Hearthstone – Who Is ‘Your Opponent’ in Battle.net?

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Playing Hearthstone ranked mode, I was matched up against someone with the username "Your Opponent". This was odd for several reasons:

  • Normally, the opponent's rank is shown on the initial screen, but this time the opponent's rank wasn't listed.

  • I thought you couldn't get spaces in a Blizzard BattleTag (except through RealID, but presumably their real name as shown on their driver's license isn't actually "Your Opponent").

  • After the match, when I went to friends list and looked at the username of the player I last played, it didn't show "Your Opponent" under "Last Played:"; it showed some username (but the username was greyed out, instead of shown in blue as it usually is).

So what is this indicating? Can one actually set their BattleTag to be "Your Opponent", or is this the game's way of indicating something about that player?

I tried searching, but as you can imagine, a search for "Hearthstone Your Opponent" turns up a lot of unrelated information. I did find a few other people who reported seeing something similar (1, 2) but didn't find an explanation.

Best Answer

Along with the two forums you linked, this Battle Net forum discussed this as well. While it doesn't contain any information directly from Blizzard on this, a user gathered that this is more than likely due to a connection blip from the server.

From what I've gathered there is only one very small window that the Hearthstone client sends the opponent information to your game client; that being right at the very start of the connection to the match. If you glitch and your connection hiccups, that information can be lost, and your client doesn't know your opponent name and rank. (Though the server still knows that information.)

Since the server still contains the information of who you faced, you were able to look at the history and see the name of the player you battled against.