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Don't forget, last week they eliminated Bo3 (Best of three matches w/sideboard) from the client, then realized they had to put it back in because that's literally what MtG is.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
Oh, and the client is still occasionally wiping hard drives if you try to uninstall it.
That whole debacle was funny, not only because it's something WOTC will add back in later anyways (so whats the point in removing it) but the player base is so casual that I question why they even gave a shit.
So yesterday, WotC had a bunch of cryptic 9.19 statements on their Arena account on Twitter.
Crickets on the forums about whatever it is so far. I'll let ya'll know if it turns out to be anything or they're just being their usual cocked up selves.
EDIT: Here's a link to the official announcement: https://magic.wizards.com/en/article...-27-2018-09-19
Highlights:
Open Beta on the 27th, full RtRtR.
Last account wipe hits everyone.
Progression will still be trash because they haven't figured out a solution to the fifth card problem yet, but it's better than it was earlier in the beta.
Some "select" Ravnica physical product will have digital codes in it.
If you were in the beta, you get 1 copy each of the fancy, full art 'walkers - Teferi, Ral, Vraska.
No word yet on what happens to your stuff after rotation, as expected, they're kicking that can down the road a year.
It's the (potentially) last wipe and the transition into open beta (= release). Plus some extra stuff:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/co...beta_announce/
And that's a bit of a bummer as I was expecting at least an idea of what was going to be done. Without any idea, we'll all flock into the best standard deck without any other considerations in collection building.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
Everything wrong with modern software development expressed in three wordsQuote:
Originally Posted by jmlima
No dude, it's just 1 word and that word is Agile.Quote:
Originally Posted by thecrav
I dunno, I've been having an unexpected blast playing mono U storm in Standard. I have accumulated enough other cards to probably make 1 other high tier Standard deck but don't really want to win with creatures or slow control.Quote:
Originally Posted by jmlima
The only change I really wish they had is to make some of the silly events free, I'm not spending my gold to play something as stupid as Standard Momir, but I'd probably mess around in there if they didn't try to make it competitive.
Don't bother. It's a heck of a crappy experience (standard momir). First player to 9 mana wins.Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix Ignition
One thing that really annoys me since the release of Arena (and let's face it, the open beta is just a name to justify putting out an unfinished product) is not being able to find good magic streams anymore. Everything plastered with a) paid shills or b) people with < 20 viewers, most even in the < 5 viewers range. There are currently 40 Arena streams up with 1 or 0 viewers and 88 Arena streams with <20 viewers. Wading through this sea of shit makes me lose interest in watching Magic streams.
http://www.mtgstreams.com/ shows all the streams and you can filter to whatever format you want.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
According to Pete Jahn's article series over on MTGO Traders, the cost of a "1 of everything" collection on MTGO has dropped by $3000 in the last two weeks. That's a huge amount. Now amplify it by a couple dozen or hundred or however many card sets the big bot chains have. I can't imagine they'll keep eating that kind of loss without raising hell with WotC. And a lot of those big MTGO bot chains are extensions of big physical MTG stores.
I don't expect WotC to do anything smart here, but I wouldn't at all be surprised by some asinine hairbrained reaction from someone. That's a LOT of "on paper value" getting destroyed fast.
WotC has zero long-term planning. While it might contribute to the issue, I don't think Arena is the main problem here. Why would Eternal cards drop that heavily when you can't even play it on Arena? The main problem is WotC enriching themselves on cost of the players (and bot chains) by using Treasure Chests as prizes. More and more supply with no demand to match is going to drive down prices heavily, matching the doomsayers from months ago claiming that treasure chests are the biggest threat to collection values, not Arena. And here we are. While it's awesome that you can get decks comparatively cheap now, it seems like a bad investment, considering cards will keep on dropping due to treasure chests.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
@phonics: Awesome link, thanks!
So you're basically complaining that card prices are getting lowered which makes legacy more avaliable online? Which also is the main goal for abolishing the RL in paper magic?
