Crafting A Better War: Hearthstone Open Beta Delayed
Beta late than never
Are all of your friends in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft's closed beta? Have they replaced the you-shaped hole in their lives with shiny virtual trading cards? Well, for one, you should probably get new friends. Yours sound a bit, um, terrible. But, if you reeeeally want to join them in their quest for gold and glory and more trading cards, I'm afraid I have a bit of bad news for you: the open beta's been delayed. The already nicely polished card battler was supposed to open its floodgates to every Tom, Dick, and Yu-Gi-Oh around this month, but now that won't be happening until January-ish.
Citing server stability and other similar issues, Blizzard explained its rationale in a post on Hearthstone's website:
"We believe the right thing to do for the game is to not rush it out into open beta, but to instead hold onto it a little longer to make sure it’s ready for wider testing. At BlizzCon, we mentioned that we hoped to get the game into a state where it’s ready for open beta this month, but we’re just not quite there yet. The development team has been working hard to get this out before the end of the year, but our highest priority is that Hearthstone has an awesome launch when all gates are lifted and everyone can download it and play at the same time."
On the upside, Blizzard just sent invites out to everybody who opted in before December 16th, and the warchief of all things Warcraft plans to pull a similar stunt again on January 7th. At that point, opt-ins will end, and the open beta won't be too far off.
There's no solid date on the open beta yet, but keep your eyes peeled. And when you do, remember to throw your eye peels in the garbage can. People can slip on those things, you know.