NetEase developed a tournament mode client for Hearthstone in China

If you’ve always wanted a tournament mode in Hearthstone, then prepare to be jealous of the game’s China-based community.

Thanks to an official companion add-on developed by NetEase, players in China can check out an easy-to-access tournament mode this weekend. A Reddit user broke and translated the news, so now we know how the mode will function.

First, players will need to install a special client. At time of writing, the client is said to only work on Windows. If you’ve ever used Blitz for League of Legends, you’ll be familiar with this type of client overlay. You could also compare it to the way HSReplay functions in Hearthstone now. Since NetEase is officially associated with Blizzard in China, it greatly expands what the company can do with its overlay add-on.

Once you log in to Hearthstone with the add-on client open, you’ll be able to dive into a tournament. The tournaments will be in the Standard, Last Hero Standing best-of-three format. Each player will play 15 rounds. There will be a 5,000 player limit.

There’s no way of knowing whether the American client will ever get this type of support, however. Players have wanted a tournament mode for quite some time and Blizzard has mentioned it in the past.

On the bright side, Hearthstone’s meta is pretty diverse at the moment and a new solo adventure is just around the corner. The next two months should still be very exciting for Hearthstone, with or without a tournament mode.