Low entry prices are good (even from WotC's standpoint), but if this keeps going, then owning cards is going to lose you money. Since MTGO is built around the bots, this is going to fuck up the entire ecosystem once major, reliable bots don't become sustainable anymore because WotC could never be assed to integrate an auction house. That's unlike Paper, where price gauging works due to the RL and shitty reprint policies, so scalpers and hoarders have a field day.Quote:
Originally Posted by MorphBerlin
Yeah, this. I don't know if any of you were around on MTGO before the bots showed up en masses, but jesus was that ever a clusterfuck. It was like a mid-90s AOL chatroom with everyone just screaming into the void. Also, no fractional ticket prices on anything. Basically, if any of the big bot chains detonate themselves, it has huge ripple effects, because it puts that much more pressure on the rest of the botchains to do the same or get left holding the bag, and it completely obliterates the way Limited works on MTGO.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
But yes, in general, I'm thrilled prices are dropping. The problem is the reasoning behind and speed of said drops.
Sorry, can't hear you I'm regression testing for cr6Quote:
Originally Posted by CptHaddock
Yeah I looked at that PR you put up, it had a comment in it so I can't approve it because we only do Clean Code hereQuote:
Originally Posted by FourDogsinaHorseSuit
3000$ loss on all cards is like -0.15$ on each card on average. hardly even noticable as a customer. besides there are tons of reprinted cards that are stupidly high priced because they were released in special sets and more or less a dead investment anyway (for the trader) since nobody will every buy them.
I wish mtgo would become more accessible in the future, because lower card prices will bring back more players. like in RL, magic should first be a game and then a secondary market buisness model.
im surprised how f2p friendly arena is (for now), so i play it a lot. its also fun because not everybody runs netdecks (for now)
That's not really how it works. The vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of cards on MTGO are essentially "free" with prices on bots of something like .0001 tix. Tournament playables are a much smaller pool, and they've been losing a LOT of value.Quote:
Originally Posted by Humphrey
Agreed, MTGA's accessibility is incredible. If you're just playing the constructed ladder it will match you up against people with "similarly powerful decks" whatever that means. I think it goes based on the number of rares/mythics in your deck, which is a decent enough guideline until people figure out the actual equation and exploit it. I've gotten decent games even with stuff like tokens decks. The rock deck I'm making with all the rares/mythics I have finds similarly powerful decks to play against as well so it seems like they're doing that pretty well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Humphrey
With the card economy as nice as it is, I don't see myself ever buying an online card again from MTGO (although I quit that a long time ago).
The average playskill is laughable, if you do guilds drafts (fun set btw) you'll have a pretty easy time going infinite. Might be people getting used to the client and how clicking once can skip your main phase or whatever, but for now it's "profitable."
Also, I'll say the auto-tap lands thing is generally good. I use it out of laziness and it only screws up how I'd want to tap once every few games, and usually not in a game losing way.
careful with the autotap though, but once you know how it works you can still manually tap. it wont use colorless special lands otherwise or tap you out of colors. running a couple of duals makes it very convenient though.
I've started playing Arena a bit recently since drafting paper doesn't consistently work with my schedule and I hate MTGO.
Man, this program is...very "in beta".
I get disconnected at the end of probably 95% of my games. I googled the problem and it seems I can fix it by fucking with the ports on my router but I'd really rather not potentially compromise my security to try to get Arena to be mildly less annoying. Also, it seems that the Arena development team's stance on the issue is that it's client-side and not on their end, so all the complaints people have been submitting have met with polite corporate "fuck you"s. That doesn't give me a lot of hope for it going forward, when real bugs start cropping up.
Also, it's really irritating that there doesn't seem to be a way to disable the auto-turn-pass feature, which makes it incredibly obvious when one player has an instant. Making decisions about whether to play around or into certain spells is now super easy because there will be a giant glowing neon sign that says, "I HAVE A RESPONSE" whenever your opponent fails to breeze through the steps and phases of their turn. There's basically no point to holding mana up and/or not running out your entire hand if you don't have an instant unless you're trying to dodge mass removal or something.
