No, it wouldn't. Crappy underpaid developers are going to produce "bloated" (whatever that word means) crappy buggy software no matter what tools they work with. Using .NET and WPF is not the reason MTGO allocates .9 GB of RAM and 66 threads just starting up and logging in to the servers (on my machine, your mileage may vary.) God help us all if the people who can't even make Oubliette give you your creature back when it leaves the battlefield suddenly have to deal with the actual pointers, native file system calls, and manual memory allocation you'd have in a C++ application. They'd honestly never have even shipped v4 if they tried to port their existing code to C++.
MTGO is crap because of the team responsible for it and the inadequate budget given to them, not because it uses some Microsoft libraries.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think you can really compare Magic and Heartstone. Even Portal is many times more complex than Heartstone. You can compare stability, user interface, easy of use, interface learning curve etc, but the game itself is just as different as any other online game.
I played Heartstone once and couldn't get any fun out of it, and I don't see it happening any time in the future, no matter how good the client/platform is.
"Want all, lose all."
Magic is the far better game because Hearthstone is pretty luck-based and shallow, but Hearthstone provides a far superior experience to MTGO, simply because MTGO is so terrible.
I feel I have to share this link.
West side
Find me on MTGO as Koby or rukcus -- @MTGKoby on Twitter
* Maverick is dead. Long live Maverick!
My Legacy stream
My MTG Blog - Work in progress
If MTGO worked on my Mac Hasbro would have a lot more of my $ by now. Thank you for saving me from myself, great overlords.
If you have so much to offer and if you're so willing to shell out lods of emone to the point where Wizards ought to beg you to be a customer, then why haven't you just sucked it up and bought a capable five dollar toaster? It seems more that you're just making noise. I don't doubt that if Wizards made their product more accessible that they wouldn't see more players, but when there's a will there's a way. If your aversion to using mtgo was their faulty product, then I empathize completely. But you, and many others, are either lazy, cheap, or self-righteous. Take your pick.
I'm cheap, actually. You hit the nail on the head. I'd rather not shell out the extra $80 for Parallels or for a "toaster" (point me to a functional $5 windows laptop and I may jump, though. I don't think that exists.) But we digress - the overwhelmingly negative reviews of the platform have been a pretty big deterrent.
I find it amusing that there's such a large demand to run Windows on Macs that the software costs $80.
I don't think I've paid for non-game software in ages.
Parallels actually doesn't run Windows on Mac. Windows will run itself on a Mac. The problem is that you can only boot up your computer as one or the other, so normally you can't be using Mac programs at the same time as Windows programs. Parallels is a product that lets you run one while booting up in the other, allowing you to run your Windows programs and Mac programs simultaneously. You still need to obtain your copy of Windows separately before you can use Parallels.
So it's a virtual machine?
Those are free, man.
Well, the only time in the past 12 years that I have ever thought about wanting Windows was for MTGO, and I clearly didn't even pursue it deep enough to learn that I would need to purchase a Windows license in addition to Parallels (or whatever VM). I'm glad to have been educated more here, though. I really do hope that Hasbro/WotC gets their act together regarding MTGO.
And... I will kindly duck out of this thread now as I have derailed it enough as is.
They sure have chosen a great time to run the survey, considering MTGO just completely shat itself.
Dear Mother of God, no wonder MTGO sucks so bad:
Take a 50% paycut to work at Wizards, but hey, those free draft sure make up for the hundreds of thousands $ you're going to lose!
I have no idea what a programmer earns (so anybody from the industry correct me if I'm wrong), but I did some research on Glassdoor.com while MTGO was down, because that did sound ridiculous.
Color me suprised - they aren't even that badly underpaid - just 5% below industry standard:
$114,379 base salary + $12,128 boni (126,507$ total)
But the point where it gets hairy is when you compare it to other companies where the actual talent they need goes, e.g. Google:
$169,784 base salary + $29,849 + $77,785 boni ($252,997 total)
So the 50% paycut when going to Wizards is suprisingly on spot.
This link says "Entry-level salary for a software developer at WotC is in the ballpark of $60,000, compared to the Seattle starting average of about $100,000." However, it doesn't indicate where they got those figures from, so I'm not sure how accurate they necessarily are.
Thanks for the link. Nailed some of the major problems pretty well.
The numbers I found where about senior software developer. Maybe that's where the difference comes from?
In the end, it puzzles me how a company like Wizards (with the backing of Hasbro) tries to save a few hundred thousand dollars a year by not paying competitive wages for good programmers while losing tens, if not hundreds of millons extra revenue they could make with a good client that makes people want to spend money on it.
Thinking the talent is going to flock around you, just because you're Wizards and hand out free MtG products, is so outlandish, it baffles me. It didn't work in the past and it isn't going to work in the future.
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