Patch 0.23.0: The Watch

If your account is actioned, there is now a real way to contest it. You can open the appeal page while signed out, because being unable to sign in was always the point at which the old path fell apart. You submit an appeal, you keep a status link, and a person reads it and writes you back.
Trying to sign in on an actioned account now sends you straight to that appeal page, with copy that tells you plainly what happened and what to do next, in your own language. Previously you landed on the home page with a message about a suspension that did not match, pointing at a support route you could not reach.
Lost the status link? You can get it back at the recovery page using the email on the account or by signing a Hive Keychain challenge. The status page also shows you when the appeal was submitted, when we replied, and whether it is still open, so a reply from us no longer reads as a closed case.

Running a stack of alt accounts or handing your matches to a script is now something we find and act on, instead of something we could only suspect. This is the largest piece of work in the release by a wide margin.
Two commitments matter more than the machinery, so they are the part we will state plainly. Nothing is ever automatic: no account is restricted, actioned or banned without a person deciding it, with a written reason stored against that decision. And every action is graduated and reversible, so the first response to a suspicious pattern is a narrow limit, not a ban.
If a restriction is ever placed on your account, you keep your access and you keep playing. What a restriction can do is hold a ranked payout, or pause market listing and bidding, or pause ranked queueing, while it is in force. It comes with a reason, it can be lifted, and it can be appealed.
An honest player should notice nothing about any of this except that the ladder is cleaner.

Re-running a finished match in the Battle Lab now reuses that match's own combat seed by default, so when you swap one Fighter and run it back, the difference you are looking at is your team change and nothing else. Before this, every Lab run rolled a fresh seed, which meant a swap and a coin flip moved at the same time and you could not tell which one you were reading.
A new Replay seed control sits alongside it: keep the source match's seed, or enter a custom one to explore a different line entirely. Either way the run is repeatable, because the same teams, ruleset, mana cap and seed always resolve to the same battle.

The privacy policy, the cookie policy and the cookie banner have been rewritten to state, in plain language, that we read device, browser and connection signals for fairness and fraud prevention. They now also say how long we keep that data, which is twelve months at the outside and usually far less, and that any decision affecting your account involves a human being and can be contested.
This is a disclosure change, not a behaviour change. It exists because a policy that does not describe what the product actually does is worth nothing, and ours did not.

The battle log used to name only some of the pre-battle aura debuffs and silently skip the rest, so a Fighter could walk into round one already weakened with nothing in the ticker explaining why. All eight are now named as they land, which makes the opening state of a board readable instead of something you reverse-engineer from the stat bars.

Filtering the card catalog by an ability now puts the ability's actual name in the address bar instead of an internal number. A filtered catalog link is legible when you paste it to someone, and it keeps working across releases rather than silently pointing at a different ability.

Weaken recorded the health it intended to remove rather than the health it actually removed, so when the Fighter carrying the aura died and the debuff lifted, the target got back more than it had lost and finished with an over-full health bar. The ledger now stamps the real amount, so the bar returns to where it should and the replay shows the true number.

When a death animation happened on the same beat as another effect, a Fighter that was still very much alive could flicker and fade out along with it, which made replays read as though the wrong unit had died. The two beats no longer share a fade.

On a short viewport the replay board ran past the bottom of the window and took the playback controls with it, so scrubbing meant zooming the whole browser out first. The board now scales to fit the height it has, and the controls stay on screen.

If the message announcing your match went missing in transit, you were left watching the SEARCHING overlay while the match you were already in ran without you, and the only tell was your own draft timer quietly burning down elsewhere. The page now notices that you are in a live match and takes you to your draft instead of waiting for a message that is never arriving.

On the packs page the revealed card was sized and positioned wrongly, and hovering the first card moved the preview somewhere it did not belong. Each pack tile was also reading a shared reserved count rather than its own, so the number under one pack could describe a different one. Both are fixed: the reveal sits where it should and every tile counts itself.

Signing up with an EVM wallet or with Google walked you all the way to picking a username and then failed at the last step, because the address that final step posted to did not exist in production. It exists now, and both signup paths complete.

Large numbers were grouped the English way everywhere, so a German page wrote 1,234,567 where it should have written 1.234.567. Every place a count or a balance is displayed now groups digits according to the language you are reading, which is the other half of the decimal fix that shipped in 0.22.1.

Commander auras were applied in one flat pass, which meant an enemy debuff could resolve before the friendly buffs on the other side had been added. A stat sitting at its floor cannot be reduced below it, so a debuff that arrived early against an already-low stat hit the minimum and was simply thrown away. Whether it landed at all came down to which side of the board you happened to be on, which is not a thing a draft should ever depend on.
Friendly buffs now resolve first and enemy debuffs land afterwards, against the stat that is actually there. No card's numbers were touched. What changed is that five commanders now do the thing their text always claimed, so treat all five as meaningfully stronger than they were last patch, and expect the boards built around them to follow. Three of them are Commons, which means this is a cheap effect that quietly became real.