It does seem to be F2P friendly, at least relative to Hearthstone, but unlike that game you can't dust cards you don't want to make cards you do and the card pool is bigger, so making the decks you want is actually a bigger grind. If you made the same mistake I did and built a Standard deck that's now off-meta, you're kind of SOL because getting the rare/mythic wildcards is a sloooooooow process. Drafting lets you keep the cards (nice!) but drafting without paying money for at least an initial stockpile of gems is basically impossible (boo!) and the draft robots seem to have sub-Bestiaire level AI and avoid Boros and Dimir like the plague, meaning 80+% of your opponents are on one of those two decks (super boo!).
I haven't been impressed so far and I'm waffling on whether I want to keep going with it or pick up Gwent or Eternal instead. It does look pretty, though.
Against my better judgement, I started playing Arena this weekend. It feels kinda nostalgic to build shitty decks to play against other shitty decks.Quote:
Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies
That said, the economy is pretty ass and their solution to the Vault being shit is hiding it being shit (unless you look up the current value in your log - good job, you incompetent chucklefucks). And boy, this whole Vault thing is ass:
90 mythics = 1 mythic wildcard payout. Good riddance.Quote:
Mythic — 1.1%
Rare — 0.5%
Uncommon — 0.3%
Common — 0.1%
Opening the Vault requires getting duplicates through packs/drafting: 900 common, 300 uncommon, 180 rare, or 90 mythic rares duplicates. Duplicates progress define value of 1 mythic = 2 rares = 3.3 uncommon = 10 common duplicate cards. Therefore, the value of a single Vault with 1 mythic, 2 rare and 3 uncommon wildcards is equal to 3 mythic wildcards. That way a single wildcard of any rarity equals 30 duplicates of the same rarity.
I might play it for a while for the novelty of it, but anybody who spends money on this (who isn't a content creator) is insane. Burning money is probably more profitable than this. Alot of people are in for a rude awakening sooner or later.
Funnily enough, those %'s are actually HIGHER than they were in the closed beta.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
Throughout the entirety of closed Beta, they made absolutely ZERO attempts to improve the economy. All of their economy tweaks were designed to keep the same acquisition rates, and just present them in different ways that they hoped wouldn't "feel as bad". They are locked in on the card acquisition rates, and they are not going to change them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Barook
With all of the new players on MTGA I'm surprised all of you are having such a hard time with staying at least even while drafting. If you don't have a bomb you can force dimir and win pretty easy. With daily gold payouts you can pretty easily keep to ~1 draft/day (where you get to keep all your drafted cards!) without ever putting money in. In the future when new players aren't so abundant I'm betting it will be much harder, but right now you get to just farm these noobs.
As for the economy, I guess I'm not that huge into standard so I'm happy with my 1 deck that's about 80% of where I want it to be in terms of card selection. I could finish it, but I'm not willing to waste rare wildcards on the manabase when I only lose like 1 in 20 games because of it. I haven't gotten to play Abzan in modern/legacy in a long time and it's pretty great in standard, so it's a lot of fun.
If you compare the amount of money it takes to build a deck here with MTGO I'm guessing MTGA wins by far.
This is probably my favorite part of MTGA. You can click on a phase to have it auto yield for that phase, or hit control to bluff you have a response to something. It's so underused that you can so very easily mindgame people that you do have a spell. I'm guessing most opponents won't really notice, but for those who do it will absolutely make them misplay around your bluffed card (holding space auto-passes priority so you can bluff not having a card if you want as well).Quote:
Originally Posted by Aggro_zombies
What annoys me the most is the inconsistency of the phase auto-passing.
On MODO you set up your stops, and after some time, you get the flow of it and get to play without thinking too much.
On Arena, the phases auto-pass following certain fixed rules, but if you're not paying attention you'll skip phases and turns because you didn't realize you had no instants in hand.
