MTG and the internet. rants to follow

[csy]

copy and pasted from the thread I was derailing on people playing MODO.

The world of paper magic has a community based entirely on trading, its an amazing world. the MODO world does not have that. The only interest is in tix. In other games with an online market, take world of warcraft, diablo, final fantasy XI XIV, etc. You have a market place accessible to everyone where you post your product for a price and it is searchable. you're capable of finding the best price, and even contact the other players to make your own offers.

one way I feel WOTC could learn from this system is by implementing a similar marketplace
users could flag a card, say Garruk relentless for sale or trade, Id like 15tix or These cards. I will automatically accept any offer of 13-15 tickets, or automatically accept offers of the card(s) Id like. This can all be done online or offline, removing the need for the secondary market to rely on bots to manage their accounts. Back to the world of warcraft example. Now that game has got the online offline experience NAILED. From the wow armory application a user can view their characters, communicate with their guild, browse their inventories, post items to the in game auction house, and make purchases from the auction house. This can all be done from an iPhone/iPad.

If the MODO user had the ability to meet another MODO player in person and say "have any trades? no but I have modo trades do you?" that would be amazing, we could look at each others online binders and discuss trades. then via an application we could send each other our inventory.

MODO is also considered so secondary to the actual paper game, which baffles me. MODO is the only format where WOTC controls both the singles market and the sealed market. To me this is a huge oversight by WOTC. Why wouldn't you make the application more friendly and intuitive. Every penny they invest to make the online experience more rich and advanced would directly lead to them getting more money in tix.

Another hard to swallow fact about MODO is that Im completely anonymous why not link my DCI number and allow me to collect MODO PWpoints? Why not have a similar level of identity online as I do offline? I can't tell you how many games Ive played against obviously immature and rude users that are on one of their multiple accounts. Disconnecting from games when they're not happy with the outcome, drafting like jerks just to get cards with the most value only to drop. ORC_BlatheringNoHelp -"take a screenshot and report to wotc" MODO can be just as successful as paper, but its success only makes wotc more money. Dollars = tix. Every store that sells a card for 112 tix is tix for wotc.


Back to the iPhone application. Or rather, the dailymtg.com website with a slower less intuitive deck builder and life management system than any other app. Every piece of information you attain from the application be it the tourney locator, or the daily articles are just links to the website. And we ALL know those pages exist, and how to access them via the web. Why would I use this application if it does nothing other than direct me back to my mobile web browser to read the articles on a non mobile site. They need to make mobile versions of the desktop experience if they want it to be a success. Going back to my other points about trading and the need for a true market. All of this could be incorporated in a similar way to the wow armory.

I imagine an application where my planeswalker points, favorite articles, videos, mtgo inventory, paper inventory, new paper event locations based on my location, stores that have reviews by users, notes on matches, life scores, deck building, registration, round pairings all exist in one place. now THATS a toolbox. (I can go into further detail on this should you want me too.)

I would literally work for free as a consultant and give them every bit of data I could comparing MODO to any other 'video game' because that what MODO is. Except that its not right now, right now its an awkward online card game with graphics that you'd expect to find on freeflashgames.ru (now featuring shoot a duck win an iPod)


this is driving me into the rest of my rant about technology and magic the gathering in general. Having played a lot of games 'competitively' or obsessively I can honestly say that every single Magic based website is about 10 years behind modern web trends, and almost every one of them ignore how a human interacts with a website.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazin...iption=feature

seriously???? thats the fucking URL for your Features articles tucked below 400px of Advertisements in 10pt default blue hyperlink typography?

starcitygames.com or as I like to call it, the tale of the broken scroll wheel. Where is the 'older' link for the next page of articles that have fallen off the page?

channelfireball.com Live customer service is offline. (when has it ever been online? why is that there?) Free articles! are there premium articles that Im unable to locate?


magic.tcg.... who am I kidding, Im not touching this one.

/rant..

[Koby]

Ya man, seriously. what a fuck!!

SCG is probably the worst: After you collapse 5 ad sections, you have to scroll 2 screens to get to content. Ya - I get it, you want to sell product. It sells itself if your writers simply link to "Griselbrand, the most broken card in Legacy - here's a list of card$ that beat the $not out of it."

[rxavage]

WotC should allow people with cardboard to pay a monthly premium and use their cards online. I know it's next to impossible to prove who has what and all that but one can hope.

[Water_Wizard]

Posting my previous comments from another thread in response to csy's comment, above...

+1 Thanks for the info.

I think WOTC's major concern (read "limiting factor") in promoting MTGO is that they do not want to cannibalize their paper market. They have a bunch of store owners who have millions in stock in paper cards and also rely on tournaments and events to pay their rents.

I asked a similar question about DCI/Ranking on the MTGO to an Orc (I was angry because a server connection issue caused a match loss and as such, my ranking dropped). The ORC told me the reason real life rankings are not tied to MTGO is because there is no way to verify who you are on MTGO. You could have players boosting other players accounts to get them registered for tournaments, etc.

csy, thank you for your thoughts. They've definitely got me thinking. I think the crux of the problem is that WOTC is somewhat paralyzed by fear of the digital market overtaking the paper market, so they are happy to ignore the problems and let things be as they are, rather than confronting the issues head on and taking charge of the future.

