With the announcement that popular fansite HearthArena would be making an overlay to help you pick cards, I asked you wonderful readers if you thought it was an okay thing in this week’s Topic of the Week. I also reached out to Blizzard with a laundry list of questions about how they would be responding to the tool, and their policy on things like it. They’ve now got back to us, though with apologies that they can’t answer questions of that sort at this time. They did, however, provide this statement:

“Like any third party programs for Hearthstone, we can’t condone or approve of their use. Our Terms of Use don’t allow changing game files or automating game play.”

Obviously the latter is where the HearthArena overlay may be crossing the line. While it doesn’t automatically take the best card for each pick, that is inevitably how a large portion of its install base will use it. Unlike a deck guide or a best cards list, its immediate presence on top of the client – almost making it a part of the program itself – moves it closer to the problem pile. Whether either of those points of semantics will prove significant remains to be seen.

Clearly this isn’t a committment by Blizzard to stop the tool from being released, which has been delayed from today until at least Monday, but it’s not what the developers of the tool will have wanted to see. They’ve put a great amount of effort and work into what would be a very useful thing for a huge number of players. I’m very tempted to use it myself and will almost certainly give it a shot upon release to see just how off the mark my personal ratings are – but it’s very close to the line of what is deemed okay by Blizzard and the community alike.

We’ll hopefully get more answers from Blizzard about this in the near future, or at Blizzcon at the start of November, where we’ll be bringing you all the latest info on what’s coming next from the company.