"Adapting our technology to best serve a modern framework mean some software and services must change. On May 27, 2020 we will be sunsetting Planeswalker Points and removing access to the Planeswalker Points website."
I'm actually surprised it took them this long. Nearly all companies with an online presence requires an account with thier main site now. The use of big and small data is key to any company's growth.
Kinda scary but it's nothing new.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Wizards. listen. The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
Well that's fun. With the advent of Planeswalker Points I dropped from top 100 in WA to somewhere in the thousands, and now that's gone too. /salt
That aside, this was always going to happen, but it is a bit obnoxious that they didn't merge them. Not sure why they didn't, actually. Obviously this is going to also funnel people past Arena's window when they sign up, while cutting a nostalgia cord between the player and their LGS, so it's a win-win-win for WotC.
They are essentially dumping the old one to make a new one... that is the same...
Actually thinking more about, this seems like a really dumb move (not merging). The data is essentially
A bit of history that ties the players to each other and to wotc. It is a connection that other corporations
try to make but cannot get. Magic's historical depth/nostalgia is something
that has always made it stand out from other games. Yet wotc is giving that up because
they are unable to merge the data (something that should be doable).
The real reason why Wizards of the Coast is doing this is because In-Store Play at Local Game Stores (LGSs) are now prohibited due to COVID-19.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
The real reason why Wizards of the Coast is doing this is because In-Store Play at Local Game Stores (LGSs) are now prohibited due to COVID-19.
Yeah... I'm going to have to call that out as false. Catalyst? Maybe. But the real reason? No.
It was bound to happen. If not now, then sometime in the next few years.
I'm going to agree with some of the other posters, this is a lazy move on WotC's part. To be honest, I was puzzled as to why Arena didn't utilize the DCI for registration when it first came out. Then it hit me while working on my own company database. The DCI database is probably so old and so kludged together that no one at Wizards really understands how it works anymore. How long ago was the DCI number introduced? About 20 years? How many admins worked on it and how many features were added during that time?
So the Arena guys probably came on board and, due to some combination of inexperience and hard headedness, decided to build the Arena player database from scratch. Or it could have been managements plan the entire time. Either way, management probably decided the cost of maintaining or exporting the old database to a new system wasn't worth the cost so they decided to drop the tables.
Changing databases isn't easy or cheap but it is always doable, it's just a matter of how much money anyone wants to throw at it.
The real reason why Wizards of the Coast is doing this is because In-Store Play at Local Game Stores (LGSs) are now prohibited due to COVID-19.
Yeah... I'm going to have to call that out as false. Catalyst? Maybe. But the real reason? No.
It was bound to happen. If not now, then sometime in the next few years.
I'm going to agree with some of the other posters, this is a lazy move on WotC's part. To be honest, I was puzzled as to why Arena didn't utilize the DCI for registration when it first came out. Then it hit me while working on my own company database. The DCI database is probably so old and so kludged together that no one at Wizards really understands how it works anymore. How long ago was the DCI number introduced? About 20 years? How many admins worked on it and how many features were added during that time?
So the Arena guys probably came on board and, due to some combination of inexperience and hard headedness, decided to build the Arena player database from scratch. Or it could have been managements plan the entire time. Either way, management probably decided the cost of maintaining or exporting the old database to a new system wasn't worth the cost so they decided to drop the tables.
Changing databases isn't easy or cheap but it is always doable, it's just a matter of how much money anyone wants to throw at it.
exactly this.
I work in IT so those scenarios are the easy way outs. A new start if you will. Easier to just ignore the legacy code and data rather than rework it.
Looking through my own data (and it is rather abysmal - in fact maybe its best I forget this history haha), what I see are past results and people I met. Some friends, some acquaintances, others less so. But I will then recall roughly the attitudes of the environment and players at that time including my own. The LGSes I have been to etc. All the history it evokes.
This is all the way to 1997... man I was waay younger then. Playing a phasing deck and getting crushed.
I mean I can just download that as a cvs apparently at least for myself.
