V4 is the worst piece of software I've ever used in my life. Magic is a game of turning images sideways and somehow Wizards managed to have a program that could do this, and then had an idea to come out with a new program that would completely drain all memory from your computer, freeze constantly, makes triggered abilities a horror show for my computer, don't ever try to trade and they don't even think they are doing a bad job. "If it aint broke, break it." -WOTC Now V3 wasn't great but it was still head and shoulders above V4 because, well, it worked. There are other games you can play on your computer were you are running really fast and shooting things and images are popping up and flashing and there are explosions and they run fine. Wizards can't make a game where my opponent plays a Scry land turn one and my computer doesn't freeze for thirty seconds. I have trouble playing non-aggro decks due to lag and on my computer I could never play familiar combo (pauper deck). There is so many other things out there that are being run so much better than MTGO that I have no idea how things like V4 are getting the go ahead.
Wizards really needs to look at what other companies are doing and figure out what is wrong with their management system where bad ideas get the thumbs up. They make a great game in that R&D a great job, but as soon as someone gets close to a computer everything turns to crap. I'm someone who sold all of my actual cards (thank you capefeargames) and just wants online where my cards are always in mint condition, I can use them far more often, and I can play from my bedroom but they make programs that are unplayable.
Although I usually agree on all things Magic with Paul, I have to side with JXC here. I just saw where Hasbro is having a record year for profits and somehow they can't put enough resources into MTGO to fix it.
Other game companies with far fewer resources are going all-out to put a quality product in the hands of their fans. Why can't Magic do that?
I try hard not to be negative, but then I see the great things other games are doing, and other game companies are doing, and I just can not understand how a subsidiary of Hasbro cannot do these great things as well.
Pokemon is on my ipad right now. The magic answer for that is DotP. I can play the full game, but have to settle for a arcade version of magic? That's insane!
Hearthstone is going to be on android devices soon. DotP is the only way for me to magic on an android device.
Other games are embracing mobile tech. Other games are outsourcing things that they do not understand (I would not want Square to do a console version of MTGO, unless there was an opera involved.)
I see great things going on in paper, but it's not the same online, and it bothers me, because online players should not be thought of as an afterthought, and that's how I feel personally.
Yes I did fill out the survey no I didn't give them all 0s. Not only does that negate the purpose of the survey it isn't very honest. They have done a lot of "wrong" things with MTGO but it is still (semi) functional. Particularly in some areas. And areas I was very unhappy with 4 months ago I am less unhappy with now. Marginally but it makes a difference. That said they got a lot of 2s from me with a few 5s scattered about. As AJ says fair is fair.
Also Josh stop being so negative!! :p I know it's hard when the company gives so much to complain about. It is the same struggle I have had when writing my articles. I want to say good things. I want to be the apologist railing against the trolls and whiners. I want to support the best game company I know. But MTGO is such a shoddy product at this point and it is inexcusable. Even from a purely bottom line point of view.
They had a poor but acceptable product in v3. V4 is unacceptable in many important ways. It is good in some and great in others so lets not be onesided but it needs a lot of work. And if I worked on the MTGO team I would be ashamed to acknowledge it right now.
Also I agree with the general assessment of Brain Maggot's promo. Ugh could have done without seeing that. Thanks guys... :/
I haven't played much lately but I did play Momir on Saturday and I didn't notice any lag. But with many players lagging it obviously has to be a problem with mtgo. But increasing the time is not the solution. That encourages slow play and makes for even longer rounds. A friend of mine has been playing a lot of Hearthstone and when he played one cube draft he just couldn't stand that his opp kept making him wait 1 minute every turn, even when he was tapped out. I know this can't be solved because of the way magic works but adding more time will create even more problems. What they have to do is fix the lag even if they have to hire more/better people.
I have had some serious issues with lag in game too. I have lost matches due to this as well. Recording the matches allows me to go back and look at the clock and it 'skips'... not only a lot, but in large quantities of time too. The simplest way for wizards to remedy this would be to increase the match times. Aggro vs Aggro matches shouldn't be going to time. Something like Eggs or Jeskai Ascendancy is unplayable on MTGO in its current state.
