The only problem there is that you can't play against people who are also playing their own limited decks; I would like to play against people who have decks of roughly the same power level, and of the same format, and the easiest way to guarantee that is to play in a sealed event like a league or a swiss sealed.
However, my point was mostly about the argument that leagues were bad because you had to play alot of tiebreakers if you wanted to increase your chance of getting the best possible prize...
This is why I don't think it makes much sense to talk about extra tiebreaker rounds as a bad thing...
You have a very good point. The old leagues were very suited for the type of play experience you seek. There is nothing available from Wizards today that gives you an unlimited number of matches using a closed card pool at a fixed cost. I'm not in touch with what's happening with player run events, but maybe there's something there for you?
My play choices for limited have also diminished because of the new leagues. I used to play 4-3-2-2 single elimination drafts. These were replaced with 6-2-2-2 swiss drafts, which was kind of ok for me. However, draft leagues replaced these after a couple of months. If I want to draft the current set and only play those from my draft pod, my only option is 8-4.
I can't stand seeing the same card in 2 decks facing off against each other unless that card is a basic land. I wish modo would die, just so WotC was forced to wake up and make the client not a pile of *****. It's so grating playing on v4.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Yawgmoth," Freyalise whispered as she set the bomb, "now you will pay for your treachery."
OK so I actually spent some time playing Magic Online the past few days. I played a ton of phantom sealed Eldritch Moon/Shadows over Innistrad, I mean something around 22 events in three days. Overall my success was surprisingly good; I felt like I had a reasonable level of bad draws instead of the terribly bad luck I had the previous couple of times I played Magic Online. Overall I went 3-0 I think four times, 2-1 about 10 times, 1-2 6 times, and 0-3 only about twice. It would have been three or four times but sometimes my third round opponent dropped. My rating improved about 100 points during this time, and I only spent a total of about 18 tickets, cruising on my winnings the majority of the time.
I actually enjoyed myself. I still wish Magic Online would go away so that I wouldn't have to be tempted to play it.
OK now ... I checked out the leagues, I didn't play any, but I took a look at them. There are about 10,000 players currently playing leagues across all leagues. That is surprisingly low. The events are a month or two long, and that means that at best, Wizards is selling 10,000 league entry fees a month. If they make $20 on average in entrance fees per player, then they're pulling in $200,000 per month from leagues. At best. That's really not that much. One thing I don't know though is if you can enter a league more than once, and if so, whether the listing of player is a listing of entries or a listing of unique players. For example, if I entered the same league three times (is that possible?) would I be counted as 3 in the listings or just 1?
It used to be that at least two drafts would fire every minute on Magic Online, often more (these days it feels alot closer to 1.5 drafts per minute, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say 2). Taking one per 30 seconds as a baseline, and multiplying by the entrance fee of $10 (on average because some people will enter at a reduced rate by using previous winnings as entry fees), that's 876,000 dollars per month income from drafts. This dwarfs the league income. I don't know if those people playing leagues would spend the same, more, or less on drafts if they didn't have leagues though.
There are about 10,000 players currently playing leagues across all leagues. That is surprisingly low. The events are a month or two long, and that means that at best, Wizards is selling 10,000 league entry fees a month. If they make $20 on average in entrance fees per player, then they're pulling in $200,000 per month from leagues. At best. That's really not that much. One thing I don't know though is if you can enter a league more than once, and if so, whether the listing of player is a listing of entries or a listing of unique players. For example, if I entered the same league three times (is that possible?) would I be counted as 3 in the listings or just 1?
The number of players displayed is the current number of players in the League, and when you finish you are removed from the total, so to get a good estimate you have to look at the rate at which the displayed number changes.
There is now a market crash because of the treasure chests. Rightfully so, because it is now completely unclear what you will win. For instance, in the introduction video the first chest gives a whopping 0.0051 (buylist Goatbots)/ 0.034 tix (sell list Goatbots) of card value.
