f13.net

MTGO V3 has been a total clusterfuck. Let me briefly count the ways:

1. No new rules engine, each card is still programmed in by hand with custom code.
2. They have redone the interface a couple of times, which is warning sign.
3. In addition their main interest in the interface has been a "fantasy theme" rather than usability.
4. Similarly they put a lot of emphasis on 3D avatars and other trappings like that.
5. Buehlers post basically said they were dissapointed with the end result.
6. It has taken forever, another warning sign.

They just don't seem to get it. For the most part people don't care about "fantasy theme" or awesome 3D avatars that you only see in the non-spreadsheet view between matches. Just giver us something functional that looks clean, it doesn't have to look awesome it just has to work.

I actually paid 10 bucks, got a starter deck, and tried it. Man, those starter decks suck. I can't decide what to do from here -- try to trade away useless cards, buy another starter or two, or purchase some boosters.

I won 2 out of three games, which wasn't bad given the fact that I was forced to put together a three color deck (white/blue/green) just to get 60 cards -- no real theme, just small and large creatures. I'm not used to not having variety -- I've got a huge box of the stupid cards somewhere out in the garage.

Eeew starter decks. 

Try a League.  It's like a sealed deck tournament that lasts a month, adding a booster each week.  Perfect for new/budget players.  If you were a serious player before, I'd recommend trying the Time Spiral Leagues; if not, 9th edition is a good education (avoid blue!).

Premier Events are not yet in the Beta test, but they are close. We don't want to ship with out them.

Leagues are not yet ready and probably won't be ready by launch. We know they're very popular and in particular we don't want to run a release event without them. One reason why it's not quite as painful to ship without them is that we overhauled the premier events functionality since we had to rewrite all that code anyway and we now have access to some new formats that can accommodate some of the players who prefer to play in league-like formats. (I'll see if I can twist Scott Larabee's arm to get him to explain this in more detail.)

The avatar rooms do not work correctly. This is not a high priority for us and we've already decided not to spend time on it before launch. Games will be accessed via spreadsheet mode at launch.

The home page should do a better job of getting you quickly into a game. After you log in it currently takes several clicks along a menu structure to find the room you want and go there. We know we can do better than this from a usability point of view and we will do better (I'm imagining big buttons that say "Play Now" and "Draft Now"). However, is it worth slowing down the launch in order to figure out precisely the best way to use that page, do the redesign, and then implement it? Probably not ... esp. when that redesign would benefit from feedback from all of you.

The free trial server is being worked on and probably will be ready for launch. Obviously one of the big things we're hoping to do with V3 is to recruit more players and grow the community. The free trial server is a big part of that.

New elf blog below. Headlines...

 - Leagues won't be available in v3.0. Will be patched in later.
 - Nor will 3d avatars, spreadsheet mode only.

Also announced elsewhere, launch is now expected after Future Sight, but still before the end of June.

To be fair to the specific team coding v3, from what I call tell it is a team of something like three people. And they have to maintain the existing client at the same time.

I think that has a lot to do with this whole debacle.

The only slightly complex part is handling the actual gameplay,

Oh shit, they aren't changing any of that!

They didn't want to have to reprogram the last 5 odd years of cards, so they just copied in the duel engine, even the pre-existing and known card bugs are staying in v3.

The NDA dropped?

STILL SHIT.

Man, I'm glad I waited til the NDA dropped to say that.

P.S. Don't put your shit on fileplanet unless you want the NDA to not matter one tiny bit.

The duel UI lay-out is ugly/inefficient.

The duel UI has gone through many different iterations. Some iterations were focused more on playability without capturing the right visual feel of the game, while others have been more artistically focused without necessarily addressing all the playability issues we'd like. In the team's efforts of redesigning the UI, we've ended up with the current version which has brought us back to something that ended up being much closer to version 2.5 then earlier iterations happened to be. While everyone acknowledged that the current duel UI layout (including the mana wheel, borders, etc) isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, it's not something we're going to have the time to redesign from scratch before launch. It's certainly something that we intend to look at post launch, but the very basic elements of the duel UI (again, referring to the mana wheel, borders, turn phase bar) isn't going to undergo a redesign before launch.



The Play Area is too Small. There are some weird scaling issues.

There is actually some interesting restrictions on the UI that cause a lot of the issues I've heard people voice over the play area. The aspect ratio of the main duel UI (life points, mana wheel, turn phase chat, etc) doesn't change, meaning that if you resize your screen to make it wider or longer you'll notice that the duel UI template gets larger or smaller as a unit, while the rest of the play area changes independently. This has the somewhat ironic result of making the play area smaller if you expand the length of the screen, but making it larger if you expand the width of your screen. Of course, this begs the question: Does this mean that I will have a larger area of play if I use a wide screen monitor? And the short answer is: Yes! Of course, we'd never suggest that folks need to go buy a wide screen monitor to enjoy v3, and we understand that the way this works may seem a bit unorthodox, but just making your screen wider rather then longer (even on a small laptop screen) should increase the play area for everyone.

F13 Member number 1750 just signed up as 'mlescault'.

Which is either a gimmick account, or the new wizards community guy.

If it is the latter. Hi.

Does a community guy have enough sway to ask that a completely barebones version 3 client be made with options for moving the placement of things and not being a bloated piece of trash?