Its not just the endless list of awkward things or things not working with mtgo, its also the things that actually WORK with mtgo that are there with an added cost in form of cpu/memory usage.
So, a 3-4 year old computer works like that with other games, but in mtgo terms that 3-4 yo computer in effect is rather like 7-10 year old.
That said, I think V4 will become better than v3, only that it will take 2-5 months to become as good as V3, and then use an extra year or so to build up "betters" than v3.
The pace of which wotc needs to do things is puzzling.
In parallel this doesn't mean that much money loss for wotc because there will always be the percentage of mtgo players that use mtgo to improve their paper game to do well at GPs, PTs and PTQs. These players aren't that much "victimized" by the mtgo flaws because they most often recognize when a flaw happens, which newer players don't do, but do in aftermath, and then get very disappointed (determining what is a valid redemption request is a rollercoaster arguementation wise, im very certain wotc gets away with far too much nonsense replies to customers, and some players draft watchdog/spirespine to actively seek out redemption from wotc(a player can also mull for this/these card in games). And then you also have that extra layer where (some) experienced players exploit things at wotc/newer players cost, and you get the discussions about what actually is exploiting vs what is just making the most of it.
If I were wotc I would implement the possibility to block out a player from playing certain formats instead of having this idiotic redemption e-mailing forth and back, but that is probably way too much to expect of their computing skills.
It sounded weird to me too, but this latest time it lost my settings and undocked the chat for me, I tried putting it on the left instead. I'm liking it so far.
Really good points, all, Kuma. Also You should definitely do a section the various chat ills.
I don't miss V3 for everything but I do miss certain things a lot. With chat I could detach it from the dock and it would remain in the overall window where I decided to place it and at any size down to about 250px x 50px which was perfect to fit over a game chat for instance at the top and still completely track both. Or at the top right corner where nothing important happened. That they reinvented chat to be harder to manage, less flexible and flaky really really upsets me. Not as much as not being able to play at all but still...
As far as the Emoticons yeah I know the basics are there but for instance they don't actually show in the trade scene if you use them to search with (though they do the search correctly) and you can't use them to filter for say the untap symbol, the tap symbol, etc. That is mainly what I miss them for.
In the old editor I could say make 3fireball symbols and the editor would show me only spells that have 3 red mana in their cost or text.
And that's another issue I didn't bring up in the article that irks me, the editor filters are not boolean. You can't put "Trample & Haste" in the editor to only find cards with both words on them. It will show those with just trample, those with just haste and those with both.
And often it will show extraneous things that have nothing directly to do with the search word because it happens to be mentioned in the reminder text obscurely. (No one reads that stupid text normally.)
It works well for you that way?
I guess the majority of players use it on the right (I never even saw a screen shot with the chat on the left), also because that's how it was on V3.
I'll have a large update on my State of V4 article next week, I'll delve into chat.
For now, I just want to point out that with my current setup (a large 16:9 monitor) there was a good way to experience chat... until they took out the chance to dock the chat at the bottom, for no discernible reason. That way, I could see all my chat tabs horizontally, and what do you know, they would actually flash each on its own when someone was writing on them. It was really an improvement, but it was gone before I could even talk about it, despite actually fitting the horizontal flow of the client.
Anyway I don't have to re-dock the chat often. Mostly (say, 90% of my re-logs) the client remembers where I left it. (Of course, a functioning client should remember EVERYTHING and ALWAYS, that's without saying). I gather this varies from user to user, which is baffling.
So right now the in-game chat experience doesn't look much different from V3 to me (it used to occupy the same exact space it does now, no more no less), with some improvements:
1. the log is not mixed with the chat anymore, which made no sense as the log is an important game element;
2. the stupid, unkillable black box is gone;
3. you don't get automatically relocated to the last active chat, which was totally annoying and caused countless mistakes (it's funny, people seem to remember V3 like it didn't drive you crazy half the times, only because over the years most of us were terminally resigned to its flaws).
