Under sealed pratice I wrote: "What I did for sealed practice was play in two Born of the Gods Game Day events in early March."
While I did win the events, they were standard. However the week (or so) before at the same stores I played in Born of the Gods release events with full sealed decks. While I didn't finish 1st I did win prizes in each of them, and it was enough to familiarize me with the difference between BNG and Theros-only sealed.
Everyone seems to forget (I've seen similar sentiment several times and have responded) that Wizards *is currently* **paying** ***outside*** people to work on the program. They *very* clearly have learned from their mistakes to at least some extent.
The pictures in your article are from before the program went back online and before any kind of compensation was paid out. Or did I get that wrong?
SamBlack is talking about what he expects the refund policy to be.
If the refund policy is that you get the minimum of your entry fee and of the minimum guaranteed prize, then WotC is EXTREMELY bad at communicating it out.
I would also be very bitter and vocal in my dissatisfaction if I were kicked out of the money because of a system error.
The monetary and time-spend factors are not unique to the competitive players. Casual players also spend money and maybe just as much time playing a specific deck. They also loose out on the entertainment value when the system is down. But they are never compensated?
I dont think that you risked your money for a certain prize, since you got your money refunded.
My problem with these vocal statements about the refund policy, is that they are always made by bitter people in the heat of the moment when they get kicked out of the money. Like the ones from your pics. "It is not fair" - but they dont talk about fairness when they get over-compensated for being out of the money. When you get kicked out by a system error, no compensation is large enough, if you were in the money.
If the policy was to give you the minimum of the entry fee and the number of guaranteed prizes, then that seems perfectly fair to me....... but next time Kibler, SamBlack and other bitter people will say: "My win percentage is 65% on average, hence my expected payoff is XXX and I only got compensated with the minimum number YYY. We demand a more fair compensation policy which takes account of our expected prizes".
You know the compensation policy, you know that system crashes can occur. You have full information on the possible outcomes when you decides to enter a tournament.
I've been thinking: Given that Kaleidoscope necessitates a nonbasic mana base, we may need to emergency ban Wasteland. Its power increases massively in this format, and it has a couple of easy tutors such as Knight of the Reliquary. We don't want this to turn into 'You need a 300-dollar playset to compete' event.
That's not how I view how I should be compensated, personally. I do play this game for fun, but there is definitely a monetary and time-spent factor to consider. That was actually the entire point of Brian Kibler's "The MOCS shouldn't exist" blog post.
Wizards is doing a great job at promoting the game. I am thoroughly entertained every time I play a game of Magic. It's extremely frustrating however that when I put my money on the line and perform well enough to cash that I may not get what was promised in the Event advertisement. Think about it like a game of poker where you have collected a huge stack of chips, only to be told it was just for fun and that chip stack is worth your entry.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the point of the game is entertainment, but when I risk my money for a certain prize, I expect to be rewarded that prize if I perform well, regardless of system errors.
I haven't lost sight of playing for fun, I still frequent the Tournament Practice room and hell, I play Mono Black Aggro in Standard. I'm asking to be crushed by decks that laugh in the face of small black creatures.
Some people get comped, myself included, when the system crashes and they're on a x-2 record. If I have that record I don't expect to be compensated and I would totally be fine with not being compensated.
Linker and LSV and other pros still play MTGO because they don't have different options for online Magic. Most pros aren't exactly quiet about how much they dislike that they have to settle for such a subpar program.
This is the first I've ever heard of people compensated packs. Picture in the article shows many have had similar experiences of only getting comped entry
Ill say this: I agree that WOTC should be more proactive about their players being a little healthier and hygenic. Maybe go so far as to have a room in a nearby hotel that players could use if they really needed a shower. Little care packages of hotel sized soap, toothpaste, etc? Well it's a nice idea anyway.
Also, I am not interested in playing on a Buttcrack interface. :p I'd be down for an ascii based "GUI" if the engine was smooth and the UI worked in the players' interests. (IE: Optionalize all those things that are now mandatory that players hate.)