AND

I like this conversation, as it is allowing me to purge a bunch of pent up frustration and anger that I was previously only able to purge in the privacy of my domicile (no sick jokes, please).

Casey, I think the one thing your analogies are missing is that MTG was a paper game that went digital, while all the other examples (WOW, Diablo, Final Fantasy) only ever existed in video game form (sans physical off-shoots), making it easier to for them to exist/adapt in a digital world.

The coding limitations behind taking a paper game and making it digital are immense. If you are coding a came like WOW or Skyrim, if you run into a problem, you just change the game (there is no reality anchor you're tied to). In MTGO, the game's interactions, and thus coding, must match the real world interactions of the cards. There is no changing the underlying principles or modifying the game, rather you must modify the code. This is one of the reasons why I think MTGO does look about 10 years dated. However, it seems WOTC have taken steps to make MTGO better over the past few years. V3 equaled the end of mass server crashes. Since Shards of Alara, I don't think there have been any major gliches in the new releases (Skeletonize was the last big 'opps' I remember).

Hopefully, in 2-3 more years, WOTC will upgrade the MTGO user interface and it will feel and look like a 21st Century product.

When WOTC decided to launch MTGO, I think they had no clue how complicated coding all the card interactions would be. I think they bit off more than they could comfortably chew, and we've been feeling the reverberations ever since. However, I think WOTC is steadily taking steps to remedy these 'aftershocks' and I look forward to the future of MTGO.

[csy]

I dont think they get off on a 'first time' pass here. The property has been around for a long time in the electronic form. in the DOTP games you can play against an AI, you use the same mechanics, and you interact with other people in multiplayer games. I think they are limiting themselves to inhouse development with MODO and thats whats stifling them.

The reason the other properties do well, is because they are given development attention. Have developers working constantly to improve player experience, and interact with the community. Talking about upcoming changes to the product, and encouraging with incentives players to... play. While a pack here or a pack there or a random unhinged land is a cool incentive, its not giving the player base a whole lot of return.

the companies compartmentalized structure is probably another thing thats causing the online side to suffer. But I can only guess as to why/how. The fact that when the company tweets they often seem to not know what the other sectors are talking about is just confusing.

[CorpT]

I'm sure that there are a handful of people who play a lot of MTGO that they could talk to for a few hours and get a year's worth of improvements from. There are some blindingly obvious changes that would improve things dramatically.

How about a Google Calendar I can subscribe to that lists Standard Daily and Premier events? I have a phone that could remind me when to play. How long could that possibly take to implement and maintain?

[csy]

well MTGmom.com went ahead and did it for paper overnight. You'd have to harass lee sharp for that kinda information though. The scuzzy drives that run the servers might not be able to handle the read rate of a google scrape though.

[socialite]

well MTGmom.com went ahead and did it for paper overnight. You'd have to harass lee sharp for that kinda information though. The scuzzy drives that run the servers might not be able to handle the read rate of a google scrape though.

You can say that ten times fast.

[Water_Wizard]

I'm sure that there are a handful of people who play a lot of MTGO that they could talk to for a few hours and get a year's worth of improvements from. There are some blindingly obvious changes that would improve things dramatically.

How about a Google Calendar I can subscribe to that lists Standard Daily and Premier events? I have a phone that could remind me when to play. How long could that possibly take to implement and maintain?

Yes, there are many simple improvements they could make to really improve the player experience.

I agree with you and csy, WOTC is not doing enough to develop the platform. However, it seems over the past couple of years, WOTC has emerged from 'firefighting' mode and is slowly progressing towards 'proactive' mode. Proactive mode includes many of the things that have been talked about, namely, reaching out to the community for input and increasing platform accessibility through multiple user interfaces, such as apps, google calendars, etc.

[Kich867]

Yes, there are many simple improvements they could make to really improve the player experience.

I agree with you and csy, WOTC is not doing enough to develop the platform. However, it seems over the past couple of years, WOTC has emerged from 'firefighting' mode and is slowly progressing towards 'proactive' mode. Proactive mode includes many of the things that have been talked about, namely, reaching out to the community for input and increasing platform accessibility through multiple user interfaces, such as apps, google calendars, etc.

The problem there is that they just don't really want to. I've actually tried to find openings at Wizards for software engineers to specifically work on MTGO because there's a lot of things they could do better with it on if they just spent a little time. It's likely they don't even have a team working on it anymore, just someone that updates sets and fixes a bug if it shows up.

[CorpT]

The problem there is that they just don't really want to. I've actually tried to find openings at Wizards for software engineers to specifically work on MTGO because there's a lot of things they could do better with it on if they just spent a little time. It's likely they don't even have a team working on it anymore, just someone that updates sets and fixes a bug if it shows up.

More importantly, it's not like these things aren't being done with other games. Take the Warcarft Auction house and port it to MTGO. Problem solved. They've had a reasonable Auction House for literally years. Why can't WotC do something similar? Even if they take a cut. Imagine that. They take a 5% cut on trades of products that they already sold. We're not asking for MTGO to break new ground. We're asking MTGO to catch up to 2006 Warcraft.

[Serbitar]

Also, why can't there simply be fractions of a ticket? It's very annoying to manage purchases this way without constantly overpaying ('saving credit').