Been in the closed beta for some time now and as much as I like the layout itself of the new client, the things is SUCH a memory hog, even more so than the current client which I regularly see hitting 400-500K in Task Manager processess. Makes it hard to play without enduring 5 minutes of freezing per game :/
I was in the closed beta for a while, and I watched this program evolve from ah bug-ridden-mess to a not-so-bad client. It still needs more time to bake though. I'm kind of surprised that they pushed this out now.
But maybe this will allow much greater feedback for further improvement of the client. During the closed beta, the developers seemed somewhat receptive and things did get incrementally better each week. And that was with only a few dozen people online at a time and forums that were virtually dead.
One of the reasons this sneak peak is being done now is to leave enough time for substantial changes based on feedback before launch. This is probably the last window for major changes before launch.
Seeing people defend V3 is hilarious. When V3 came out there was so much backlash and people complaining that it was so much worse than V2 and they should just stick with it because there was nothing wrong with it and they didn't understand all these new buttons.
V4 adds some awesome features and, while it isn't perfect yet, when it finishes being polished up will be head and shoulders over the V3 client. A lot of the complaining I see in this thread so far boils down to "I don't know my way around it yet." Guess what, you'll get over it. I understand that MODO is an unforgiving environment and getting used to the interface can cost games, but the whole idea behind a lot of these changes is to keep you from losing to stuff. All of the battle interface has changed to make it easier to see what is attacking and blocking. The stacking is to make it easier to get all of your guys/land/whatever and not miss something along the way. The new draft window is just night and day compared the V3. This is the same problem facebook has whenever it changes anything.
V4 has some faults. Collection takes forever to load and scroll through, it is a little memory bloated, the way the chat windows pop up isn't perfect. It is a huge step in the right direction (especially when you consider that it is a new UI being placed over the same back end. Yikes!)
For those of you disappointed with it, I strongly urge you to put some time into it, familiarize yourself with it. Watch some videos of it if you have to, and then try to assess what you like or dislike about it. I think you'll find that overall, it's a better product. Here's what I sent to Wizards:
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- I like the bar for phases, but the other information pieces seem incomplete. Like the box in the lower left hand corner where we get most of our information being white with black lettering looks cheap. Could we maybe get a textrure with some color or something? I will try playing around with themes and see if that helps.
- When I mouse over a card in the current client the tooltip that shows up has reminder text for the keywords in it not matter what the keyword is. That doesn't seem to be happening in the new client and I couldn't completely remember what unearth did on my PDS hellspark elemental. (luckily, I figured it out) I realize there is a check box to turn on reminder text which is awesome but if we could get a "tooltip only" box that would be ideal.
- I like the new "previous trade partners" tab. It's a step in the right direction, what about a favorite traders list. I have a buddy list but with the new buddy list features like telling me when they have logged on or off I don't really want to put the bots I use on that list. I would much rather have a seperate "favorite traders" list to put these traders on so that I can go to them when I need them quickly but not have to keep tabs on them.
- On the deck filters, can we get some way to set and/or? Right now it seems to be set that if I click standard and pauper I get all the cards that are legal in standard and all the cards legal in pauper, but not what I want which is the cards that are legal in both standard and pauper. The more I think about this the more I think this might only apply to Format, I think the others might want to stay where they are, except maybe color? Maybe a toggle for and/or on each bar?
- This might be more of a bug report but my opponent played an Awakener Druid and animated his forest. It did not show a power or toughness on the forest and when I enlarged the card it said 0/0.
- Love that the soulbound cards say who they are paired to.
- Putting too many permanents on the board so that they disappear off the screen but are able to be scrolled to is annoying. I think it was better when the cards would shrink in size. The stacking is sweet though.
- Durring one of my drafts something happend (unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure what) and suddenly I could not enlarge cards with right click + left click.
- There seems to be an immense amount of slowdown when manipulating my collection. This is pretty inconvenient since it includes deck and binder building.
- Only being able to add 1 or all tickets in a trade is pretty inconvenient. It was nice when there was a couple of options, like adding ten at a time.
- When playing a multiplayer game, if I try to open a private chat with my partner it opens to my base window rather than my current window, a seperate window, or a tab of the game chat... any of these would be preferable.
