On Aug. 3, the new Hearthstone expansion, United in Stormwind, launched. The first day of a new expansion is always the most exciting. All of the players get to play with the new cards, try a lot of different decks. The day one meta is a special experience because players can try out interesting decks which could be unplayble once the meta is solved.

However, this opportunity was not open for players on the Asia server. For almost a week, the Asia Battle.net server has been unstable. There were disconnect issues not only in Hearthstone but also in other games like Starcraft and Diablo 3.  Now with the new Hearthstone expansion out, the server issue has gotten even worse. Constructed Ranked mode queue consistently disconnects, which stops players from enjoying the new meta. These disconnects could last from a few minutes to several hours. For players who spent money to preorder the new packs, day 1 has been a very disappointing experience.

Server issues or any game-breaking bugs are not rare issues. Even if the developer team tries its best, unexpected issues can definitely pop up. The issue itself could be understandable. However, the problem here is that this issue has been around for several days now. The Hearthstone dev team has not made any official announcements regarding this. The only reliable messages came through a short tweet from Celestalon, some days after the issue popped up. This message also didn't promise any fixes coming soon.

This "issue" that has been going on for days is not a small bug that we can pass. If there is a bug with a certain card or certain interaction, players can avoid it. However, this is an issue that prevents players from playing the game.

Last weekend, the server issue affected qualifiers for Hearthstone Masters Tour Stormwind, which is a major tournament that decides players who advance to the Grandmasters Circuit. In such an important tournament, admins had no other option but to coinflip(!) to decide the winner. On Aug. 1, DrBoom tweeted that he had had to coin flip to replace his match. He was only one of many who had the same undesirable experience.

Again, there are sudden issues that Blizzard might not expect. However, not fixing such a major issue without any announcement is a different problem. This was first a disturbing experience to competitive Hearthstone players and now it affects every Hearthstone player on Asia server. This is not just a "small bug". It stops every constructed Hearthstone player from playing the game.