I'm sure HASBRO said to WotC that they need to grow their digital product to compete with Hearthstone and if they had full confidence in MTGO they would have dumped more money into it. I bet there were lots of discussions on the problems with MTGO to make the decision to build a new program. I just hope they actually do open it up to Mac users as well.
One of the most well-known problems with MTGO is they simply refuse to pay for good talent. Modern corporations view labour as a cost to be minimized by any means possible, rather than seeing skilled employees as being beneficial (there's also a very bad "good old boys" problem with Wizards keeping bad talent around but again they're hardly the only offenders). Arena benefits there because it doesn't have to support situations like "what if someone tries Panglacial Wurm shenanigans with alternate costs?" because from a programming perspective that can get rather messy. But as new sets get released, the bloat will happen.
Essentially, as long as corporations feel they can afford to take no risks and feel they can take talent for granted, Wizards (and by extension Hasbro) is going to follow suit. Basically what I'm saying here is Arena is currently the safe new corporate darling for Wizards but as it ages, it'll become a liability until they feel about it how they feel about MTGO.
Fun fact: This also extends to fan sites, since the kinds of people who "understand" Hearthstone et al. but not MTGO will try to push more Arena content, not because Arena is good or anything, but because it fits a known business model. Thankfully MTGS hasn't fallen into the trap of trying to push Arena articles, streams, and other content because of that, but I've seen some facepalm-inducing stuff off this site.
Corporations think almost exclusively in the short term. I don't mean this like R&D is only designing sets a few months in advance or something, but the actual corporate decision-makers don't really give a crap about anything except the immediate. Essentially corporations feel like they're obliged to say "yeah but next year is next year and we can get our quarterly bonuses now so let's cash in whatever we can to make that happen." Not a happy thing, but it's why corporations do the things they do.
Corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value. Absolutely everything else, even making good products, is only ever a means to this end.
I acknowledge that any more like this would be a breaking of the reserve list. I don't think it's likely, just spitballing.
Unlike with the reserve list, there isn't a significant legal barrier to them shutting down MTGO, so you should consider that their likely course of action would just be to try and promote their other business interests no matter how tone-deaf "we're shutting down one program but go play this other program we totally won't shut down" would be (corporations don't think their stances through in the rare cases they actually stand for anything at all, and ultimately only care about profit, so you get things like that). Probably with an EA-like "pride and accomplishment" announcement if they ever do it.
They could put a caveat that reserved list cards come with a gold border.
They've already stated that gold-bordered cards violate the reserve list. Not the actual, written terms of it (which don't actually matter in any real way), but the vague "spirit" of it that also prevents things like printing more Reverberate-like cards in the future.
If they went the physical compensation route they'd almost certainly just send people a bunch of Standard crap or some Arena codes or something and it wouldn't be anywhere near good enough for all but the most casual of MTGO players. While certain people on this forum might be content to sit back and collect free Standard product without doing anything, I'd be pretty pissed since I never cared about that sort of thing.
There's "good" and then there's "glass cannon combo can never dominate the format as long as people are maindecking zero-mana counterspells that they side out against fair decks" good. Modern needed bans to keep those kinds of decks under control. Legacy just kind of shrugs for the most part.
Format balance gets better, not worse, the older you draw the set legality line.
I dont think so. Guilds and Ravnica, and even Dom, are all better by far, than any of the sets that made up Frontier. Even Khans.
The problem isn't set quality per se, but the diversity of answers in the format. Legacy has Force of Will and Wasteland keeping things from getting out of hand. Even Modern has access to extremely flexible, powerful pieces of removal and disruption (Thoughtseize, Path, Surgical, etc). A smaller format is inherently going to be at a disadvantage there as those kinds of answers aren't things Wizards likes to print in large quantity anymore. It's a problem Frontier had and it's a problem any new format is going to have as the questions each deck can ask get stronger as new sets release while the answers generally don't keep pace.
They've already stated that they're going to create a new non-rotating format when rotation happens, so as people who play Arena have a way to use their cards that rotate.
Why do I have a feeling that it'll manage to be even worse than Frontier was? And that one was just a blatant cash grab by store owners wanting to move old inventory that had rotated (a trait it shared with Tiny Leaders, which was a similarly terrible format).
They cannot get rid of MTGO but they also do not want to really support MTGO.
The problem is MTGO is an affordable way to play non-rotating formats, and Wizards would really just prefer if everyone were to play nothing but Standard, Limited, and maybe like Brawl or something.
Ha, I was kind of thinking of firearms, there. Basically, do you necessarily have, for lack of a better phrase, selective pressure for firearms when wands exist?
