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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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Magic the Gathering?!? Oh, yeah... I remember...
cardboard crack.
I was hooked big time, but the thing I liked the best was the interaction and watching your opponents face when you whipped out that killer combination on them.
I tried the software version and it left me cold. The AI stunk and there was no joy in owning rare cards (anyone wanna buy my REAL cards, PLEASE?!?).
The online version can only be better as far as gameplay, but given the number of enterprising hackers, they'll ruin any chance the online version has for success.
I think I'll pass...
Don't anthropomorphize computers, they don't like it.
I read this when penny arcade posted a link to it. I, unfortunatly, would have to agree that the unpleasent population in many online communities is much too large. I haven't tried magic online but I do know a couple of things that can help clear some stuff up in the article. The article talks about duping making everyone's account get erased. They have a protection mechnisim in place that goes like this. Each card is "born" when a deck is opened, it has a unique identifier to that specific card on the server and using that they keep track of all transactions the card has been in. Thus, if a card was duped, they could follow all the transactions back to the original duper and >ONLY ban their account. I beleive that in the contract it does say that you do own your virtual cards, not them. This would probably protect you from some of the nastyness. Now, granted, there's a lot more that can go wrong, but I don't think it's as horrible as the article implies.
The author goes on and on about how cheating will be rampant online and if you dup cards that we could end up with lots of dupped card being traded or worse yet that these cards could be traded in for actual magic cards.
On and on he goes about how dangerous this online version will be... but here's the catch:
If you can get physical cards for your online cards then you're playing Magic Online when you play at your local store. The meta game is now the same game. How can you tell if someone's "real life" deck isn't stacked with duped cards from his online deck?
Well you can't. And guess what, the game was hacked a long time ago, in real life. Richard Garfield never envisioned people buying crates of the cards to get four of the rare ones in their deck... the game was hacked with money.
So next time you lose at Magic the Gathering at your local hobby store, you can call the guy a cheater. I mean, can he prove he actually bought all those cards?
I have some hope that M:tG:OL might actually work -- unlike other online games you have something serious to lose besides access -- the card collection you have built up. The biggest problem with online games, as this article points out, is the lack of repercussions to being an ass.
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.
On most online games you just re-register under another name.
Of course then the issue is -- will they really kick off somebody who has bought $10000 worth of cards ...
... but an accurate description of the current status of Diablo II online. The supposedly secure realms have been hacked to pieces. Many people charge items to help other players, sell items on ebay, and focus on the repetitive play that the game rewards.
One of the latest hacks, for example, which I find particularly funny, can program mouse and keyboard actions so that you keep creating games and killing the same monster over and over again soley for the purpose of getting the items the monster drops. This bot works - the prices within the trading economy have already gone down about one half because of the flood of all the items from players running it.
A good online game should not be based on rewarding this kind of repetitive behavior that a bot can perform (quote stolen from LB talking about Tabula Rasa.
Is because the Wizards have the intention to charge full retail price for virtual cards. That's right, the same money you could spend in a store, and get real physical cards and at least have something to look at (or take elsewhere) when you're done playing. For this idea alone, I don't see how it can work very well beyond a very dedicated core of people.
Unlike most MMORPG games, MTG: Online isn't going to charge a monthly fee. The draw for EverCrack, Ultima Online, etc is that you pay your 10 bucks same as everyone else, and it's what you do in the game that makes you better or worse than everyone else. MTGO, it's all about the size of your wallet and how much you can afford to spend on getting better. Sure, some of you can say "but you still have to know how to play the game or 10,000 dollars worth of cards don't help". Yeah, true. But during the beta, I estimated that it would cost well over $500 to become "competitive" at the game, with little or no way to change that. Things would be pretty even for about a month, and then the "Mr. Suitcase" players would overwhelmingly dominate the game, much like that one guy who figured out Magic just a little too early at your local comic/card store and whipped the crap out of almost everyone on a regular basis.
My major attraction though, was Tournaments. This is where MTGO really lacks IMO. A typical tourney with 128 players (or so) can and will take up to 8 hours to finish. 8 hours! And you can't leave and go anywhere else either, cause the round might finish early and you'd default by not showing up! I tried a few of these tournaments and they don't have the appeal of a physical tournament where you can go and mess around doing other things (like side tournaments) since you have to sit at the game for a solid 8 hours (or until you lose).
Yeah, it'll suck if hackers do their thing, and if people rip other people off.. but it has to get people to play first if that's going to happen, and I don't think it will.
What they should do (this is just a thought of mine) is sell the regular cards in stores, but print a unique serial number on each one, then you can enter those serial number onto your online account. That way your virtual deck can be the same as your real deck.
People guessing serial numbers shouldn't be a problem if there is a delay in entering the number and it uses a large enough base with enough digits.
Also, no teenager stench, which is always a bonus...
If this online Magic game were to sponcer a "get-together" like dating clubs, how many people would actually show up after the amount of smack delt online?
"Oh, so you're The Verminator... I'M GONNA RIP YOU STINKIN' HEAD OFF!!! NOBODY TALKS ABOUT MY MOTHER LIKE THAT!!!"
Hell, I'd pay just to watch....
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The expense is the reason I gave up on MtG. After dropping about $200 on cards, I realized that it was going to cost way too much to ever keep up. Mind you, I spent some of it about 1 tournament before some of my cards became unusable.