With less options to win packs (which contain cards that can be redeemed) with constructed events you can almost only win virtual prizes now. Q: What is worth a virtual Tarmogoyf which whom you can only win you virtual cards? A: Not so much anymore as it used to be. MTGO is going into the direction of being an overprized version of Hearthstone (Arena is 4x cheaper than a League).
I think the crash has more to do with the redemption change and WotC's obvious first step in decoupling the paper and online markets. The day the announcement was made I sold my collection which was valued at about 10k. I didn't even think twice about it either.
I don't really know, but I do know that have been slowly spending less and less and being less and less impressed.
I am a heart a casual player who top decks like a champ. I want to have 1 of every card, play a lot of limited and build a bunch of commander decks.
I just feel that they keep making ***** decisions that devalue the reason I play, Cube drafts should be nix or minimum tixs. I have no idea why they think
it should cost 10tix to enter with little or know prize support. I don't get why they introduced cube prize boosters and made them limited.
I can't just buy the latest commander decks I want, now I have to scour bots for all the cards.
I have no idea why MM, EM an VM aren't in regular rotation for drafting even if it was 1 week in 4 or as a flashback in the lead up to pre-releases.
Ultimately I feel that I no longer get value for money and it's all just a big crap shoot.
I honestly think they need to do more to separate the pros and grinders from the players that just want to play for fun (who still want a chance at getting boosters/prizes).
V4 is good - it's far less laggy and it doesn't do anything really dumb like lag for 30 seconds appearing not to register a click, then rushes you through two phases. Also a lot of the prompts in V3 were unintuitive and it was completely unforgiving if you clicked "yes" when it was "3 damage or gain 3" or something.
Remember when rares were 3 for 1 on Online. Those days are long gone, eh? The bots pay half a penny on rares now.
Pretty much MTGO is always only "for the fun of it" nowadays. There's no way you can get any value out of it - the market is too efficient.
I have a pile of tix from selling off stuff that appreciated so I'm just going to draft until I've used the tix up then redeem sets.
I disagree Volcanon. I think there is still value there, it's just really hard to get at. In my opinion as long as there is a way to cash out tix (Thanks MTGOtraders!) then there will always be SOME value. Recently when Pucatrade launched MTGO trading I was able to easily convert my Pucapoints to tix and my tix to cash. Something I couldn't do through Pucatrade but only required about 10 minutes to cash out on MTGO.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Now I am not saying we should kill all the stupid people, I am just saying we should remove all the warning labels off the bottles and let the problem work itself out."
LandLords Land Donation Thread<----This is a "link"...Click it!
I will accept any number of free basic lands on MTGO PM LandLord to get rid of them! Donate today and be part of the project!
The only problem there is that you can't play against people who are also playing their own limited decks; I would like to play against people who have decks of roughly the same power level, and of the same format, and the easiest way to guarantee that is to play in a sealed event like a league or a swiss sealed.
However, my point was mostly about the argument that leagues were bad because you had to play alot of tiebreakers if you wanted to increase your chance of getting the best possible prize...
This is why I don't think it makes much sense to talk about extra tiebreaker rounds as a bad thing...
You have a very good point. The old leagues were very suited for the type of play experience you seek. There is nothing available from Wizards today that gives you an unlimited number of matches using a closed card pool at a fixed cost. I'm not in touch with what's happening with player run events, but maybe there's something there for you?
My play choices for limited have also diminished because of the new leagues. I used to play 4-3-2-2 single elimination drafts. These were replaced with 6-2-2-2 swiss drafts, which was kind of ok for me. However, draft leagues replaced these after a couple of months. If I want to draft the current set and only play those from my draft pod, my only option is 8-4.
OK so having played a decent number of leagues now with Kaladesh I have to say that there are some distinct advantages. Having the deck build time take exactly as long as it takes me saves five to 10 minutes of my time, which is valuable. And being able to get a game fairly immediately whenever I want it is very good. No dead time between rounds, unless I have something to do, and then I can wait as long as I want.
These are distinct advantages over normal queues and are so valuable from a time management perspective that I don't even play normal queues anymore.
However, the game is still too expensive per unit play time.
