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I only see my students playing Yu-Gi-Oh during breaks, but never MtG.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
As for trying to reach new people, they're trying - except this whole "diversity" thing is completely misguided and ineffective.
My expectation is that Papa Hasbro brings down the hammer once MtG Arena flops. Although they're probably just going to replace Chris Cocks instead of doing the necessary purge at all levels.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
I guess it's out if question that Arena bombs given they copypasta Hearthstone without a grip about online economy and the market they set foot into.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
If we are honest, the only reason why no one touched MaRo and his lackeys is that Hasbro has, and that's somewhat relatable, no idea of how to replace him, without putting the franchise as a whole on thin ice. I can't imagine there is any VC on Hasbros table which provides an alternative to MaRo, matching his own expertise with a TCG brand. Who can you pick? One of his lackeys?
Maro has too many fanboys to fire him. It would be really bad PR if the franchise was already failing. And since they're looking for "more of the same" when they search new designers, Maro's asskissers wouldn't be any better as replacement.
Which is a shame, really. Dominiaria feels like a breath of fresh air thanks to Richard Garfield's involvement.
Thats always the case when you bring someone with vision and influence to a design team that knows echo chamber at best.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
What does Mark Rosewater have to do with Arena?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
MaRo has become a problem for the whole fanchise in general with his boring and yet problematic set designs, not for Arena in particular and its failed economy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Seth
If Hasbro really wanted to finally react to MTGs development, they will do it if the last straw for online MTG bombs. I hope it's the shakeup the brand needs so desperately.
Y'know, between MTG, DC (movies), Star Wars, and BioWare, I'm really getting tired of rooting for my favorite brands to fail so that they get the long needed blatantly obvious creative shakeups they so desperately need.
They all do a great job at that as they sacrifice their brand name for quick cash.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
DC released Justice League on schedule, despite half of the movie had to be reshot shortly before and the CGI Department would have needed additional time. A manager decided that it needs to be released rather than being good, so we ended up with ridiculous bad CGI effects.
Bioware fucked up with Dragon Age sequels as well as andromeda, because they felt like milking the franchises without any idea behind sequels.
And Disney is just creating a copypasta of the original Star Wars Trilogy without a clear vision for the story they wanna tell over 3 movies. And because they can't come up with a masterplan on the franchise they make standalone movies too which don't need to follow a grander scheme. All for the yearly Star Wars movie in cinemas
Lets say Arena bombs (which it most likely will). Do you really think WOTC/hasbro has the competency to do a shake-up when there's rumors that they're discussing partnering with GAMESTOP of all places to run FNM?!?! Honestly, the only out I see here for WOTC and MTG in general is that the WOTC sale does go through to an entity that has the balls to actually completely shake up MTG over ; massive firings, complete revamp of WPN, actually start paying the judges as employees/contractors, fix arena (and merge MODO into it?), etc.
That's just a pipe dream but the current trends of WOTC has nothing but bleakness going for it
I recently started playing again and I'm actually having a pretty good time drafting RIX. Also the small comic store I draft at gets 12-20 players per FNM, which I think is pretty good. That's 2 more or less full draft pools on average.
Also Arena looks pretty smooth and entertaining. Can't wait to try it myself. People at my LGS are looking forward to it as well.
Of course there are always the eternally unhappy few complaining about A25, Arena, Ixalan, etc. They are also the loudest.
I invite everyone to ask themselves once in a while, while playing, "Am I enjoying this?". For example I was not excited seeing A25, but during the release sealed I had a blast, and most people around me, too. The fast paced games of Arena are entertaining to watch on stream, I am enjoying those as well. I'm afraid some players form their opinion early on, even before plaing at all, and never change it.
I want to highlight that there are people ut there that are actually pretty happy about the current direction.
Also DOM looks awesome.
I am glad you enjoy your time drafting, but it isn't related to the bigger topics like the downfall of Standard, format Management (or lack of), advertising, price spirals, etc.
You being entertained by Arena Streams, does not affect the economy of the game being totally wack and unattractive according to all the playtesters, not even talking the ripped off interface.
That is true, but also having a great free playing experience and unique interface are not deciding factors. We still don't know how much a draft will cost.
I think mtg actually has a much bigger problem: a draft (main income source) takes too long. When playing Counterstrike or whatever, you can always play "just one more game". A draft typically takes 3-4 hours at my LGS. If they manage to create a system where you can split up the playing experience, so that you can draft a pack while taking a dump, the second one on your way to school, etc., that would do more for the game than slightly better economy, I think.
I don't think you (or anyone who hasn't been a part of it for awhile) understands just HOW BADLY the beta has been going. Que times are up to minutes, and you almost never see anyone within even the same rank band as an opponent. The beta forums have gone from bug reports and suggestions/complaints about the game and economy to endless threads complaining that blue is too good and asking for card bans. All the real players bailed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Amazingxkcd
Arena will get two more cracks at it, they're going to do another wipe and econ revamp in a few weeks, then I think one more before the beta goes open and collections become permanent. But right now, they've already lost all the hardcore players they had in the beta. I'd expect a big surge of people checking it out, and then everyone will just be done. Buh bye.
Sealed is a whole type of formats invented just to sell packs and i can't imagine that constantly dumping money into Arena for drafting is anything the crowd you want to attract with an online game is going to do. It's literally worse than gatcha.
Arenas economy is trash as meta constructed decks would only be accessible for whales as well according to the calculations on reddit.
Both factors are a huge liability for the game unless they get fixed before launch
I think this means Magic Arena is actually just Magic: the Gathering.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
Arena is going to be a ton of fun if the economy improves and I've been having a blast playing crappy standard for free. I thought I would hate it compared to alternatives like MTGO or Eternal but it's got me doing my win a day for now at least. They are getting universally negative feedback about the economy so I'm not completely ready to write it off yet.