After briefly stabilizing last week, a complete MTGO collection dropped another $1000 this week. That's $7000 total over the last month. Which is like, a lot. Seems to be concentrated in Vintage/Legacy staples at this point, but who knows if that will continue or not. "Arena Modern" is supposed to debut next year at rotation, and they have cards at least back through one of the Innistrad's already programmed (this is known from the Beta), so who knows what the future holds.
In other, related news, they also just updated the interface for MTGO, so maybe they're serious about this whole "double program" thing, at least for now. It's a pretty standard WOTC style mess.
I'm surprised the legacy and modern stuff would lose value when MTGO is the only platform to play those formats. I figure standard cards wouldwould tank
I suspect thats WOTC leaving a backdoor in case Arena tanks. It's looking good so far (the community seems to like it and the pros do as well) but WOTC has an at best mediocre track record when it comes to digital anything really so who knows.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
The writing is on the wall for MTGO, may as well not hold onto any cards in MTGO if you don't absolutely have to. Standard has a lot of hype behind it plus it's a pro tour format (Arena isn't quite there yet, although Sam Black has mentioned wanting to test for the pro tour on Arena)Quote:
Originally Posted by Megadeus
What is happening with the masterpiece series in MTG Arena? Are these included or totally omitted? Maybe they will add them later?
Also, did WOTC ever explain why they dont include complete packs? 15 cards per pack...
Grinding in this game feels terrible.
Although there are bugs to work out the platform shows promise. If only MTGO was like this in some capacity instead of the shit show it is now.
I could see WOTC using the money from this game to create all the cards for MTGO and then and only then would they switch MTGO to this style of game play. So we're talking like 1-2 years depending on how committed they are.
Also, they really need better game designers. The UX just seems inferior to hearthstone. UX is the main thing blizz tends to get right and it's consistent throughout their games. I dont know how else to describe it but MTG Arena seems flat and lifeless.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord_Mcdonalds
This is the perfect time to buy into MTGO. They arn't going to kill MTGO and MTG arena will NEVER replace MTGO. What'll happen is that people will sell out of MTGO move to MTG arena. Then once WOTC is able to improve the interface for MTGO they will and ppl will move back to it. MTGO is the closest thing to irl mtg that will ever happen. Of course the interface is garbage but i'm referring to the things like trading and packs actually containing 15 cards.
For quite a long time MTGO was the ONLY choice you had. That has changed and I can see that plenty of players moving to MTGA due to its superior interface, more players and evasion of secondary market insanity. For Legacy and Vintage you wont have many alternatives to MTGO, but these formats aside, I have a tough time justifying to go for MTGO tbhQuote:
Originally Posted by apple713
I do agree with Lemnear.
If hearthstone has so much sucess, it's due to its good interface.
MTGA has the good interface that makes everything easier for people and this is the Platform they will promote.
At one point in time, MTGO will go away. Not yet, but it's nearly sure...
Here's the thing though. WotC doesn't actually decide when MTGO will end. It will end, regardless of what WotC does, once the major bot chains decide it's a losing proposition.
Yeah, they put batman symbols on planeswalkers. Perhaps they're purposely sabotaging the program at this point.Quote:
Originally Posted by morgan_coke
Isn't sabotaging MTGO their general modus operandi? :eyebrow:Quote:
Originally Posted by iatee
On topic: I'm already bored with Arena. God, the reward system is complete garbage.
They’ve had how many years to fix MTGO and they haven’t yet, they are not going to, they don’t want to (or lack the resources to). Arena likely would not exist if fixing MTGO was seriously considered.Quote:
Originally Posted by apple713
I agree that resources was the issue. MTGA helps with that because it is a significantly smaller project to undertake than MTGO, (lower startup costs). Additionally, it will generate cash flows while they finish developing. There are tons of cards they need to program into MTGO with the MTGA code and they can work on it while MTGA is generating cash flows.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord_Mcdonalds
I dont see the F2P model as something ideal for competitive magic. I see MTGA catering to a casual crowd and MTGO, after its been remade, taking over.