MTG Salvation

So I've been on the forum for while. Even though it doesn't seem like it, and I've been noticing a lot lately that when I go into sub forums like Standard, Limited/Sealed, or even General Discussion, the same posts are at the top and most of the times replies to threads are very slow.

I'm just curious if the website's visitor count has been down drastically or if there's another reason to it.

Thanks for Reading,
Kyle

I thought the same thing as what you have just reported has happened to the EDH subforum as well.

I'm here, so it's obviously going down in quality.

Quote from SpeedGrapher »

I don't think mtg salvation is dying but in real life magic might be dying a bit. When I go out to play there are not many younger players. Even at free EDH tournaments. The mere introduction of free tournaments with booster pack prizes worries me a little. I know it's a way to pull people into a store to spend money they wouldn't have unless they were there. But again the player base is OLD in my area age 21 to 40+. I would be shocked to meet new players younger than that. I've seen the same people playing magic for forever and I hop around to different stores with in a hour driving time. I'll be changing up the nights that I go play soon to more standard events maybe I will see new players there. At least I really hope so. I feel like the only time I see people that are new are at pre-release and release events. I know there is a casual crowd, a FNM crowd and a competitive crowd. It worries me that the middle crowd seems to be disappearing.

If anyone else experiencing a lack of younger players in their area? For me it seems that other card games such as force of will, pokemon, other, are drawing away the younger crowd.

I'm a middle school teacher and I'd argue the opposite. A few years ago I might have had one or two students per grade who played, and for most of them it was more of a passing interest. Now there are multiple kids in each grade (there's only one class per grade at my school) bringing their cards in to school on a daily basis. The interest goes down to 5th grade at least.

It's all anecdotal though. My understanding of the hard data is that Magic is growing and is quite profitable.

MTGS is not dying, I want to put that out there first. We had our most active day in the site's history this past December.

We are somewhat slower than we used to be, but there are a lot of reasons for that, but the two big ones are that Curse is blocked by a lot of professional firewalls (so when the site moved to Curse we lost those work day posters) and there has been a rather huge shift to social media (Facebook/Twitter) in the last few years, to the point where Wizards closed their own forums.

We're most active during spoiler season (and just after leaks are posted), so in the lull between spoiler season and the next major event, we do tend to slow down.

Anecdotally, there seems to be a player retraction in some areas. Over the long term, I think people approach magic cyclically, as many magic players I know (including myself) have periods of high involvement and lower involvement (or outright quitting). My impression was that, starting around 2010 and the "duel of the planeswalkers" era, magic picked up a lot of players. What I've seen is that many of the players I knew who were "in" at that point, have started fading "out." NOW, none of that means that the game is doing poorly (especially if numbers are up overall), but I do think certain segments of players have left or are leaving (even if they are being replaced). This will probably impact some areas disproportionately (such as a given town, website, or even subforum).

Quote from schepo55 »

Quote from Jay13x »

We are somewhat slower than we used to be, but there are a lot of reasons for that, but the two big ones are that Curse is blocked by a lot of professional firewalls...

What do you mean with this ?
What is a pro firewall ?

I mean the kind that businesses and government agencies install to filter what employees can access to prevent employees from wasting company time. The old website got through these, and we found that quite a few people (including some staff) couldn't access the site at work anymore when we moved to Curse since it's more well known.

Let's not beat around the bush: r/magictcg has eaten into its userbase, and MTGsalvation provides a vastly superior quality of discussion and is a better forum for pro input. I saw a thread on there about Lantern Control strategy where some random grinder's opinion had more upvotes than Zak Elsik's. This is absurd.

Quote from SpeedGrapher »

If anyone else experiencing a lack of younger players in their area? For me it seems that other card games such as force of will, pokemon, other, are drawing away the younger crowd.

I regularly see a few kids who look like they're probably elementary school aged drafting and playing standard at my LGS. I don't have a good sense of how young the other players in those events are because I'm never in them, but the kids stick out more than the high school/college aged ones. The pokemon and yu gi oh crowds are definitely younger on average, but magic isn't exclusively old guys.

So this is two different questions, is the forum or magic dying. No, magic from my point of view is not dying. HOWEVER, the forum traffic seems very sluggish . For example it seem the number of topics generated and new replies is very slow. At least in my humble opinion.

My assumption would be that even if MTGsalv's numbers are dropping, they aren't dropping any more than forums in average. The heyday of the forum as the primary way to interact online is over.

