As it was mentioned countless times, v3 wasn't great, but it was clean and rather simple. It got the job done. Now v4 goes in different direction, not towards optimized and improved gameplay, but just to be different from v3.
I don't get, how could they implement those trigger pop-ups as they are. Why are they so huge? And why is pop-up for madness so tiny?
Why is Phase bar vertical and goes through the whole screen? In v3, to know which phase of turn are you in, you had to look at one small area of the screen. Now you have to actually move your eyes from left to right every time you want to make sure you didn't miss exact step. It's very annoying on 20+ inch monitors.
Why is collection view just one single sheet of cards? Why are dark rituals shown as Mythics? I'm pretty sure, that when I want to sell some valuable cards to get some tickets, I simply filter by rarity (Mythics and Rares are only worth money, with few exceptions).
Why is there so much gradient? Do they have any competent designers at all?
I wonder if they implemented tracking events to find out which areas of client (during game and collection management) are used most? It feels like no one asked one simple question - What is good in v3, so we could probably keep it? What is bad, so we should improve it?
It just feels like a huge mess, in terms of performance, usability and general smoothness.
The only reason for any confidence at all is that V3 was equally unstable and horribly designed when it was launched (the discussion was practically identical) they managed to make it stable and also made some small changes to the UI to improve the gameplay.
Of course that's hard to rely on, because it's not like that's a guarantee that the New Client will improve. The lack of improvement in memory leak issues is especially concerning. At least when V3 crashed, it was the server's fault.
The new client is ugly, and simply does not function well enough for me to justify playing on it. I'm sure I could get used to all the quirks and eventually they may iron out all of the terrible interface design, but the real question is am I willing to suffer during the time it takes to do that. The answer is no.
I play other games anyway, and I'm pretty much into more casual formats in paper magic (EDH, draft, cube, etc.) at this point in my life so it's not that big of a deal for me to just stop giving them the money I was giving them to play online.
Also of note, it's no longer playable through Remote Desktop on ANY of my touch enabled devices. The new UI is too much of a mess to deal with.
Someone asked earlier if some of the issues were tied to AMD and Radeon. No they are not. My main rig is my AMD machine, and yes I'm using Radeon graphics. At the time I built it, Intel had just recalled the chips I wanted to buy, and I couldn't wait to get a new computer any longer.
However, My i5 computer I built at the same time for my wife, running NVIDIA graphics, also can't run the V4 client without overheating and running massive memory leaks.
FWIW my AMD machine has a windows experience score of 9, and my wifes gaming rig has a windows experience score of 8. Both machines are running the same Gigabyte motherboard model, and the same 16 gigs of Crucial RAM, the same HDDs (Got a sweet deal buying 10 at a time, so I'm set for awhile...).
Neither of those computers can run MTGO, and I do some serious computing on them. CNC simulators and other robotics design packages, don't hiccup on these bad boys.
The Memory leaks have gotten a little better. My laptop still freezes from time to time, but waiting a few seconds usually brings it back. Its kind of a crappy laptop so that's understandable.
My big issue is I can't see my opponent's graveyard. Its hidden by their avatar and various other bits of information that I haven't been able to re-size. I've avoided drafting any sort of reanimation decks because of this. I'm also terrified of snapcasters.
As it was mentioned countless times, v3 wasn't great, but it was clean and rather simple. It got the job done. Now v4 goes in different direction, not towards optimized and improved gameplay, but just to be different from v3.
I don't get, how could they implement those trigger pop-ups as they are. Why are they so huge? And why is pop-up for madness so tiny?
Why is Phase bar vertical and goes through the whole screen? In v3, to know which phase of turn are you in, you had to look at one small area of the screen. Now you have to actually move your eyes from left to right every time you want to make sure you didn't miss exact step. It's very annoying on 20+ inch monitors.
Why is collection view just one single sheet of cards? Why are dark rituals shown as Mythics? I'm pretty sure, that when I want to sell some valuable cards to get some tickets, I simply filter by rarity (Mythics and Rares are only worth money, with few exceptions).
