Those are 150/$ to 200/$, so 200 gems is ~$1 if you buy in bulk.Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
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Those are 150/$ to 200/$, so 200 gems is ~$1 if you buy in bulk.Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
Now we still need to set that into relation with booster structure itself and its value/junk rares/mythicsQuote:
Originally Posted by rufus
Holy fuck that's awful. I'll be honest, I just don't see how basing your entire revenue model around parents not keeping track of what their kids buy on their credit cards is a good idea. But hey, what do I know?
It works pretty well on the mobile market for almost 10 years when "microtransactions" became "freemium", gatcha Mechanics made their way into the global game market and recently got flak in regards to lootboxes. You would be shocked so see the revenue of some of these games (which are often public).Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
I dunno if there is much of a difference between gambling with 20,000 gems in Arena or do the same with a box of Dominaria from your local dealer.
I wonder if that Belgium "loot boxes are illegal" court ruling would make Arena an illegal video game.
The problem isn't the model, the problem is they won't get a single "free" player under this method, and if you don't have those, you don't have a userbase, and you don't have new blood to convert to paying customers. Also, the return rates for the $$ are a bad joke.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
They have several problems and if they don't sort them Arena will just be another MTGO, trudging along without making any big dents into a highly profitable market:Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
a) The link between paper and digital means we can always have another caw blade or energy deck turning every single stream into the same thing over and over again. They will not be able to artificially balance things by tweaking the digital cards like HS does.
b) By and large they are aiming at two groups. The FTP and the people already using MTGO. Saying to the people already in MTGO, easy to move into Arena, just spend even more money there to play only Standard, is not going to have mass-appeal.
c) Related to b), if you are a FTP, I have done every single quest and maximized my wins since the last wipe-out, I've opened the vault once (!) and still do not have enough mythics / rares wildcards to make any of the top decks. I must say the vault was amazing when they offered mythics and we only had a couple of sets.You got so many repeats when opening packs that filling up the vault was dead easy. Now, with so many sets in there, it's becoming tediously slow to fill it.
There's still a chance to make it work, but it's beginning to look iffy.
The main problem they have is they're basing their economy on HS, which just flat out doesn't work with MTG's deck construction rules, power levels at various rarities, and giant card pool.Quote:
Originally Posted by jmlima
You need 40-50 rare+ cards to make the vast majority of standard decks. Given the size of MTG's cardpool you're almost never going to get the rare/mythics you need out of packs. And given you need 4x+ of a card before it starts filling the vault, pack progression is pretty much all you've got for filling the vault. Thus any pack is basically 4% of whatever you actually need. It's insane.
That's what you end up, if you employ idiots without any knowledge of the digital market: They simply copy & paste the rates for chase rares from other known games, without questioning, if these fit for your own game.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
3% is about the industry standard for chase rares, but no other game requires you to pull 40+ cards at that (or a similar) rate. This level of incompetence in regards to pricing, odds and awareness of ones own deck structures is indeed unbelievable
They should take a page from Yu-Gi-Oh duel links economy.
Was able to get a top tier deck there relativity fast just grinding NPC's/Online.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/...be_hosting_an/
There's another Arena AMA tonight on Reddit. It's probably not leading anywhere, given how much people are pissed about the economy, but who knows.
What do you think the odds are they curate it so it's just fanboi's asking why they're giving losers so much free stuff in the game already? 2:1? 3:1?Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
I'm trying for the life of me to understand who this is going to appeal to, and I can't get past this point. They're trying to create a competitive digital environment by invalidating and alienating their already existing (and deeper) digital environment. It feels like a Duels of the Planeswalkers game with a pay-to-play component.Quote:
Originally Posted by jmlima
They might try, but chances are that it would still get drowned in a flurry of angry economy questions. People are fucking furious and the latest update hasn't changed much about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
I checked in on that AMA. As expected it was a giant pile of fuckery where the few economy questions that slipped in got deflected.