But this connection, this relation to the game. Like mould accumulating on the wall... is an pile that takes time to build and accumulate.
Nobody's complaining about the need for a new database.
The issue is that customer history is being lost by not merging old Cust_ID's into the new system.
That's just incredibly lazy transition management and bad business practice and WotC deserves to have the egg on their tie pointed at with blinking neon lights.
Yeah. This makes me very sad. I've been afraid it was happening, because they haven't done much to the PW Points page regarding as achievements etc.
The loss of DCI points was cool - I hated the ranking system because it made me feel bad. But Planeswalker points were a fun, additive way. I would play matches and meet people I had played against 10-15 years ago and be able to look that up.
It's just another little loss of Wizards connecting with their customers. I miss the free promos that came in the mail. The DCI cards.
There were times I would roll up to my local store just for PW points (or back in the day to get enough tourneys in to get the promo for that quarter). I guess this means I'll be even less worried about sanctioned vs. non-sanctioned events.
In fact- does this erase the entire point of sanctioned vs. non-sanctioned at the store level?
Would have been nice for them to figure out a way to let us keep the old records.
Nobody's complaining about the need for a new database.
The issue is that customer history is being lost by not merging old Cust_ID's into the new system.
That's just incredibly lazy transition management and bad business practice and WotC deserves to have the egg on their tie pointed at with blinking neon lights.
On almost any other platform you would have a massive outcry or the company would NEVER do that.
Losing your history data is a no-go.
And exporting the customers data to make a new account for them is trivial, anybody can do that no matter how incompetent they seem to be.
Exporting the entire history of who played who, possible but not important.
Effectively deleting your entire data and forcing user to make a new account on a different platform is absolutely atrocious and a big fku for the customers.
It screams incompetence all over the place, but its WotC we are talking about, so thats nothing new.
For a very long time they ran with "If it works dont touch it" , now they just break things all over the place and just assume that customers wont give a *****.
This sounds like a cost-saving measure by Wizards. Wizards may have determined that the number of people affected by this forced migration is smaller than the "kitchen table casual" people who would sign up at the Wizards site as a new user.
Ideally, if they don't want to port the data over, they should keep the old site up in archival mode as a public service to its customers.
whats so difficult about merging it? couldn't they just have a field that asks for dci number when you create/update an account - that's pretty basic isn't it?
i mean its a minor thing, but it definitely feels like another in the many small missteps that alienate players and disconnect the company further from them, especially veteran players.
i'm not all that surprised though given the growing mentality that is just throw it out and start over instead of fixing what's broken. self fulfilling prophecies are pretty par for the course with wotc lately. where a product or service declines in use after a decline in quality or necessity, and rather than analyze why and improve it, its better to scrap it and say we've got this other new thing instead! hype! hype! previewing previews of previews! **** the lgs you can get this direct now!
whats so difficult about merging it? couldn't they just have a field that asks for dci number when you create/update an account - that's pretty basic isn't it?
i mean its a minor thing, but it definitely feels like another in the many small missteps that alienate players and disconnect the company further from them, especially veteran players.
It may be a "minor" thing on the surface but underneath the hood, it's possible that the DCI database is horribly complex. When the original database was born, it very likely had a very small number of tables with a limited amount of interaction across them. But I guarantee that as the years went by, the original developers probably left. New developers came in. Time marched on and some pointy haired boss told those later developers to add a new feature or start tracking something else. They probably looked at the code and the table structure, looked at the clock, and said, "screw it, I'll just add a new table with some new keys and call it done." And that's exactly what they did. Added a new feature without ever actually touching the old code or old database. Then someone else came along looked at those tables , query strings and old code with orders to add a new feature. So instead of changing the table which would likely break old code, they added another table, or two, or three then added more code. Then some feature was obsoleted and that table sat disused but never dropped because dropping that table would break code somewhere else.
