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This article was pointless. This addressed none of the important issues, mainly what for the guys with actual jobs who can BUY the 1000 something dollar decks and can only play once a week, and how going 4-5 and 3 american gps beats winning a ****ing european one! ADDRESS THE ****ING PROBLEMS, DON'T PROVIDE FLUFF!!!

I've had a few days to ponder these changes since they were announced, and while I'm not happy about them I'm going to learn to live with them. I am one of the so-called "casual-competitive" players. I enjoy bigger events like PTQs, GPs, and Nationals and will travel to them when it is reasonable. I also have a full-time job and a relationship, so I have to choose the events I play in carefully to maximize my enjoyment of the game without disrupting these other important elements of my life.

The fundamental change that is occuring here is that you are replacing a rating system with an achievement system. While ELO was not perfect for Magic, it was a very clear indicator of how well someone performed over time. There may have been peaks and valleys, but everyone with a high rating EARNED it in some way by playing Magic well. Those with a high number of Planeswalker Points may also end up being good players, but the system rewards different things. Primarily, it can reward players who spend all their free time playing Magic, and all their expendable income on buying your products and travelling to your highest multiplier tournaments each week.

My greatest concern in all of this is that Wizards as a company is now promoting these potentially unhealthy social habits by dangling the biggest rewards they can offer in front of its players as an incentive. Aaron's MMO analogy is spot-on, and make no mistake, the high-level competitive Magic scene will undoubtedly become the type of grindfest that is the biggest negative association most people have with those types of games. Pro Tour Magic will no longer be about gathering together the best in the game, but about gathering together those for whom Magic is Life, with little room for anything else life has to offer.

I'm going to say something that'll probably make you skim this post and not get the point, so I'm just asking you to read the second sentence, too, before dismissing me out of hand.

"Incentivizing gameplay" is bad, okay?  It's one thing to take away reasons not to play the game, and of course it's great if the game is fun and people want to play to enjoy themselves.  But giving people a reason to play the game even if it isn't fun is going to hurt the game in the long run.

You actually SAID you stole this from MMOs; have you actually played WoW (which is what I assume was the specific game that meant)?  Grinding is NOT FUN.  It's a CHORE.  WoW's little system of turning everything into positive reinforcement took away the ability to enjoy the activities involved.  Leveling is a chore you do in order to be able to play in dungeons - except once you get to that point, playing in dungeons is a chore you have to do in order to be able to play in raids.  And then raids turn into a big grind in order to prepare for the next tier of content.  Everything is positive reinforcement all time, and NONE of it is fun as a direct result.  The only place in WoW that DOESN'T give you all positive reinforcement all the time is PvP, and hey, guess what?  PvP is what keeps long-term players in the game.

Constant positive reinforcement will not keep players interested in playing on a long-term basis.  In fact, the opposite is true: it will hurt people's ability to stay interested, because constant positive reinforcement is boring.  This is a demonstrated fact that you can see just by glancing over the demographics of what activities long-term players engage in, in WoW.