Unless magic is something the vast majority of the population can use well enough to engage in combat with (and most settings don't fit that description), guns would actually be seen as a way for non-mages to be able to fight mages, so there'd be more pressure for an equalizer than there would be in the real world.
Guns are certainly not part of the current art direction, though, and even in older sets were very uncommon.
Yes, and the reasoning I gave is why they refuse to have guns or even gunpowder despite the fact that, in the real world, gunpowder is a thousand years old. There are some cannons and other stuff scattered around Magic, I suppose, but it seems guns cannot exist in any plane in the multiverse no matter the tech level or availability of magic, solely because of bad stylistic decisions.
Even Pathfinder has stats for firearms up to the Mosin Nagant, plus whatever firearms are in supplementary materials. Magic is too afraid to have so much as pike and shot.
Rosewater did say that Kaladesh was very likely the most technologically sophisticated we'd get for a plane...And it actually makes sense, given that sorcery probably does certain things better than machinery ever could.
It's more that they're operating under the absurd "guns and technological technology can't be FantasyTM" thing writers tend to crutch on when they aren't creative enough to be able to integrate magic and technology.
The big problem with fusing MTGO and Arena is that there is a lot of money tied up in the MTGO economy. The larger bot chains are essentially fully fledged businesses, with thousands of dollars' worth of tickets and product moving relatively briskly around the economy each day, and Wizards doesn't want to rock the boat too hard when it comes to the online economy because tanking it would destroy faith in digital Magic. Even something simple like set redemption changes can cause bad things to happen to the online economy, and merging two games together like that would likely wind up doing more harm than good.
What I'd personally like to see them do is have Arena as a game mode for MTGO rather than being its own thing. Can either get the full Magic experience online through regular MTGO play, or you can play the Arena mode for funsies without there being prizes involved.
I am a bit confused on that one. She had a fight with Garruk and actually won in the end. Would it be a better fight if things were totally one-sided and Lili just pummeled Garruk into submission? I honestly think that was one of her stronger moments to recover from that and prevail in the end. Why would you not want to show that?
I'm just saying that if one is "Garruk on his back surrounded by zombies" then it wouldn't have been a bad decision as if the other art was, say, Liliana backed into a corner by Garruk's beasts.
Well there "data" is terrible and making judgment of that data is just as random as it ever was.
You have a citation on how their data is "terrible" and "random"? Actual data, that is.
I do not like to think of groups, and especially not claim what makes a "minority" group. That kind of thinking is toxic and opinions based on that kind of grouping are purely evil as they have the gravest of effects and never truly help an individual, but just put people into boxes, and thats never ever a good thing to begin with.
Saying "I refuse to think about these things" is just intentionally setting yourself apart from established discourse on the subject. It's actively disruptive and unhelpful.
You can maximize shareholder value in long term, by building an honoring your values.
Can you name a comparable corporation that's successfully done that?
Because this subject is literally what I have a degree in and I couldn't give you any Hasbro-sized examples of that working out (could give you plenty of values-based examples for why companies tanked, most notably "the Internet is a passing fad wait why am I going bankrupt?" examples from the turn of the millennium).
Thats the essence of a thought example, you might not be familiar with.
Hypotheticals are irrelevant. When I speak of people here, I only speak of real people. For instance, the intersection of "victims of domestic violence" and "Magic players" who aren't going to be particularly comfortable with a big burly dude about to punch a woman, despite the fact that it's a fantasy game. If nobody was actually put off by the art, then it would be a very different matter. Same with sexually objectified art and other areas Wizards has improved upon lately.
they hate WotC doing this, as it has no logical reason, its just political agenda.
Have you considered that the market force of "sexual objectification doesn't play as well as it used to" might be behind Wizards' move?
If VIOLENCE is bad, then ALL Violence is bad
If there's no room for nuance in your arguments, then we aren't going to get very far. The world isn't a simple place, and if you try to remove context from everything (for instance, seeing no difference between a man about to beat a woman and a bunch of zombies knocking a man to the floor), you're going to find you're left with arguments that don't match up with reality.
You also didn't address the fact that your willful blindness to something that members of minority groups see as being completely obvious is more indicative of a privileged mindset than anything else. The argument essentially boils down to "I personally don't see it so it must not exist." Nor did you address the accusation that you're willfully denying that patterns exist despite there being clear statistical trends (nothing but isolated incidents, perhaps?).
Its a form of betrayal thats really hurting.
If you want to get into what businesses are "supposed" to be doing, then it's entirely one thing: Maximizing shareholder value. Your tastes do not line up with overall audience trends, so Wizards no longer caters to them. It's not political. They're just trying to make the most money they can, and they aren't going to do that by keeping the same art style as 20 years ago. That's the ultimate reason you don't see Earthbind-style art anymore, and Basandra-style art is nowhere near as prevalent as it used to be. Don't mix up the beliefs of the players with the beliefs of the company making this game, because the reasons each group holds its respective views are very, very different.