Is this factually correct? "Think about this: A person who is 4-0 when a Daily Event crashes gets entry refunded. That person was actually guaranteed 11 packs, but because the event crashed they now get 6 tickets. With boosters selling at ~3 tickets per pack right now, that person stood to make 33 tickets vice 6. That's a pretty substantial difference. Nevermind if packs are sitting around 3.3 - 3.7 tickets..."
It's my understanding that you are paid out any guaranteed prizes that you've earned. if you're one click away from winning the match which will make you 3-1, then you only get your entry refunded, but if you have actually won that match and are just waiting for the event to finish then I believe you get your 6 packs. There's multiple reports here of people winning prizes in this circumstance, for eg:
Seeing as that entire section of your article is based on that premise, I think you want to be fairly sure that that is their policy - I 'm not sure it is.
I used to play Halo for a living and after that I worked for a company that held Halo tournaments on a national level. This article has two really interesting intersections from that portion of my life that I feel are worth mentioning.
Halo 1 was the best, most skill-intensive of the series and probably the greatest FPS ever created (certainly the one with the most skill-testing elements). But Halo 1 was created in 2001 and didn't include an online option for team play. People created applications to get around that problem - essentially creating giant LANS online - but the lag was so terrible that it was essentially unplayable off-host. To play anything close to a fair match, a bunch of people had to be in the same place at the same time in order to connect to a LAN. These tournaments were large and awesome.
Then xbox live came around, Halo 2 (and a bunch of other games) arrived, and suddenly you could play team games from your home with relatively little impediment to the fairness of the game. But to the competitive Halo crowd, neither Halo 2, nor 3, nor Reach, nor 4 compared to the first game. For a decade now, people have clamored to see Halo 1 playable online. The developers claim the game would have to be radically redesigned to include netcoding, which would alter the fabric of the game itself. I always marveled at the fact that we could put a dude on the moon in 1969, but we can't write netcode for Halo 1 in 2014. But I digress. The Halo community always had a joke about remaking Halo 1 with netcode and precisely zero flashiness. The point would be to make a game of Halo 1's precision and skill sets, without the bells and whistles, which would make it as close to latency-free as possible. The conventional thinking in the industry is that no one would buy a game as "dumbed-down" as that when it comes to aesthetics. I think that's bunk, but it brings me to my first point.
1. I always hear about the MTGO client looking terrible and looking like a program from the 90s. My first response is always "And?" The new client has upped the "appearance" in some ways. Hearthstone looks great. It all looks great. Might we all be willing to play a nuts and bolts game that plays flawlessly and looks like 1997? I obviously have inside knowledge of the beta client's coding. I, for one, however, would be willing to play the game with no issues and have it look like a buttcrack than worry about it crashing, while still seeing how "shiny" the whole thing is.
2. The Halo (and other games) tournaments brought in a bunch of nerdy kids from all over the country with no social awareness, packing them 10 deep into a hotel room for half a week. The kids never showered. They played games 24/7, barely stopping for food or bathroom. Cramming thousands of people into a room with a bunch of electronics, elbow to elbow, makes for a disgusting, sweaty mess. People started to avoid the tournaments because of this situation.
What did the company do about it? They pumped in a ton of air conditioning to the tourneys at cost to them, they made public announcements to shower, and they generally encouraged good hygiene, health, and environment. Things got better. The COMPANY did this.
Nothing will change with Magic until Wizards takes some sort of action. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps bad PR is what it will take to do something. Should the guy have posted those photos? I wouldn't post them. Should he be banned? Sure, if that's their standard. Should they do something about the overall problem? I would vote yes!
Well from the data to date it seems the lesson should be: "Hey we suck at this software thing. Lets find someone who does not." I mean it is a little like rocket science but there are plenty of people who are good at it.
I agree that they are not learning from their mistakes. At least in the sense that they have not made a change to the compensation policy.
But on the other hand that is not the same thing as not learning from their mistakes. The mistake is that the program keeps crashing. The lesson should be that they should stop the program from crashing. I will bet anything that it is the number 1 wish of any WotC employee. They even say so in the latest wide beta update article.