So twenty years later, you have a database with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of tables, half of which the programmer has no idea what they're for or why they're there with so much legacy code that they just write they're own functions to do their own thing because they have no idea what a similarly named function actually does and they don't have the time to figure it out because the boss said they have to produce the code by Monday 9AM and it's already 2AM. Oh, and don't forget that they have to fix an entire block of code they wrote 3 years ago on a whim because they read all about refactoring in "Code Complete" Chapter 24 but completely ignored all the commenting requirements because they thought they would never forget what they wrote at 2AM.
So yeah, there are times that a simple box that allows a specific entry can be extremely convoluted and far more complex that it seems on the surface.
whats so difficult about merging it? couldn't they just have a field that asks for dci number when you create/update an account - that's pretty basic isn't it?
i mean its a minor thing, but it definitely feels like another in the many small missteps that alienate players and disconnect the company further from them, especially veteran players.
It may be a "minor" thing on the surface but underneath the hood, it's possible that the DCI database is horribly complex. When the original database was born, it very likely had a very small number of tables with a limited amount of interaction across them. But I guarantee that as the years went by, the original developers probably left. New developers came in. Time marched on and some pointy haired boss told those later developers to add a new feature or start tracking something else. They probably looked at the code and the table structure, looked at the clock, and said, "screw it, I'll just add a new table with some new keys and call it done." And that's exactly what they did. Added a new feature without ever actually touching the old code or old database. Then someone else came along looked at those tables , query strings and old code with orders to add a new feature. So instead of changing the table which would likely break old code, they added another table, or two, or three then added more code. Then some feature was obsoleted and that table sat disused but never dropped because dropping that table would break code somewhere else.
So twenty years later, you have a database with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of tables, half of which the programmer has no idea what they're for or why they're there with so much legacy code that they just write they're own functions to do their own thing because they have no idea what a similarly named function actually does and they don't have the time to figure it out because the boss said they have to produce the code by Monday 9AM and it's already 2AM. Oh, and don't forget that they have to fix an entire block of code they wrote 3 years ago on a whim because they read all about refactoring in "Code Complete" Chapter 24 but completely ignored all the commenting requirements because they thought they would never forget what they wrote at 2AM.
So yeah, there are times that a simple box that allows a specific entry can be extremely convoluted and far more complex that it seems on the surface.
This is cute, but it is nonsense.
We can still query the database successfully, even through the customer-facing web API. That means WotC can still query its database on the backend. Therefore they can still extract data from it to populate the new architecture with legacy customer data.
(I teach database design and I right now in the private sector I am transferring legacy content to a new database architecture)
whats so difficult about merging it? couldn't they just have a field that asks for dci number when you create/update an account - that's pretty basic isn't it?
i mean its a minor thing, but it definitely feels like another in the many small missteps that alienate players and disconnect the company further from them, especially veteran players.
It may be a "minor" thing on the surface but underneath the hood, it's possible that the DCI database is horribly complex. When the original database was born, it very likely had a very small number of tables with a limited amount of interaction across them. But I guarantee that as the years went by, the original developers probably left. New developers came in. Time marched on and some pointy haired boss told those later developers to add a new feature or start tracking something else. They probably looked at the code and the table structure, looked at the clock, and said, "screw it, I'll just add a new table with some new keys and call it done." And that's exactly what they did. Added a new feature without ever actually touching the old code or old database. Then someone else came along looked at those tables , query strings and old code with orders to add a new feature. So instead of changing the table which would likely break old code, they added another table, or two, or three then added more code. Then some feature was obsoleted and that table sat disused but never dropped because dropping that table would break code somewhere else.
So twenty years later, you have a database with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of tables, half of which the programmer has no idea what they're for or why they're there with so much legacy code that they just write they're own functions to do their own thing because they have no idea what a similarly named function actually does and they don't have the time to figure it out because the boss said they have to produce the code by Monday 9AM and it's already 2AM. Oh, and don't forget that they have to fix an entire block of code they wrote 3 years ago on a whim because they read all about refactoring in "Code Complete" Chapter 24 but completely ignored all the commenting requirements because they thought they would never forget what they wrote at 2AM.