Wizards never betrayed you, because they never owed you anything to begin with. The only people who matter to a corporation are the shareholders, and unless you own enough shares for Hasbro to take notice of you, then you can either accept the shift in presentation or quit the game. That horse isn't going back into its stable.
Some people is not a group, its literally an undefined group of everyone and that fits perfectly well.
If the group "some people" is undefined, then the argument carries no weight because there's absolutely no guarantee that those people even exist and aren't just made up for the sake of argument.
Marking a specific "group" of people as more valuable or more "worth" protecting than other "groups" is just again the display of a form of group thinking thats extremely problematic and toxic.
There are people who are statistically at greater risk than others. Hence why it's exceedingly tasteless to show Garruk about to punch Liliana after restraining her. Refusing to acknowledge social groups is a privilege afforded to people who don't have to think about the subject on a regular basis. Put another way, the fact that you're willing to reject the idea that groups matter is evidence that you've never been pigeonholed or disadvantaged based on gender or any other facet of identity.
Society and its norms are the sum of its actors. So when a company like Wizards produces art that's uncomfortably close to real-life gender-based violence (or they objectify women, or whatever else), they're contributing to an overarching trend. When they don't do that, they're not contributing to an overarching trend. But at the end of the day, it's always intellectually disingenuous to say "there are no such things as patterns, only a great many isolated incidents."
Some people fits perfectly well, as it doesnt check any boxes.
If you don't want to label groups, then why label a group as "some people"?
One of the most well-known problems with MTGO is they simply refuse to pay for good talent. Modern corporations view labour as a cost to be minimized by any means possible, rather than seeing skilled employees as being beneficial (there's also a very bad "good old boys" problem with Wizards keeping bad talent around but again they're hardly the only offenders). Arena benefits there because it doesn't have to support situations like "what if someone tries Panglacial Wurm shenanigans with alternate costs?" because from a programming perspective that can get rather messy. But as new sets get released, the bloat will happen.
Essentially, as long as corporations feel they can afford to take no risks and feel they can take talent for granted, Wizards (and by extension Hasbro) is going to follow suit. Basically what I'm saying here is Arena is currently the safe new corporate darling for Wizards but as it ages, it'll become a liability until they feel about it how they feel about MTGO.
Fun fact: This also extends to fan sites, since the kinds of people who "understand" Hearthstone et al. but not MTGO will try to push more Arena content, not because Arena is good or anything, but because it fits a known business model. Thankfully MTGS hasn't fallen into the trap of trying to push Arena articles, streams, and other content because of that, but I've seen some facepalm-inducing stuff off this site.
Corporations think almost exclusively in the short term. I don't mean this like R&D is only designing sets a few months in advance or something, but the actual corporate decision-makers don't really give a crap about anything except the immediate. Essentially corporations feel like they're obliged to say "yeah but next year is next year and we can get our quarterly bonuses now so let's cash in whatever we can to make that happen." Not a happy thing, but it's why corporations do the things they do.
Corporations have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize shareholder value. Absolutely everything else, even making good products, is only ever a means to this end.
Unlike with the reserve list, there isn't a significant legal barrier to them shutting down MTGO, so you should consider that their likely course of action would just be to try and promote their other business interests no matter how tone-deaf "we're shutting down one program but go play this other program we totally won't shut down" would be (corporations don't think their stances through in the rare cases they actually stand for anything at all, and ultimately only care about profit, so you get things like that). Probably with an EA-like "pride and accomplishment" announcement if they ever do it.
They've already stated that gold-bordered cards violate the reserve list. Not the actual, written terms of it (which don't actually matter in any real way), but the vague "spirit" of it that also prevents things like printing more Reverberate-like cards in the future.
If they went the physical compensation route they'd almost certainly just send people a bunch of Standard crap or some Arena codes or something and it wouldn't be anywhere near good enough for all but the most casual of MTGO players. While certain people on this forum might be content to sit back and collect free Standard product without doing anything, I'd be pretty pissed since I never cared about that sort of thing.
Format balance gets better, not worse, the older you draw the set legality line.
Why do I have a feeling that it'll manage to be even worse than Frontier was? And that one was just a blatant cash grab by store owners wanting to move old inventory that had rotated (a trait it shared with Tiny Leaders, which was a similarly terrible format).
The problem is MTGO is an affordable way to play non-rotating formats, and Wizards would really just prefer if everyone were to play nothing but Standard, Limited, and maybe like Brawl or something.