Greatest current flaw: the unavoidable, entirely useless notification of "Playername sent you a message", that has no purpose, lasts several seconds, and appears RIGHT OVER THE CHAT WINDOW (same as the other notifications, most notably the trade scene ones). This is seriously infuriating, black-box-style, because the only way to avoid being hindered by that notification box, that prevents you from typing, is to have the chat docked on the left, which doesn't feel too natural because (at least in the case of Western cultures), we're naturally wired to look at a screen/page from left to right, so the chat column would always be "in the way" when looking at the game area.
By the way, the basic emoticons are there. For instance, [sS] is the basic smiley. There's more, maybe not all of those that there used to be, but I'm sure they'll be back eventually. They have been correctly given very low priority. After all, old school Internet people (including me) don't even like the graphic emoticons too much. You want to use emoticons, use the damn ASCII characters. :P
I didn't play Siege-Gang Commander, but another way to kill it would be with Lightning Crafter + Mogg Fanatic/Goblin Sharpshooter or Goblin Sharpshooter + 2 Mogg Fanatics/Skirk Prospector. With 4 Goblin Matrons and 4 Goblin Ringleaders I am actually probably much more equipped to find an answer to a creature than Gq is with his deck.
I agree about Prophet though I didn't make the changes, I considered a number of alternatives. One thing is, the deck runs 3x Silence which is almost a one sided sweeper when you can tap for 10 or so. In fact I've done so earlier this evening (after the server came back up finally) and blew out several games where my opponents thought they had me. Silence is golden when you take the teeth out of their creature offensive.
:D So I am a bit torn on what to replace Prophet with. It may be that a focus on more instants is in order or maybe run some 1 drops like the search font or mystics.
As to the empty room syndrome, I am sorry Grap if I have contribute there. I stopped using Juff regularly since it doesn't auto open when I join the play lobby the way it used to. And that I think is one of the major (criminally) broken things about chatting in the new client. Being unable to set default open chats particularly rooms you frequent is just beyond wrong.
Having it imitate mIRC would have been ideal. (You could set default rooms to open whether they were established, user created or merely ones you wanted to make temporarily while you were on IRC.)
Also the fact that the game chat doesn't open docked/stay docked by default with an option to change the state is absurd. Any time you see me on, hit me up for conversation man. You know I am always willing to jabber at ya. :D
-Vintage: Another thing that really has hurt Vintage as a format was prize support. For a while they were paying out 2 Vintage Masters packs for a 3-1, while Standard/Modern payed out 6 current set packs for 3-1. In "Store value" this is 10 tickets less for a far more expensive format, and really hurt the affordability of playing competitively even more than the entry price already does. They have since switched prizes, but damage was done.
-Chat, not sure what else needs to be said other than I agree and that it makes things very tough to be social. I often open the JFF chat room and see nothing said for half hours at a time before I close.
-Villanous Wealth: The deck looks fun, but I feel like some more mana producers or card draw would fit better than Prophet. With no instants in deck, I don't see it having quite as big of an effect as in others.
Mihahitlor could have stopped Blinding Angel with Gempalm Incinerator or Siege-Gang Commander. There aren't a ton of answers in the goblin deck for something like that, though, so just one of your protection effects like Shelter could be a game ender. It would be really nasty to put a Lightning Greaves on it.
I played in 2 KTK drafts last week and both had crashing issues. First one crashed 3 times, during drafting, during deck building (when I hit the submit button), and then during game play at going to sideboarding. Second draft a day later crashed during game play. Very frustrating, to say the least, but at least CS were prompt in compensation.
@Re, I never got to use it in my own prerelease Sultai deck but it seems better when you can use mana dorks, land untappers and land auras to pump it up because nothing says "I win" quite like doing it for 13x :)
@Levi, thanks man. You make a really good additional point about the chat window. This is a matter of severely bad design and space management. I hope they get around to fixing this stuff soon. If it was just a few complaints here and there I would not expect much but the cry for changes is pretty universal.