So yeah, there are times that a simple box that allows a specific entry can be extremely convoluted and far more complex that it seems on the surface.
This is cute, but it is nonsense.
We can still query the database successfully, even through the customer-facing web API. That means WotC can still query its database on the backend. Therefore they can still extract data from it to populate the new architecture with legacy customer data.
(I teach database design and I right now in the private sector I am transferring legacy content to a new database architecture)
You assume all businesses maintain ideal database architecture and content? You also assume that their existing programmers can actually untangle what previous programmers actually did? It must be nice but such ideals do not exist whole hog across all companies. It's something to always strive for, sure. But it's hardly a reality for everyone.
You assume all businesses maintain ideal database architecture and content? You also assume that their existing programmers can actually untangle what previous programmers actually did? It must be nice but such ideals do not exist whole hog across all companies. It's something to always strive for, sure. But it's hardly a reality for everyone.
What you say bogs down to :
They are probably just super incompetent.
----
They should absolutely be able to merge account data with the new one.
If they cant do that, they are terrible at their job as a programmer.
They just choose not to do it, which is atrocious, but they also managed to teach their "customers" to not give a fk.
Its the pathetic ability to make incompetence look like "Look what we have here, ignore anything else!"
So there is no excuse to not merge data. They could and just decide not to do it.
And they dare to just assume customers dont care and they will get away with it, which is even more sad and will give them even more of a push to not give a fk for anything they have of customer data.
They literally say to customers, we dont care for your data, if you want them, just search for them on your own and "print" the stuff out.
Its hilariously unprofessional.
whats so difficult about merging it? couldn't they just have a field that asks for dci number when you create/update an account - that's pretty basic isn't it?
i mean its a minor thing, but it definitely feels like another in the many small missteps that alienate players and disconnect the company further from them, especially veteran players.
It may be a "minor" thing on the surface but underneath the hood, it's possible that the DCI database is horribly complex. When the original database was born, it very likely had a very small number of tables with a limited amount of interaction across them. But I guarantee that as the years went by, the original developers probably left. New developers came in. Time marched on and some pointy haired boss told those later developers to add a new feature or start tracking something else. They probably looked at the code and the table structure, looked at the clock, and said, "screw it, I'll just add a new table with some new keys and call it done." And that's exactly what they did. Added a new feature without ever actually touching the old code or old database. Then someone else came along looked at those tables , query strings and old code with orders to add a new feature. So instead of changing the table which would likely break old code, they added another table, or two, or three then added more code. Then some feature was obsoleted and that table sat disused but never dropped because dropping that table would break code somewhere else.
So twenty years later, you have a database with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of tables, half of which the programmer has no idea what they're for or why they're there with so much legacy code that they just write they're own functions to do their own thing because they have no idea what a similarly named function actually does and they don't have the time to figure it out because the boss said they have to produce the code by Monday 9AM and it's already 2AM. Oh, and don't forget that they have to fix an entire block of code they wrote 3 years ago on a whim because they read all about refactoring in "Code Complete" Chapter 24 but completely ignored all the commenting requirements because they thought they would never forget what they wrote at 2AM.
So yeah, there are times that a simple box that allows a specific entry can be extremely convoluted and far more complex that it seems on the surface.
This is cute, but it is nonsense.
We can still query the database successfully, even through the customer-facing web API. That means WotC can still query its database on the backend. Therefore they can still extract data from it to populate the new architecture with legacy customer data.
(I teach database design and I right now in the private sector I am transferring legacy content to a new database architecture)
You assume all businesses maintain ideal database architecture and content? You also assume that their existing programmers can actually untangle what previous programmers actually did? It must be nice but such ideals do not exist whole hog across all companies. It's something to always strive for, sure. But it's hardly a reality for everyone.
Heck no. I'm actually working for a Fortune 500 company whose name you'd recognize and I prepare weekly financial statements in freaking Excel because our current database is horribad, hence why we're upgrading. And our existing programmers cannot actually untangle what previous programmers did, and our enterprise is much larger than WotC.