Or is the lesson they should learn that people are unhappy when the client crashes? What exactly should the lesson learned be?
Making WotC pay out more in the event of a crash because it would increase the incentive for them to fix the problems, is implying that they have low incentive to fix the problems right now. But that is a naïve statement. They loose money when they reimburse entry fee. They have plenty of incentive already not to let the program crash. Why would they do a self-imposed extra monetary penalty? The potential upside from fixing the problems should be all the incentive that they need.
I tend to agree with this point of view because it is a no-win situation for the company. However I will say they do not seem to be learning from their mistakes. It is tempting to think if they were forced by their policy to pay out more for their crashes they would be more incentivized to find a good solution instead of patching the bad one. I realize that temptation is flawed since the ultimate fix would be to take it away altogether and thus avoid having to pay a dime. However this is their money maker and if it ultimately doesn't work properly they are losing profits and potential earnings down the line.
You should not get compensated for the "time" and "money" invested into playing. You should get compensated for the entertainment value lost. Don't see MTGO as an investment.
The few people making a living on MTG and MTGO are still playing despite the crashes. Did LSV quit? Even Kibler is still playing. If anyone has anything "invested" into the game it is those guys and they are still playing. Committing 6 hours in a weekend is not an "investment" it is you enjoying the game for entertainment. Will you go to bed hungry because the crash made you loose your "investment"? No.
Can WotC compensate the lost entertain value better than now? Maybe. We only hear the ones who where guaranteed a prize cry over the compensation policy. What about all the players who were out the money at the time of the crash? They got the entry fee back as well. I'll bet they are satisfied with the compensation policy (in a limited event they even get to keep the cards, so they come out ahead from a crash).
What should WotC do? Should they pay you the minimum guaranteed prize? Should they pay you the highest possible prize given your standing? WotC would probably be happy to pay the minimum guaranteed prize, since the total payout would then be smaller than what they promised to pay out at the inception of the tournament. Players out of the money would be worse off because they would get nothing. But you would probably not even be content with the highest possible prize given your standing because you also lost the satisfaction of winning, getting the prize is only half the fun, but you then lost out of the other half.
with simple complaining, it will take a lack of players or all the players refusing to spend a dime for a month or more to make any real changes. That in itself is so unlikely because most players are casual, not competitive so they don't care if PTQs are up, or what the compensation for tournies are, since they just get on to build a deck to play against someone at the drop of a hat and to have access to each card, if they so choose.
I don't understand why you have a problem with them taking down PTQs. I don't think they need to tell us that they're having stability issues because it's obvious that they are still having them. What good would it do for them to say on a weekly basis "Hey guys, the client is still having issues and not as stable as we want it to be" What would we do with that information? Nothing really.
This is what I feel happened: WOTC thought they were coming along fine with stability and decided to tell us in February that PTQs would be coming back (probably a little sooner than they originally planned). Then a week prior to them starting they realized that they weren't where they needed to be and decided to take them down before wasting anybody's time. I see no problem with them preventing a bad user experience that they would already know about.
MTGO, and MTG for that matter have had "us" since the beginning. This is an excellent game without comparison...And "they" know it. They know we'll keep on coming back. I've walked away about five different times, and sold out four times...and yet, still I am here like so many others. One thing for sure, MTGO needs to change many things...the first is to go back to simple formats like back in the day when there was only Type I, and Type II. This game is trying to do too much...which is causing numerous catastrophic failures, like the one this morning...and so on over the last few months. Because of the instability, I don't tourny as much as I used to. I also got burned when the client crashed, and now I am weary. Once bitten twice shy.
I think going back to four simple formats will solve many problems:
1. Vintage type I
2. Standard Type II
3. Commander
4. Block
Leave out pauper, modern, legacy, and all those stupid ready made deck formats...uhg....
OR better yet...Have two clients and two servers. One for the kiddie gaming, and one for the serious MTG player who relies on top quality hosting from reliable servers not cluttered with over exploited over commercialized game content.
