f13.net

So... tried to play some moringtide release events this weekend.

Moringtide itself is quite neat. The way classes overlap between races certainly improve on vanilla flavour Lorwyn. So that's all nice.


But v2 is now way past the point of being usable.

Drafts that start on 4th pick, regular server crashes, and crushing lag in all rooms.



At this point v3 is probably better than v2, which is pretty remarkable.

What possible excuses do they have for this?  I understand you can't just throw more programmers at a game for better results, but they've had YEARS to work this shit out.

I gather they don't understand the code they are supporting, and so they have no idea why it is collapsing around them, they keep turning off features at random (replays, trading, drafts etc) in the hope that it will somehow all get better.

This week, wotc decided that the problem might be drafts running at the same time as sealed and constructed tournaments, so, their latest genius scheme is to alternate between 24 hours of having drafts turned off, and 24 hours of tournaments turned off.

It doesn't seem to have made any difference.


And naturally it doesn't help that the 'team' responsible for mtgo consists of 2 programmers and a canary. It's incredible, a supposedly serious corporation are sitting there owning the sole gateway supporting a million dollar industry (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6111.0), and they still don't care enough to fund it.

The canary has been dead for some time now. I don't know why they keep him around but I have a theory that they don't know how to work bins and are just hoping the problem fixes itself sometime in the future.

Yah, so:

Logged on for the first time in a while last night,  see if I couldn't throw together a couple Standard decks.  The lag was BONECRUSHING.  My chat was on a fucking one minute timer.

Has it even occurred to them to profile/read the code, figure out what the slow part is and fix it? I quit a long time ago when 4 drafts in a row crashed on me.

He'll, I've decompiled entire servers. There's no excuse for this.

WotC has made it clear that the online MTG would never "damage" the RL card property, that it would just exist as an auxiliary offshoot and they've consistently treated online MTG in that disregard…

…yes, it appears to be the work of infinite stupidity and a blatant dismissal of just minimal effort that would grant them dominance on a Blizzard scale or greater…

I've never done anything like that, but I have paid other people to do it, and yes, it would have taken much less time than failing to develop v3 has taken, but you do need some kind of management structure with skills and experience in managing IT knowledge. You can't really do it in a sustainable way with a handful of random techies, a seemingly ever-expanding list of community/PR shills, and Randy Buehler (who's exact skillset or understanding of the intar-nets is hard to determine).

There was no reason to rewrite the client side at all. Typical example of biting off way more than they can chew.

The funny thing about V3 is that not only us the client terrible but I suspect under full load the server will be as well. No reason to believe otherwise.

The nice thing about client/server apps is that the client and server are relatively independent. Someone at Wizards needs to take some freshman-level classes.

You know why I don't play M:TG? Not enough of my friends really care to play. I tried MTGO and liked playing again, but frankly the soul-crushing awfulness of the UI and underlying structure just killed my attempts to give them money in return for electrons.

MTGO is Sony's dream of RMT realized, and they're fucking around with -- apparently-- a dev team consisting of a recent college grad, an engineer that taught himself VB Script once, and a guy who won an award for "Most Eye-Bleedingly Bad UI Design" in 1986.

Same.

My friends who used to play RL M:TG are no longer in touch, and my cards just sit… …I tried to get family interested but it not their bag… …I would eagerly fork over cash to play MTGO but the product sucks and I feel cheated for the money I have spent on it that was wasted in desperate hope…

…but like I wrote earlier, WotC just doesn't give a fsck, it's just gravy for them as they stated repeatedly how they don't wish to jeopardize their RL card property… …ironic detail is that I stopped buying physical cards and don't intend to restart that habit again…

Thirded. My last friend that played Magic IRL moved to Japan. Online got too frustrating, not even the expense (I was dong pretty well in draft) but in the frustration of playing for 2 hours then crashing and losing event.