Could someone explain a little bit more detail what this whole thing is about? It sounded like a bunch of pro players got fed up with the inadequacy of MTGO and have openly opposed it such as to take away any popularity to MTGO
First of all, the high level tournaments (PTQ and MOCS) were crashing on a regular basis. Everyone accepted that because MTGO players accept everything. However, when the most recent MOCS crashed, Brian Kibler, a pro player, didn't accept that for a change and suggested people to delete MTGO. This caused some uproar and WotC decided to fix the tournaments. For this most tournaments are suspended indefinitely (at least until 2014). Why do you need expensive cards if you can't play with them in tournaments? That's right, you just sell them. Therefore, there was a dip of 11% in MTGO prices.
However, just like smokers that promise to quit smoking after the price of cigarettes is raised, but will keep on smoking anyway, MTGO players just started to play the low quality tournaments and needed their expensive cards again. Last time I checked there were at least 400 people spending their money in the constructed queues, so instead of dailies, people just play the queues.
So, there we are, right at the place we started. Nothing happened, just like usually nothing happens. In such cases there is an easy way and a hard way. The easy way is to complain on forums and the hard way is actually selling your collection. There are a lot of complaints on this forum, on Reddit, angry articles on Forbes written by amateurs, but at the end of the day it is all blahblah and people carry on with their habits.
I think it's less people craving tourneys like cigarettes and more people buying in while the prices are down. People start cashing out in a panic and once the prices drop enough other people rush in to get a good deal on cards they'll want to play once the system is back up and running at full strength.
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Current Decks
EDH: Captain Sisay Tokens
Standard: White Weenie :symw:, UW Control:symwu:
It is pretty sad. Every version of MtGO has lost functionality as time goes on. There is nothing you can do in the current version of the game that you couldn't do better, easier, and cheaper in v1. v4 is going to be even worse, and there's no indication at any level that it's ever going to get better.
Once Hearthstone gets publicly released, I really can't see how I can justify paying for two different Magic collections. Hearthstone will kill MtGO for me, if them retiring v3 doesn't do it first. Hopefully that will be true for enough people that Wizards will be pushed into making a client that doesn't completely suck, and someday it'll be worth coming back to.
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
Magic Online plays and looks like something from the mid 90s. Wizards has no visible intention of fixing it, as even the new version that's been in beta for years looks like something from 2003.
They have a captive userbase, and since the servers are crap they don't have any desire to grow it. In fact, if they were to grow it, they'd have even more crashes. As is they'd rather keep a relatively even group shelling in more money, since they can continue to roll out new sets without sinking much money into it and make huge profit off it.
Recall that the Rate Of Return for most limited events is lower than how most paper magic works (4-3-2-2 rather than 5-3-2-2)
Edit: I believe I read a summation of the problem once. Basically Wizards outsourced the original creation of the whole engine to a crappy company, and hasn't been able to do anything to meaningfully fix it ever since. They need to redesign the program from the ground up, because it's fundamentally flawed, and they're incapable of doing so.
My guess is in 5 years or so they'll simply kill MTGO as a stand alone program and import everyone's collection and account into a new version of Duals of the Planeswalkers.
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Cyme we inne frið, fram the grip of deaþ to lif inne ðis smylte land.
I have to agree with you guys that the interface is not great and the client itself is a resource hog. The biggest problem of the client is that it is barely user friendly and uses outdated interfaces. The newest beta in my opinion is not that bad, but not great either. It suffers from memory leaks and when I am jamming to music on iTunes the client causes stuttering for some bizarre reason. I believe this maybe due to interrupt handling on the client, as I have never had this problem with any other application before.
Literally my system spec are far greater than probably most of the people posting here:
6 core CPU, 8GB of RAM, 2 Solid State Drives, plus 2 primary mechanical hard drives and 1 backup mechanical hard drive. On top of all that I have a Radeon 6670 GPU and a Creative Labs X-Fi.
There should be absolutely no reason to have any problems with this client and running iTunes in the background.
Edit: I believe I read a summation of the problem once. Basically Wizards outsourced the original creation of the whole engine to a crappy company, and hasn't been able to do anything to meaningfully fix it ever since. They need to redesign the program from the ground up, because it's fundamentally flawed, and they're incapable of doing so.
Leaping Lizards actually approached Wizards with the idea, ~13ish years ago. The original program was quite lightweight, in fact, but it had scalability problems that were never going get overcome, and there were crashes as a result.
v2 was the result of WotC deciding that LL wasn't going to fix the scalability and stability issues, and letting them go. As a consequence, they had to redesign the client from the ground up, which let them improve scalability (not enough, hence the need for v3, but whatever), but they had to let go of a lot of functionality due to pure lack of expertise with coding: v2 was vastly more heavyweight than v1.
I don't know why they haven't been able to produce a worthwhile client since then. v3 was an embarrassment on basically every level, and even more resource heavy than v2. It has fewer crippling bugs, but it's still unwieldy and plays very poorly with other software. It isn't a product that should be seeing the light of day, especially not after a decade of knowing what the problems are. But since WotC has never had any competition from a source that both could do it better, and that they couldn't sue, they've never had a reason to improve it.
