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6 months ago ::
Dec 17, 2012 - 5:37PM
#41
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Date Joined:
Aug 13, 2001
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You guys are very much like the boy who cried "wolf" when it comes to leagues. I will believe they are coming back when they come back, and not a second before.
Jeff Heikkinen
DCI Rules Advisor since Dec 25, 2011
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6 months ago ::
Dec 17, 2012 - 7:32PM
#42
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Date Joined:
Oct 28, 2006
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It looks like 10 cube tickets are worth 8 regular tickets, or $8.
By that logic the total entry fee for cube is $8 for 8 people, or $64.
Payout (at least in the swiss) is 30 cube tix total, or 18 regular tickets, or $18.
So that means that for me, it's an $8 entry, and expected payout of $2.25. So on average I'm paying $5.75 for a phantom draft. Makes no sense.
Not quite. Entry is 8 event tickets or 10 cube tickets PLUS 2 regular ones. So 10 cube tickets = 6 event tickets. Or 1 cube ticket = 0.6 ETs. Also, your payouts are wrong. You're treating swiss like that's 1/2/3/4 payout, not X-Y payout which is what swiss does. After 3 rounds of swiss, there's one 3-0, three 2-1, three 1-2, and one 0-3. So the total payout is 54 cube tickets. Which we'll convert to 32.4 Event Tickets. So pay in is 64 and pay out is 32.4, meaning they pay out half and the average player pays $4 for the experience. Certainly not generous. But then that shouldn't be news nowadays, anyway. I'm baffled by the business model. Why is the price so high? Can someone explain this to me?
Because people pay it. Simple as that, really.
Free MTGO Tournaments you should be playing: Pauper (all commons) - Tuesday Nights, prizes by MTGOTraders Peasant (Pauper + 5 uncommons, with paper rarity) - Sunday Nights, prizes by MTGOTraders Silverblack (Modern-era Commons and Uncommons - Most Wednesday nights, prizes by MTGO Bazaar Heirloom ("Cheap" cards only, e.g. rares under 20 cents) - Sunday afternoons, sponsored by MTGOTraders Check the superbly-made Gatherling site for more. Other games you should try: Spectromancer - Online card game by Richard Garfield, available cheap on Steam. DC Universe Online - action-based MMO. Free to play. Surprised me how well designed it is. Simunomics - Free-to-play economy simulation game.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 17, 2012 - 8:15PM
#43
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I don't like all of the negativity, but I have to be honest, as an average MTGO user, who plays some casual games, some swiss drafts, and never in anything more competitive than that, I'm not really sure what all of the money spent on the new client is getting me. Certainly, hearing Leagues are still a year and half away is gutting. I've actually been waiting ever since the V3 client did away with them but now I have to let it go forever, I think. I work in the software industry, so I know that "it's only a year and a half away" really just means "it's likely never to be actually released, but we do talk about it sometimes." Given that Worth gets asked the question all the time, I'm guessing that either the market research data doesn't verify the anecdotal evidence that people really like Leagues, or they've done the math and just decided it's not really worth it. Either way, it'd be good to get a straight-up "we're not going to bring Leagues back" rather than being strung along for literally years. Like I said, I don't know the economics of it, but if there were Leagues I'd pretty much always be in one. Not having them has sucked me into a handful of drafts - maybe 2-3 when a new set comes out, and then I move on. So Leagues would actually get more money out of me, personally, since I'd buy at least the 9 packs every month (assuming that's how Leagues would still work) and likely would sometimes be in a couple of Leagues at the same time. I also don't understand why they're even doing a new client. It's baffling, since the V3 client just seemed to take away features and now a worse client is being created. I get that flashy user experience is cool, but it seems like people just want functionality with a reasonable ux. From the outside looking in, it feels like the software development team is constantly turning over employees, the new developers look at the old code and decide there's no way they want to touch that mess, so they lobby the powers-that-be to just be allowed to start over. The thing is, customers expect more, and starting from scratch is always way harder than it seems since it takes so long just to get back to the point of origin from a functionality perspective. I agree with those that said "don't throw the baby out with the bath water" - there are clever ways to incrementally improve the architecture of a software system and even the UI but starting from scratch all the time just produces diminishing returns. (This from a software architect  ). I know all too well that software development is way more expensive and way more time-consuming than the average consumer of software thinks it is so I am taking this into account. But customers still have the right to expect better product/more features as time goes on and this contant iterating over the same ground is really going nowhere. I really hope that the software team at WotC can start to show evidence learning from their mistakes - generally known as 'experienc' - rather than simply repeating them.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 17, 2012 - 11:16PM
#44
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Date Joined:
Mar 20, 2010
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Leagues would be a lot of fun again! They were a great way to hop on Magic Online for an hour or less at a time and feel like you had fun yet were trying to accomplish something. Logging on for a couple friendly matches is just so-so, otherwise you have to join a multi-hour tournament. I enjoy the longer tournaments, but I don't always have the time during the week. If I could join a league and play for 30-55 mins a night I would do it, and I'd be happier being able to play this enjoyable game whenever I had some spare time.
