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The bigger problem about that is that more serious players with more serious decks will now go to FNMs to earn more points, meaning those events will lose their casual appeal.

wow. this is definitely a big change for the game. not sure if it is a big blunder, but besides some upsides, this cannot be called "rating" anymore, because it just isn't. It's more a marketing trick than anything else, leveling always is, because it just rewards quantity. (and btw. if you take a look at the website you can already see how this "trick" is trying to motivate you ... " x points left for level x" ... kind of pointless) plus, for every grownup, this whole "what level are you" -thing is really, really childish.

This is not a rating system, it's obviously a selling system...and although I was never someone who cares a lot about it, it was still a indicator for your game skills. Everybody gets, that as a company they want to make money - who doesn't, but taking a mediocre rating system away from competitive magic and replace it with something like this cannot be good for the game at all.

For everybody mentioning the ELO system. I am a chess player too, and I can say, the ELO rating system works a little bit different than the DCI rating. In Chess, the ELO system also protects good players from random losses, because there is not just plus/minus points, there is also a factor based on your actual rating. The higher your rating, the less ELO points you can win and lose. This makes a big difference, because a good player can keep the variance very low. The DCI rating, however, made some really ridiculous things possible. For example, typically the one who wins Nationals has the highest rating afterwards, just because of that many wins in a row. In such a system, it's more than understandable, that competitive players want to keep their rating and don't play minor events.

So, if the intention was only just about rewarding players for playing, then i wonder, why just not change this little thing in an existing system. This would be way more professional than just rewarding stupid grinding.

As it is, it's definitely NOT about having a professional rating system for competitive playing, it's all about marketing and selling.

But in the end i guess, the old rating system was also as bad, so I think I do not really care at all. Let's see, how it turns out.

Considering ratings invites to the Pro Tour:
For example Germany gets it's number of PTQ halfed, to 6.
Furthermore the number of GPs in Europe will be 3 in the first season of 2012, compared to 8 in the USA. Add to that big K-Value tournaments like the SCG-Open, and suddenly, as a German player, you are in the position that there aren't many high value tournaments around to get competitive points.

So expect to see an enormous rise of US Pro Tour participants. Because the Europeans will just lack the possibility to qualify via rating (due to the lack of high level tournaments), plus the number of PTQs is heavily reduced.

While the change overall seems reasonable (apart from the way too high FNM factor), this detail appears to anger a lot of the European players.

Imagine 2 cases for Competitive rating:
1. A player plays every day a draft for 8 people with an average result 1:2. For every such event he gets 4 points to his competitive rating this season. At end of season he gets 4*30 (days in a month)*4(months in a season)=480 points
2. Another player plays only once a week, but he wins every draft. For each draft he gets 10 points. At end of season he gets 10*4(weeks in a month)*4(months in a season)=160 points

And now some questions:
1. Who plays better and who gets more rating?
2. Who will get buys and invitations based on a rating?

While the ideas behind the change are solid (remove incentives to stop playing events for high rated players, boost tournament attendance in general), as a European player the recent changes seem overall very negative. 

First of all, it seems clear that if you live in an area with smaller tournaments of all sizes and less tournaments overall, you're realistically never going to qualify for anything (apart from Nationals) with the PW points.

PT slots likely require several solid finishes per season from very large events (including the previous PT, so grinding in from the outside is extra hard) and it's very hard to compete with someone who can play a PTQ, say, every two weeks anyway when your country has 1 PTQ total for the whole season given equal opportunity to play FNM weekly.

With GP's giving out no PT invitations, it doesn't seem worth it to travel to GP's anymore since you'd have to attend and do well in several during one season to have any chance to get an invite through PWPs and without the PT slots of the GP, you basically need to make top 32 to even cover the costs of getting to the tournament. Previously doing well gave you a nice rating boost (that didn't go away at end of season) and a realistic shot at a PT slot.

The FNM champs slots are also most likely out of reach unless you live in an area that has large FNM's due to the double whammy of participation points multiplying by three and larger FNM's being more likely to have more rounds to score points.  

So, for a lot of places in the world it looks like the only thing the points will ever be good for is qualifying for Nationals and GP travel becomes a waste of effort unless you're in the position to be able to play 3 GP's or so during a season and PTQ's (of which there are now less of in Europe) now become the only reasonable way to get to the Pro Tour.