V4 is the worst piece of software I've ever used in my life. Magic is a game of turning images sideways and somehow Wizards managed to have a program that could do this, and then had an idea to come out with a new program that would completely drain all memory from your computer, freeze constantly, makes triggered abilities a horror show for my computer, don't ever try to trade and they don't even think they are doing a bad job. "If it aint broke, break it." -WOTC Now V3 wasn't great but it was still head and shoulders above V4 because, well, it worked. There are other games you can play on your computer were you are running really fast and shooting things and images are popping up and flashing and there are explosions and they run fine. Wizards can't make a game where my opponent plays a Scry land turn one and my computer doesn't freeze for thirty seconds. I have trouble playing non-aggro decks due to lag and on my computer I could never play familiar combo (pauper deck). There is so many other things out there that are being run so much better than MTGO that I have no idea how things like V4 are getting the go ahead.
Wizards really needs to look at what other companies are doing and figure out what is wrong with their management system where bad ideas get the thumbs up. They make a great game in that R&D a great job, but as soon as someone gets close to a computer everything turns to crap. I'm someone who sold all of my actual cards (thank you capefeargames) and just wants online where my cards are always in mint condition, I can use them far more often, and I can play from my bedroom but they make programs that are unplayable.
Although I usually agree on all things Magic with Paul, I have to side with JXC here. I just saw where Hasbro is having a record year for profits and somehow they can't put enough resources into MTGO to fix it.
Other game companies with far fewer resources are going all-out to put a quality product in the hands of their fans. Why can't Magic do that?
I try hard not to be negative, but then I see the great things other games are doing, and other game companies are doing, and I just can not understand how a subsidiary of Hasbro cannot do these great things as well.
Pokemon is on my ipad right now. The magic answer for that is DotP. I can play the full game, but have to settle for a arcade version of magic? That's insane!
Hearthstone is going to be on android devices soon. DotP is the only way for me to magic on an android device.
Other games are embracing mobile tech. Other games are outsourcing things that they do not understand (I would not want Square to do a console version of MTGO, unless there was an opera involved.)
I see great things going on in paper, but it's not the same online, and it bothers me, because online players should not be thought of as an afterthought, and that's how I feel personally.
Yes I did fill out the survey no I didn't give them all 0s. Not only does that negate the purpose of the survey it isn't very honest. They have done a lot of "wrong" things with MTGO but it is still (semi) functional. Particularly in some areas. And areas I was very unhappy with 4 months ago I am less unhappy with now. Marginally but it makes a difference. That said they got a lot of 2s from me with a few 5s scattered about. As AJ says fair is fair.
Also Josh stop being so negative!! :p I know it's hard when the company gives so much to complain about. It is the same struggle I have had when writing my articles. I want to say good things. I want to be the apologist railing against the trolls and whiners. I want to support the best game company I know. But MTGO is such a shoddy product at this point and it is inexcusable. Even from a purely bottom line point of view.
They had a poor but acceptable product in v3. V4 is unacceptable in many important ways. It is good in some and great in others so lets not be onesided but it needs a lot of work. And if I worked on the MTGO team I would be ashamed to acknowledge it right now.
Also I agree with the general assessment of Brain Maggot's promo. Ugh could have done without seeing that. Thanks guys... :/
Love it. tempted to make a tribal version with Worldspine Wurm as backup.
I smell potential Tribal Wurms brewing here as well. :D Nicely done again.
I haven't played much lately but I did play Momir on Saturday and I didn't notice any lag. But with many players lagging it obviously has to be a problem with mtgo. But increasing the time is not the solution. That encourages slow play and makes for even longer rounds. A friend of mine has been playing a lot of Hearthstone and when he played one cube draft he just couldn't stand that his opp kept making him wait 1 minute every turn, even when he was tapped out. I know this can't be solved because of the way magic works but adding more time will create even more problems. What they have to do is fix the lag even if they have to hire more/better people.
I find it a lot less distracting on the left side
I have had some serious issues with lag in game too. I have lost matches due to this as well. Recording the matches allows me to go back and look at the clock and it 'skips'... not only a lot, but in large quantities of time too. The simplest way for wizards to remedy this would be to increase the match times. Aggro vs Aggro matches shouldn't be going to time. Something like Eggs or Jeskai Ascendancy is unplayable on MTGO in its current state.
Its not just the endless list of awkward things or things not working with mtgo, its also the things that actually WORK with mtgo that are there with an added cost in form of cpu/memory usage.
