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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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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...