The biggest problem I see with this client is client-side time delays as opposed to the old client. In particular, when doing some testing Momir Basic for funsies, I noticed that when made to draw 6 cards from an ability, it took ~20-30 seconds of time before the cards were drawn and loaded.
I think most of the client is in a step in the right direction. But that amount of lag I can imagine adds up when instead of Momir Basic you're playing a control deck. They already run out of time, so that clearly is a problem area in terms of client side delay.
I really wanted to give it benefit of the doubt. I was quite excited to try it out. One thing about V4 I've seen that is nice is that it gives you the option to see random starting hands for your deck. I've yet to draft with it, but I've heard nice things. I don't have any problem with the V3 draft interface though, so I'm not sure what the big deal is.
To be honest the V3 main menu is kind of bland. I don't like the trading and messaging options available. The binder is pretty great, but when you have cards from almost every set the tabs become so small that it is almost impossible to search.
I don't see V4 fixing any of those problems significantly. V4 deck-building and binder options take forever to load, and quite frankly seem worse in almost every way imaginable. I'm particularly sickened by how awful foils look in V4. I hope that is just something with the beta.
The battle system in V3 to me is flawless. I rarely, if ever, make a mistake due to the interface. I've never had problems attacking, blocking, casting spells, or using the stack. In V4 the stack has it's own box. Yay. I've never found this necessary, nor do I feel it is a huge improvement. On the other hand every other facet I feel has taken a legitimate step backwards in V4. The random card placement changes are horrible. The main box where your decisions are made is in a horrible spot, and getting information (Life, Cards in Hand, Etc.) are in bad places.
My first impression of it was so bad I could hardly believe it. As I delved deeper into it I started to hate it more and more because just building a deck and getting into a game took too long and was not intuitive at all. Then the battle system itself just blew me away with how much I hated it. I'm actually surprised that people are not only defending it, but actually championing it.
Just took another quick run at it, and it looks like some of the issues to v4 performance seems to be a memory leak. I'm not sure if this is 64x specific or not, but I run up to 99% of CPU usage on my computer while in an actual game. It's very unfortunate.
And there are some severe UI issues. At least the "search for game" is a bit better set-up now?
I was one of the few, I guess, that never had an issue with the V3 UI. There were some quirks that I didn't like, but overall, I'm used to it and have never had much to complain about.
Maybe it's disliking the change, but I'm not impressed with the new UI. In game, I don't like how the stack is horizontal and I dislike that the chat for the game opens in a separate window. Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like I either have to cover up a portion of the game screen, or hide the chat. I also don't like the new way it displays targeting by displaying a symbol over the targeted card when you hover over the targeting card. I much prefer the V3 arrow, since you didn't have to scan the screen to find the symbol. It just pointed you directly to the target.
I also dislike the tournament lobby. In V3, it showed you the current round's matches and their results. Again, unless I'm missing something, you now need to expand each individual player to see the status of their match. There's no quick way to scan the matches of the round to see how many are left to be completed.
So, I definitely prefer V3, so far. The only thing I can say I definitively like better in the new UI is the drafting interface. Everything about it is superior imo.
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The game lobbies look better/fresher. Games selection is also better/more streamlined. However, the gaming screen is a bit worse. The cards on the stack are too big and the chat window is weird. Why don't they just use the lobbies from V4 and the rest of the interface from V3? It would be fine for me.
I don't know about the game selection being better/more streamlined. Have you tried playing a game of 1 on 1 Commander? It is damn near impossible to figure out how to set it up.
Has anyone tried playing an enchantment like Rhystic Study? Whenever your opponent plays a spell, the big icon from Rhystic plops on to the stack ON TOP OF their spell, and I can't see what they hell card they are playing.
How about Rite of Ruin? The opponent "chooses" the order of permanents to sacrifice but the software never tells you what the order is. It just informs you to "sacrifice a permanent."
Also, it is clunky/slow/freezy like everyone else said too.
Very un-happy with V4. I remember when V3 came out and I had no problem switching over. I just spent 4 hours going over different things.
Building a deck or looking for cards took forever. Very slow when scrolling and loading.
Playing a game was horrible. Chat system set up was bad but can deal with something as minor as that. But targeting, the way the stack works, how small everything is (I play on a 17in laptop and it still seems very small.) I have no clue how they think this is better?
