Hearthstone Open Beta delayed till January 2014

By Michael Dunaway, News Editor December 20, 2013

If you were hoping to play the Hearthstone open beta before the end of the year, you're out of luck. Blizzard has decided it needs more time fine tuning the CCG and has now set its sights on releasing the game sometime in January 2014.

Blizzard originally intended to launch the open beta this December, but after the most recent update to Hearthstone, the team felt their were still too many things in need of fixing before Hearthstone was ready for a wider audience. In a blog post on Battle.net, Production Director Jason Chayes explained the team has "been making great progress on improving server stability, but there are still a few things that have come up that we want to fix before we leave the closed beta phase." He goes on to say the team is "very close" to the open beta and urged everyone to continue to provide feedback and report bugs.

Chayes did have some good news though. As of yesterday, everyone who opted into the closed beta prior to Monday, December 16th should have received a beta key. If you happen to check your inbox and find no key, some users are reporting the invite emails are landing in spam folders and Gmail's new Promotions tab.

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About the Author

Michael Dunaway, News Editor
Michael Dunaway has been part of the MMOBomb team for years and has covered practically every major Free-to-Play title since 2009.

Dokkodo 8 years ago

I'm in the closed beta, it's not all that great. Kingdoms CCG is basically the exact same game but more polished and with a singleplayer mode.

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extasist 8 years ago

people that says its p2w are dumb, arena have nothing to do with what cards got in your collection, you get to select 1 card out of 3 till you get 30 cards, from this points you play till 12 wins depends how good you are, im not the best one, usually i get from 5 to7 wins, 5 wins gets me 100 gold + pack, 7 wins 160~ gold and pack, so its free pack and one more free run in arena, when you start game first time you get simple card deck, but with that deck in play mode i got 7 wins out of 8 plays, so its not about p2w its about how good you are in strategy.

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blabla 8 years ago

game looks like its for kids

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Rareloot 8 years ago

Sort of pay to win. Basically the situation is this: without paying, you have an extremely limited pool of cards from which to make your decks. Now you can grind gold and not pay for it, but who wants to do that? Play like 10 games in a row for the sole purpose of getting one new pack, which may or may not even have the cards you want. On the other hand, you can pay from the start, and have a huge pool of cards to choose from immediately. More cards = more wins because you can make a deck that can adapt to more situations. Playing it strictly F2P means until you grind up all those packs, which should literally take hundreds of games to do, you will have a pretty boring experience because you won't be able to enjoy forming new strategies and making a lot of good decks from a large pool of cards and you will be losing a lot because you lack the cards you need to deal with certain tactics top ranked players are using.

Trenix 8 years ago

The game is pay to win, which is expected since most card games are. Played the game for over a month only to have my cousin finally get into beta, spend over $50 on cards, and beat me easily like I even had a chance. Its kind of hard to play a game after experiencing something like that. It's an ok game to play once in awhile, but I'm sure I'll eventually forget about it.

Bleh! 8 years ago

Most pay to win and forever alone game just no.Aready quit (Actually Beta player Rank 20/older system Gold)

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I'm 7 8 years ago

and what is this?

Im Superman Five Thousand 8 years ago

Good job like i said

im batman 8 years ago

i get invite to play this and... is the best card game i ever played... but card game? seriously... in my opinion card games are thing of the past. my little brother likes it. i let you think

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Neosapience 8 years ago

Oh yeah Blizzard, polish that turd.

I don't know why people continue to support developers that obviously don't play the kind of games they're pushing. You know why D3 sucked so bad? Nobody making it knew what the initialism 'RPG' stood for.

If these guys played even one game of Yu-Gi-Oh, they would have spotted their balance issues 10 builds ago.

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