Community

We have been paying a lot of attention to what people in the gaming world have been doing in recent years, and across the board—whether it is MMOs or social games—the way you keep people invested is through a constant stream of positive reinforcement.

Now I've heard everything.  Magic is now trying to be more like Farmville.

"I think that we don't need to prove that Magic is a skill game anymore. We have fifteen years of data that proves that."
- Aaron Forsythe arguing against ELO

While there may be some validity to this point I tend to disagree since removing the ELO system completely and replacing it with the Planeswalker Points still undoubtedly sends the signal that Magic is in fact a game where the amount onf time you spend playing it gets rewarded rather than your actual skill level. I think it is critically important to the game that it keeps some semblance of an actual skill based game at least in its rating system. One of the great things about Magic after all is that it is fun to play at any level but DOES lend itself to actual competitive play very well.

I am firmly of the opinion however that the best players should reap the rewards of their playskill and receive byes or invites to the Pro Tour. This is a metric that the new system utterly fails at since only those who play frequently in high level events have a legitimate shot at the benefits.

What I find most hypocritical is that the Planeswalker Points will be used as a ranking metric when it is completely apparent that the thing that is being measured by them is not in fact playskill but rather the sheer volume of tournaments played. I find this very troubling as it telegraphs a completely wrong idea of what competitive play is about. The more impressive feat should always be going 15-0 in tournaments rather than playing 5-10 in three times as many tournaments. Under the new system these two "achievements" are met with the same reward. This is very obviously wrong and demonstrates that the PPs are in no way a justifiable measure for skill when they HAVE TO be if used as a ranking system. Number 1 in a ranking should always be the best because of winning most in relation to his/her losses.

Something else that is very bothersome is that the system is utterly US-centric. There are most tournaments available in the US and thus it is likely that most of the benefits will be handed out to US players on the simple grounds that they have more chances to play in more tournaments. Europe has greatly skilled players as has been made obvious on the PT circuit since basically forever, and distributing byes and PT invites via the worldwide rankings puts these players at a disadvantage since they don't even have the chance to rack up the same number of points as players in the US with the SCG open series and similar events. I don't see what the problem is with regionalizing the byes in a similar fashion as has been hinted at with the PT invites. It just seems way more fair to distribute the byes and incidentally more of the PT invites by means of the more regional (that is continental) rankings since players in those regions have more of the same preconditions and can thus be measured more fairly by the same scale.

I am all for the idea of making losing less of an issue but this can certainly not be the way to go about it if one wants to represent Magic as any kind of competitive and skill testing game.

EDIT: Something else that just came to my mind is that more casual players usually don't show much, if any, interest in their ratings. Why "mess it up" for those people who actually care about/benefit from/are interested in the portrayal of Magic as a skill-based game via rating only to make it for those people who likely won't care one way or the other. The tournament scene did not have much of a grudge against the "old" rating system as far as I can tell and it did reflect much better what mattered to those people: How good am I at Magic in comparison to my peers.