The difference is that friends are generally established as being friends before acting in a way that (otherwise) might be rude, cruel, vicious, etc.
Think about it like this - Sunny in Philly is hilarious. It's a group of friends who treat each other horribly (and expect it) but also treat others (not their friends) horribly. They don't mind it too much amongst themselves, but outsiders who are treated in the same fashion hate them, because that's not an acceptable way to behave to people you aren't friends with, who don't expect it.
I strongly agree with Point 2 in this post. The appearance of some MTG players is a huge turnoff to people joining the game. Fantasy game enthusiasts are just sort of used to this, and it's been that way since everybody's first D&D group back in the 1980's, but mainstream people take one look at a room full of paper Magic players and say "hey look, more fat slovenly nerds, why would I want to involve myself in that?" I was fat for most of my life, and one thing you have to realize is that no matter how funny or smart or interesting you are, being fat -- particularly if you dress poorly -- will prevent a lot of people from ever seeing your virtues. You do not get to change that reality, you have to accept it and do your best to change yourself.
From my own experience, I believe shame can be a powerful force for change. But the community could also do things to be positive when people make improvements to their weight, health and appearance, and that sort of thing creates a feedback loop that encourages more improvement. But that is hard to change, because for decades the fantasy gaming community has been where people who are "different" in some way go to have a "safe" place where they aren't judged. I get that people need that, but people also need to be encouraged to better themselves.
But the problem is bigger in perception than in reality. In my personal experience, the "fat slob gamer" stereotype begins to fade away the higher you go in competitive events. At a recent SCG Open I attended in St Louis, through 7 rounds of Legacy play I never once played against anybody I would describe that way. I played against mature, working professionals, including another attorney. Of course, that's more likely with Legacy. But even in Standard events, if you stroll about the top tables a few rounds into the tournament, the best players are usually appropriately dressed and are not any fatter than the population at large.
I wish that WotC would realize that the public perception of their player base is costing them money, and that it really does make the game repellent to mainstream folks. They don't do enough to discourage this perception, and they should be putting good-looking thin professionals all over their website event coverage to fight the perception.
I don't believe nothing will ever happen because customers will never be able to vote with their wallet when it comes to MODO. However crap the software is, it is the only portal to access the great game of Magic for anyone who does not care for or cannot have cardboard. Better software is ubiquitous, better card games are non-existent. If you will pardon my French, they got us by the balls, and have for the past 10 years.
I think the outrage would have been a lot clearer if he had been taking pictures of exposed parts of female anatomy, instead of male anatomy (although that's legal in Mass. apparently).
2. My girlfriend was only telling me one month ago that she won't play MTG because when she first tried it in the 1990s, it was a played by a room fully of "smelly fat boys whose parents should have hosed them down before allowing them to go out in public." Now our community has grown up into fat smelly men whose parents don't hose them down, and if you want to avoid "promoting the fat, sloppy gamer stereotype" as you put it pete, then the process starts with the fat, sloppy gamers. It's been 20 years now and nothing has changed. Our culture, our community, needs to change, and it has to start with us and from within. Posting our embarrassing moments to Imgur should be a wake-up call, and the only thing that should shock us is that it doesn't happen more often.
3. A DCI dress code and hygiene code sounds like a reasonable and appropriate suggestion to take away from this experience.
I am surprised so much of the argument revolves about the weight of the guys in the pictures. Of course, it is obvious the guys with their cracks showing were of the rather heavier persuasion, but the way I took it, it was much more about cracks showing than anything else. Especially as he guy posing in front was not exactly lightweight himself. Maybe it's due to me having a different - unamerican - sensibility?
But if you take away the weight dimension, than I don't think it's bullying. It's still wrong and obnoxious, but it's hardly bullying to go after socially repulsive habits.
According to the weekly update, Replays will return after the downtime this week.
Under sealed pratice I wrote: "What I did for sealed practice was play in two Born of the Gods Game Day events in early March."
