This is seriously stupid. MTGO just keeps getting worse. First they eliminate a bunch of formats and match options, now this. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually it only supported paid events.
For real, this is just completely sad. As greedy and lazy as they've gotten with MTGO, I was still actually surprised when I heard they had removed support for 2HG. I mean, what the hell? The client has supported 2HG for thirteen years. Is it really that hard to keep around? Just utterly insulting to the community. And then there's this transparent moneygrab of not allowing players to just buy the Commander 2015 decks and trying to force them into playing these stupid phantom drafts that cost 10 tickets to play and pay out in tiny 6 card prize packs. They just keep getting greedier and greedier. I feel like they think they have no accountability now that they've deleted their official forums.
Also the client still has absurd game-breaking bugs, like the one where you set a block and hit F2 and it REMOVES THE BLOCKER instead of moving to the next step. Just totally ridiculous. It's crazy to think about how functional gameplay (and specifically multiplayer) used to be on MTGO, how vibrant the community was, how beautiful the cards and the art looked, and how fun of an experience it was overall compared to the absolute pile of garbage it is now. Wizards of the Coast makes hundreds of millions of dollars on this game every year.
As for features, we plan on addressing two items that are high on players' wish lists: improving graveyard visibility and adding the ability to filter decks and binders. These updates will really improve the player experience and we're glad we can get to them with our next update.
Disgusting. They really think they can just take this Orwellian approach where they refuse to acknowledge the reality of the deluge of complaints.
Incidentally, I just tried to fire up V4 on my laptop for the first time in about a week, and it turns out that after the last update it just hangs at "Please be patient while Magic Online is loading" forever.
How did they go about releasing such a crappy product. Basically we got freeish pre-releases to beta test. I'm not paying any more money to play (or spend tix to play) until most of these issues are fixed.
Same. I've just completely lost interest at this point, and casual play is practically dead. Also, I've been watching MTG Goldfish and I've noticed that the value of non-tournament cards has plummeted since the release of V4. Cards which used to have a lot of value because of Commander are just going down and down.
It's funny to look back on the old days of V2, when there was a thriving multiplayer community and cards like Mind's Eye were worth a ton. I think it was 8 or 10 tickets back then, and now it is 1. Some of the people in that community left with the release of V3, but there were still many multiplayer games and people were pretty social. Then they killed the multiplayer room, with no reason given. And now we have this pathetic state of affairs, where even when you do manage to get a game there is no sense of fun or community because of the way WotC has raped the chat features in the client. People literally don't talk in games now. Total silence. It's just not fun at all, and there is no reason for chat functionality in the client to be in the miserable state it's in. It's just completely inexcusable, and meanwhile they are losing players because of it and the values of cards will continue to fall.
Maybe they thought they were being smart with these lazy, callous decisions that disrespect people who have sunk hundreds or thousands of dollars into MTGO over the years and enjoy casual play, but they are going to find that it will bite them in the ass when the secondary market crashes and people stop buying tickets from their store. I'm refusing to give them a single dollar now, and I don't know if I ever will pay real money for anything on MTGO again. They have disrespected me as a customer, and they don't deserve my money.
thinking that you're paying for the service is flawed. You're paying for cards (which you always get to keep) and you're paying for events (which are always refunded when they fail). The client itself is not the product.
Oh OK, well in that case they can just get rid of Magic Online, and we can all play games against each other via email. Or maybe we could use facebook or forums to play. And then we can somehow mail each other the cards and packs that we win oh wait we can't everything is electronic the client IS the product your argument is utterly and completely nonsensical.
No we're not! MTGO is free. You choose to enter events or buy additional products. If the client prevents you from playing properly, you get a refund and keep the product. (They are very good about giving refunds.) If you don't like the game, don't play it! We did not pay for a client made to our specifications. You might feel that way, but it's misplaced loyalty -- thinking that by being a loyal customer, you've earned something.