You need to either improve your assumption making skill, or reduce your assumption making predilection.
The evidence remains the fact that the data is accessible. Therefore...(wait for it) the data is accessible. The data therefore can be reinstalled into whatever superior architecture they're migrating to. They're just of the opinion that the effort isn't worth the value. That is literally all there is to it. My estimate (and remember, I do this, I teach this, and I write textbooks on this) is that if it costs them $5,000 in Seattle-area wages for the person-hours of labor this migration would take, then they're easily overpaying. So. They're ditching all of this data on their oldest customers to save a pretty insubstantial amount of money on an enterprise scale.
I work for an entity with approximately $14 billion in expenditures this fiscal year. Not a Fortune 500
I hear you. I had to build my own Excel spreadsheet tools to pull relevant data when and how I want them because the existing databases (yes, plural) are such patch jobs.
The real beauty is we started our upgrade probably... five years ago (give or take a year and ramp up) and we're only about half way through. Even better it's live and no one can find the source code to finish the remaining portion for the project. All of the people from the beginning of the project retired.
So I get to sit here and decide whether I want to craft new queries or use Perl to massage the UI data into something useful.
Good luck on your project
Note that my comments in no way shape or form is intended to give WotC an excuse on their crockery. I'm of the firm opinion that WotC discarding the DCI and not porting the data to the new architecture is either lazy or a cost cutting measure or both. Neither of which is excusable.
Assuming dropping the DCI data is a computer architecture problem, it reminds me why Magic Online is not modernized. WotC went to create an entirely new client in Magic Arena. Same behavior: drop legacy product (or not enhance it) and start a new project.
They are essentially dumping the old one to make a new one... that is the same...
Actually thinking more about, this seems like a really dumb move (not merging). The data is essentially
A bit of history that ties the players to each other and to wotc. It is a connection that other corporations
try to make but cannot get. Magic's historical depth/nostalgia is something
that has always made it stand out from other games. Yet wotc is giving that up because
they are unable to merge the data (something that should be doable).
Hey respect WotC, they are not a softwere company and even if they were remember that there are plenty of those that failed merging new products with old ones (looking at you, Blizzard - WC3 Refunded)
Now being serious the sad thing about this is that some people will lose a "memorabilia" of past events and tournaments. Back in January i entered and saw a achivement of one of the first oficial events i played after i returned to MtG in 2006, and it brought back memories .
It is trully a chame they are ending it but i hope we get something like a play story, etc in the future.
whats so difficult about merging it? couldn't they just have a field that asks for dci number when you create/update an account - that's pretty basic isn't it?
i mean its a minor thing, but it definitely feels like another in the many small missteps that alienate players and disconnect the company further from them, especially veteran players.
It may be a "minor" thing on the surface but underneath the hood, it's possible that the DCI database is horribly complex. When the original database was born, it very likely had a very small number of tables with a limited amount of interaction across them. But I guarantee that as the years went by, the original developers probably left. New developers came in. Time marched on and some pointy haired boss told those later developers to add a new feature or start tracking something else. They probably looked at the code and the table structure, looked at the clock, and said, "screw it, I'll just add a new table with some new keys and call it done." And that's exactly what they did. Added a new feature without ever actually touching the old code or old database. Then someone else came along looked at those tables , query strings and old code with orders to add a new feature. So instead of changing the table which would likely break old code, they added another table, or two, or three then added more code. Then some feature was obsoleted and that table sat disused but never dropped because dropping that table would break code somewhere else.
So twenty years later, you have a database with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of tables, half of which the programmer has no idea what they're for or why they're there with so much legacy code that they just write they're own functions to do their own thing because they have no idea what a similarly named function actually does and they don't have the time to figure it out because the boss said they have to produce the code by Monday 9AM and it's already 2AM. Oh, and don't forget that they have to fix an entire block of code they wrote 3 years ago on a whim because they read all about refactoring in "Code Complete" Chapter 24 but completely ignored all the commenting requirements because they thought they would never forget what they wrote at 2AM.
