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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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They will just have to have a very anti-cheating policy.
That and if it is a least reasonably popular, it will make a whole lot of money, and they will be able to hire alot of coders to stay ahead of the cheaters.
Blizzard, Everquest, and games of that type are at a disadvantage because they only get like $10 a month from their subscribers, MtG subscribers will pay much more as they pay $3 dollars per pack of cards. Adding the fact that the cards can be redeemed for real cards will really draw the MtG fans as well.
As long as WotC pumps a good portion of the revenue into coders to fend off the cheaters, I don't think that they will have much problem. Bandwidth wise WotC is looking at a much more attractive position then the MMORPG's as the ping times won't have to be nearly so low to have a good game.
So lets add up the points shall we?
1. Less Bandwidth required (Less cost)
2. Higher Subscriber Revenues (More revenue)
3. Tangible product extremely cheap to produce
= a large amount of profit to pay coders
Sure their will be bugs, I wouldn't recommend trading with people in the first 2 weeks, for example. But I believe that it won't be nearly as much of a problem as this article's author seems to believe.
I've played this game years ago, back when legends and the Dark were out. Well, after looking what they were doing, they were adding "new" rules and making half-assed cards basd on older, and more powerful, cards. Then you have the Tier1 and Tier 2 playing sets. To play on the upper set, you have to BUY NEW CARDS.
This continual upgrading scheme (for paper,. nonetheless) is what ran me away. I play for fun now, and spend half the time trying to figure out the stupid new variations on the original rules.
Then again, the rules change every other week. How can they update the game so that the new rules are correctly in effect? Still, Online or offline, the game still stinks these days.
---"Of course then the issue is -- will they really kick off somebody who has bought $10000 worth of cards ..."
That's 10000$ bucks for free for them. Why not?
Richard Garfield never envisioned people buying crates of the cards to get four of the rare ones in their deck...
Never envisioned it without also having visions of dancing dollar signs, you mean.
Seriously, the whole point of putting rare cards in any collectible card game is so that people will buy crates of cards to get them...
When you play Magic at your local card store, you're playing against people you know and respect.
I don't give a damn what Geordie Tait thinks about online magic, I want to know - Where does he go to play cards? Damn, his e-mail is Canadian.
Now, Shadowfist, there's a game. I want to see an online version of Shadowfist+Necromunda. Here's how it would work:
You have a squad, ala X-Com, that fights other people's squads. In addition, you have a virtual deck of Shadowfist cards. The deck of Shadowfist cards contains cards that are tied to the stats of the characters in your Squad; so if a character in your squad gains the Infiltrate skill, his corresponding card in your deck gains the Infiltrator ability from Shadowfist (attack backrow sites.)
That game would rock.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
If you've invested a lot more that time into something (eg. bought lots of boosters) then getting kicked off for breaking the terms of use might be enough of a feedback loop to keep some modicum of control.
You've obviously never spent much time on AOL.
As a teenager speaking for all my peers across the planet, all I can really offer up in response is this: my peers are complete assholes, in both senses of the term. They have the common sense of your average toddler, and about the same amount of empathy for others, to boot. (DoNt FoRgEt, ThEsE aRe ThE pEoPlE wHo InVeNtEd TyPiNg LiKe ThIs.) Those two qualities, combined with the sense of invulnerability that the Internet provides, does not make for someone who feels they need to follow the TOS, even if failing to do so means a few bits on a distant server might be twiddled.
(I extend my deepest apologies to anyone reading this who is between the ages of 13 and 20 whose higher-order mental processes have survived puberty. You're a model to us all. really.)
Magic: The Gathering is a brilliant game. I have played it since 1993. I have watched the development of the game from day one. Richard Garfield is a genius, and all people in the CCG industry need to tip their cap to him whenever they design any game. That said, it uses a horrible business model, one that was never intended to work on a real player level. This shows up on the tournament level and will show up in MTGO.
When the game was designed, the most powerful cards were the rarest. Black Lotus, a card that lets you get 3 mana for free (where you normally only get to produce one on the first turn and two on the second and so on), is one of the rarest of all tournament-legal Magic cards. This was done because Wizards naively believed that hardcore players couldn't collect all of the cards, so the harder it was to get something the more powerful it should be.
Unfortunately, the tournament players learned that to compete you HAD to have one copy of each of the "Power Nine," the most-abusable cards in the game. Cards quickly spiraled into the $20, $30 and even (gasp) $50 range! If those cards weren't restricted to one-per-deck (where most cards are four-per-deck), their prices would have been even higher on the secondary market.
Well, Wizards learned that those cards were too powerful and stopped printing them. Again, naively assuming that if you limit the supply that eventually things will become more fair. That wasn't what happened -- the cards became more and more expensive. Today, to get the "Power Nine," you're talking about $800 or more.
Wizards learned that having a group of "haves" and "have nots" was not good for the long-term success of the game. So they created a new tournament format that didn't use any really old cards. This was called Type II, and eventually called Standard. What the Standard tournament format did was to "ban" hundreds of cards without specifically choosing to do so. Invalidating the early players' purchases.
If Magic was an online game from day one, they could have tweaked the costs and gameplay effects of their most-broken (and most-useless) cards. But in Magic, you are stuck. Since MTG-Online must mirror MTG-card board, you get all of the drawbacks of being online but none of the benefits.
Further, when you are dealing with an online game the FIRST priority must be "how will the abusers play this game?", because if it isn't you are screwed. With MTG-card board you have tons of social gaming groups that don't have to deal with the tournament gaming scene. This is extremely unlikely to happen in MTG-Online. Again, since it is linked to a nine-year-old game with sloppy, very complex rules, problems arise.