Also, imagine the social media connections with leagues! Half my friends sign up for multiple fantasy football leagues just to have fun, they don't always live nearby one another and it allows them to socialize over something. Let players be able to set up their own leagues for friends/clans/enemies and more people would play more often!
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6 months ago ::
Dec 18, 2012 - 12:37AM
#45
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- Quantum Leap
- Staunch Defender
Date Joined:
Nov 13, 2003
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MTGO has existed for more time without leagues than it did with them.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 18, 2012 - 12:44AM
#46
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Date Joined:
Mar 25, 2006
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In the first couple of years after leagues disappeared, I remember statements that it would be available or at least begun within a couple or three quarters...then a year...then two years.
I hear ya'. Course, the last straw with MTGo for me was when an ORC told me that a Russian Reversal joke was hate speach. I put up with the version 2 launch, Chuck's Virtual Party, server issues, version 3 (oh, gawds, the stupid, it burns!), but that was it. That was the last straw.
At this point, I'm rather content NOT playing MTGO.
True.
Magic is a game of interaction also and you provide plenty of chatrooms which are basically unusable, because there are those stupid(as in not smart) orcs who cannot answer basically a single question other than what is the difference between the draftqueues or how many rounds there are. yet, they stop every other interesting conversation because something "can be considered hate speech" or if something has seen a lot of play we cannot discuss it because it also includes its value going up. Also, I find it extremely disturbing that some words extremely out of context will you get you an automatic mute. You have to loosen up. Let people have the chat. We are not babies who cry each time someone says something. This censorship needs to stop.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 18, 2012 - 1:22AM
#47
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Date Joined:
Dec 24, 2007
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ORCs aren't paid well enough to have ORCs that are good at their job. Don't blame the ORCs. It's the corporation at fault.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 18, 2012 - 3:28AM
#48
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When you started talking about the huge sucess of MTGO in the past year I was really skeptic but waited for some statistics to back it up. Your asemption was backed up by the sucess of RtR?
Do you even realize that it has NOTHING to do with MTGO client right? Mtg development team did their job, you didn't, you are just sucking up their sucess.
1. Leagues (keep trolling your consumers, thats the way to go)
2. Replays not working.
3. Scroll down in tournament lists bug.
4. Clan support.
5. A tutorial.
6. A better trade sistem. Searching by words (which fails many times if you put more than 1 word) through dozens of wall texts with tiny fonts? Is that the best you got?
7. Impossible to know if you got disconnected from a game. (I am yet amazed by your solution to that one... restart the client and see what happens)
8. Streaming support
...
If you are happy with what you offer, cool for you, but someone in your company should ask himself;
- We are making money now but...what could happen if we really start investing money in this?
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6 months ago ::
Dec 18, 2012 - 5:53AM
#49
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Date Joined:
Nov 29, 2007
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I am making a point to use the open beta as much as possible and I want it to succeed, but I'm amazed that beta is now the more preferred, there are so many frustrating things about it still.
Most of the recent improvement has gone into things that I take for granted, such as stability (fewer crashes) and reintroducing features that v3 already has. Most of the new stuff is still slow, ugly, clunky or at worst unusable (e.g. I can't configure any function buttons beyond f8 as they are off the visible screen - and yes, there's a workaround that involves finding and editing a config file, but that isn't very user friendly is it).
Someone above said that fixing the bugs wasn't enough, and I agree with that. They need to start in on the timewasting stuff, like not having to reposition chat every time you start a game, and reducing the number of clicks to join a game etc. I'd also like more visibility of the people on mtgo - in v3 you see there are a thousand people in the fun room, can see them chat etc. Beta feels empty like a solitaire game.
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6 months ago ::
Dec 18, 2012 - 7:46AM
#50
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Date Joined:
May 30, 2010
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Have you guys considered that your survey results simply might be skewed because of peoples' refusal to play the Beta? I won't touch the thing, literally only updated it because of the cube tickets, and in the middle of Saturday during the day it still took about a half hour for the 8man draft queue to fire, despite the offer of free stuff.
I just don't understand how anyone could think the Beta is near playable. Performance and clicking during games is slow. The interface, while in some cases being improved over v3, is just as bloated in other ways. And who in the world thought this color scheme was something I'd want to spend time looking at? Simple things, like the deckbuilder when you're done drafting being tiny, and yet the "Add Basic Lands" button gets a huge box that it doesn't need around it, are just frustrating. I am a Magic addict, so I know I'm not the one WoTC is trying to court with this new client, but I don't see how someone who hasn't played Magic Online before will be more drawn in by the new client then v3.
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