The tournament system was ridiculous in our area. It was the same people over and over, with no qualified judge, because WotC wanted way too much time and money to certify someone. Our nearest official judge in Lubbock, TX - which meant a three hour drive for him just to sit around and arbitrate. I don't think he ever really enjoyed it and in the end, I believe he quit working as a judge.
In the end, I watched the Magic community in our town switch over to other games. It stopped being fun and the requirements of running a real tournament were too high. I think the main discouragement for me was realizing that the point system in place meant that no one from our group was ever going to get outside the county (anyone from our group would have been OK).
I don't get it - competition can be fun without being as anally organized as WotC made it. They managed to take a game that looked great and played pretty well and turn it into some sort worldwide bizarre Darwinistic system. For what? Grins? I doubt it.
I think that maybe DnD and most paper-and-pencil RPG's are more fun because you can't make a tournament system work in that way. In the end, I went back to my book games and that's where I am now.
Never again.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
I had a friend... Let's call him Mike. Mike became bored with magic when he realized that he was spending hundreds of dollars per deck to change his proxy cards (fake cards for testing purposes) into real cards. A well-designed proxy deck will basically win every time, btw. He was sick of it.
He sold off all of his cards, and gave me his land / commons (somewhere I have a grocery bag full of living lands, wyrms, forests, etc) and bought two special starter packs that contained a starter and two boosters each. He proceeded to trade with people... collecting unwanted cards and trading bits here and there for things that other people wanted. He would hook people up for cards that they were looking for in exchange for a small cut, and he was a good dealmaker. Within a week, his deck was competitive again (he knew the power of common green), and within six months he was trading legends / antiquities and his collection rivaled that of his old deck... And within the year he was bored again and gave me all of his cards.
The moral of the story... Lots of people are going to be spending lots of money on this online game. If you can spend 10 hours playing a game every day, can you really resist buying a booster every morning? I used to be one of those people. We didn't put any value into common or uncommon cards, or even crappy rares. It sounds like there will be a lot of room for friendly tag-a-longs who are willing to ingraciate themselves by not taking the game seriously... and who don't have to pay any money to play.
Sounds fun. Where can I sign up?
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
I admit to playing only casually, and never in a tournament. I admit to not being a card game designer. But I respectfully disagree with everything you just said about price.
I stopped playing some years ago, so I don't know the new card sets and rules. Maybe things are different now. But when I was playing, I built my best decks by going to the card store and looking through the 5 and 10 cent card bins. These were the cards that 'serious players' were throwing away. They just weren't powerful enough to really cut it. No self respecting player at a tournament would play with them.
I remember one deck in particular. It was built for ~$2 plus a few common cards from my collection. There were no uncommon, rare, ultra-rare cards. And it won. My friends who were big on the tournament scene talked about 'lightweight' decks vs 'heavyweight' decks. By any standard, this should have been a lightweight deck. It creamed everything.
Was I that good? No, I was a fairly average player. Was my deck that good? Not by anyone else's standards. MtG has one of the most incredible buisiness I have ever seen. People think they can win by buying more cards - the Mr. Suitcase approach. But true to the original advertising and the original idea of what the game should be, you can win with a *cheap* deck.
I would be most interested to see a tourny in which players could buy their cards for the decks before the tourny from discount 5 and 10 cent bins. Put a price cap on it - no more than $10 for the whole deck. Maybe allow a few uncommons. No rares.
This sort of format would take some of the randomness out of sealed deck tourneys - it is entirely possible to get an unusuable deck in those sorts of situations. It would force an emphasis on deck building, creativity, and player skill rather than bank accounts. If you still want some randomness, everybody digs through the same bins. If it has to be 'fair,' give everybody a bin with the same cards in it.
And because you are deailing with mostly common cards, there does not need to be a cap on which sets are used. Opening the field up to all cards forces players to look for interesting combos that no one could ever use in the current style of tournament.
I bet the decks that came out of a tourney format like that would be some of the most fun to play. And I bet there would be be one or two every tourney that could whoop my 'unbeatable' deck.
Let's see an emphasis on creativity - as the game was intended to be played. You stop the Mr. Suitcase syndrome at the tourney level, and return to a game of strategy and a little luck. Who knows, maybe your favorite card will be lurking at the bottom of the bucket...
While I can understand the commentator's point about people online being complete choads, and could even be generalized, in specific instances, it's completely backwards. One case in point is Sanctum, an online collectable card game, probably the best one I've found looking around. The people are great to play with. The game is balanced. The replay options are enormous. Did I mention the people are great to play with? Instead of the 90% of people are choads (a la Penny Arcade) I'd have to say 99.98% of the Sanctum community is truly interested in helping new people play, giving pointers on how to play certain strategies, willing to trade and help new players get going with common cards and such.
I highly recommend it. I can't imagine playing M:TG Online.
Sanctum can be found here.
Regards,
Mark Norton
Any and everyone who played the beta in its last days realized how cool and fun this concept is. IF the game was more of a monthly-fee type then it would be great, but like the author of this article realized... paying for 'virtual objects' screws you over once the dupe hacks come out... and there WILL be dupe hacks. See Diablo II. The economy on the main realms got anally raped when the first dupes came out.