I had a easy time finding a game. I kind of deal with a tab system with a major program at work so it was to bad for me and seemed very nice. But once I got to the room and choose the game type I clicked on some games and they already had people in them. I couldn't or didn't see where it said if a game was already process.
I am going to play around with it some more but at this point there is no way I would play a tournament with it. If it stays the way it is I don't see myself playing MTGO after the force move.
For all the fan-fare that WotC put out about this being a great UI improvement, I expected to not have to struggle learning un-intuitive UI. This program is a farce, difficult to navigate, and does not respond quickly to user actions.
I was already looking to head out from MTGO, and this is the nail in the coffin.
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The UI isn't intuitive. I want to play a game and it takes me nearly a full minute to get to that point after logging in. This shouldn't happen. In the current version there's a nice, big PLAY button right there that I just click and it brings up a window with all the relevant variables. In the new version I'm simply redirected to a screen that feels like I'm looking through a database. God forbid I actually want to play a game of Magic.
Gameplay looks and feels awful. From the start, your match chat window starts off in a part of the screen that's in the way of the game. I couldn't find a way to resize the game window so that the match chat could fit nicely on the side like it does in the current version. I had a hard time figuring out my opponent's hand and deck size because the information blends into all the other information. In the current version we have icons on top of which the numbers are placed. Want to know how many cards are in your hand? There's a very obvious graphic right there. Everything stacks and I can't find a way to get it to unstack. I don't want all my creatures of the same card type to stack up in a pile so that I can't easily tell how many I have. Their idea of how to rectify this is to plop a big ugly number on top of each stack, which makes it difficult to tell which cards are underneath and it's just misery. Don't even get me started about tapping lands. I don't want to have to rearrange my eyes every time a permanent enters the battlefield. Having everything centered and having their position be reliant on so many factors (how many of them I have in play, how many other permanents I have in play, whether any are tapped, how many 'stacks' of a card I have on the field) was an absolute headache. I don't want a big red line to ERUPT in the middle of the battlefield whenever the combat phase happens. It's ugly, disrupting, and unnecessary.
I have yet to try out drafting, so hopefully that'll be better. It just seems like they've taken a number of steps backwards with this. Hopefully they'll look at what they have now and observe what works instead of trying to reimagine the entire client into something that's clunkier than the original was. (Remember actual tables you'd click on to find a match? This, in my opinion, is worse than that.)
I agree with all of these points, but would like to add that my biggest annoyance is everything you do opens a new WINDOW instead of a tab within the client. This makes switching between an event window, chat, and deckbuilding really cumbersome, especially for folks like me that lock/hide their taskbar (I have to minimize my current window to pull it up since it interferes with programs where I'm moving my mouse near the bottom a lot). It's also just ugly and unnecessary, a giant leap backwards from current functionality.
The interface itself is just ugly. There is too much white space, and I tried a number of different themes but none of them solve that issue. The draft interface is terrible because there's no card image window like there is in the current client, so you have to make the cards massive to read them (forcing you to actually scroll through each pack) or wait the 3-5 seconds for the tooltips to pop up.
The only good thing I have to say about it thus far is it's nice having alerts for when a round begins, this was a huge omission in the current client. Aside from that, everything seems worse. Even something as simple as the look of the cards themselves seems off, they don't look like real cards to me, the black borders seem overly thick and contrasted with the white background just makes them look really odd.
I'm truly amazed this is something Wizards is willing to "show off." I'm not sure it's even salvageable. They've been working on this for so long I and Magic has been so successful recently that I really expected a massive improvement, not something clunkier and uglier than the current client (which is a feat in itself). I was really hoping for something like a massively expanded DoTP interface. DoTP doesn't have near the functionality needed for serious competitive magic, but the aesthetics/feel of the interface was perfect.
Is it too much to expect something with the slickness of DoTP and the functionality of the current client for something I'm dumping 100's of dollars into every year?
Is it too much to expect something with the slickness of DoTP and the functionality of the current client for something I'm dumping 100's of dollars into every year?
No, it's not. MTGO is WotC's cash cow and should deserve the royal treatment. They simply refuse to develop the product to make it Prime Time. They are sufficiently happy milking this beast for every last penny rather than develop it into its own stand alone. The idea behind it is that WotC would still rather have people play paper Magic.