Unless magic is something the vast majority of the population can use well enough to engage in combat with (and most settings don't fit that description), guns would actually be seen as a way for non-mages to be able to fight mages, so there'd be more pressure for an equalizer than there would be in the real world.
Yes, and the reasoning I gave is why they refuse to have guns or even gunpowder despite the fact that, in the real world, gunpowder is a thousand years old. There are some cannons and other stuff scattered around Magic, I suppose, but it seems guns cannot exist in any plane in the multiverse no matter the tech level or availability of magic, solely because of bad stylistic decisions.
Even Pathfinder has stats for firearms up to the Mosin Nagant, plus whatever firearms are in supplementary materials. Magic is too afraid to have so much as pike and shot.
It's more that they're operating under the absurd "guns and technological technology can't be FantasyTM" thing writers tend to crutch on when they aren't creative enough to be able to integrate magic and technology.
What I'd personally like to see them do is have Arena as a game mode for MTGO rather than being its own thing. Can either get the full Magic experience online through regular MTGO play, or you can play the Arena mode for funsies without there being prizes involved.
Which makes -1/-1 counter themes rarer than they should be, because Wizards doesn't like mixing counter type themes in adjacent sets.
Not that I think we should have more -1/-1 counter shenanigans, of course.
I'm just saying that if one is "Garruk on his back surrounded by zombies" then it wouldn't have been a bad decision as if the other art was, say, Liliana backed into a corner by Garruk's beasts.
Edit because Sarnathed:
You have a citation on how their data is "terrible" and "random"? Actual data, that is.
Saying "I refuse to think about these things" is just intentionally setting yourself apart from established discourse on the subject. It's actively disruptive and unhelpful.
Can you name a comparable corporation that's successfully done that?
Because this subject is literally what I have a degree in and I couldn't give you any Hasbro-sized examples of that working out (could give you plenty of values-based examples for why companies tanked, most notably "the Internet is a passing fad wait why am I going bankrupt?" examples from the turn of the millennium).
Hypotheticals are irrelevant. When I speak of people here, I only speak of real people. For instance, the intersection of "victims of domestic violence" and "Magic players" who aren't going to be particularly comfortable with a big burly dude about to punch a woman, despite the fact that it's a fantasy game. If nobody was actually put off by the art, then it would be a very different matter. Same with sexually objectified art and other areas Wizards has improved upon lately.
Have you considered that the market force of "sexual objectification doesn't play as well as it used to" might be behind Wizards' move?
If there's no room for nuance in your arguments, then we aren't going to get very far. The world isn't a simple place, and if you try to remove context from everything (for instance, seeing no difference between a man about to beat a woman and a bunch of zombies knocking a man to the floor), you're going to find you're left with arguments that don't match up with reality.
You also didn't address the fact that your willful blindness to something that members of minority groups see as being completely obvious is more indicative of a privileged mindset than anything else. The argument essentially boils down to "I personally don't see it so it must not exist." Nor did you address the accusation that you're willfully denying that patterns exist despite there being clear statistical trends (nothing but isolated incidents, perhaps?).
If you want to get into what businesses are "supposed" to be doing, then it's entirely one thing: Maximizing shareholder value. Your tastes do not line up with overall audience trends, so Wizards no longer caters to them. It's not political. They're just trying to make the most money they can, and they aren't going to do that by keeping the same art style as 20 years ago. That's the ultimate reason you don't see Earthbind-style art anymore, and Basandra-style art is nowhere near as prevalent as it used to be. Don't mix up the beliefs of the players with the beliefs of the company making this game, because the reasons each group holds its respective views are very, very different.
Wizards never betrayed you, because they never owed you anything to begin with. The only people who matter to a corporation are the shareholders, and unless you own enough shares for Hasbro to take notice of you, then you can either accept the shift in presentation or quit the game. That horse isn't going back into its stable.
If the group "some people" is undefined, then the argument carries no weight because there's absolutely no guarantee that those people even exist and aren't just made up for the sake of argument.
There are people who are statistically at greater risk than others. Hence why it's exceedingly tasteless to show Garruk about to punch Liliana after restraining her. Refusing to acknowledge social groups is a privilege afforded to people who don't have to think about the subject on a regular basis. Put another way, the fact that you're willing to reject the idea that groups matter is evidence that you've never been pigeonholed or disadvantaged based on gender or any other facet of identity.
Society and its norms are the sum of its actors. So when a company like Wizards produces art that's uncomfortably close to real-life gender-based violence (or they objectify women, or whatever else), they're contributing to an overarching trend. When they don't do that, they're not contributing to an overarching trend. But at the end of the day, it's always intellectually disingenuous to say "there are no such things as patterns, only a great many isolated incidents."
If you don't want to label groups, then why label a group as "some people"?