Jamaican Zombie Legend
11-11-2015, 06:16 PM
There's been a bit of a dustup on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/3scfoz/wizards_has_requested_that_mtggoldfish_no_longer/) about the reasons behind a feature on MTGGoldfish being pruned. Apparently, Wizards prefers that sites that produce Magic content avoid publishing data that leads to metagames being solved too quickly.
A post from the owner of the Goldfish (https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/3scfoz/wizards_has_requested_that_mtggoldfish_no_longer/cwwbtb3) clarifies:
I want to provide some clarification on the situation:
R&D contacted us and asked us to remove the matchup win percentages and analysis. This was the feature that said Jeskai was 55% favored against Abzan Aggro. This feature was removed back in September. The winning decklists, the metagame breakdown, the strategy articles, and basically everything you see on the site today is unaffected and will continue to be there.
The motivation for removing the data from Magic R&D at Wizards of the Coast:
We asked MTGGoldfish to suspend the Constructed Metagame series on MTGGoldfish that compiles large volumes of MTGO tournament results to paint a picture of a current Constructed format. While these articles are informative and interesting, we feel that this level of data-driven metagame analysis ultimately damages the health of those formats.
Magic thrives on being a recurring puzzle for players to solve, and intensive data mining leads to a more rapid understanding of a new metagame. Solving the puzzle then becomes less interesting, and the format grows stale ahead of its time. The number of tournament-viable deck options for players is reduced, and player interest in the format shrinks along with it. This hurts everyone creating content for Magic players, which is ultimately why we stopped publishing such a high volume of winning MTGO decklists on our own site, and why other Magic content sites have also subscribed to this philosophy after becoming aware of this impact.
We appreciate MTGGoldfish's cooperation in this matter, and while we expect some readers will be disappointed by this news, we hope players will understand that the decision comes from our desire to keep the game as healthy as possible.
The matchup statistics were gathered via Magic Online replays. Wizards can easily block access to this data by either blocking bot access to replays, or removing replays altogether. I would rather remove the data (which we did) rather than having the Magic Online team divert resources to block access to the data (instead of developing and improving Magic Online), or worse yet, everyone losing the ability to watch replays altogether. Either way, Wizards can block this data since Magic Online is the source.
Now if you disagree or want to discuss the merits of having access to such data, that is fine. But please keep it civil, and provide feedback, examples and reasons that are constructive and forward the discussion.
It's an interesting precedent and, judging from the Reddit thread, a rather unpopular one as well.
To be fair to Wizards, throttling data and analysis isn't entirely unwarranted. Magic is a game created by a small handful of people and is, mostly, a physical game. It's hard for a few designers at WotC to be able to match the collective metagaming power of the millions-strong Magic-playing community, making the balancing act they have to perform quite a tough one; the end-users are going to have a lot more play-hours to break the game than the designers had to craft and balance it. And, unlike digital games, there's no luxury of balance tweaks via patching. The widespread use of power-level errata or haphazard bannings would be deleterious to the health of the game; even with the proliferation of smartphones, checking Gatherer before every interaction for the updated Oracle text would be miserable and jam up the flow of gameplay.
All this adds up to a situation in which formats, especially Standard, will be solved soon after the release of new cards, with little recourse available to Wizards besides printing more cards (or speeding up the release/rotation schedule), "gittinggudder" at design (kind of a trivial response*), or engaging in unorthodox tactics like this one to keep things (more) fresh and interesting.
However, this tactic of suppressing critical information might not have any real benefits.
For one thing, the information is still out there, just not as readily available to the average player. Hypothetically, any determined individual or group could replicate the MTGGoldfish data-mining methods and have access to the metagame/matchup stats. The demand for such data is unlikely to falter; competitive players are going to want every morsel of info that could help to bump up their win percentage. And it would seem Wizards hasn't denied access to the replay-watching methods from which the raw data is scraped from. So the (likely) end result is containing the spread of Magic analytics to the more spikey set, giving them an additional leg up over the more "casual" competitors (if that term makes sense).
Secondly, analytics aren't always necessary to understand a format. Many times the best cards/decks are strikingly obvious to anyone with sufficient knowledge of the way Magic works. Most players likely didn't need to see hard numbers to *know* Affinity was busted; anecdotal evidence from local events and games played was mostly enough. Turns out things like "Draw 2 cards" for U and "free" 4/4s on turn two are kinda busted. Same thing with Shards->Zen Jund, Caw-Blade, U/W DelverGeist, and other dominant decks; players could just *tell*. Sure, big data offers empirical backing that's a bit more robust, but scarcely do most players demand such a burden of proof when talking about meta (for better or for worse).
And lastly, a bit on the peripheries, what exactly does data-driven analysis really crowd out? People still enjoy jamming pet-decks, brews, and other choices borne out as less competitive by MagiMetrics™. And there's always budget players who will be precluded from playing the best decks due to monetary constraints. The point is, not everyone will want to act upon the information or even be able to. I guess a lot of the "Gotta make deadline, gotta move stock!" articles penned by pros lose their luster in the face of hardcore analytics. No, that brew designed to sell Narset Transcendent posts a ~40% winrate against the field and is not going to break the meta wide open.
A bit of a rambling post, but I figure this is an interesting enough topic and might spark some discussion.