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No, it's not. MTGO is WotC's cash cow and should deserve the royal treatment. They simply refuse to develop the product to make it Prime Time. They are sufficiently happy milking this beast for every last penny rather than develop it into its own stand alone. The idea behind it is that WotC would still rather have people play paper Magic.
Part of the problem is also in that this new version is still built on MTGO's crappy back end. They really need to go through the process of revamping the whole program and not just the UI. It seems to me that with the recent hires WotC did to their digital department they might be starting the process for a giant overhaul, but they wanted to give us something for now to help bridge the gap since V3 is so incredibly archaic. Something with the Duels interface but MTGO structure would be awesome and I would be really pleased if they went that route, but you can't just slap that over the current structure of the game and have it work. I mean, fight now the two clients are interchangeable on the server; that means the game isn't different at all (which makes a lot of these complaints even more hilarious) just the way it visually organizes things.
I am with you though, the current back end is out-dated, bloated, buggy, and problematic. A new coat of paint from a new UI isn't going to help that. That being said, I think the new features brought to the table with V4 are worth it and if they can shore up some of the bugs/bloat issue and ideal tweak some of the visuals and add some more customization it will be leagues better than V3. It is far far far, even in its current form, from an unsalvagable mess.
The argument reminds me a lot of when Office switched over to the ribbon (2007?) and everyone complained that their productivity went down because they didn't know how to use the ribbon. Turns out it just had a learning curve and when they figured it out it was faster and more productive then ever (in before "I still hate the ribbon!"). The same argument came up at work the other day. We got a new point of sale system for our museum gift shop that finally has the inventory and receipts coming from the computer and a woman tried to argue that it was faster for her to write receipts out by hand.
One day you'll get used to the new UI and when you do you'll see that so far most stuff is vastly improved. Once everything is working properly go to next is going to be immensely better then clicking the next name to pop up on the screen and hoping you beat someone to it, or having your game disappear down the list and having to cancel and repost every 30 seconds to play a game of momir. The new draft interface is awesome and building your deck on the fly is so so sweet. The collection is a mess right now but some and/or operators and some bug fixes would make that pretty good too because filters really are the way to go.
No, it's not. MTGO is WotC's cash cow and should deserve the royal treatment. They simply refuse to develop the product to make it Prime Time. They are sufficiently happy milking this beast for every last penny rather than develop it into its own stand alone. The idea behind it is that WotC would still rather have people play paper Magic.
I think there is a lot to that. If they actually made serious improvements to it, it could seriously overtake the paper game. Right now the in-game interface for Duels AND V3 are both very good. And V4, which should be an improvement, is significantly worse than both of them. Sad.
It looks like party poker or some poker client from 10 years ago. I haven't played on it yet, but I watched some streamers using it and I couldn't tell what was going on half the time and neither could the streamer.
The targeting system is whack, it just hightlights the cards and then it's a game of Where's Waldo to find the cards that are being targeted.
I have no idea why WIzards won't just contract out Blizzard or someone to build the most amazing MODO out there with a full support team making this thing run like a Caddy. They need people who know the business to handle this for them. Wizards is blind by the fact that they have one of the best products in gaming, but have no idea how to present it properly. The corporate big wigs think that they must be doing something right because of the sales numbers, however, people just play it due to no other choice to play MTG... if it was designed properly, I bet numbers would double
It looks like party poker or some poker client from 10 years ago. I haven't played on it yet, but I watched some streamers using it and I couldn't tell what was going on half the time and neither could the streamer.
The targeting system is whack, it just hightlights the cards and then it's a game of Where's Waldo to find the cards that are being targeted.
This sort of brings up another good point. It took poker sites like Party and Stars YEARS to finally respond to customer complaining about their crappy interfaces. And they definitely had only one cash cow.
This sort of brings up another good point. It took poker sites like Party and Stars YEARS to finally respond to customer complaining about their crappy interfaces. And they definitely had only one cash cow.
... MTGO is at least 10 years old. We can now say WoTC has had a DECADE to find digital representation. In fact, the original Shandalar game got it right more or less off the bat!
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I'm disappointed with it so far, but I'm sure I'll get used to it. It just seems not user friendly. The last interface was so simple... this is a lot of obnoxious boxes.