They have every right to publish a completely horrible game client. They also have every right to shut it down, without notice. You have every right to stop paying them.
Any expectations of quality that you have are purely fabricated in your mind. They did not offer a service at a particular price and fail to provide it, or fail to offer a refund in its place. We can hope for better but that's all.
This is not like when a game ships with a $60 price tag and is unplayable. Technically MTGO is free-to-play software with a lot of premium upgrades.
Extremely dumb post. MTGO is not "free" by any definition of the word. It costs money to acquire cards on it. Period.
Honestly, you sound like you're fanboying. Can't take any of your arguments seriously. And btw, since our last conversation about the client crashing I have crashed at least 15 times.
Two years in beta. Half a billion dollars in profits during those two years. 99% of player feedback ignored, even on extremely obvious bugs. Incompetence and greed.
Half a billion in revenue in the last two years. "We have a team of 4 people". ~5:15. I know he said dev's are basically in another department, but if the Dev's aren't talking to the customers and he's filtering what we're really saying, of course we have a crappy product.
lol that's such bull*****. "The devs are in another department."
Any big game that is run competently allows communications between the actual devs and the players. Look at how MMOs do it. Wizards is just lazy and cheap and they feel no sense of accountability.
Four people? LOL. I bet they spent less than a couple hundred thousand dollars on this client, out of their millions and millions.
This chat is the worst. I get a pop up that someone is chatting with me. So I close out that pop out since i'm playing a game, but i think when I close the pop up window it closes that chat window as well?
And there's no chat history so I don't know who even messaged me.
"That puts the brand's annual revenue somewhere close to $250 million, though Hasbro hasn't released an official figure."
Two hundred and fifty million dollars per year. Apparently that is not enough money to make a MTGO client with even passable features after two years in beta, during which time Magic: the Gathering made roughly half a billion dollars.
I think this is the laziest/cheapest/greediest/most incompetent product I have ever seen put out by a major game company outside of Electronic Arts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The old client was a joke. Looked like something from 1997. You just have to get used to the new client.
I will say I'm irritated the new client doesn't have the starting handicap feature, but I'm not going to quit playing because of it. I've been using the V4 client for months and it works just fine.
No, it does not "work just fine." Do you play multiplayer? Are you aware of what a nightmare it is to try to find a game when games with open seats cannot be viewed at all? The casual matchmaking process being completely automated and not transparent is a horrible idea, and it may cause multiplayer to almost completely die out. That is just one example of how the new client critically fails at basic functionality.
Your criticism that the old client "looks like something from 1997" is facile. The old client was functional, and its UI was clean and easy to read during a match. It also presented cards in their correct aspect ratio, with a good font and no stretched-out art. Please do not white knight for the new client. It is bad.
I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree. I've played both clients extensively and I prefer V4. My personal opinion is that it is a cleaner, more modern, and much more efficient client. I enjoy creating decks and playing much more on V4.
Again, the only thing I'd like to add is starting handicaps.
I wish people would give the new client a real chance before turning to the interwebs to gripe and moan about the V4 experience. If you give it a shot you'll probably get used to it and still enjoy it.
Can you read? Did you seriously just ignore the entire content of my post in regards to multiplayer? How about the post I made underneath that one?
How about the fact that the client just completely froze Windows and then blackscreened my computer AGAIN, in the course of playing a regular casual match? Fantastic!
For real, this is just completely sad. As greedy and lazy as they've gotten with MTGO, I was still actually surprised when I heard they had removed support for 2HG. I mean, what the hell? The client has supported 2HG for thirteen years. Is it really that hard to keep around? Just utterly insulting to the community. And then there's this transparent moneygrab of not allowing players to just buy the Commander 2015 decks and trying to force them into playing these stupid phantom drafts that cost 10 tickets to play and pay out in tiny 6 card prize packs. They just keep getting greedier and greedier. I feel like they think they have no accountability now that they've deleted their official forums.