* In practice, it's true, but not particularly interesting to talk about. Bashing Wizards is fun and all (donning my amatuer-designer hat and getting salty during spoiler season is probably the most amusing thing in Magic!), but it never really goes anywhere. That being said, there are definitely certain trends, likely motivated by sales/financial concerns, that are making contemporary sets/metas a more simplistic and easier to solve.
A post from the owner of the Goldfish (https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/3scfoz/wizards_has_requested_that_mtggoldfish_no_longer/cwwbtb3) clarifies:
I want to provide some clarification on the situation:
R&D contacted us and asked us to remove the matchup win percentages and analysis. This was the feature that said Jeskai was 55% favored against Abzan Aggro. This feature was removed back in September. The winning decklists, the metagame breakdown, the strategy articles, and basically everything you see on the site today is unaffected and will continue to be there.
The motivation for removing the data from Magic R&D at Wizards of the Coast:
We asked MTGGoldfish to suspend the Constructed Metagame series on MTGGoldfish that compiles large volumes of MTGO tournament results to paint a picture of a current Constructed format. While these articles are informative and interesting, we feel that this level of data-driven metagame analysis ultimately damages the health of those formats.
Magic thrives on being a recurring puzzle for players to solve, and intensive data mining leads to a more rapid understanding of a new metagame. Solving the puzzle then becomes less interesting, and the format grows stale ahead of its time. The number of tournament-viable deck options for players is reduced, and player interest in the format shrinks along with it. This hurts everyone creating content for Magic players, which is ultimately why we stopped publishing such a high volume of winning MTGO decklists on our own site, and why other Magic content sites have also subscribed to this philosophy after becoming aware of this impact.
We appreciate MTGGoldfish's cooperation in this matter, and while we expect some readers will be disappointed by this news, we hope players will understand that the decision comes from our desire to keep the game as healthy as possible.
The matchup statistics were gathered via Magic Online replays. Wizards can easily block access to this data by either blocking bot access to replays, or removing replays altogether. I would rather remove the data (which we did) rather than having the Magic Online team divert resources to block access to the data (instead of developing and improving Magic Online), or worse yet, everyone losing the ability to watch replays altogether. Either way, Wizards can block this data since Magic Online is the source.
Now if you disagree or want to discuss the merits of having access to such data, that is fine. But please keep it civil, and provide feedback, examples and reasons that are constructive and forward the discussion.
It's an interesting precedent and, judging from the Reddit thread, a rather unpopular one as well.
To be fair to Wizards, throttling data and analysis isn't entirely unwarranted. Magic is a game created by a small handful of people and is, mostly, a physical game. It's hard for a few designers at WotC to be able to match the collective metagaming power of the millions-strong Magic-playing community, making the balancing act they have to perform quite a tough one; the end-users are going to have a lot more play-hours to break the game than the designers had to craft and balance it. And, unlike digital games, there's no luxury of balance tweaks via patching. The widespread use of power-level errata or haphazard bannings would be deleterious to the health of the game; even with the proliferation of smartphones, checking Gatherer before every interaction for the updated Oracle text would be miserable and jam up the flow of gameplay.
All this adds up to a situation in which formats, especially Standard, will be solved soon after the release of new cards, with little recourse available to Wizards besides printing more cards (or speeding up the release/rotation schedule), "gittinggudder" at design (kind of a trivial response*), or engaging in unorthodox tactics like this one to keep things (more) fresh and interesting.
However, this tactic of suppressing critical information might not have any real benefits.
For one thing, the information is still out there, just not as readily available to the average player. Hypothetically, any determined individual or group could replicate the MTGGoldfish data-mining methods and have access to the metagame/matchup stats. The demand for such data is unlikely to falter; competitive players are going to want every morsel of info that could help to bump up their win percentage. And it would seem Wizards hasn't denied access to the replay-watching methods from which the raw data is scraped from. So the (likely) end result is containing the spread of Magic analytics to the more spikey set, giving them an additional leg up over the more "casual" competitors (if that term makes sense).
Secondly, analytics aren't always necessary to understand a format. Many times the best cards/decks are strikingly obvious to anyone with sufficient knowledge of the way Magic works. Most players likely didn't need to see hard numbers to *know* Affinity was busted; anecdotal evidence from local events and games played was mostly enough. Turns out things like "Draw 2 cards" for U and "free" 4/4s on turn two are kinda busted. Same thing with Shards->Zen Jund, Caw-Blade, U/W DelverGeist, and other dominant decks; players could just *tell*. Sure, big data offers empirical backing that's a bit more robust, but scarcely do most players demand such a burden of proof when talking about meta (for better or for worse).
And lastly, a bit on the peripheries, what exactly does data-driven analysis really crowd out? People still enjoy jamming pet-decks, brews, and other choices borne out as less competitive by MagiMetrics™. And there's always budget players who will be precluded from playing the best decks due to monetary constraints. The point is, not everyone will want to act upon the information or even be able to. I guess a lot of the "Gotta make deadline, gotta move stock!" articles penned by pros lose their luster in the face of hardcore analytics. No, that brew designed to sell Narset Transcendent posts a ~40% winrate against the field and is not going to break the meta wide open.
A bit of a rambling post, but I figure this is an interesting enough topic and might spark some discussion.
* In practice, it's true, but not particularly interesting to talk about. Bashing Wizards is fun and all (donning my amatuer-designer hat and getting salty during spoiler season is probably the most amusing thing in Magic!), but it never really goes anywhere. That being said, there are definitely certain trends, likely motivated by sales/financial concerns, that are making contemporary sets/metas a more simplistic and easier to solve.