn free cards every week to boot, it hasn’t been without its issues. It’s become more common than not that a new Tavern Brawl Wednesday will be accompanied by server issues and downtime across the entire service. This week’s was especially bad, with the Decks Assemble Tavern Brawl only just managing to go live now, more than six hours after it was supposed to. Blizzard have issued an apology and statement on the matter.
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You can read the full statement on Battle.net from community manager and team leader Christina “Zeriyah” Sims, but the problems always effecting European servers comes down to that being the place the Tavern Brawl goes live first, and the issues themselves stem from the various complexities of Tavern Brawl. This week’s is especially bad as it involves forcing the Hearthstone engine to move a lot of card data around between hand and deck, as well as presenting new options every turn. Their plans to fix it in coming weeks are as follows:
“The Hearthstone team has been working on additional testing measures to identify these issues before our players experience them. This includes expansion of our automated testing efforts, an additional test effort dedicated to tavern brawl stability, and changes to our infrastructure to minimize impact in the event any issues do arise. These improvements will take some time to implement, but they are a major priority for the team and will remain so until Tavern Brawl is a great experience for all players in all regions.”
Zeriyah later confirmed that these changes should also help to speed up the fixing of non-Tavern Brawl related bugs.
As for the brawl itself, it’s the rumoured deck-building style mode that was datamined a few months back, letting you choose cards to add to your hand each turn, then trying to use them to defeat your opponent. In this way, your deck improves as you go, and the main skill becomes card selection. And not being tabbed out writing news posts while learning how it works.
Hero selection is fairly minor, as it only effects which cards you can pick up and hero powers are used very rarely due to the make up of the decks, but Rogue’s combo mechanic will do well will the cheap spells and minions you start with. It’s also all a board-control game, so being able to pull a Flamestrike out, or any one of Paladin’s strong minions, is going to be a plus. Good luck!