So yeah, there are times that a simple box that allows a specific entry can be extremely convoluted and far more complex that it seems on the surface.
This is cute, but it is nonsense.
We can still query the database successfully, even through the customer-facing web API. That means WotC can still query its database on the backend. Therefore they can still extract data from it to populate the new architecture with legacy customer data.
(I teach database design and I right now in the private sector I am transferring legacy content to a new database architecture)
You assume all businesses maintain ideal database architecture and content? You also assume that their existing programmers can actually untangle what previous programmers actually did? It must be nice but such ideals do not exist whole hog across all companies. It's something to always strive for, sure. But it's hardly a reality for everyone.
While it's true the system might be complex and horribly-maintained, a project my team and I had to finish last year revolved around porting a legacy db and API that only exists on an old mainframe and network system. We had no access to code, just a broken API; so we reverse engineered it through reflection and repeated database calls with various inputs until we created the whole API. It took some time, but is definitely doable. My bet is that WOTC knew they were doing this for quite a while, and could have done something similar if necessary.
If we're going back to Wizards website accounts, maybe that means we'll be able to comment on and rate cards on the Gatherer once more! (Optimism optimism)
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More details here:
https://magic.gg/news/sunsetting-planeswalker-points
For players this boils down to requirement of having Wizards Account.
Kinda scary but it's nothing new.
The Vorthos community will await the consequences of the Eldrazi Titans' deaths/sealing. We will keep the watch.
“The wind whispers, ‘come home,’ but I cannot.”
— Teferi
Should be trivial.
----
Cutting them from the DCI (as they pretty much dumped them for Judges anyway).
----
The existing DCI Reporter is pretty much atrocious and old.
Gets replaced by a mediocre "App".
Wonder how that will turn out for bigger events that have to work with this (say a Grand Prix).
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
That aside, this was always going to happen, but it is a bit obnoxious that they didn't merge them. Not sure why they didn't, actually. Obviously this is going to also funnel people past Arena's window when they sign up, while cutting a nostalgia cord between the player and their LGS, so it's a win-win-win for WotC.
They are essentially dumping the old one to make a new one... that is the same...
Actually thinking more about, this seems like a really dumb move (not merging). The data is essentially
A bit of history that ties the players to each other and to wotc. It is a connection that other corporations
try to make but cannot get. Magic's historical depth/nostalgia is something
that has always made it stand out from other games. Yet wotc is giving that up because
they are unable to merge the data (something that should be doable).
Reality is but a perception of your being --
Visit my blog!!! - http://huffalump-magic.blogspot.com/
"The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside."
—Emily Dickinson
For sales or trade, visit my blog or visit my ebay blog for my listings :http://myworld.ebay.com/arcane7828
881
Oooh Dicey:
[dice=1]100[/dice]
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Little to zero actual systemic benefit? check.
Brilliant.
Yeah... I'm going to have to call that out as false. Catalyst? Maybe. But the real reason? No.
It was bound to happen. If not now, then sometime in the next few years.
I'm going to agree with some of the other posters, this is a lazy move on WotC's part. To be honest, I was puzzled as to why Arena didn't utilize the DCI for registration when it first came out. Then it hit me while working on my own company database. The DCI database is probably so old and so kludged together that no one at Wizards really understands how it works anymore. How long ago was the DCI number introduced? About 20 years? How many admins worked on it and how many features were added during that time?
So the Arena guys probably came on board and, due to some combination of inexperience and hard headedness, decided to build the Arena player database from scratch. Or it could have been managements plan the entire time. Either way, management probably decided the cost of maintaining or exporting the old database to a new system wasn't worth the cost so they decided to drop the tables.
Changing databases isn't easy or cheap but it is always doable, it's just a matter of how much money anyone wants to throw at it.
exactly this.
I work in IT so those scenarios are the easy way outs. A new start if you will. Easier to just ignore the legacy code and data rather than rework it.