They're still in total denial. I will enjoy their tears.
I'm sure Wizards has complete control over that subreddit. Mods who vehemently insist no card board issues, bunch of accounts that perpetually deflect and say the card board is amazing. I imagine we'll see the same thing about Arena.
Trying to control the narrative isn't going to increase their revenue, though. It has yet to been whether they fall back to their old routine after the Garfield set (which sells like hotcakes) or not.Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
I think there was one exchange which was pretty telling.
Someone got through with a question about the lands moving around when you tap them and how much everyone hates it and how stupid it is.
The response was that they were working to improve AutoTap so you never had to bother tapping the lands yourself.
Like, the community clearly identifies a simple, significant problem with an easy, obvious fix... and the response is to double down on some nonsense that nobody asked for, doesn't work and is unlikely to ever work well enough in the future for true competitive play.
Also loved this exchange:
Question:
Answer:Quote:
The new player experience is BAD, in my and many others opinions. With the software currently in beta, are you and the team going to look into how to make that experience better?
In my opinion, this is the biggest thing (in addition to the economy that people are surely going to ask about) that should be answered, since new player retention is the biggest thing that means the software lives or dies.
If you are going to make the new player experience better: what steps are you and the team going to do while the beta is ongoing to test this?
The most scary part about this whole disaster is that WotC/Hasbro might nuke MTGO out of the blue of Arena isn't working out, with the idea that forcing players onto the platform to make it succeed. Given their lack of vision and common sense, it's a real possibility.Quote:
Right now the new player experience is right along the lines of tossing a kid in a pool and hoping they don’t drown. We’re going to be tackling this on multiple fronts. Matchmaking changes, NPE Tutorials, and quests that help guide players through their initial goals. (We do not endorse trying this at home.)
I always thought that Arena was meant to replace the casual unfriendly MTGO? Why should they keep MTGO around if they can move modern and standard to Arena?Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
Nuking mtgo in the foreseeable future would be akin to digital suicide. Arena is a replacement for the 'duels of the planeswalker' games that were an annual affair, and it will be years before they ever get a cardpool to allow for modern let alone real eternal formats. Not to mention the 'paying money for pixels you dont own' issue that will inevitably come up once any transition begins, it was easy for them to ignore it for the other games they killed, but a lot of people have serious amounts of money in their online 'collection'.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
Another part of the QA said that they're going to make a new non-rotating format on Arena. Almondkat on I guess. Not surprising, but I wonder if they'll translate that into paper too.
I did find it funny that Arena originally said there wasn't going to be crafting because they don't want players to have the feel-bad of destroying their collection to make a rare that underperforms...but now you have all the grind that goes into one Wild Card, and you can still have those same feelbads. Except now it's a completely sunk cost, the economy is way worse, so the risk is much higher.
They really need to give people who spent money to unlock cards in “Magic Duels” access to all the cards they unlocked in Arena as well (or atleast an equivalent number of tokens that they can use to unlock cards in arena.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord_Mcdonalds
They should do the same with MTGO players.
That’s the only way us Duels players will consider switching over to Arena. Otherwise we will all just stick with Duels.
Arena will flop if digital magic players don’t get the magic cards they bought in other venues transferred over to Arena
It’s a reasonable thing to do. Give the people that bought digital cards in your previous iteration access to those same cards in your New iteration.
Isn't that WotC's entire shady digital business model? Making you buy the same shit you already own over and over again? :eyebrow:Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain Hammer
Evan Erwin was on-spot with this tweet:Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
https://twitter.com/misterorange/sta...63278576734209
Until you have 4 copies of a card, you make no progress. And boy, the first Standard rotation is going to be a shitshow.
It's just kind of impressive. You're watching this HUGE car crash in slow mo and everybody but the driver can see it coming, and they're even yelling at the driver "hey man, you're gonna wreck!" and the driver is all like "nah fam, this is cool".