Why is there so much gradient? Do they have any competent designers at all?
I wonder if they implemented tracking events to find out which areas of client (during game and collection management) are used most? It feels like no one asked one simple question - What is good in v3, so we could probably keep it? What is bad, so we should improve it?
It just feels like a huge mess, in terms of performance, usability and general smoothness.
The gigantic trigger boxes are one of the most ridiculous things. Like Sword of Fire and Ice triggers and the box pops up so big that it covers almost all of my opponent's side of the screen. And now I have to move this stupid gigantic box or resize it so I can actually target something with the trigger. Once again, in beta for over a year and this is what we get? Wtf?
I can't even view my opponent's graveyard on v4, it just isn't there. My graveyard is, but my opponent's isn't and of course I get no help from the ORCs or customer support, just a standard answer of "thank you for reporting the bug, we may or may not already be looking into this."
I would suggest if you have this issue and its in an event you paid wizards to enter into then you keep filing for reimbursement when it causes issues for you. Make sure to take a screen capture of it and give them as much information as possible.
2 events, 5 rounds of Magic
4 crashes requiring hard reset
1 corruption of user files (probably due to the hard resets) requiring manual delete and re-install to get the program working again
20 tickets refunded
A few notes that might help us learn something about the crashes. During 2 of the crashes, I noticed something interesting. The first time, I was playing Pandora in the background and it kept playing even after I had lost the ability to click anything. The second time, just as an experiment, I kept hitting F2 even after the crash -- and I'll be darned if the game didn't keep proceeding! Also I had been monitoring my RAM utilization, and I happened to check it seconds before the crash. It was holding steady, below 50%, so it wasn't a RAM memory leak issue.
So based on these observations, I really do think it's a graphics card issue. In fact, it seems like most of the people experiencing repetitive crashes actually have high end graphics cards. Could it be a VRAM memory leak issue? (Is that a thing? I apologize, I'm not an expert on these matters.)
As another experiment, I upgraded to the latest Radeon Beta drivers to see if that makes any difference. Haven't had time to play yet.
The slightly good news is that my brain is starting to re-wire, and I can feel myself playing faster and with fewer blunders.
2 events, 5 rounds of Magic
4 crashes requiring hard reset
1 corruption of user files (probably due to the hard resets) requiring manual delete and re-install to get the program working again
20 tickets refunded
A few notes that might help us learn something about the crashes. During 2 of the crashes, I noticed something interesting. The first time, I was playing Pandora in the background and it kept playing even after I had lost the ability to click anything. The second time, just as an experiment, I kept hitting F2 even after the crash -- and I'll be darned if the game didn't keep proceeding! Also I had been monitoring my RAM utilization, and I happened to check it seconds before the crash. It was holding steady, below 50%, so it wasn't a RAM memory leak issue.
So based on these observations, I really do think it's a graphics card issue. In fact, it seems like most of the people experiencing repetitive crashes actually have high end graphics cards. Could it be a VRAM memory leak issue? (Is that a thing? I apologize, I'm not an expert on these matters.)
As another experiment, I upgraded to the latest Radeon Beta drivers to see if that makes any difference. Haven't had time to play yet.
The slightly good news is that my brain is starting to re-wire, and I can feel myself playing faster and with fewer blunders.
You are having the exact same crash experience as me. I can also hit F2 and hear the sound effect of the game proceeding. Sound seems to be unaffected in general. And like you, I seem to still have plenty of RAM available when the crash happens. And I have to hard reset. They direly need to fix this.
Out of curiosity, what are your system specs? I have an i5-4670, a Radeon HD 7870, and 16 gigs of RAM. Windows 7 64 bit.
edit: and I am also using the latest 14.7 Radeon beta drivers.
Overall I am coming around to V4, but one of the things I find most annoying is the inordinate number of bizarre filters in the collection view that are enabled by default. I don't think I will ever want to search by Power/Toughness or Artist Name, yet these are put before Quantity...