Looking through my own data (and it is rather abysmal - in fact maybe its best I forget this history haha), what I see are past results and people I met. Some friends, some acquaintances, others less so. But I will then recall roughly the attitudes of the environment and players at that time including my own. The LGSes I have been to etc. All the history it evokes.
This is all the way to 1997... man I was waay younger then. Playing a phasing deck and getting crushed.
I mean I can just download that as a cvs apparently at least for myself.
But this connection, this relation to the game. Like mould accumulating on the wall... is an pile that takes time to build and accumulate.
WOTC just wants to delete it.
wow.
Reality is but a perception of your being --
Visit my blog!!! - http://huffalump-magic.blogspot.com/
"The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside."
—Emily Dickinson
For sales or trade, visit my blog or visit my ebay blog for my listings :http://myworld.ebay.com/arcane7828
881
Oooh Dicey:
[dice=1]100[/dice]
Nobody's complaining about the need for a new database.
The issue is that customer history is being lost by not merging old Cust_ID's into the new system.
That's just incredibly lazy transition management and bad business practice and WotC deserves to have the egg on their tie pointed at with blinking neon lights.
The loss of DCI points was cool - I hated the ranking system because it made me feel bad. But Planeswalker points were a fun, additive way. I would play matches and meet people I had played against 10-15 years ago and be able to look that up.
It's just another little loss of Wizards connecting with their customers. I miss the free promos that came in the mail. The DCI cards.
There were times I would roll up to my local store just for PW points (or back in the day to get enough tourneys in to get the promo for that quarter). I guess this means I'll be even less worried about sanctioned vs. non-sanctioned events.
In fact- does this erase the entire point of sanctioned vs. non-sanctioned at the store level?
Would have been nice for them to figure out a way to let us keep the old records.
On almost any other platform you would have a massive outcry or the company would NEVER do that.
Losing your history data is a no-go.
And exporting the customers data to make a new account for them is trivial, anybody can do that no matter how incompetent they seem to be.
Exporting the entire history of who played who, possible but not important.
Effectively deleting your entire data and forcing user to make a new account on a different platform is absolutely atrocious and a big fku for the customers.
It screams incompetence all over the place, but its WotC we are talking about, so thats nothing new.
For a very long time they ran with "If it works dont touch it" , now they just break things all over the place and just assume that customers wont give a *****.
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Ideally, if they don't want to port the data over, they should keep the old site up in archival mode as a public service to its customers.
i mean its a minor thing, but it definitely feels like another in the many small missteps that alienate players and disconnect the company further from them, especially veteran players.
i'm not all that surprised though given the growing mentality that is just throw it out and start over instead of fixing what's broken. self fulfilling prophecies are pretty par for the course with wotc lately. where a product or service declines in use after a decline in quality or necessity, and rather than analyze why and improve it, its better to scrap it and say we've got this other new thing instead! hype! hype! previewing previews of previews! **** the lgs you can get this direct now!
It may be a "minor" thing on the surface but underneath the hood, it's possible that the DCI database is horribly complex. When the original database was born, it very likely had a very small number of tables with a limited amount of interaction across them. But I guarantee that as the years went by, the original developers probably left. New developers came in. Time marched on and some pointy haired boss told those later developers to add a new feature or start tracking something else. They probably looked at the code and the table structure, looked at the clock, and said, "screw it, I'll just add a new table with some new keys and call it done." And that's exactly what they did. Added a new feature without ever actually touching the old code or old database. Then someone else came along looked at those tables , query strings and old code with orders to add a new feature. So instead of changing the table which would likely break old code, they added another table, or two, or three then added more code. Then some feature was obsoleted and that table sat disused but never dropped because dropping that table would break code somewhere else.
So twenty years later, you have a database with dozens upon dozens upon dozens of tables, half of which the programmer has no idea what they're for or why they're there with so much legacy code that they just write they're own functions to do their own thing because they have no idea what a similarly named function actually does and they don't have the time to figure it out because the boss said they have to produce the code by Monday 9AM and it's already 2AM. Oh, and don't forget that they have to fix an entire block of code they wrote 3 years ago on a whim because they read all about refactoring in "Code Complete" Chapter 24 but completely ignored all the commenting requirements because they thought they would never forget what they wrote at 2AM.