I just tried a Draft and I was so disappointed. I actually filed a compensation request, because the client-side lag was so bad that it was repeatedly missing my commands -- like I would click a creature to add it to Attack, and nothing happened, so I clicked it again, and nothing happened, so I hit F2, and then out of nowhere I've somehow skipped combat altogether. This is on a new custom PC. There's no reason for lag on my end, that's for sure. I never experienced lag remotely like this on V3.
Also because of the sluggishness, I fell WAY behind on the game clock and had to start rushing.
I actually quit mid Draft and logged back under V3, since I had real packs and prizes on the line. Given the current state of the interface and how clunky it is, they should not be doing Drafts with V3 vs. V4 players for actual prizes. It's just not a fair playing field.
This reminds me of Diablo 3 -- don't spend much time thinking about the interface or long term goals, just push something out because we know we have a loyal fanbase that will buy anything.
The whole thing feels like the coding was outsourced out to India, and the design was done by a committee of Hasbro execs that don't really know what Magic is, or really care about it.
They need to hire a team of talented developers that love Magic to completely revamp this program. The V4 interface has some good ideas, but all the small things are completely off.
Part of the problem is also in that this new version is still built on MTGO's crappy back end. They really need to go through the process of revamping the whole program and not just the UI.
A thousand times this.
Also, I don't just hate V4, I also hate V3. V3 is a giant pile of garbage, and I can't believe that V4 is a bigger pile of stinkier garbage.
I mean, did you watch LSV's Cube 6 draft? Dancing lands? Disappearing crap? So many in game bugs... have you played Aeon Chronicler, and how it just doesn't work? Remember when Elspeth was banned because her ult would freak out the game? yeah... way to go MTGO. Keep rolling out the hits.
My opinion differs from the majority here, as overall I certainly prefer the beta client to V3, however to EVERYONE that does have issues with the client, let Wizards know. They can only fix things if you tell them you're unhappy with them and why it is that you're unhappy with it, and if possible what you think a better solution would be. Without a doubt in my mind, this is the entire reason they're having this trial run of the beta. To get widespread feedback about things before the next big changes. So again, if you have gripes, or would like to see things in a different way, this is your chance to get your feedback in.
Just want to let everyone know that with the new update from today the game chat can be docked into the game window on any of the four sides. I know a lot of people were complaining about it being a separate window from the game so now it doesn't have to be (at your discretion of course!) This is good. It means more customization. The more choices they give us to modify the UI the better.
One of the reasons this sneak peak is being done now is to leave enough time for substantial changes based on feedback before launch. This is probably the last window for major changes before launch.
V4 adds some awesome features and, while it isn't perfect yet, when it finishes being polished up will be head and shoulders over the V3 client. A lot of the complaining I see in this thread so far boils down to "I don't know my way around it yet." Guess what, you'll get over it. I understand that MODO is an unforgiving environment and getting used to the interface can cost games, but the whole idea behind a lot of these changes is to keep you from losing to stuff. All of the battle interface has changed to make it easier to see what is attacking and blocking. The stacking is to make it easier to get all of your guys/land/whatever and not miss something along the way. The new draft window is just night and day compared the V3. This is the same problem facebook has whenever it changes anything.
V4 has some faults. Collection takes forever to load and scroll through, it is a little memory bloated, the way the chat windows pop up isn't perfect. It is a huge step in the right direction (especially when you consider that it is a new UI being placed over the same back end. Yikes!)
For those of you disappointed with it, I strongly urge you to put some time into it, familiarize yourself with it. Watch some videos of it if you have to, and then try to assess what you like or dislike about it. I think you'll find that overall, it's a better product. Here's what I sent to Wizards:
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I think most of the client is in a step in the right direction. But that amount of lag I can imagine adds up when instead of Momir Basic you're playing a control deck. They already run out of time, so that clearly is a problem area in terms of client side delay.
To be honest the V3 main menu is kind of bland. I don't like the trading and messaging options available. The binder is pretty great, but when you have cards from almost every set the tabs become so small that it is almost impossible to search.
I don't see V4 fixing any of those problems significantly. V4 deck-building and binder options take forever to load, and quite frankly seem worse in almost every way imaginable. I'm particularly sickened by how awful foils look in V4. I hope that is just something with the beta.