Out of curiosity, what are your system specs? I have an i5-4670, a Radeon HD 7870, and 16 gigs of RAM. Windows 7 64 bit.
Mine's a little older. i5-2550K, Radeon HD 7850, 8GB RAM, Windows 8.1 64-bit. But the fact that we both use Radeons led someone above to speculate the GPU could be the problem. Plus the odd fact that most people who are complaining in fact have the highest end systems.
Overall I am coming around to V4, but one of the things I find most annoying is the inordinate number of bizarre filters in the collection view that are enabled by default. I don't think I will ever want to search by Power/Toughness or Artist Name, yet these are put before Quantity...
By the same token, the number of separate filters when creating a casual game is ridiculous. You have to click on each section individually and THEN click on checkboxes within the section, and then click another section, which minimizes the first. The drop-down menus of the old client required half as many clicks and were much smoother to use.
Out of curiosity, what are your system specs? I have an i5-4670, a Radeon HD 7870, and 16 gigs of RAM. Windows 7 64 bit.
Mine's a little older. i5-2550K, Radeon HD 7850, 8GB RAM, Windows 8.1 64-bit. But the fact that we both use Radeons led someone above to speculate the GPU could be the problem. Plus the odd fact that most people who are complaining in fact have the highest end systems.
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were an AMD issue. I doubt it's our processors, and we're both using different versions of Windows. And obviously it isn't our RAM. The game is probably just coded horribly GPU-wise.
I just played a long multiplayer match in which I crashed, and I noticed after coming back from the crash that the game became progressively laggier and slower the longer it went on, as if there were some kind of memory leak happening within the client. Everyone else in the game noticed this same effect, so it wasn't just me. Searching libraries took forever. People also told me that the larger your deck, the laggier the game experience will be. They said decks of over 200 cards are almost unplayably laggy.
Also, everyone was having the same effect where the game would just bug out and make things happen twice, like the "are you sure you want to empty your mana pool" message appearing two times for no reason. And having to hit F2 multiple times to make anything happen, etc. Just lagged-out and ridiculously broken.
When I submitted my first bug report/refund request (ridiculously combined into a single form), I had 2 key points. Refund my money, and I can't even get the program started again because of this Main Navigation error. They replied, gave me a refund, and did not even acknowledge my other question. So I don't think they're even reading the bug reports at this point, they're just logging the event number and sending refunds. Literally not a single word addressing the issue that I COULDN'T EVEN GET THE PROGRAM TO START!
It's so frustrating because:
1) The crashes are not reproducible. They seem to happen at random during gameplay. So it's difficult to isolate the problem.
2) If we report to Wizards without isolating the problem, I doubt they'll understand. And even if they did understand, they'd probably say it was something wrong with our individual systems. "Are you using the latest drivers?" "Is your Windows up to date?" "Have you de-activated every other service running in the background?" "Have you scanned for malware?" "Have you tried wiping your hard drive and re-installing everything from scratch?" They won't actually do anything, they'll just keep pointing out others things it might be that are not their fault, and ruling those other things out would take forever. It's like when you call your cable company about a faulty box and they make you try a million fixes that never do anything, before finally agreeing to send a tech.
3) If we report to AMD, they have bigger fish to fry than MTGO. Plus I imagine the coding for MTGO is pretty sloppy so they might not be able to figure it out without cooperation from Wizards, who seem unlikely to acknowledge they are part of the problem.
4) If it's really a high-end GPU issue, most users won't be affected so again Wizards won't really care because we'll be a small minority of the player base.
1) The crashes are not reproducible. They seem to happen at random during gameplay. So it's difficult to isolate the problem.
2) If we report to Wizards without isolating the problem, I doubt they'll understand. And even if they did understand, they'd probably say it was something wrong with our individual systems. "Are you using the latest drivers?" "Is your Windows up to date?" "Have you de-activated every other service running in the background?" "Have you scanned for malware?" "Have you tried wiping your hard drive and re-installing everything from scratch?" They won't actually do anything, they'll just keep pointing out others things it might be that are not their fault, and ruling those other things out would take forever. It's like when you call your cable company about a faulty box and they make you try a million fixes that never do anything, before finally agreeing to send a tech.
