Tag Archives: Blizzard

Blizzard Hearthstone Blank Screen Not Responding FIX

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If you are trying to play Hearthstone, now in open BETA, and are having a problem where as soon as you hit the Play button the screen or window goes dark and the process in the task manager says it’s “Not Responding”, I may have a fix for you.

I had this very same problem and after no help from the forums or tech support, I figured it out myself. Really it was just basic troubleshooting. Getting to the part that helped me with the problem, I disabled my firewall and associated agents (I am running Avast Internet Security, one of the best), the game suddenly ran fine! Imagine that. That meant that the problem was with my firewall. Sure enough, I re-enabled everything and the game stopped working, went right back to the blank screen.

So, here is where the fix comes in. Even if you aren’t running Avast, this could be your problem regardless of what brand of firewall you are running. Check out what I found and see if you have the same problem with your firewall.

I went into the settings and in the application specific rules section, where firewall rules are associated with specific executable programs, I found rules for the Blizzard Agent, the Updater and many more, even the Hearthstone Setup executable. What I did not find was any rule for the Hearthstone game app at all! They had rules for everything but the game itself! So, I simply added a rule for the Hearthstone executable itself

C:\Program Files(x86)\Heartstone\Hearthstone.exe on my system

and then all went well after that, the game ran fine. The whole problem was that the game executable could not talk through the firewall. Once that was enabled, everyone was happy, including me! I hope that helps you with your problem.

More Hacking Without The Slashing

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Blizzard Ninja ProtectionIt seems that earlier this week (8/5/2012 –  8/11/2012) the network and I am sure some servers at Blizzard, the game company behind most notably World of Warcraft got hacked. A list of games that are either played or are accessible online are at the end of this post for your reference in order to help determine if this company is behind a game that you play/like.

At this time, Blizzard “security experts”, and law enforcement are investigating what happened. They are working to find out how someone managed to get into parts of Blizzard’s network where they didn’t belong, but also what information might have been lifted before the nefarious access could be cut off Go Here. So far, Blizzard claims that at this time there is no evidence that any financial information such as credit cards, billing addresses, or real names were compromised. Their work is far from over, but they have found nothing to suggest that these pieces of information have been accessed.

The only information that they can confirm was illegally accessed include a list of email addresses for global Battle.net users, outside of China. Players on North American servers (which include players from North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia) had information regarding the answers to personal security questions accessed, and even information about Dial-in and Mobile Authenticators was gotten too. However, based on what Blizzard currently knows, this information alone is not enough for anyone to gain access to players Battle.net accounts.

It appears too that some encrypted passwords were taken as well, however, Blizzard is confident that their encryption methods and use of SRP (Secure Remote Password protocol) to protect these passwords, will make it extremely difficult to extract the actual passwords themselves. They do recommend that all Battle.net users change their passwords for good measure, and take care if the password used here is or was used anywhere else, for any other services, and recommend changing that password also.

All in all, this is a bad way to end the week for Blizzard. I expect that a great effort will go into finding whoever did this, catching them, and using them as a bright and shiny example of not messing around with Blizzard. Just my 2cp worth.

*Notes: Other games that Blizzard is known for and currently active with include World of Warcraft, Diablo II, Diablo III, StarCraft II and more. However, these are the most relevant and Internet connected of them.