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
I really cant understand why Wizards hasnt made yet a client with pretty interface, ladders with matchmaking,tutorials to attract new people and some other features that should be a given considering Wizards resources.
Yeah. It's kind of sad. On top of all the technical issues that the client has to deal with, bad interface and whatnot... there is an obvious lack of a few features.
One feature I'm surprised they have never tried to ever implement... they could have a "free" section of MTGO where they give you access to every card in the game, "free" drafts, tournaments, etc. Obviously you wouldn't be able to enter "real" tournaments with decks you make from these cards, but it would be perfect for people that primarily play real magic but want to be able to easily playtest for an upcoming tournament. Or people that are thinking about getting into MTGO but don't want to drop the 400 bucks to make a real deck. That has always been the big reason to not play MTGO, they dont want to have to manage two separate collections.
The reason I have been putting the words "free" in quotation marks this whole time is because it would have to be a subscription based thing where you pay 10 bucks a month. They would get so much extra money from people like me that don't mind paying the 10 bucks a month to use this system as a tool for playtesting.
Sure it doesn't look "sexy" but who the hell cares?
Completely agree, I actually like the UI. If anything, I'm hoping that they keep this client around as an option over the new one because the new one is terrible.
For example, I like the way they do the collection because it feels like I'm flipping through a "binder" to look at my cards.
For me, the biggest thing that they could do is just make the program not be so resource heavy and optimize it for speed (and it wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade a few other things).
I've become hopelessly addicted to it, so I'm not going anywhere, but there is really no excuse for it being the resource hog it is, at the VERY least. My computer was built to use Ableton Live for recording and performing music, and is one of the deepest, most complex programs I've ever used. Yet MTGO actually takes up more memory. It's ridiculous.
The program itself works (mostly), but that doesn't mean there can't be improvements that would benefit the game as a whole and attract even more users. The marketplace is my biggest peeve. If I'm looking for standard cards it's not a big deal, but when I'm feeling frosty and try to build a rogue modern deck I have to click through dozens of vendors to see if I can find a card.
My question is, why are so many people upset with the way the guy who writes for Forbes is trying to explain things in terms that a person who reads Forbes would understand instead of what the people who play the game would understand it as.
Guy from Forbes: writes to his audience.
Not his audience: upset that the article uses different words with the same meaning as the ones they use.
My question is, why are so many people upset with the way the guy who writes for Forbes is trying to explain things in terms that a person who reads Forbes would understand instead of what the people who play the game would understand it as.
Guy from Forbes: writes to his audience.
Not his audience: upset that the article uses different words with the same meaning as the ones they use.
I doubt many of the people here read Forbes regularly. They probably find the idea of different style and perspective confusing.
I'd be more concerned with the drop in numbers than the approch of the writer.
My question is, why are so many people upset with the way the guy who writes for Forbes...Guy from Forbes: writes to his audience.
Guy is not from Forbes. Any random joe can submit word salad like that and they will publish it. His article is garbage, as are his numbers. I'm tempted to write an article praising MODO and Hasbro/WOTC decisions in every respect, then have it published on Forbes just so there's a counter-argument being made through these seemingly official channels. I don't play MODO anymore (unrelated to this latest bruhaha) but I think this article poses genuine concern to Hasbro when so many people out there cannot distinguish between basement blogger and a legitimate investment professional. "lost 11% of market value" is unsubstantiated bull****. Luckily, market investors are probably better at sniffing out said bull**** than members of this forum. Otherwise, who knows how the article would affect stock prices.
It's damned irresponsible, both on the part of the author and of Forbes.
I always thought Farscape was about Phillip Fry finding himself on a spaceship with Delenn, Ivanova, Worf, and an unholy cross between ALF and Zachary Smith.
I don't believe any of this for a single second. There is nothing wrong with the shuffler, humans just have a difficulty with grasping randomness, and we are also prone to selective memory. And we cope with failure (losing) by blaming forces beyond our control. In this case, it is almost certain that all were in play, and that if your friend lost 90% of his games, he almost assuredly drafted, built and/or played poorly. Magic Online cannot be blamed for this.
Don't let thoughts about the MtgO shuffler being random cloud your mind, because it isn't, and probably never have been.
Cube on Cubetutor
Come trade with Puca Trade!, the best place to get those hard to get cards no one else will trade!
I think it's less people craving tourneys like cigarettes and more people buying in while the prices are down. People start cashing out in a panic and once the prices drop enough other people rush in to get a good deal on cards they'll want to play once the system is back up and running at full strength.
EDH: Captain Sisay Tokens
Standard: White Weenie :symw:, UW Control:symwu:
Once Hearthstone gets publicly released, I really can't see how I can justify paying for two different Magic collections. Hearthstone will kill MtGO for me, if them retiring v3 doesn't do it first. Hopefully that will be true for enough people that Wizards will be pushed into making a client that doesn't completely suck, and someday it'll be worth coming back to.