3) If we report to AMD, they have bigger fish to fry than MTGO. Plus I imagine the coding for MTGO is pretty sloppy so they might not be able to figure it out without cooperation from Wizards, who seem unlikely to acknowledge they are part of the problem.
4) If it's really a high-end GPU issue, most users won't be affected so again Wizards won't really care because we'll be a small minority of the player base.
Yeah well, it's obviously their problem, not ours, and the number of people who play MTGO who have GPUs similar to ours is probably pretty high. They will lose many customers over this if they don't fix it.
I actually tried using their bug report feature and it is worthless, because they will not accept any bug without an associated event ID. Guess what, there is no "event ID" for a casual game that happened before my computer crashed. So I cannot even report the bug. This is an incompetent tech support decision.
Well I found out playing a Youtube video while drafting will cause MODO to nearly crash. I got lucky it actually didn't, but still. And I even won rd 2 quick enough to relog to prevent MODO from crashing from the massive memory leak.
I've now played 4 consecutive rounds without a crash (after 4 consecutive rounds WITH a crash) so either:
1) I had bad luck at the beginning, or good luck now
2) They fixed something
3) Updating my video card drivers made a difference (though there are reports of crashes even with Radeon 14.7 Beta so probably not)
I have to say, now that I'm more used to the interface and no longer experiencing crashes, the client is OK. The process of drafting is a lot better. I can't say game play is better, but it's functional. If they can build on this, it might eventually be objectively better than V3. Right now I can't say that's true.
My biggest gripe right now is the HUUUGEEE triggered ability window. Every time, I have to shrink it down just so I can click on the target of the trigger. And the resizing of the window doesn't seem to persist. That has to be a programming error, because they could have made it the same size as the Stack.
One thing I've noticed (again, small sample) is that no one chats anymore. Could be because chat is now in a separate, easily ignored and overlooked window. Or it could just be my opponents have not felt chatty.
I've now played 4 consecutive rounds without a crash (after 4 consecutive rounds WITH a crash) so either:
1) I had bad luck at the beginning, or good luck now
2) They fixed something
3) Updating my video card drivers made a difference (though there are reports of crashes even with Radeon 14.7 Beta so probably not)
I have to say, now that I'm more used to the interface and no longer experiencing crashes, the client is OK. The process of drafting is a lot better. I can't say game play is better, but it's functional. If they can build on this, it might eventually be objectively better than V3. Right now I can't say that's true.
My biggest gripe right now is the HUUUGEEE triggered ability window. Every time, I have to shrink it down just so I can click on the target of the trigger. And the resizing of the window doesn't seem to persist. That has to be a programming error, because they could have made it the same size as the Stack.
One thing I've noticed (again, small sample) is that no one chats anymore. Could be because chat is now in a separate, easily ignored and overlooked window. Or it could just be my opponents have not felt chatty.
I crashed multiple times last night just trying to build a deck in the collection window, and I'm still using the same drivers as you, so they did not fix whatever it is. The crashes are just very random.
And regardless of what people think of the UI and layout, the optimization is still total garbage. It's so bad that a 2HG game is practically unplayable for everyone involved. As old as V3 was, at least it was coded efficiently enough to support multiplayer.
And yes, no one chats. The chat window is hidden for most people 90% of the time, and there is no notification or sound whenever someone types something in it. And the gigantic trigger window is totally unacceptable for a client that was in beta for nearly TWO YEARS. Very, very bad.
I miss the arrows. Please bring them back.
Everything's too small even when you make it as big as it can be.
You can't dock the stack or preview pane and it clumsily covers up part of the field.
I don't like the red zone. Make it go away forever.
I don't like horizontal phases. Looking across the entire screen feels bad.