I can't believe they aren't getting 1v1 brawl going immediately though. It seems tailor-made for the program and would give Arena it's own thing you wouldn't really get elsewhere. Fuck sealed lol, I'll take some standard commander over that garbage format any day.
Man those collectibles were the shit in Shenmue.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Anyway, the interesting side effect I've read about with Arena is the creation of a pauper standard meta. Red deck wins had an article by MTG Goldfish as a clear way to be hyper aggressive against multi-color decks relying on CITP budget duals. I'm sure there are natural mono-color predators to mono-red, which could mean there's an overall budget meta to the format.
Of course, then you get the whales who just crush everyone with 4x Scarab Lord, actual tiered real Standard decks or whatever.
The issue I see, is that it's next to impossible to get people hooked on a game, if you need to win for your daily tasks (and related currency) as a f2p while nonstop getting crushed by P2P and P2W players thanks to their much better decks.
It would need a major revamp im the game economy and reward system to make it AT LEAST equal to Hearthstone. That however requires WotC actually having one in charge for their Online Department who has experience with monetarizing methods of "Freemium" and Gatcha games. Hiring people with actual business knowledge is of course out of question. /s
What's a TV commercial?Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemnear
Even Google agrees that Arena is just a Hearthstone clone:Quote:
Originally Posted by iatee
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Da7eWaiX0AIu_Rl.jpg:large
So the Community thread about what makes Magic great mentioned the bad Glassdoor reviews of WotC. I knew they were terrible, but oh man, apparently in October they laid off 30+ full time employees ("a full third of the full-time equivalents in the technology groups"), mostly older (40+). Not sure if that was mentioned on here previously. Also a lot of complaints about how management was changing direction and priorities constantly. I don't know the release/development schedule of the supplemental product (thought 1-2 years), but the haphazard product releases (masterpieces on and off, conspiracies, even Unstable) and sudden changes seem to be hitting the market now.Quote:
At the cost of shipping Arena and building a "Digital Game Studio", Wizards no longer values its employees, nor are they committed to a diverse and welcoming workplace.
...
Changing your mind about business strategy every 6 months is a great way to waste your employee's time and effort, so you should stop doing that.
And yeah, it does seem that the new management is hardcore going all-in on Arena. If Arena fails, then WotC is going to be a dumpster fire.
Granted, these reviews generally come from disgruntled employees, but still...
https://i.imgur.com/n71wDC8.png
They sure try to push their new legendary border onto everything. :mad: This looks like a child didn't cut out the card properly and called it a day.
The child was Urza, clearly.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
Did they modify existing cards?
What a shitshow.
"technology groups"
If that means anything related to computer programming, it's quite possible they should have fired these guys fifteen years ago.
In fairness, haven't a number of people here been suggesting that Wizards of the Coast needs to "clear the decks" of the old guard?Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
looks like the dog chewed on the card
I wish a dog would chew on every copy of Leovold...
Don't worry, they're about to fix everything with machine learning! There is inherent power in trendy terms like 'in the cloud,' 'blockchain,' and now 'machine learning.' :laugh:Quote:
Originally Posted by ParkerLewis
@ Barook, the more pressing question is why this MTG Arena stuff is glutting the mtgo twitch when all I want to do is see real magic be it paper or mtgo. You have to scroll through 5-6 more rows of junk now - and I do mean junk, people who are less competent than an average FNM player, playing magic on a platform that doesn't create better players (unless they play mtgo or paper on top of it). That special border for legends looks bad, but it was on a modern border to begin with....so it's not like the aesthetics really took a hit; at least now you can look at a border shape and never read the card to have to know Karakas sends it back to hand.
Because it's new, shiny, exciting - and WotC literally pays off popular streamers from other games to promote the game (e.g. Day9 commented on that while streaming Arena). Nothing wrong with that kind of marketing, but I wouldn't read too much into that regarding Arena's popularity.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fox
Firing 30 senior programmers and paying streamers to play/promote Arena are two of the best things I've heard of wotc doing in years.
I laughed, but that's not necessarily true. The new border also appears on other legendary permanents.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fox
I don't understand why they changed the boarder for all legendary permanents except Planeswalkers?????
For the same reasons that other stuff isn't consistent.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tittliewinks22
Paying streamers to play your game is normal these days if a company wants extra exposure for a new game.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
I dunno about the first one. DOM on MTGO has currently the issue that 38 out 42 legendary creatures can't show up as foils in packs, screwing up both EV and foil redemption.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
The Glassdoor reviews didn't specify that the technology employees were Programmers. I think insinuated that they were engineers, but seemed to be spread across all of the different tech groups.
Regardless, it does seem that MTGO's usual bugginess has taken a turn for the worse lately.
Well, even just scale effects alone could explain that, although we know there is more to it. Adding more things to already poorly and haphazardly implemented things will have ever greater side-effects, which will dictate there being even more awkwardly implemented things for new cards to eventually come in and break. It will always just get worse, because the foundation isn't right and every addition exposes that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
Supposedly, Hasbro Gaming (including MTG and Monopoly) dropped 20% according to Hasbro 1Q18 earnings report compared to 1Q17. D&D was listed as a brand that had gains, but MTG was not.
Ben Bleiweiss has a big post on reddit mathing out that MTG is stable and we're just in between sets, Toys R' Us did it, but, well, SCG GM and all.
Ben Bleiweiss' postQuote:
Originally Posted by Claymore
Dominaria seems to be doing very well, if social media is too believed. Maybe WotC gets the hint to return more back to the roots.