The game is flat out unplayable for the F2P crowd unless you just really, really, really love playing bad precons. I mean, I've seen Sealed Decks that were better than some of the pre-sets you get.
Just an update from the Beta. They nerfed the Vault. Again.
It's like they're actively trying to sabotage the game at this point.
Indeed. Since the last reboot, I keep collecting wildcards to see how I could get by playing all quests, etc. I still do not have enough Mythic / Rares to build a standard T1 deck .Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
They did? What did they change this time? I'm suprised there wasn't a major outcry yet.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
I don't think the update is quite out yet https://forums.mtgarena.com/forums/threads/26191.
Morgan might be referring to an in-game update though and I haven't been able to log in for about a week so I may have missed it. Supposedly the big economy post is out later today so I'm sure we'll have plenty to roll our eyes at then.
They nerfed pack progress from 4% to 3.3%. Draft packs do not count for packs opened.
To cover this, 5th+ copy Mythics went from 1% to 1.1%.
I am not making any of that up.
Do they really think that an increase by 0.1% Vault progression is going to make the feel bads from wasting mythics go away? And they nerfed pack progression by 17.5% at the same time?Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
It amazes me how deep they can have their heads in their asses at times.
Being not familiar with "pack progress" and the refered "5th+ copy mythics", could someone elaborate for a dummy like me?Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
The Vault progress is one of the most important things in Arena, when you complet 100% you get 1 mythic, 2 rares, 3 uncommon wild cards, that you can change for any card of the dame rarity. Wild cards is what matters, since there isn't trade or dust, is the only gmway to you truly get the cards you want.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
When you get the 5th copy of some card, you get an ridiculosly small increasment in your vault, instead of the card:
1.1% for mythic
0.7% for rares (I think)
0.3% for uncommons
0.1% for commons
You need to get 90 5th+ copies of mythic rares to trade the vault reward.
Ah, pack progress and the 5th copy value increase refer to the vault fill progress. Gotcha. Have many thanksQuote:
Originally Posted by procobrito
I'm playing Arena now after like 10 years of not playing Magic.
I don't get what their design goal is for Arena. It's more expensive that paper or the existing digital platform and because of things like adding animations and voiceovers they clearly don't intend to add the entire cardpool any time soon so it can't be a Magic Online replacement. Is it literally just to sucker some Hearthstone people in for a year and get $200 out of them? I mean it sort of worked - I've been playing Hearthstone for the last three years, but as a free player, and I won't be paying into Arena without some clarity about the future of the platform, and I doubt many other people will be either, besides the psychos who spend a thousand dollars on any Magic product in existence.
Last quarter Hearthstone made $440 million. MTGO made $250 million.Quote:
Originally Posted by Y The Alien
Arena is aimed squarely at the shareholders who want that mobile money, but it's run and designed by idiots who don't understand how to make it profitable.
Correction: MTG made roughly 250 million as a whole, including Paper. Even the old 40% of MtG's revenue number (which would be ~100 million $) is quite outdated and from times before MTG entered its Golden Age.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
Take these numbers with a grain of salt, though.
Realistically, MTGO's revenue might be a bit higher than that, but I can't see it surpassing 50$ million - and that's pretty generous. That's how shitty their digital department is ever since they've had competition.
Yeah Hearthstone didn't make $440 million dollars in a quarter either. Hearthstone's total yearly revenue was about $400 million in 2016 and about $215 million in 2017, according to analysis. That being said I'm just not sure why a push for the casual market wasn't done in, say, a revamp to the existing digital platform's interface and visuals, rather than a whole new client.
Because the existing MTGO client cannot operate outside PCs. It's based on .net, casual market means mobile gaming, that needed a new platform, they can barely keep MTGO running without bugs let alone port the entire thing to a new engine, so they decided on the path of least resistance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Y The Alien
Given how blatantly they rip off Hearthstone, it seems more like an attempt to appease shareholders who want the Hearthstone bucks more than anything else.Quote:
Originally Posted by jmlima