So yeah, there are times that a simple box that allows a specific entry can be extremely convoluted and far more complex that it seems on the surface.
This is cute, but it is nonsense.
We can still query the database successfully, even through the customer-facing web API. That means WotC can still query its database on the backend. Therefore they can still extract data from it to populate the new architecture with legacy customer data.
(I teach database design and I right now in the private sector I am transferring legacy content to a new database architecture)
You assume all businesses maintain ideal database architecture and content? You also assume that their existing programmers can actually untangle what previous programmers actually did? It must be nice but such ideals do not exist whole hog across all companies. It's something to always strive for, sure. But it's hardly a reality for everyone.
What you say bogs down to :
They are probably just super incompetent.
----
They should absolutely be able to merge account data with the new one.
If they cant do that, they are terrible at their job as a programmer.
They just choose not to do it, which is atrocious, but they also managed to teach their "customers" to not give a fk.
Its the pathetic ability to make incompetence look like "Look what we have here, ignore anything else!"
So there is no excuse to not merge data. They could and just decide not to do it.
And they dare to just assume customers dont care and they will get away with it, which is even more sad and will give them even more of a push to not give a fk for anything they have of customer data.
They literally say to customers, we dont care for your data, if you want them, just search for them on your own and "print" the stuff out.
Its hilariously unprofessional.
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Heck no. I'm actually working for a Fortune 500 company whose name you'd recognize and I prepare weekly financial statements in freaking Excel because our current database is horribad, hence why we're upgrading. And our existing programmers cannot actually untangle what previous programmers did, and our enterprise is much larger than WotC.
You need to either improve your assumption making skill, or reduce your assumption making predilection.
The evidence remains the fact that the data is accessible. Therefore...(wait for it) the data is accessible. The data therefore can be reinstalled into whatever superior architecture they're migrating to. They're just of the opinion that the effort isn't worth the value. That is literally all there is to it. My estimate (and remember, I do this, I teach this, and I write textbooks on this) is that if it costs them $5,000 in Seattle-area wages for the person-hours of labor this migration would take, then they're easily overpaying. So. They're ditching all of this data on their oldest customers to save a pretty insubstantial amount of money on an enterprise scale.
I hear you. I had to build my own Excel spreadsheet tools to pull relevant data when and how I want them because the existing databases (yes, plural) are such patch jobs.
The real beauty is we started our upgrade probably... five years ago (give or take a year and ramp up) and we're only about half way through. Even better it's live and no one can find the source code to finish the remaining portion for the project. All of the people from the beginning of the project retired.
So I get to sit here and decide whether I want to craft new queries or use Perl to massage the UI data into something useful.
Good luck on your project
Note that my comments in no way shape or form is intended to give WotC an excuse on their crockery. I'm of the firm opinion that WotC discarding the DCI and not porting the data to the new architecture is either lazy or a cost cutting measure or both. Neither of which is excusable.
Hey respect WotC, they are not a softwere company and even if they were remember that there are plenty of those that failed merging new products with old ones (looking at you, Blizzard - WC3 Refunded)
Now being serious the sad thing about this is that some people will lose a "memorabilia" of past events and tournaments. Back in January i entered and saw a achivement of one of the first oficial events i played after i returned to MtG in 2006, and it brought back memories .
It is trully a chame they are ending it but i hope we get something like a play story, etc in the future.
While it's true the system might be complex and horribly-maintained, a project my team and I had to finish last year revolved around porting a legacy db and API that only exists on an old mainframe and network system. We had no access to code, just a broken API; so we reverse engineered it through reflection and repeated database calls with various inputs until we created the whole API. It took some time, but is definitely doable. My bet is that WOTC knew they were doing this for quite a while, and could have done something similar if necessary.