I don't like how the graveyard, hand, and library numbers are shown.
It's horrendous. And I don't think it's just a "Oh, I'll eventually get used to this" kind of thing. It's just terrible.
The tiny maximum card sizes are just baffling to me. They are smaller than the ones in V3 for sure, and barely even readable at maximum size in 2560x1440. The font in the chat window desperately needs a resize option as well.
Basically I agree with everything Rachmiel said. I could live with the red zone since they seem so intent on having it, but the rest of that stuff needs to be fixed. And MAKE CHAT AND THE STACK LOG PART OF THE MAIN WINDOW. Stop hiding things in the UI.
The Beta is disorganized because the game-play information is scattered and has your visual focus looking at different parts of the screen for information. This game information like the white phase box has a font that is too small and placed too high. The mana pool icons, player's cards in hand and deck are too small as well.
I've noticed that the program gets really laggy after a few hours of play.
What I hate even more though is that there's no sound or anyway of knowing that someone is chatting with you. I've had friends not realize for hours that I was trying to talk to them, and the same thing has happened to me. In V3 there would be a clear sound and the conversation would pop up when someone sent you a message. This has made it extremely difficult to get ahold of my testing partners.
EDIT:
Forgot to mention, when I play against an opponent with courser of krupix (or I play my own) I still see their top card in the next match. THAT is ridiculous.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If MTG is a part of your life, the formats are like relationships:
Standard/Block = The on-again, off-again holiday fling
Modern/Vintage/Legacy = Stable, homely. A ***** after absence/misreading
Limited/Sealed = Heart breaking free spirit
Commander/Cube = Agreeable, needy and expensive
Pauper/Peasant = Sweet, kind, practical, but shy and boring
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
This is a sore subject with people here so please do not stoke the flames. -Rai
Storm Crow is strictly worse than Seacoast Drake.
I don't get, how could they implement those trigger pop-ups as they are. Why are they so huge? And why is pop-up for madness so tiny?
Why is Phase bar vertical and goes through the whole screen? In v3, to know which phase of turn are you in, you had to look at one small area of the screen. Now you have to actually move your eyes from left to right every time you want to make sure you didn't miss exact step. It's very annoying on 20+ inch monitors.
Why is collection view just one single sheet of cards? Why are dark rituals shown as Mythics? I'm pretty sure, that when I want to sell some valuable cards to get some tickets, I simply filter by rarity (Mythics and Rares are only worth money, with few exceptions).
Why is there so much gradient? Do they have any competent designers at all?
I wonder if they implemented tracking events to find out which areas of client (during game and collection management) are used most? It feels like no one asked one simple question - What is good in v3, so we could probably keep it? What is bad, so we should improve it?
It just feels like a huge mess, in terms of performance, usability and general smoothness.
Of course that's hard to rely on, because it's not like that's a guarantee that the New Client will improve. The lack of improvement in memory leak issues is especially concerning. At least when V3 crashed, it was the server's fault.
I play other games anyway, and I'm pretty much into more casual formats in paper magic (EDH, draft, cube, etc.) at this point in my life so it's not that big of a deal for me to just stop giving them the money I was giving them to play online.
Someone asked earlier if some of the issues were tied to AMD and Radeon. No they are not. My main rig is my AMD machine, and yes I'm using Radeon graphics. At the time I built it, Intel had just recalled the chips I wanted to buy, and I couldn't wait to get a new computer any longer.
However, My i5 computer I built at the same time for my wife, running NVIDIA graphics, also can't run the V4 client without overheating and running massive memory leaks.
FWIW my AMD machine has a windows experience score of 9, and my wifes gaming rig has a windows experience score of 8. Both machines are running the same Gigabyte motherboard model, and the same 16 gigs of Crucial RAM, the same HDDs (Got a sweet deal buying 10 at a time, so I'm set for awhile...).
Neither of those computers can run MTGO, and I do some serious computing on them. CNC simulators and other robotics design packages, don't hiccup on these bad boys.