While I did win the events, they were standard. However the week (or so) before at the same stores I played in Born of the Gods release events with full sealed decks. While I didn't finish 1st I did win prizes in each of them, and it was enough to familiarize me with the difference between BNG and Theros-only sealed.
Everyone seems to forget (I've seen similar sentiment several times and have responded) that Wizards *is currently* **paying** ***outside*** people to work on the program. They *very* clearly have learned from their mistakes to at least some extent.
The pictures in your article are from before the program went back online and before any kind of compensation was paid out. Or did I get that wrong?
SamBlack is talking about what he expects the refund policy to be.
If the refund policy is that you get the minimum of your entry fee and of the minimum guaranteed prize, then WotC is EXTREMELY bad at communicating it out.
I would also be very bitter and vocal in my dissatisfaction if I were kicked out of the money because of a system error.
The monetary and time-spend factors are not unique to the competitive players. Casual players also spend money and maybe just as much time playing a specific deck. They also loose out on the entertainment value when the system is down. But they are never compensated?
I dont think that you risked your money for a certain prize, since you got your money refunded.
My problem with these vocal statements about the refund policy, is that they are always made by bitter people in the heat of the moment when they get kicked out of the money. Like the ones from your pics. "It is not fair" - but they dont talk about fairness when they get over-compensated for being out of the money. When you get kicked out by a system error, no compensation is large enough, if you were in the money.
If the policy was to give you the minimum of the entry fee and the number of guaranteed prizes, then that seems perfectly fair to me....... but next time Kibler, SamBlack and other bitter people will say: "My win percentage is 65% on average, hence my expected payoff is XXX and I only got compensated with the minimum number YYY. We demand a more fair compensation policy which takes account of our expected prizes".
You know the compensation policy, you know that system crashes can occur. You have full information on the possible outcomes when you decides to enter a tournament.
I cant argue against the data :-) You are spot on.
I've been thinking: Given that Kaleidoscope necessitates a nonbasic mana base, we may need to emergency ban Wasteland. Its power increases massively in this format, and it has a couple of easy tutors such as Knight of the Reliquary. We don't want this to turn into 'You need a 300-dollar playset to compete' event.
That's not how I view how I should be compensated, personally. I do play this game for fun, but there is definitely a monetary and time-spent factor to consider. That was actually the entire point of Brian Kibler's "The MOCS shouldn't exist" blog post.
Wizards is doing a great job at promoting the game. I am thoroughly entertained every time I play a game of Magic. It's extremely frustrating however that when I put my money on the line and perform well enough to cash that I may not get what was promised in the Event advertisement. Think about it like a game of poker where you have collected a huge stack of chips, only to be told it was just for fun and that chip stack is worth your entry.
Don't get me wrong, I understand the point of the game is entertainment, but when I risk my money for a certain prize, I expect to be rewarded that prize if I perform well, regardless of system errors.
I haven't lost sight of playing for fun, I still frequent the Tournament Practice room and hell, I play Mono Black Aggro in Standard. I'm asking to be crushed by decks that laugh in the face of small black creatures.
Some people get comped, myself included, when the system crashes and they're on a x-2 record. If I have that record I don't expect to be compensated and I would totally be fine with not being compensated.
Linker and LSV and other pros still play MTGO because they don't have different options for online Magic. Most pros aren't exactly quiet about how much they dislike that they have to settle for such a subpar program.
This is the first I've ever heard of people compensated packs. Picture in the article shows many have had similar experiences of only getting comped entry
Ill say this: I agree that WOTC should be more proactive about their players being a little healthier and hygenic. Maybe go so far as to have a room in a nearby hotel that players could use if they really needed a shower. Little care packages of hotel sized soap, toothpaste, etc? Well it's a nice idea anyway.
Also, I am not interested in playing on a Buttcrack interface. :p I'd be down for an ascii based "GUI" if the engine was smooth and the UI worked in the players' interests. (IE: Optionalize all those things that are now mandatory that players hate.)
