Update: This bug was fixed in the 19.4.1 patch on January 28, along with the Hysteria nerf and the Duels balance update.

Last Thursday, the first miniset of Hearthstone's Darkmoon Race was released, introducing 35 new cards to the Darkmoon Faire pool. As you can imagine, new patches often mean new bugs, some of which quickly surfaced. Thankfully, these glitches were fairly minor. The strangest was that The Witchwood's Town Crier temporarily reverted to human form and some cards displayed gems of the wrong rarity. This caused several players to look twice when they opened their Darkmoon Faire packs, thinking they had received a pack containing only common cards.

The Blizzard team reacted immediately. Community Manager u/cmdylux immediately posted an update on Reddit, acknowledging the issue. However, one of the bugs that has yet to be resolved is by far the most harmless, yet by far the most annoying. Currently, when you log into Hearthstone, a notification appears in your journal, directing you to the "Achievements" tab.

Unfortunately, no matter how much you scroll through the oddly clunky achievement system, no matter how many times you click on it, you will not find the achievement in question. So far, there is nothing you can do to get rid of this phantom notification, and it doesn't seem to be linked to any particular achievement at all. Despite being little more than a visual prompt, this little badge has predictably sent the community into paroxysms of despair, with threads being posted all the time notifying Blizzard of the problem and asking for help.

Players have reported similar problems with the Book of Heroes chapters, which are now marked as incomplete, even if they were all previously beaten.

A fix is in the works, but it is interesting that such a harmless and empty prompt has sparked so many threads on Reddit and Blizzard forums. Sure, it's a little annoying to see the notification every time you start the game, but I've never really cared much for it. I've had more pressing issues like the new OTK combo "Wretched Tiller" where Priest can do a whopping 60 damage with 4 cards. This deck has been raging in the wild since January 21 and is already in need of a quick nerf.

The attention that the nonsensical notice received reminds us that all of us are plagued by various badges, ringing, and shouting from devices and pieces of software that simply will not shut up. So when something literally cannot be deleted, the resulting anger may seem a bit out of touch with reality.

It is also a headache for Hearthstone's new reward track and achievement system. Despite the twists and turns, the affordability of the mini-sets seems to have calmed players somewhat. Nevertheless, the issue of cost will continue to be a point of contention.

As Luke explained in December, the current anger over Hearthstone's "greed" has been coming for years, but when you make such drastic changes to a six-year-old free game, it's hard to please everyone Blizzard is offering compensation as a one-time reward in an effort to patch things up with players, and the system has already undergone a major overhaul. The season track has been adjusted to award gold more frequently, with less XP required to make it easier to reach higher levels.

We are clearly immersed in the idea of ticking off achievements and keeping a clear Hearthstone to-do list, which is also an indication that the game is in pretty good shape. If bug notifications are an issue worth highlighting on multiple threads and platforms, then Hearthstone is in for a good year in 2021.