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Why Magic Online Will Suck
An anonymous reader sends us a link to this funny dissection of online gaming. The writer obviously speaks from bitter experience. :)
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You-know-who that he is referring to is likely Jamie Wakefield, as further evidenced by his reference to punching 'Jankfield' later in the article.
Wakefield was a well known magic player and columnist who quit the game for Asheron's Call. Many magic players were fans of his articles, which were better thought out and written than this piece of tripe IMO.
If the author is consistant, he is likely to want to punch me in the skull. My email address is zaphod(at)charter.net, feel free to contact me for my physical address.
-Zaphod
If you want to avoid cheaters, play online with your friends. Playing anonymously is for chumps.
the whole point of putting rare cards in any collectible card game is so that people will buy crates of cards to get them...
Actually the creator thought that a most people would have two starter decks and 4 booster packs. The reason for rare cards was to help balance the powerful cards. No one at wizards thought that magic would be as popular as it became and there was no way to predict it. Richard Garfield thought you'd never actually see all the cards, and rare cards would make the game more interesting.
The dollar signs came later.
I played MTGO quite extensively during the free beta period. Stopped when they went live and started charging far too much.
1) Cards you buy for MTGO are not stored locally, but in a large database WOTC has back at their co-lo. It is conceivable that duping/illegal card hacks are possible, but the Leaping Lizard folks have been going out of their way to make sure that doesn't happen. Of course, that setup hasn't stopped all the duping hacks in Diablo II...
2) As was mentioned in another post, WOTC is charging real-life prices for MTGO cards. Same price per pack as if you went to your local store and got a physical set. This wouldn't be terrible if it didn't lead into...
3) You don't own your MTGO cards, nor is WOTC liable to replace them beyond $15. This language was inserted into the TOS about 2/3 of the way through the beta period and caused a huge shitstorm amongst the beta testers. So let's say you've spent $1000 on MTGO cards, and there's some sort of database corruption and your account is hosed. You're now out $985 with nothing to show for it.
See, the thing is that WOTC adamantly does NOT want MGTO to compete with standard MTG. They believe that if they charge less for MTGO (say, something like $0.50 US/booster) that all the MTG players will defect to MTGO. (Never mind the fact that physical MTG is on its last legs anyways.) They're right to a degree...I do think there would be some defecting, but not nearly as much as WOTC is panicking about. As it is, a significant portion of the beta testers pledged to quit as soon as the game went live, and from what I've seen most of them stuck to their guns.
When you register a Windows product, doesn't it record your CPU's serial number?
It was my understanding that the Pentium III was the only CPU with a serial number. If so, it makes this scheme fairly useless.