So, a 3-4 year old computer works like that with other games, but in mtgo terms that 3-4 yo computer in effect is rather like 7-10 year old.
That said, I think V4 will become better than v3, only that it will take 2-5 months to become as good as V3, and then use an extra year or so to build up "betters" than v3.
The pace of which wotc needs to do things is puzzling.
In parallel this doesn't mean that much money loss for wotc because there will always be the percentage of mtgo players that use mtgo to improve their paper game to do well at GPs, PTs and PTQs. These players aren't that much "victimized" by the mtgo flaws because they most often recognize when a flaw happens, which newer players don't do, but do in aftermath, and then get very disappointed (determining what is a valid redemption request is a rollercoaster arguementation wise, im very certain wotc gets away with far too much nonsense replies to customers, and some players draft watchdog/spirespine to actively seek out redemption from wotc(a player can also mull for this/these card in games). And then you also have that extra layer where (some) experienced players exploit things at wotc/newer players cost, and you get the discussions about what actually is exploiting vs what is just making the most of it.
If I were wotc I would implement the possibility to block out a player from playing certain formats instead of having this idiotic redemption e-mailing forth and back, but that is probably way too much to expect of their computing skills.
From the Vault boxes couldn't be opened. That was the issue.
It sounded weird to me too, but this latest time it lost my settings and undocked the chat for me, I tried putting it on the left instead. I'm liking it so far.
Really good points, all, Kuma. Also You should definitely do a section the various chat ills.
I don't miss V3 for everything but I do miss certain things a lot. With chat I could detach it from the dock and it would remain in the overall window where I decided to place it and at any size down to about 250px x 50px which was perfect to fit over a game chat for instance at the top and still completely track both. Or at the top right corner where nothing important happened. That they reinvented chat to be harder to manage, less flexible and flaky really really upsets me. Not as much as not being able to play at all but still...
As far as the Emoticons yeah I know the basics are there but for instance they don't actually show in the trade scene if you use them to search with (though they do the search correctly) and you can't use them to filter for say the untap symbol, the tap symbol, etc. That is mainly what I miss them for.
In the old editor I could say make 3fireball symbols and the editor would show me only spells that have 3 red mana in their cost or text.
And that's another issue I didn't bring up in the article that irks me, the editor filters are not boolean. You can't put "Trample & Haste" in the editor to only find cards with both words on them. It will show those with just trample, those with just haste and those with both.
And often it will show extraneous things that have nothing directly to do with the search word because it happens to be mentioned in the reminder text obscurely. (No one reads that stupid text normally.)
It works well for you that way?
I guess the majority of players use it on the right (I never even saw a screen shot with the chat on the left), also because that's how it was on V3.
I always dock the chats on the left side of the screen.
I'll have a large update on my State of V4 article next week, I'll delve into chat.
For now, I just want to point out that with my current setup (a large 16:9 monitor) there was a good way to experience chat... until they took out the chance to dock the chat at the bottom, for no discernible reason. That way, I could see all my chat tabs horizontally, and what do you know, they would actually flash each on its own when someone was writing on them. It was really an improvement, but it was gone before I could even talk about it, despite actually fitting the horizontal flow of the client.
Anyway I don't have to re-dock the chat often. Mostly (say, 90% of my re-logs) the client remembers where I left it. (Of course, a functioning client should remember EVERYTHING and ALWAYS, that's without saying). I gather this varies from user to user, which is baffling.
So right now the in-game chat experience doesn't look much different from V3 to me (it used to occupy the same exact space it does now, no more no less), with some improvements:
1. the log is not mixed with the chat anymore, which made no sense as the log is an important game element;
2. the stupid, unkillable black box is gone;
3. you don't get automatically relocated to the last active chat, which was totally annoying and caused countless mistakes (it's funny, people seem to remember V3 like it didn't drive you crazy half the times, only because over the years most of us were terminally resigned to its flaws).