The battle system in V3 to me is flawless. I rarely, if ever, make a mistake due to the interface. I've never had problems attacking, blocking, casting spells, or using the stack. In V4 the stack has it's own box. Yay. I've never found this necessary, nor do I feel it is a huge improvement. On the other hand every other facet I feel has taken a legitimate step backwards in V4. The random card placement changes are horrible. The main box where your decisions are made is in a horrible spot, and getting information (Life, Cards in Hand, Etc.) are in bad places.
My first impression of it was so bad I could hardly believe it. As I delved deeper into it I started to hate it more and more because just building a deck and getting into a game took too long and was not intuitive at all. Then the battle system itself just blew me away with how much I hated it. I'm actually surprised that people are not only defending it, but actually championing it.
And there are some severe UI issues. At least the "search for game" is a bit better set-up now?
Maybe it's disliking the change, but I'm not impressed with the new UI. In game, I don't like how the stack is horizontal and I dislike that the chat for the game opens in a separate window. Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks like I either have to cover up a portion of the game screen, or hide the chat. I also don't like the new way it displays targeting by displaying a symbol over the targeted card when you hover over the targeting card. I much prefer the V3 arrow, since you didn't have to scan the screen to find the symbol. It just pointed you directly to the target.
I also dislike the tournament lobby. In V3, it showed you the current round's matches and their results. Again, unless I'm missing something, you now need to expand each individual player to see the status of their match. There's no quick way to scan the matches of the round to see how many are left to be completed.
So, I definitely prefer V3, so far. The only thing I can say I definitively like better in the new UI is the drafting interface. Everything about it is superior imo.
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I don't know about the game selection being better/more streamlined. Have you tried playing a game of 1 on 1 Commander? It is damn near impossible to figure out how to set it up.
Has anyone tried playing an enchantment like Rhystic Study? Whenever your opponent plays a spell, the big icon from Rhystic plops on to the stack ON TOP OF their spell, and I can't see what they hell card they are playing.
How about Rite of Ruin? The opponent "chooses" the order of permanents to sacrifice but the software never tells you what the order is. It just informs you to "sacrifice a permanent."
Also, it is clunky/slow/freezy like everyone else said too.
Building a deck or looking for cards took forever. Very slow when scrolling and loading.
Playing a game was horrible. Chat system set up was bad but can deal with something as minor as that. But targeting, the way the stack works, how small everything is (I play on a 17in laptop and it still seems very small.) I have no clue how they think this is better?
I had a easy time finding a game. I kind of deal with a tab system with a major program at work so it was to bad for me and seemed very nice. But once I got to the room and choose the game type I clicked on some games and they already had people in them. I couldn't or didn't see where it said if a game was already process.
I am going to play around with it some more but at this point there is no way I would play a tournament with it. If it stays the way it is I don't see myself playing MTGO after the force move.
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I was already looking to head out from MTGO, and this is the nail in the coffin.
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I agree with all of these points, but would like to add that my biggest annoyance is everything you do opens a new WINDOW instead of a tab within the client. This makes switching between an event window, chat, and deckbuilding really cumbersome, especially for folks like me that lock/hide their taskbar (I have to minimize my current window to pull it up since it interferes with programs where I'm moving my mouse near the bottom a lot). It's also just ugly and unnecessary, a giant leap backwards from current functionality.
The interface itself is just ugly. There is too much white space, and I tried a number of different themes but none of them solve that issue. The draft interface is terrible because there's no card image window like there is in the current client, so you have to make the cards massive to read them (forcing you to actually scroll through each pack) or wait the 3-5 seconds for the tooltips to pop up.
The only good thing I have to say about it thus far is it's nice having alerts for when a round begins, this was a huge omission in the current client. Aside from that, everything seems worse. Even something as simple as the look of the cards themselves seems off, they don't look like real cards to me, the black borders seem overly thick and contrasted with the white background just makes them look really odd.
I'm truly amazed this is something Wizards is willing to "show off." I'm not sure it's even salvageable. They've been working on this for so long I and Magic has been so successful recently that I really expected a massive improvement, not something clunkier and uglier than the current client (which is a feat in itself). I was really hoping for something like a massively expanded DoTP interface. DoTP doesn't have near the functionality needed for serious competitive magic, but the aesthetics/feel of the interface was perfect.
