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Lorem ipsum posted:Game will be shutdown/back to closed alpha in 2 months I'm pretty good at this game I guess.
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Jun 30, 2021 16:31
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| # ? May 2, 2024 19:52 |
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30.5 Days posted:The team that oversaw this on the wizards side is the same one that oversaw dark alliance. The VP in charge has been running it for like 3 or 4 years and has nothing to show for it. The tabletop team is apparently accusing him of "ruining the summer of drizzt" with his lovely game, so that dude's projects are probably all getting rolled up now. This explains so much.
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Jul 1, 2021 02:29
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30.5 Days posted:The team that oversaw this on the wizards side is the same one that oversaw dark alliance. The VP in charge has been running it for like 3 or 4 years and has nothing to show for it. The tabletop team is apparently accusing him of "ruining the summer of drizzt" with his lovely game, so that dude's projects are probably all getting rolled up now. The thing about WotC is, for the past 15 years at least, their corporate culture has been 100% focused on "get the latest Magic set out the door." Any task that's not part of the Magic pipeline is given to the FNG or the madogiwa.
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Jul 1, 2021 03:21
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Gynovore posted:The thing about WotC is, for the past 15 years at least, their corporate culture has been 100% focused on "get the latest Magic set out the door." Any task that's not part of the Magic pipeline is given to the FNG or the madogiwa. I think Hasbro a few years ago came to see the fact that wizards isn't just bringing in money from video games hand over fist as a serious embarrassment, and this embarrassment has become more urgent as the % of hasbro's profits that come from wotc rises (because profits from everything else are falling). Current CEO was put in to correct this situation but he and all the people he hired are just random microsoft drones put into positions with too few people around to cover their inadequacies. The only reason magic arena is as successful as it is is that they hired a complete screaming violent game industry psychopath to run it so the specific type of disfunction is different from most of wizards.
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Jul 1, 2021 03:30
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I would Imagine that MTGO was raking in money by the truckload, and that Arena isn't doing too badly either.
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Jul 1, 2021 04:47
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Gynovore posted:I would Imagine that MTGO was raking in money by the truckload, and that Arena isn't doing too badly either. MTGO was, like, fine. Eventually. It was originally a huge boondoggle (https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Do-You-Believe-In-Magic-Online) and never made big time service game money. Arena is doing rather well but they spent like 5 years being wizards before they brought the abusive guy in so it'll be a minute before they make their money back. But when Chris Cox took over as CEO it was a floundering product that had just inexplicably handed millions of dollars to a military contractor to build their rules engine. And they had never successfully developed a game and MTGO was the only game they had ever published themselves.
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Jul 1, 2021 05:27
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Are they still arbitrarily kneecapping Arena in functionality and pricing because they can't bring themselves to depricate or at least make MTGO a secondary product?
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Jul 1, 2021 14:57
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They aren't doing that. If you're talking about why they aren't implementing old sets, it's because they believe that it wouldn't be a big source of revenue and it would be a lot of money to develop (and also the director has a bizarre belief that the game will die if non standard matchmaking becomes too attractive). MTGO is still alive because it does bring in a little bit of money.
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Jul 1, 2021 16:55
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they also seem very against enabling players to trade cards with one another
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Jul 1, 2021 17:09
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I used to really love mtg but it has gone down the tube. Sad, really. I miss u every day siege rhino.
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Jul 1, 2021 20:24
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LordSaturn posted:they also seem very against enabling players to trade cards with one another If they did this, the tryhards would create 17 accounts each and grind all day.
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Jul 2, 2021 03:45
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Gynovore posted:If they did this, the tryhards would create 17 accounts each and grind all day. Also the secondary market would kick in and people would be selling cards there I feel like part of MTGAs design is to keep other people from making money with singles
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Jul 2, 2021 03:53
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you mean like how it is already done on MTGO? yes, that's what would happen: people would pay dollars into the system for a currency they could use to buy the cards they want, whose sellers would probably be working some kind of grey-market angle to cash that currency back into money the rest of this post is for my own satisfaction, writing down a lot of things that have come up in conversation as friends asked me about the game, both recently and earlier in beta. things that worked well in this game: * building an interesting, synergistic deck with a mostly-complete collection of spells and artifacts was actually pretty cool and captured a similar feeling to building an MtG deck * unlocking cards by completing missions: incentivizes story progression, makes it perfectly obvious what you're going to get * missions with a lot of dense, focused combat where you could cast a bunch of spells and generally play the game intensely * several things they fixed during the beta that sorely needed it, but the horses were long out of the barn (performance of the game itself, new player experience, drawing redundant creatures, card drop rates - there's probably more) things that worked poorly: * everything involved in equipment was a complete trash fire. the equipment system should have never been in the game * unlocking cards by random drop: given that the cards are unique functional components and there's no way to identify which ones you still don't have, or control what ones you'll get next; no, gently caress off * unlocking cards via faction grinding: some of the cards in this system are actually super powerful and there's not even a paid option to accelerate them, as much as that would just be P2W * unlocking cards via realm progression: fewer good cards here, and more P2W options; this system also doesn't tell you what cards are in it until you've nearly gotten them, making it harder to know for sure what's available via random drop and what isn't. * unlocking cards via booster pack: if this game had kept running they'd eventually have put an important card as a booster pack exclusive and attracted a bunch of negative attention. they already had to move the booster pack class into the battlepass where everyone could get it, this was just a recipe for disaster. * the world map sucked. too much open space, too hard to find what you need, too hard to get the teleport waypoints to work, too many clicks to do anything at all * dailies needed work. too many of them required you to replay a story mission (rush through the talk triggers ASAP) or find a specific mob. the ones that required a specific kind of deck needed some tuning, but at least present an interesting challenge to the player * the UI was a hot loving mess right through close. they got rid of some of the worst issues but everything was too many clicks and there were too many ways to get 'stuck' trying to do some normal operation
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Jul 2, 2021 06:28
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Running a game where a stolen account is worth more than ten times as much as a stolen credit card sucks, actually, and wizards doesn't like doing it. MTGA not being that is one of the nice things about it.
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Jul 2, 2021 07:52
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30.5 Days posted:Running a game where a stolen account is worth more than ten times as much as a stolen credit card sucks, actually, and wizards doesn't like doing it. MTGA not being that is one of the nice things about it. Huh whaaaaat?
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Jul 2, 2021 18:06
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Gynovore posted:Huh whaaaaat? Because MTGO "cards" have value on the secondary market, so losing one would be like losing your binders of cards. Some folks have "collections" valued in the $10,000+ range if they could be liquidated for their market value MTGA avoids this somewhat because there is no secondary market. Losing an account you spent a lot of money on still sucks, but you couldn't sell it off piecemeal. Either you sell the entire account, or you keep it.
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Jul 2, 2021 18:23
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MTGO collections can be liquidated for a lot of money. Average value of an account is about a hundred dollars although the median is certainly a lot lower. This creates an entire small industry of full time MTGO hackers despite how few people still play. It sucks a lot!
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Jul 2, 2021 18:23
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