My big issue is I can't see my opponent's graveyard. Its hidden by their avatar and various other bits of information that I haven't been able to re-size. I've avoided drafting any sort of reanimation decks because of this. I'm also terrified of snapcasters.
The gigantic trigger boxes are one of the most ridiculous things. Like Sword of Fire and Ice triggers and the box pops up so big that it covers almost all of my opponent's side of the screen. And now I have to move this stupid gigantic box or resize it so I can actually target something with the trigger. Once again, in beta for over a year and this is what we get? Wtf?
2 events, 5 rounds of Magic
4 crashes requiring hard reset
1 corruption of user files (probably due to the hard resets) requiring manual delete and re-install to get the program working again
20 tickets refunded
A few notes that might help us learn something about the crashes. During 2 of the crashes, I noticed something interesting. The first time, I was playing Pandora in the background and it kept playing even after I had lost the ability to click anything. The second time, just as an experiment, I kept hitting F2 even after the crash -- and I'll be darned if the game didn't keep proceeding! Also I had been monitoring my RAM utilization, and I happened to check it seconds before the crash. It was holding steady, below 50%, so it wasn't a RAM memory leak issue.
So based on these observations, I really do think it's a graphics card issue. In fact, it seems like most of the people experiencing repetitive crashes actually have high end graphics cards. Could it be a VRAM memory leak issue? (Is that a thing? I apologize, I'm not an expert on these matters.)
As another experiment, I upgraded to the latest Radeon Beta drivers to see if that makes any difference. Haven't had time to play yet.
The slightly good news is that my brain is starting to re-wire, and I can feel myself playing faster and with fewer blunders.
You are having the exact same crash experience as me. I can also hit F2 and hear the sound effect of the game proceeding. Sound seems to be unaffected in general. And like you, I seem to still have plenty of RAM available when the crash happens. And I have to hard reset. They direly need to fix this.
Out of curiosity, what are your system specs? I have an i5-4670, a Radeon HD 7870, and 16 gigs of RAM. Windows 7 64 bit.
edit: and I am also using the latest 14.7 Radeon beta drivers.
Mine's a little older. i5-2550K, Radeon HD 7850, 8GB RAM, Windows 8.1 64-bit. But the fact that we both use Radeons led someone above to speculate the GPU could be the problem. Plus the odd fact that most people who are complaining in fact have the highest end systems.
By the same token, the number of separate filters when creating a casual game is ridiculous. You have to click on each section individually and THEN click on checkboxes within the section, and then click another section, which minimizes the first. The drop-down menus of the old client required half as many clicks and were much smoother to use.
Yeah I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were an AMD issue. I doubt it's our processors, and we're both using different versions of Windows. And obviously it isn't our RAM. The game is probably just coded horribly GPU-wise.
I just played a long multiplayer match in which I crashed, and I noticed after coming back from the crash that the game became progressively laggier and slower the longer it went on, as if there were some kind of memory leak happening within the client. Everyone else in the game noticed this same effect, so it wasn't just me. Searching libraries took forever. People also told me that the larger your deck, the laggier the game experience will be. They said decks of over 200 cards are almost unplayably laggy.
Also, everyone was having the same effect where the game would just bug out and make things happen twice, like the "are you sure you want to empty your mana pool" message appearing two times for no reason. And having to hit F2 multiple times to make anything happen, etc. Just lagged-out and ridiculously broken.
It's so frustrating because:
1) The crashes are not reproducible. They seem to happen at random during gameplay. So it's difficult to isolate the problem.
2) If we report to Wizards without isolating the problem, I doubt they'll understand. And even if they did understand, they'd probably say it was something wrong with our individual systems. "Are you using the latest drivers?" "Is your Windows up to date?" "Have you de-activated every other service running in the background?" "Have you scanned for malware?" "Have you tried wiping your hard drive and re-installing everything from scratch?" They won't actually do anything, they'll just keep pointing out others things it might be that are not their fault, and ruling those other things out would take forever. It's like when you call your cable company about a faulty box and they make you try a million fixes that never do anything, before finally agreeing to send a tech.