Is it too much to expect something with the slickness of DoTP and the functionality of the current client for something I'm dumping 100's of dollars into every year?
No, it's not. MTGO is WotC's cash cow and should deserve the royal treatment. They simply refuse to develop the product to make it Prime Time. They are sufficiently happy milking this beast for every last penny rather than develop it into its own stand alone. The idea behind it is that WotC would still rather have people play paper Magic.
5x SCG Legacy Open T8
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Part of the problem is also in that this new version is still built on MTGO's crappy back end. They really need to go through the process of revamping the whole program and not just the UI. It seems to me that with the recent hires WotC did to their digital department they might be starting the process for a giant overhaul, but they wanted to give us something for now to help bridge the gap since V3 is so incredibly archaic. Something with the Duels interface but MTGO structure would be awesome and I would be really pleased if they went that route, but you can't just slap that over the current structure of the game and have it work. I mean, fight now the two clients are interchangeable on the server; that means the game isn't different at all (which makes a lot of these complaints even more hilarious) just the way it visually organizes things.
I am with you though, the current back end is out-dated, bloated, buggy, and problematic. A new coat of paint from a new UI isn't going to help that. That being said, I think the new features brought to the table with V4 are worth it and if they can shore up some of the bugs/bloat issue and ideal tweak some of the visuals and add some more customization it will be leagues better than V3. It is far far far, even in its current form, from an unsalvagable mess.
The argument reminds me a lot of when Office switched over to the ribbon (2007?) and everyone complained that their productivity went down because they didn't know how to use the ribbon. Turns out it just had a learning curve and when they figured it out it was faster and more productive then ever (in before "I still hate the ribbon!"). The same argument came up at work the other day. We got a new point of sale system for our museum gift shop that finally has the inventory and receipts coming from the computer and a woman tried to argue that it was faster for her to write receipts out by hand.
One day you'll get used to the new UI and when you do you'll see that so far most stuff is vastly improved. Once everything is working properly go to next is going to be immensely better then clicking the next name to pop up on the screen and hoping you beat someone to it, or having your game disappear down the list and having to cancel and repost every 30 seconds to play a game of momir. The new draft interface is awesome and building your deck on the fly is so so sweet. The collection is a mess right now but some and/or operators and some bug fixes would make that pretty good too because filters really are the way to go.
Sets completed in the "Vale" Block
Vale: The Shadowlands
More sets to come
My Have/Want List
I think there is a lot to that. If they actually made serious improvements to it, it could seriously overtake the paper game. Right now the in-game interface for Duels AND V3 are both very good. And V4, which should be an improvement, is significantly worse than both of them. Sad.
The targeting system is whack, it just hightlights the cards and then it's a game of Where's Waldo to find the cards that are being targeted.
This sort of brings up another good point. It took poker sites like Party and Stars YEARS to finally respond to customer complaining about their crappy interfaces. And they definitely had only one cash cow.
... MTGO is at least 10 years old. We can now say WoTC has had a DECADE to find digital representation. In fact, the original Shandalar game got it right more or less off the bat!
5x SCG Legacy Open T8
16th place GP Indianapolis 2012
Check out my Legacy stream
Also because of the sluggishness, I fell WAY behind on the game clock and had to start rushing.
I actually quit mid Draft and logged back under V3, since I had real packs and prizes on the line. Given the current state of the interface and how clunky it is, they should not be doing Drafts with V3 vs. V4 players for actual prizes. It's just not a fair playing field.
This reminds me of Diablo 3 -- don't spend much time thinking about the interface or long term goals, just push something out because we know we have a loyal fanbase that will buy anything.
They need to hire a team of talented developers that love Magic to completely revamp this program. The V4 interface has some good ideas, but all the small things are completely off.
A thousand times this.
Also, I don't just hate V4, I also hate V3. V3 is a giant pile of garbage, and I can't believe that V4 is a bigger pile of stinkier garbage.
I mean, did you watch LSV's Cube 6 draft? Dancing lands? Disappearing crap? So many in game bugs... have you played Aeon Chronicler, and how it just doesn't work? Remember when Elspeth was banned because her ult would freak out the game? yeah... way to go MTGO. Keep rolling out the hits.
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Sets completed in the "Vale" Block
Vale: The Shadowlands
More sets to come
My Have/Want List