Is this factually correct? "Think about this: A person who is 4-0 when a Daily Event crashes gets entry refunded. That person was actually guaranteed 11 packs, but because the event crashed they now get 6 tickets. With boosters selling at ~3 tickets per pack right now, that person stood to make 33 tickets vice 6. That's a pretty substantial difference. Nevermind if packs are sitting around 3.3 - 3.7 tickets..."
It's my understanding that you are paid out any guaranteed prizes that you've earned. if you're one click away from winning the match which will make you 3-1, then you only get your entry refunded, but if you have actually won that match and are just waiting for the event to finish then I believe you get your 6 packs. There's multiple reports here of people winning prizes in this circumstance, for eg:
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/magic-online-general/548362-...
Seeing as that entire section of your article is based on that premise, I think you want to be fairly sure that that is their policy - I 'm not sure it is.
I used to play Halo for a living and after that I worked for a company that held Halo tournaments on a national level. This article has two really interesting intersections from that portion of my life that I feel are worth mentioning.
Halo 1 was the best, most skill-intensive of the series and probably the greatest FPS ever created (certainly the one with the most skill-testing elements). But Halo 1 was created in 2001 and didn't include an online option for team play. People created applications to get around that problem - essentially creating giant LANS online - but the lag was so terrible that it was essentially unplayable off-host. To play anything close to a fair match, a bunch of people had to be in the same place at the same time in order to connect to a LAN. These tournaments were large and awesome.
Then xbox live came around, Halo 2 (and a bunch of other games) arrived, and suddenly you could play team games from your home with relatively little impediment to the fairness of the game. But to the competitive Halo crowd, neither Halo 2, nor 3, nor Reach, nor 4 compared to the first game. For a decade now, people have clamored to see Halo 1 playable online. The developers claim the game would have to be radically redesigned to include netcoding, which would alter the fabric of the game itself. I always marveled at the fact that we could put a dude on the moon in 1969, but we can't write netcode for Halo 1 in 2014. But I digress. The Halo community always had a joke about remaking Halo 1 with netcode and precisely zero flashiness. The point would be to make a game of Halo 1's precision and skill sets, without the bells and whistles, which would make it as close to latency-free as possible. The conventional thinking in the industry is that no one would buy a game as "dumbed-down" as that when it comes to aesthetics. I think that's bunk, but it brings me to my first point.
1. I always hear about the MTGO client looking terrible and looking like a program from the 90s. My first response is always "And?" The new client has upped the "appearance" in some ways. Hearthstone looks great. It all looks great. Might we all be willing to play a nuts and bolts game that plays flawlessly and looks like 1997? I obviously have inside knowledge of the beta client's coding. I, for one, however, would be willing to play the game with no issues and have it look like a buttcrack than worry about it crashing, while still seeing how "shiny" the whole thing is.
2. The Halo (and other games) tournaments brought in a bunch of nerdy kids from all over the country with no social awareness, packing them 10 deep into a hotel room for half a week. The kids never showered. They played games 24/7, barely stopping for food or bathroom. Cramming thousands of people into a room with a bunch of electronics, elbow to elbow, makes for a disgusting, sweaty mess. People started to avoid the tournaments because of this situation.
What did the company do about it? They pumped in a ton of air conditioning to the tourneys at cost to them, they made public announcements to shower, and they generally encouraged good hygiene, health, and environment. Things got better. The COMPANY did this.
Nothing will change with Magic until Wizards takes some sort of action. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps bad PR is what it will take to do something. Should the guy have posted those photos? I wouldn't post them. Should he be banned? Sure, if that's their standard. Should they do something about the overall problem? I would vote yes!
Well from the data to date it seems the lesson should be: "Hey we suck at this software thing. Lets find someone who does not." I mean it is a little like rocket science but there are plenty of people who are good at it.
I agree that they are not learning from their mistakes. At least in the sense that they have not made a change to the compensation policy.