And my biggest point: Magic is just too expensive. To play in a constructed Standard tournament with just one deck, you usually need to spend $100. Many of the most popular decks run north of $200. And these use cards that are IN PRINT! Then, when Standard has a set rotation (banning another 700 cards to make room for the new sets that have just been released) you need to buy more and more.
You can avoid this by entering Sealed Deck tournaments, but then you are paying around $20 to make a deck with a limited set of cards. I like them, but how many $20 tournaments can you enter a month? Even one every other week makes MTGO a $500/year online game.
For the record, to play any of the online CCGs that I have developed, players need to spend $10 to jump in, $35 to have a serious tournament deck and about $100 to have a full "play set" of any given expansion.
When Wizards gives up on MTG-Online, much like it has the Magic Interactive Encyclopedia and the original Magic PC game, the people who have spent their money will be left with exactly nothing. Our games allow peer-to-peer play (albiet awkwardly) such that if something ever happens to us, you can keep on playing.
Disclaimer time: I speak for Blue Sky Red Design and myself only, not for my employer, our parent company or World Wrestling Entertainment in any way.
Online wrestling as a trading card game? WWF With Authority.
Of course, if you were just interested in playing the game on a friendly basis, and didn't bother attending the tourneys, there were always the counterfeit cards.
Back in Toronto, there was at least one manufacturer who's product was indistinguishable from the real thing. A complete set - that's f$cking everything that was done to date - in triplicate, used to cost ~$80 cdn.
Which is kinda frightening when you consider how many people are well into the thousands 'invested'.
As for the online game, geez, I'm pretty sure the same thing will happen. Don't think I'm in the the minority here, when I say I really hate to lose because some moron with money has a better deck than me. I like the game (any game, in fact), to be a fair competition, not who has the most spare cash in the RW.
An interesting point has been made, would you seriously pay money to get virtual cards that can be redeemed for real cards, and potential play experience rivalling a high school fight?
I think only hardcore magic fans would want to play this, seriously. Anyone who doesn't play the game in real life has no incentive to play it online, since the hardcore players will be spending so much time trying to screw over the system and other players to get those uber-rare cards and redeem them so fast that nobody else has a chance at them.
Multiplayer Online games have fatal flaws
1. Any form of RL value ("ebay")
- Fine rare item, sell it on ebay, play for 6 months sell your character on ebay, etc.
2. Any form of in-game currency or inventory/items that doesn't work on market-based principals. (IE, no license to duplicate items, each item in the world is unique and can only have one owner.)
- No generation or re-spawn should be required to keep sufficient inventory in the game. All existing games as far as I know need to "replenish" stores, or the stores are unlimited, which let's people hoard certain items.
3. Inventory period.
- Can a real person hold 300 dead rabbits? Didn't think so. The reason people can hoard anything in these games is because their inventory is so deep that it allows them to. One certain game I was playing during betatest would have 60 players surround this one shop keepers respawn point, then when the server rebooted they would quickly login and buy everything the shopkeeper had and turn around and sell the items for 100000X the price. If there was a realistic limit(like in weight/room-in-backpack) on inventory, one person should not be able to buy out 20,000 units of any item and be able to fit all that in their inventory.
4. Any form of client-side storage
Diablo I/II has this problem, as the game stores data on the client side, it's easy to make whatever item you want, even make your character have any stats you want. This is also the same problem in peer-to-peer server-less games, where the client data can be "bot"-ed. The client should only recieve game state and send actions, not do any calcuation and not send what isn't requested. "Attack player X" and server does the calculation. FPS games present a further problem since to shoot, a aiming point has to be sent, and since the client also receives the location of everyone, it makes it easy to just auto-track.
In short, why would you pay money to be part of a fictional world where you get screwed over, and over and over? This is why many RPG games don't attract the right kind of people (usually the hack and slash FPS/Diablo crowd) since the people who are used to kill everything that moves ruin the game for everyone else. (Some games have a notoriety feature that makes it so pk'ers are highlighted when they are in the area.)
(think about it - increased price through scarcity will fail utterly in an electronic forum where scarcity is completely artificial.)
This has already been proven to be wrong. Try searching on ebay for rare equipment from MMORPGs, or other Diablo type games. One rare piece of equipment can sell for literally hundreds of dollars.
However, Whether or not it retains that value over time is questionable.
I play a fair bit of Diablo II online and I've developed a technique for dealing with cheats: I don't care. If someone were to steal a valuable item from me somehow, through my naivity or otherwise, I just wouldn't care. I've built up my character, and I can do it again. I'm playing the game to enjoy myself, not so I can be 133+.
I don't know much about MtGOL, but from what I've read here virtual cards will be redeemed for real ones (or at least their value). Because of this, people with good collections of genuine Magic cards can only lose. Their collections will be as valuable as the dupers' fake collection.
This is the equivalent of a government allowing virtual money in an insecure environment. If it is possible for someone to cheat the system and print their own money (or dupe their cards) with no legal recourse, it will happen, and the value of every holder of that currency will lose out.
To end this semi drunken rant, I will summarise by saying that anything's value is in the eye of the receiver. Be it cash, a Grandfather sword, or a Black Lotus card. If you can't trust the printer of the currency, don't invest in it.
Cheers,
Noims.
PS. please excuse my spelling, grammar, and keyboard (my E doesn't work right)
This is not the greatest sig in the world. This is just a tribute.