I would be happy with phantom leagues. 60 play points/6 tickets to play a phantom league, with payouts similar to current phantom queues, would be much more attractive than the current cost structure, although true leagues like the Days Of Old would be better still (but never going to happen, apparently).
I come to these forums once in awhile to see if MTGO has improved the UI and overall game experience at all, always to leave disappointed. I converted a few years ago from being a MTG player (who started playing during revised), to being a Hearthstone player. Hearthstone leaves me totally wanting to get back into MTG because its a far superior card game IMO, but UI and things like having a ranked mode, timers, pack costs, etc leave me not wanting to return. Hopefully one day WotC will wake up and make MTGO better, and learn that they have to compete vs Hearthstone or the game will slowly wither and die.
Hearthstone is pretty to look at and fun in small doses, but you can't expect Magic to work like Hearthstone. MTGO will always seem clunky because Priority has to be a thing. Hearthstone took a colorful and cartoony route that Magic can never take to MTGO because it is a game of structure and rules, while Hearthstone is rife with inconsistent rules text and bugs they refuse to patch out.
As long as Wizards is making money, MTGO will never be buried. In the 6 years of my MTGO experiences, I have never cared for drafting or entering any events. I use it strictly for casual play and to play test cards to help me determine if anything is worthy enough to build into a physical deck. It does have some benefits. I like how you can add any card from your collection into any deck. The card filtering is OK, although I've seen other apps with much better filtering. I used to play a lot more when the client was V3, but I have to agree, V4 is completely rubbish. Sure, the graphics are better, but not by much (Duels of the Planeswalkers dominates in that respect). Although there have been updates to the UI over the years, it's still terrible. The gameplay is painfully slow, partly due to being prompted every time for options that are sometimes not available. Example of this is when it asks if you want to cast instants or activate abilities when I have no instants to cast or no abilities to activate at that time. Another annoyance is when my opponent attacks with an unblockable creature or any creature with evasion, and then I get asked to declare blockers that have no way of blocking their creatures. This makes no sense.
Hopefully all of the woes and cons that have plagued MTGO will be addressed with Magic Digital Next, which is the new project Wizards is working on. They're going to have to, if they have any chance of competing against rivals like Hearthstone and the like, which are currently dominating in the digital arena.
I come to these forums once in awhile to see if MTGO has improved the UI and overall game experience at all, always to leave disappointed. I converted a few years ago from being a MTG player (who started playing during revised), to being a Hearthstone player. Hearthstone leaves me totally wanting to get back into MTG because its a far superior card game IMO, but UI and things like having a ranked mode, timers, pack costs, etc leave me not wanting to return. Hopefully one day WotC will wake up and make MTGO better, and learn that they have to compete vs Hearthstone or the game will slowly wither and die.
Hearthstone is pretty to look at and fun in small doses, but you can't expect Magic to work like Hearthstone. MTGO will always seem clunky because Priority has to be a thing. Hearthstone took a colorful and cartoony route that Magic can never take to MTGO because it is a game of structure and rules, while Hearthstone is rife with inconsistent rules text and bugs they refuse to patch out.
The Microprose game is infinitely faster about casting, stack resolution, instants and interrupts. And it's abandonware from 1997.
It's not the game, it's the ammount of money they're willing to put into it.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
My play choices for limited have also diminished because of the new leagues. I used to play 4-3-2-2 single elimination drafts. These were replaced with 6-2-2-2 swiss drafts, which was kind of ok for me. However, draft leagues replaced these after a couple of months. If I want to draft the current set and only play those from my draft pod, my only option is 8-4.
Currently Playing:
Retired
I actually enjoyed myself. I still wish Magic Online would go away so that I wouldn't have to be tempted to play it.
OK now ... I checked out the leagues, I didn't play any, but I took a look at them. There are about 10,000 players currently playing leagues across all leagues. That is surprisingly low. The events are a month or two long, and that means that at best, Wizards is selling 10,000 league entry fees a month. If they make $20 on average in entrance fees per player, then they're pulling in $200,000 per month from leagues. At best. That's really not that much. One thing I don't know though is if you can enter a league more than once, and if so, whether the listing of player is a listing of entries or a listing of unique players. For example, if I entered the same league three times (is that possible?) would I be counted as 3 in the listings or just 1?