3) If we report to AMD, they have bigger fish to fry than MTGO. Plus I imagine the coding for MTGO is pretty sloppy so they might not be able to figure it out without cooperation from Wizards, who seem unlikely to acknowledge they are part of the problem.
4) If it's really a high-end GPU issue, most users won't be affected so again Wizards won't really care because we'll be a small minority of the player base.
Yeah well, it's obviously their problem, not ours, and the number of people who play MTGO who have GPUs similar to ours is probably pretty high. They will lose many customers over this if they don't fix it.
I actually tried using their bug report feature and it is worthless, because they will not accept any bug without an associated event ID. Guess what, there is no "event ID" for a casual game that happened before my computer crashed. So I cannot even report the bug. This is an incompetent tech support decision.
https://twitter.com/CKiritz/status/490225989385854976
1) I had bad luck at the beginning, or good luck now
2) They fixed something
3) Updating my video card drivers made a difference (though there are reports of crashes even with Radeon 14.7 Beta so probably not)
I have to say, now that I'm more used to the interface and no longer experiencing crashes, the client is OK. The process of drafting is a lot better. I can't say game play is better, but it's functional. If they can build on this, it might eventually be objectively better than V3. Right now I can't say that's true.
My biggest gripe right now is the HUUUGEEE triggered ability window. Every time, I have to shrink it down just so I can click on the target of the trigger. And the resizing of the window doesn't seem to persist. That has to be a programming error, because they could have made it the same size as the Stack.
One thing I've noticed (again, small sample) is that no one chats anymore. Could be because chat is now in a separate, easily ignored and overlooked window. Or it could just be my opponents have not felt chatty.
I crashed multiple times last night just trying to build a deck in the collection window, and I'm still using the same drivers as you, so they did not fix whatever it is. The crashes are just very random.
And regardless of what people think of the UI and layout, the optimization is still total garbage. It's so bad that a 2HG game is practically unplayable for everyone involved. As old as V3 was, at least it was coded efficiently enough to support multiplayer.
And yes, no one chats. The chat window is hidden for most people 90% of the time, and there is no notification or sound whenever someone types something in it. And the gigantic trigger window is totally unacceptable for a client that was in beta for nearly TWO YEARS. Very, very bad.
Everything's too small even when you make it as big as it can be.
You can't dock the stack or preview pane and it clumsily covers up part of the field.
I don't like the red zone. Make it go away forever.
I don't like horizontal phases. Looking across the entire screen feels bad.
I don't like how the graveyard, hand, and library numbers are shown.
It's horrendous. And I don't think it's just a "Oh, I'll eventually get used to this" kind of thing. It's just terrible.
[Primer] WBR Tariel: You'll Thank Me For This WBR [Primer]
GGG Dosan of the Green Rainbow GGG
RWU Zedruu: I Ain't Even Mad RWU
Basically I agree with everything Rachmiel said. I could live with the red zone since they seem so intent on having it, but the rest of that stuff needs to be fixed. And MAKE CHAT AND THE STACK LOG PART OF THE MAIN WINDOW. Stop hiding things in the UI.
What I hate even more though is that there's no sound or anyway of knowing that someone is chatting with you. I've had friends not realize for hours that I was trying to talk to them, and the same thing has happened to me. In V3 there would be a clear sound and the conversation would pop up when someone sent you a message. This has made it extremely difficult to get ahold of my testing partners.
EDIT:
Forgot to mention, when I play against an opponent with courser of krupix (or I play my own) I still see their top card in the next match. THAT is ridiculous.
Standard/Block = The on-again, off-again holiday fling
Modern/Vintage/Legacy = Stable, homely. A ***** after absence/misreading
Limited/Sealed = Heart breaking free spirit
Commander/Cube = Agreeable, needy and expensive
Pauper/Peasant = Sweet, kind, practical, but shy and boring