Standard is pretty bad right now, Modern is pretty bad right now, Legacy and Vintage are as irrelevant as ever, and EDH is hit and miss depending on how many friends you know who have decks. So it's understandable if it seems like things are not as strong as they used to be. Rotation is about to take care of Standard, a ban announcement should help Modern's Eldrazi infestation, Shadows over Innistrad looks to be an excellent draft format, and two exciting supplemental sets (Eternal Masters and Conspiracy 2) will be coming out shortly. Things have been bad the past several months, but will be getting much better soon.

I think MTGS is still where it is at regarding forums. Facebook and the like are now the premier places people go to trade and discuss new spoilers, but they go to MTGS for specific discussion regarding decks, especially obscure decks in Modern and Legacy. The same can be said of The Source etc. If I want to know about a specific Legacy deck that is obscure but viable I sure as hell don't want to go to content sites written by Pros because pros don't actually play those decks, they play the best decks they can with the highest return for them. Nobody comes here for deck lists any more, and tournament reports are very much a thing of the past.

I rarely post any more because current Magic formats are pretty bad (like said above) and also the demands of high school life. But SOI has me planning new modern brews like a storm plus I'm also going to the prerelease this weekend (I ended my run of not missing pre-releases with Oath of the Gatewatch). Summer is approaching and I'm ready to jump back into Magic. Magic is pretty seasonal as it requires a good amount of time and practice for people who like winning to enjoy. Summer hopefully brings back in some of the younger community occupied with school.

Quote from asmallcat »

My assumption would be that even if MTGsalv's numbers are dropping, they aren't dropping any more than forums in average. The heyday of the forum as the primary way to interact online is over.

I feel like this is true, bk in 2007 it was kind of a boom, and now all that is left is the flakes and pieces floating around after the explosion. ALOT of forums just died lol (including mine R.I.P)


Disclaimer: There is no statistical data i am pulling from, more of a observation from my social exp etc.

<blows raspberies...> Heck no, I don't think so.

Mtgnews.com is dying.

I wouldn't say it's dying per se, but as said before it's just hit a lower point. Maybe people are getting bored of the NWO way of designing sets. Standard has stagnated, modern is screwed with Eldrazi and flawed with the design, edh popularity seems to have leveled off. Makes sense it would seem the forums are slower now than before. Rotations and bannings will help with traffic though.

We are going through one of the roughest modern seasons in the last couple of years paired with the most boring standard block in years. Everyone is probably going to be running into the streets with belated christmas bells when Innistrad rotates in just because it means we are one step closer to Eldrazi cycling out. So if MTG salvation forums got a little slow, I'm not exactly surprised.

The mobile site is pretty awful, I'd be on a lot more (particularly on break and lunch at work or when I'm out and about) if it wasn't slow, links didn't take effort to click on, and there were no obtrusive ads.

Quote from KitKatTipz »

I'm just curious if the website's visitor count has been down drastically or if there's another reason to it.

I've been asked about this a few times this past year.

Here's the blunt facts:
Total number of visitors is up.
Total number of active users is up.
The rate of new users registering is up (with adbots accounted for).
The rate of posting has stayed about the same from last year (less then 2% growth).

Things are alive and well. The fact that the active user base has grown more then the post rate, and that the post rate has not increased are the only things I would find at all troubling. With active users going up, that means each person is lurking a bit more, even if we're getting a little more posts.

Where people are posting has changed drastically.
Especially when you compare to a few years ago. Some subforums are growing and bustling, even needing split up into new subs, while others that used to be popular are slowing down. This is where things feel like they're dying or getting slower. Forum X seems like it just isn't as active, because people are spending a lot more time in forum Y. Interest in Commander and Modern since their advent has directly stolen attention from Standard, for instance.

I'd like to get our members a little more engaged, but it's far from dying.

Quote from Jay13x »

I mean the kind that businesses and government agencies install to filter what employees can access to prevent employees from wasting company time. The old website got through these, and we found that quite a few people (including some staff) couldn't access the site at work anymore when we moved to Curse since it's more well known.

My last job blocked MTGS (before the move to Curse). But every single person in the IT department was running a server on their machine, and so we all simply used localhost as a proxy server, and everything became unblocked.

I mean, there were legitimate reasons for the IT staff to unblock themselves (the firewall also blocked sites we actually needed for work, like StackOverflow), but I still think it's funny.

Well this is good news to me.

Thanks for taking time to reply to the thread Feyd and Jay13. It's great to know a forum I visit multiple times a day isn't dying as feared before.