Also the client still has absurd game-breaking bugs, like the one where you set a block and hit F2 and it REMOVES THE BLOCKER instead of moving to the next step. Just totally ridiculous. It's crazy to think about how functional gameplay (and specifically multiplayer) used to be on MTGO, how vibrant the community was, how beautiful the cards and the art looked, and how fun of an experience it was overall compared to the absolute pile of garbage it is now. Wizards of the Coast makes hundreds of millions of dollars on this game every year.
Disgusting. They really think they can just take this Orwellian approach where they refuse to acknowledge the reality of the deluge of complaints.
Incidentally, I just tried to fire up V4 on my laptop for the first time in about a week, and it turns out that after the last update it just hangs at "Please be patient while Magic Online is loading" forever.
I am quite out of patience.
Same. I've just completely lost interest at this point, and casual play is practically dead. Also, I've been watching MTG Goldfish and I've noticed that the value of non-tournament cards has plummeted since the release of V4. Cards which used to have a lot of value because of Commander are just going down and down.
It's funny to look back on the old days of V2, when there was a thriving multiplayer community and cards like Mind's Eye were worth a ton. I think it was 8 or 10 tickets back then, and now it is 1. Some of the people in that community left with the release of V3, but there were still many multiplayer games and people were pretty social. Then they killed the multiplayer room, with no reason given. And now we have this pathetic state of affairs, where even when you do manage to get a game there is no sense of fun or community because of the way WotC has raped the chat features in the client. People literally don't talk in games now. Total silence. It's just not fun at all, and there is no reason for chat functionality in the client to be in the miserable state it's in. It's just completely inexcusable, and meanwhile they are losing players because of it and the values of cards will continue to fall.
Maybe they thought they were being smart with these lazy, callous decisions that disrespect people who have sunk hundreds or thousands of dollars into MTGO over the years and enjoy casual play, but they are going to find that it will bite them in the ass when the secondary market crashes and people stop buying tickets from their store. I'm refusing to give them a single dollar now, and I don't know if I ever will pay real money for anything on MTGO again. They have disrespected me as a customer, and they don't deserve my money.
Do not edit Moderated Posts unless specifically allowed to. -Rai.
Oh OK, well in that case they can just get rid of Magic Online, and we can all play games against each other via email. Or maybe we could use facebook or forums to play. And then we can somehow mail each other the cards and packs that we win oh wait we can't everything is electronic the client IS the product your argument is utterly and completely nonsensical.
Extremely dumb post. MTGO is not "free" by any definition of the word. It costs money to acquire cards on it. Period.
Honestly, you sound like you're fanboying. Can't take any of your arguments seriously. And btw, since our last conversation about the client crashing I have crashed at least 15 times.
Two years in beta. Half a billion dollars in profits during those two years. 99% of player feedback ignored, even on extremely obvious bugs. Incompetence and greed.
lol that's such bull*****. "The devs are in another department."
Any big game that is run competently allows communications between the actual devs and the players. Look at how MMOs do it. Wizards is just lazy and cheap and they feel no sense of accountability.
Four people? LOL. I bet they spent less than a couple hundred thousand dollars on this client, out of their millions and millions.
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/04/05/magic-the-gathering-hasbros-key-to-growth.aspx
"That puts the brand's annual revenue somewhere close to $250 million, though Hasbro hasn't released an official figure."
Two hundred and fifty million dollars per year. Apparently that is not enough money to make a MTGO client with even passable features after two years in beta, during which time Magic: the Gathering made roughly half a billion dollars.
I think this is the laziest/cheapest/greediest/most incompetent product I have ever seen put out by a major game company outside of Electronic Arts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Can you read? Did you seriously just ignore the entire content of my post in regards to multiplayer? How about the post I made underneath that one?
How about the fact that the client just completely froze Windows and then blackscreened my computer AGAIN, in the course of playing a regular casual match? Fantastic!
Yeah dude, I'll "give it a shot."