They have a captive userbase, and since the servers are crap they don't have any desire to grow it. In fact, if they were to grow it, they'd have even more crashes. As is they'd rather keep a relatively even group shelling in more money, since they can continue to roll out new sets without sinking much money into it and make huge profit off it.
Recall that the Rate Of Return for most limited events is lower than how most paper magic works (4-3-2-2 rather than 5-3-2-2)
Edit: I believe I read a summation of the problem once. Basically Wizards outsourced the original creation of the whole engine to a crappy company, and hasn't been able to do anything to meaningfully fix it ever since. They need to redesign the program from the ground up, because it's fundamentally flawed, and they're incapable of doing so.
My guess is in 5 years or so they'll simply kill MTGO as a stand alone program and import everyone's collection and account into a new version of Duals of the Planeswalkers.
Literally my system spec are far greater than probably most of the people posting here:
6 core CPU, 8GB of RAM, 2 Solid State Drives, plus 2 primary mechanical hard drives and 1 backup mechanical hard drive. On top of all that I have a Radeon 6670 GPU and a Creative Labs X-Fi.
There should be absolutely no reason to have any problems with this client and running iTunes in the background.
Leaping Lizards actually approached Wizards with the idea, ~13ish years ago. The original program was quite lightweight, in fact, but it had scalability problems that were never going get overcome, and there were crashes as a result.
v2 was the result of WotC deciding that LL wasn't going to fix the scalability and stability issues, and letting them go. As a consequence, they had to redesign the client from the ground up, which let them improve scalability (not enough, hence the need for v3, but whatever), but they had to let go of a lot of functionality due to pure lack of expertise with coding: v2 was vastly more heavyweight than v1.
I don't know why they haven't been able to produce a worthwhile client since then. v3 was an embarrassment on basically every level, and even more resource heavy than v2. It has fewer crippling bugs, but it's still unwieldy and plays very poorly with other software. It isn't a product that should be seeing the light of day, especially not after a decade of knowing what the problems are. But since WotC has never had any competition from a source that both could do it better, and that they couldn't sue, they've never had a reason to improve it.
Yeah. It's kind of sad. On top of all the technical issues that the client has to deal with, bad interface and whatnot... there is an obvious lack of a few features.
One feature I'm surprised they have never tried to ever implement... they could have a "free" section of MTGO where they give you access to every card in the game, "free" drafts, tournaments, etc. Obviously you wouldn't be able to enter "real" tournaments with decks you make from these cards, but it would be perfect for people that primarily play real magic but want to be able to easily playtest for an upcoming tournament. Or people that are thinking about getting into MTGO but don't want to drop the 400 bucks to make a real deck. That has always been the big reason to not play MTGO, they dont want to have to manage two separate collections.
The reason I have been putting the words "free" in quotation marks this whole time is because it would have to be a subscription based thing where you pay 10 bucks a month. They would get so much extra money from people like me that don't mind paying the 10 bucks a month to use this system as a tool for playtesting.
Ux Whirza
Rb Goblins
Legacy
U Urza Stompy
Duel Commander
Sai, Master Thopterist
MTGO works perfectly fine most of the time
Sure it doesn't look "sexy" but who the hell cares?
Flaming/Trolling is not allowed. Infraction issued. -Galspanic
Completely agree, I actually like the UI. If anything, I'm hoping that they keep this client around as an option over the new one because the new one is terrible.
For example, I like the way they do the collection because it feels like I'm flipping through a "binder" to look at my cards.
For me, the biggest thing that they could do is just make the program not be so resource heavy and optimize it for speed (and it wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade a few other things).
Look for me on MTGO, sslater
Follow me on Twitter, @slatertheman
My youtube channel:https://www.youtube.com/user/sslater22710
Guy from Forbes: writes to his audience.
Not his audience: upset that the article uses different words with the same meaning as the ones they use.
I doubt many of the people here read Forbes regularly. They probably find the idea of different style and perspective confusing.
I'd be more concerned with the drop in numbers than the approch of the writer.
How To Keep Your FOIL Cards From Curling: http://youtu.be/QTmubrS8VnI
The Best Deck Boxes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEwgLph_Pjk
The Best Binders: http://youtu.be/H5IauASYWjk
Guy is not from Forbes. Any random joe can submit word salad like that and they will publish it. His article is garbage, as are his numbers. I'm tempted to write an article praising MODO and Hasbro/WOTC decisions in every respect, then have it published on Forbes just so there's a counter-argument being made through these seemingly official channels. I don't play MODO anymore (unrelated to this latest bruhaha) but I think this article poses genuine concern to Hasbro when so many people out there cannot distinguish between basement blogger and a legitimate investment professional. "lost 11% of market value" is unsubstantiated bull****. Luckily, market investors are probably better at sniffing out said bull**** than members of this forum. Otherwise, who knows how the article would affect stock prices.
It's damned irresponsible, both on the part of the author and of Forbes.
Censor evasion infraction -Rax
Don't let thoughts about the MtgO shuffler being random cloud your mind, because it isn't, and probably never have been.
Noah Weil on scouting, an attorney from Seattle with 20 Pro Tour appearances.