Greatest current flaw: the unavoidable, entirely useless notification of "Playername sent you a message", that has no purpose, lasts several seconds, and appears RIGHT OVER THE CHAT WINDOW (same as the other notifications, most notably the trade scene ones). This is seriously infuriating, black-box-style, because the only way to avoid being hindered by that notification box, that prevents you from typing, is to have the chat docked on the left, which doesn't feel too natural because (at least in the case of Western cultures), we're naturally wired to look at a screen/page from left to right, so the chat column would always be "in the way" when looking at the game area.
By the way, the basic emoticons are there. For instance, [sS] is the basic smiley. There's more, maybe not all of those that there used to be, but I'm sure they'll be back eventually. They have been correctly given very low priority. After all, old school Internet people (including me) don't even like the graphic emoticons too much. You want to use emoticons, use the damn ASCII characters. :P
so Koira's Follower + Rosheen = 8 mana...that's harsh.
I've got a fair few tasty ideas for villainous Wealth, considering putting it in a deck with Rosheen Meanderer.
I didn't play Siege-Gang Commander, but another way to kill it would be with Lightning Crafter + Mogg Fanatic/Goblin Sharpshooter or Goblin Sharpshooter + 2 Mogg Fanatics/Skirk Prospector. With 4 Goblin Matrons and 4 Goblin Ringleaders I am actually probably much more equipped to find an answer to a creature than Gq is with his deck.
I agree about Prophet though I didn't make the changes, I considered a number of alternatives. One thing is, the deck runs 3x Silence which is almost a one sided sweeper when you can tap for 10 or so. In fact I've done so earlier this evening (after the server came back up finally) and blew out several games where my opponents thought they had me. Silence is golden when you take the teeth out of their creature offensive.
:D So I am a bit torn on what to replace Prophet with. It may be that a focus on more instants is in order or maybe run some 1 drops like the search font or mystics.
As to the empty room syndrome, I am sorry Grap if I have contribute there. I stopped using Juff regularly since it doesn't auto open when I join the play lobby the way it used to. And that I think is one of the major (criminally) broken things about chatting in the new client. Being unable to set default open chats particularly rooms you frequent is just beyond wrong.
Having it imitate mIRC would have been ideal. (You could set default rooms to open whether they were established, user created or merely ones you wanted to make temporarily while you were on IRC.)
Also the fact that the game chat doesn't open docked/stay docked by default with an option to change the state is absurd. Any time you see me on, hit me up for conversation man. You know I am always willing to jabber at ya. :D
-Vintage: Another thing that really has hurt Vintage as a format was prize support. For a while they were paying out 2 Vintage Masters packs for a 3-1, while Standard/Modern payed out 6 current set packs for 3-1. In "Store value" this is 10 tickets less for a far more expensive format, and really hurt the affordability of playing competitively even more than the entry price already does. They have since switched prizes, but damage was done.
-Chat, not sure what else needs to be said other than I agree and that it makes things very tough to be social. I often open the JFF chat room and see nothing said for half hours at a time before I close.
-Villanous Wealth: The deck looks fun, but I feel like some more mana producers or card draw would fit better than Prophet. With no instants in deck, I don't see it having quite as big of an effect as in others.
Mihahitlor could have stopped Blinding Angel with Gempalm Incinerator or Siege-Gang Commander. There aren't a ton of answers in the goblin deck for something like that, though, so just one of your protection effects like Shelter could be a game ender. It would be really nasty to put a Lightning Greaves on it.
Thanks for adding the Changeling issue to the timeline, Pete!
You put there twice, though. :) The second one with a curious "Trial Wars" moniker :)
I played in 2 KTK drafts last week and both had crashing issues. First one crashed 3 times, during drafting, during deck building (when I hit the submit button), and then during game play at going to sideboarding. Second draft a day later crashed during game play. Very frustrating, to say the least, but at least CS were prompt in compensation.
Thanks for the comments guys.
@Re, I never got to use it in my own prerelease Sultai deck but it seems better when you can use mana dorks, land untappers and land auras to pump it up because nothing says "I win" quite like doing it for 13x :)
@Levi, thanks man. You make a really good additional point about the chat window. This is a matter of severely bad design and space management. I hope they get around to fixing this stuff soon. If it was just a few complaints here and there I would not expect much but the cry for changes is pretty universal.