CANCELLED: Livestream put on ice due to issues with Ranked Play.
This page contains start times for Hearthstone’s Year of the Raven QA livestream in the US (PST, EST), UK (GMT) and European (CEST) timezones.
UPDATE – 8:20AM 2nd March 2018
Tonight’s planned livestream has been cancelled so that the team can continue working on the problems that have kept Ranked Play offline since the start of the new season.
The news came in a post on the official Hearthstone forums late yesterday evening. Here’s the full statement:
Greetings,
Currently, the Hearthstone team’s primary focus is working to resolve the issues with Ranked Play as soon as possible. You can view the updates on this issue here.
To focus on these issues, we will be cancelling the Year of the Raven developer livestream that was originally scheduled to take place on Friday, March 2.
Your questions are very important to the team, and we would still like the chance to address them. If you have any additional questions you would like answered, please still definitely send them our way. You can do so by posting on the Year of the Raven announcement blog found here.
Thank you for your understanding, and we look forward to speaking more with our community soon.
ORIGINAL STORY – 1st March 2018
The Year of the Raven is the official name for the collection of expansions that will be sprinkled into Hearthstone over the next 12 months or so. We know that there’ll be three new full-blooded expansions in the year ahead, along with a new – cosmetic – Druid hero, as well as the game’s first foray into officially supported player-run tournaments.
There’s an awful lot that we don’t know right now, however. Thankfully, Blizzard has promised that we’ll get some more detail on what to expect from the year ahead in Hearthstone during a special Year of the Raven QA livestream taking place on Friday 2nd March (that’s tomorrow).
When does the Year of the Raven stream actually start though? Well, we know it’s kicking off at 7pm in the UK, but we also know that a lot of our readers live in the United States. For our friends on the other side of the pond, the Year of the Raven QA livestream will begin at 11:00am on the West Coast and 2:00pm on the East Coast. European readers will be able to tune in from 8:00pm local time.
The stream itself will almost certainly take place on the official Hearthstone Twitch channel which we’ve embedded for you below. As the event plays out we’ll be adding in key facts from the stream right below the video, so make sure you refresh the page if you’ve come in late or you’ve had to step away for a moment:
Hearthstone: Year of the Raven Overview
For those of you just catching up, you might want to take a look at our comprehensive Year of the Raven guide. That contains everything we currently know about the year ahead, but here are the key facts if you’re in a rush:
- The Year of the Raven will consist of three – as yet unnamed – expansions.
- Each expansion will consist of the usual 130+ cards.
- Once the Standard rotation happens, you’ll be able to make use of cards from the Basic, Classic, Journey to Un’Goro, Knights of the Frozen Throne, Kobolds and Catacombs sets, as well as 2018 Expansion 1.
- The following sets are being cycled out with Year of the Raven: Whispers of the Old Gods, One Night in Karazhan and Mean Streets of Gadgetzan. You’ll only be able to use cards from these sets in the Wild format.
- In-game tournament support is finally coming! It’ll be a simple affair at first, but Blizzard hopes to build on the feature over time and based on community feedback.
- A new Druid hero – Lunara – is being added to the game. She’s just a cosmetic switch-up for the character, but check out our guide on how to unlock Lunara in Hearthstone if you want to know what’s going to be required.
- Three more cards will be consigned to the Hall of Fame: Ice Block, Coldlight Oracle, Molten Giant. Check out our Hall of Fame guide if you want to find out more about crafting dust compensation and what have you.
