Hearthstone bots get the hammer — Blizzard bans thousands of accounts

Hearthstone is one of the most popular head-to-head collectible card games online, but the head on the other end might not always belong to a human.

Developer Blizzard announced today that it’s cracking down on people who use bot programs to constantly play Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft. This software essentially enables players to farm the game for digital cards and other in-game resources like gold. But Blizzard has had enough, and any account caught doing this is now banned until 2015, according to a post on the Hearthstone blog. This purge has resulted in “thousands” of bans.