Hearthstone Battlegrounds has serious lag issues right now. The game has always had its fair share of issues when it comes to the various animations and calculations taking place in the background, but it’s worse than ever.
With the introduction of elementals, the scaling possible from golden cards, and the APM Khadgar plays, you’ll probably start to notice a lot of choppiness and frame lag while playing Battlegrounds. Is there anything you can do to fix it? Not really, unless you feel like constantly restarting your client.
Different builds have more issues than others. The scaling from Hogger or APM pirates makes the game lag like crazy, and the Elemental animations cover the entire screen. With no option to turn off animations in-game, the problem will presumably only get worse as more minion types are added.
Blizzard hasn’t been ignoring the problem. There have been multiple hotfixes and patches that are designed to address the server and performance lag, although they haven’t exactly worked out too well. Just last week Blizzard announced a hotfix to address in-game lag…which quickly proved to be still there.
The problem also isn’t a straightforward one, not everyone experiences the same lag. Personally, the game lags worse when applying stat boosts to my entire board, but also when trying to purchase/sell cards. The freezing makes some builds unplayable.
Lag also gets worse and worse if you play more games in a row. Usually, the first game isn’t too laggy, but after going into another match it begins to get laggy again. This is where you might need to restart your game, although that does take away from the enjoyment.
Although Blizzard continues to add new content to the game on a pretty regular basis, the Battlegrounds addition to Hearthstone performs poorly after each patch. Combined with the sometimes frustrating gameplay – dying on turn 9 before completing even half a build – Battlegrounds is in a ropey patch.
Hopefully Blizzard can continue to address the performance problems with more patches in the future, and can work towards ensuring better server stability and frame rate in-game. Here’s hoping.