But on the other hand that is not the same thing as not learning from their mistakes. The mistake is that the program keeps crashing. The lesson should be that they should stop the program from crashing. I will bet anything that it is the number 1 wish of any WotC employee. They even say so in the latest wide beta update article.
Or is the lesson they should learn that people are unhappy when the client crashes? What exactly should the lesson learned be?
Making WotC pay out more in the event of a crash because it would increase the incentive for them to fix the problems, is implying that they have low incentive to fix the problems right now. But that is a naïve statement. They loose money when they reimburse entry fee. They have plenty of incentive already not to let the program crash. Why would they do a self-imposed extra monetary penalty? The potential upside from fixing the problems should be all the incentive that they need.
I tend to agree with this point of view because it is a no-win situation for the company. However I will say they do not seem to be learning from their mistakes. It is tempting to think if they were forced by their policy to pay out more for their crashes they would be more incentivized to find a good solution instead of patching the bad one. I realize that temptation is flawed since the ultimate fix would be to take it away altogether and thus avoid having to pay a dime. However this is their money maker and if it ultimately doesn't work properly they are losing profits and potential earnings down the line.
You should not get compensated for the "time" and "money" invested into playing. You should get compensated for the entertainment value lost. Don't see MTGO as an investment.
The few people making a living on MTG and MTGO are still playing despite the crashes. Did LSV quit? Even Kibler is still playing. If anyone has anything "invested" into the game it is those guys and they are still playing. Committing 6 hours in a weekend is not an "investment" it is you enjoying the game for entertainment. Will you go to bed hungry because the crash made you loose your "investment"? No.
Can WotC compensate the lost entertain value better than now? Maybe. We only hear the ones who where guaranteed a prize cry over the compensation policy. What about all the players who were out the money at the time of the crash? They got the entry fee back as well. I'll bet they are satisfied with the compensation policy (in a limited event they even get to keep the cards, so they come out ahead from a crash).
What should WotC do? Should they pay you the minimum guaranteed prize? Should they pay you the highest possible prize given your standing? WotC would probably be happy to pay the minimum guaranteed prize, since the total payout would then be smaller than what they promised to pay out at the inception of the tournament. Players out of the money would be worse off because they would get nothing. But you would probably not even be content with the highest possible prize given your standing because you also lost the satisfaction of winning, getting the prize is only half the fun, but you then lost out of the other half.
with simple complaining, it will take a lack of players or all the players refusing to spend a dime for a month or more to make any real changes. That in itself is so unlikely because most players are casual, not competitive so they don't care if PTQs are up, or what the compensation for tournies are, since they just get on to build a deck to play against someone at the drop of a hat and to have access to each card, if they so choose.
I don't understand why you have a problem with them taking down PTQs. I don't think they need to tell us that they're having stability issues because it's obvious that they are still having them. What good would it do for them to say on a weekly basis "Hey guys, the client is still having issues and not as stable as we want it to be" What would we do with that information? Nothing really.
This is what I feel happened: WOTC thought they were coming along fine with stability and decided to tell us in February that PTQs would be coming back (probably a little sooner than they originally planned). Then a week prior to them starting they realized that they weren't where they needed to be and decided to take them down before wasting anybody's time. I see no problem with them preventing a bad user experience that they would already know about.
MTGO, and MTG for that matter have had "us" since the beginning. This is an excellent game without comparison...And "they" know it. They know we'll keep on coming back. I've walked away about five different times, and sold out four times...and yet, still I am here like so many others. One thing for sure, MTGO needs to change many things...the first is to go back to simple formats like back in the day when there was only Type I, and Type II. This game is trying to do too much...which is causing numerous catastrophic failures, like the one this morning...and so on over the last few months. Because of the instability, I don't tourny as much as I used to. I also got burned when the client crashed, and now I am weary. Once bitten twice shy.
I think going back to four simple formats will solve many problems:
1. Vintage type I
2. Standard Type II
3. Commander
4. Block
Leave out pauper, modern, legacy, and all those stupid ready made deck formats...uhg....