It used to be that at least two drafts would fire every minute on Magic Online, often more (these days it feels alot closer to 1.5 drafts per minute, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say 2). Taking one per 30 seconds as a baseline, and multiplying by the entrance fee of $10 (on average because some people will enter at a reduced rate by using previous winnings as entry fees), that's 876,000 dollars per month income from drafts. This dwarfs the league income. I don't know if those people playing leagues would spend the same, more, or less on drafts if they didn't have leagues though.
The number of players displayed is the current number of players in the League, and when you finish you are removed from the total, so to get a good estimate you have to look at the rate at which the displayed number changes.
I think the crash has more to do with the redemption change and WotC's obvious first step in decoupling the paper and online markets. The day the announcement was made I sold my collection which was valued at about 10k. I didn't even think twice about it either.
The trend started with the 'new' client and then the removal of two headed giant.
EDH is all but dead in a casual sense. That's mostly due to the hyper competitive decks floating around nowadays.
I am a heart a casual player who top decks like a champ. I want to have 1 of every card, play a lot of limited and build a bunch of commander decks.
I just feel that they keep making ***** decisions that devalue the reason I play, Cube drafts should be nix or minimum tixs. I have no idea why they think
it should cost 10tix to enter with little or know prize support. I don't get why they introduced cube prize boosters and made them limited.
I can't just buy the latest commander decks I want, now I have to scour bots for all the cards.
I have no idea why MM, EM an VM aren't in regular rotation for drafting even if it was 1 week in 4 or as a flashback in the lead up to pre-releases.
Ultimately I feel that I no longer get value for money and it's all just a big crap shoot.
I honestly think they need to do more to separate the pros and grinders from the players that just want to play for fun (who still want a chance at getting boosters/prizes).
Remember when rares were 3 for 1 on Online. Those days are long gone, eh? The bots pay half a penny on rares now.
Pretty much MTGO is always only "for the fun of it" nowadays. There's no way you can get any value out of it - the market is too efficient.
I have a pile of tix from selling off stuff that appreciated so I'm just going to draft until I've used the tix up then redeem sets.
LandLords Land Donation Thread<----This is a "link"...Click it!
I will accept any number of free basic lands on MTGO PM LandLord to get rid of them! Donate today and be part of the project!
OK so having played a decent number of leagues now with Kaladesh I have to say that there are some distinct advantages. Having the deck build time take exactly as long as it takes me saves five to 10 minutes of my time, which is valuable. And being able to get a game fairly immediately whenever I want it is very good. No dead time between rounds, unless I have something to do, and then I can wait as long as I want.
These are distinct advantages over normal queues and are so valuable from a time management perspective that I don't even play normal queues anymore.
However, the game is still too expensive per unit play time.
I would be happy with phantom leagues. 60 play points/6 tickets to play a phantom league, with payouts similar to current phantom queues, would be much more attractive than the current cost structure, although true leagues like the Days Of Old would be better still (but never going to happen, apparently).
Hearthstone is pretty to look at and fun in small doses, but you can't expect Magic to work like Hearthstone. MTGO will always seem clunky because Priority has to be a thing. Hearthstone took a colorful and cartoony route that Magic can never take to MTGO because it is a game of structure and rules, while Hearthstone is rife with inconsistent rules text and bugs they refuse to patch out.
Hopefully all of the woes and cons that have plagued MTGO will be addressed with Magic Digital Next, which is the new project Wizards is working on. They're going to have to, if they have any chance of competing against rivals like Hearthstone and the like, which are currently dominating in the digital arena.
Here's an interesting article regarding Digital Next:
https://www.channelfireball.com/articles/magic-digital-next-the-new-mtgo/
The Microprose game is infinitely faster about casting, stack resolution, instants and interrupts. And it's abandonware from 1997.
It's not the game, it's the ammount of money they're willing to put into it.