OR better yet...Have two clients and two servers. One for the kiddie gaming, and one for the serious MTG player who relies on top quality hosting from reliable servers not cluttered with over exploited over commercialized game content.
Avatar and UltimateUltimatum on MTGO.
The difference is that friends are generally established as being friends before acting in a way that (otherwise) might be rude, cruel, vicious, etc.
Think about it like this - Sunny in Philly is hilarious. It's a group of friends who treat each other horribly (and expect it) but also treat others (not their friends) horribly. They don't mind it too much amongst themselves, but outsiders who are treated in the same fashion hate them, because that's not an acceptable way to behave to people you aren't friends with, who don't expect it.
I strongly agree with Point 2 in this post. The appearance of some MTG players is a huge turnoff to people joining the game. Fantasy game enthusiasts are just sort of used to this, and it's been that way since everybody's first D&D group back in the 1980's, but mainstream people take one look at a room full of paper Magic players and say "hey look, more fat slovenly nerds, why would I want to involve myself in that?" I was fat for most of my life, and one thing you have to realize is that no matter how funny or smart or interesting you are, being fat -- particularly if you dress poorly -- will prevent a lot of people from ever seeing your virtues. You do not get to change that reality, you have to accept it and do your best to change yourself.
From my own experience, I believe shame can be a powerful force for change. But the community could also do things to be positive when people make improvements to their weight, health and appearance, and that sort of thing creates a feedback loop that encourages more improvement. But that is hard to change, because for decades the fantasy gaming community has been where people who are "different" in some way go to have a "safe" place where they aren't judged. I get that people need that, but people also need to be encouraged to better themselves.
But the problem is bigger in perception than in reality. In my personal experience, the "fat slob gamer" stereotype begins to fade away the higher you go in competitive events. At a recent SCG Open I attended in St Louis, through 7 rounds of Legacy play I never once played against anybody I would describe that way. I played against mature, working professionals, including another attorney. Of course, that's more likely with Legacy. But even in Standard events, if you stroll about the top tables a few rounds into the tournament, the best players are usually appropriately dressed and are not any fatter than the population at large.
I wish that WotC would realize that the public perception of their player base is costing them money, and that it really does make the game repellent to mainstream folks. They don't do enough to discourage this perception, and they should be putting good-looking thin professionals all over their website event coverage to fight the perception.
I don't believe nothing will ever happen because customers will never be able to vote with their wallet when it comes to MODO. However crap the software is, it is the only portal to access the great game of Magic for anyone who does not care for or cannot have cardboard. Better software is ubiquitous, better card games are non-existent. If you will pardon my French, they got us by the balls, and have for the past 10 years.
Ah, hygiene. I went to a paper tournament once. Once.
My two cents on crackgate:
I think the outrage would have been a lot clearer if he had been taking pictures of exposed parts of female anatomy, instead of male anatomy (although that's legal in Mass. apparently).
2. My girlfriend was only telling me one month ago that she won't play MTG because when she first tried it in the 1990s, it was a played by a room fully of "smelly fat boys whose parents should have hosed them down before allowing them to go out in public." Now our community has grown up into fat smelly men whose parents don't hose them down, and if you want to avoid "promoting the fat, sloppy gamer stereotype" as you put it pete, then the process starts with the fat, sloppy gamers. It's been 20 years now and nothing has changed. Our culture, our community, needs to change, and it has to start with us and from within. Posting our embarrassing moments to Imgur should be a wake-up call, and the only thing that should shock us is that it doesn't happen more often.
3. A DCI dress code and hygiene code sounds like a reasonable and appropriate suggestion to take away from this experience.
I am surprised so much of the argument revolves about the weight of the guys in the pictures. Of course, it is obvious the guys with their cracks showing were of the rather heavier persuasion, but the way I took it, it was much more about cracks showing than anything else. Especially as he guy posing in front was not exactly lightweight himself. Maybe it's due to me having a different - unamerican - sensibility?
But if you take away the weight dimension, than I don't think it's bullying. It's still wrong and obnoxious, but it's hardly bullying to go after socially repulsive habits.