Red names need to stop popping up when I'm developing a nice rage. Now I feel all bad for calling people he works with unprofessional, dishonest monkeys. Well, I didn't say the monkey part, but I should have.

Imagine the surge of card sales if they put out a MTGO that could scan in your cardboard decks and an ad campaign of 'Do you love Magic?  Wanna play your deck anytime, anywhere, against anyone on the Internet?'

Not necessarily.  There's no real replacement for sitting at a table with some buddies, real cards in your hands, staring 'em in the eye while planning their hideous defeat.  But when you can't get a live game going with local people, it's a fair consolation prize to be able to hop online and play other people with the same decks.  I don't think that cardboard will ever be driven out by digital, even if digital gets snazzy graphics and 3D representations of the creatures and spells.

If I remember correctly....  Basically what is said, is that market research found that Wizards picks up most of their new players from stores.  The "little kid" demographic, basically, but they stick with it and get a bit hooked.  Anything that would cannibalize the stores sales is kaboshed.
That was the prevailing common wisdom I've heard,  and anectdotally makes some sense to me.  Of course,  we have a captive red name to question.....

If I remember correctly....  Basically what is said, is that market research found that Wizards picks up most of their new players from stores.  The "little kid" demographic, basically, but they stick with it and get a bit hooked.  Anything that would cannibalize the stores sales is kaboshed.

That was the prevailing common wisdom I've heard,  and anectdotally makes some sense to me.  Of course,  we have a captive red name to question.....

Not necessarily.  There's no real replacement for sitting at a table with some buddies, real cards in your hands, staring 'em in the eye while planning their hideous defeat.  But when you can't get a live game going with local people, it's a fair consolation prize to be able to hop online and play other people with the same decks.  I don't think that cardboard will ever be driven out by digital, even if digital gets snazzy graphics and 3D representations of the creatures and spells.

While we haven't set a date yet for the V3 launch of MTGO, I do have some information on how the switch over to the new version will be handled. At a pre-announced date, version 2.5 will be brought down and V3 will go into Open Public Beta (OPB). While in OPB, players may use their 2.5 accounts to log into v3 or may create new accounts, free-of-charge, if they do not have an existing 2.5 account. While in OPB, players will be able to "purchase" cards through the new in-game ecommerce system, without having to spend any (real) money. Keep in mind that once OPB is over, all the new accounts and cards will be deleted. Again, the cards that will be free to purchase during the Open Public Beta will be deleted once the OPB ends.

When the v2.5 service goes down and v3 OPB begins, we'll also simultaneously take down the Free Play v2.5 server and replace it with the v3 Free Play (FP) server. For those of you not familiar with the FP servers, they are free servers that anyone can log onto and play Magic the Gathering Online without having an account, using pre-formed decks.

After V3 OPB has been up for 4 or 5 days, we will take it down in preparation for the official launch of V3. During this time, we will be constructing the all the databases that contain all the account and card information for v2.5. This will take 3-4 days but could take longer if there are problems. Once that is finished, V3 will be live and available for all to play. The V3 Free Play server will be available for the few days between V3 OPD coming down and V3's official launch, so those who really need their Magic Online fix will still be able to log on and play using the pre-formed decks.

When V3 launches, we will have some new and interesting back end features that may not be immediately apparent to our customers. First, we will have instant in-game account creation that will allow people to make a new account without having to exit the game client and load a web page. We will also have the in-game ecommerce system which will function the same way, allowing people to make purchases from the within the game client without having to exit to a web page.

Perhaps more important, we're going to have a tremendous increase in server stability. If one of the lobby or game servers happens to crash, the redundancy in place will mean that other servers running will automatically take over the load. From the player perspective, this might mean a few seconds pause, but otherwise there won't even know there was an issue and play can continue as normal. Another benefit of this, and one that I am pretty excited about given our recent issues with IPA #2 (which I have news on below, keep reading), is that we'll now be saving much more information server side then we ever did on 2.5. This means that if the whole system happens to shut down in the middle of a 256 person premier event, all the data relating to the state of that event at the time of the shutdown will be available in the database. The event can be restored and restarted after the system is back up during any phase of the event after it has begun, whether it be in drafting, deckbuilding, matches, or playoffs. As a general rule, drafts will only be resumed if the system can assure that no system selected cards are included in the player's card pool after the restart.

V3 User Interface Update

I was able to pin down Gordon and Worth after one of our meetings today to shake them down for an update. (I almost literally had to pin down Worth, as he tried to make a break for the door as soon as the meeting had ended) Right now we've been updating the chat dock backgrounds to improve the contrast to make it more readable. We're also increasing the size of the card text font in the spreadsheet or tableview that lists all the cards in your deck, which should make that a LOT easier to read. We're also going to remove or improve the background texture of the spreadsheet text when a card is highlighted, since it's very hard to read right now.

We've also improved the text on the menu buttons to make them more readable and are exploring ways to see if we can't make them a bit larger and easier to click on. We've made some great progress in improving the scaling/resizing of the entire interface, which required a series of little fixes to make possible. These improvements have benefited the game overall, but some of the value of this change won't be noticeable in the dueling screen until a couple more loose ends are tied up to make sure it's taking full advantage of the change.

In addition to the above, we discussed a lot of other ideas and possibilities for further improving the V3 UI, but I want to hold off on announcing them until we know for sure what we'll be able to promise to have in place before launch.

the chat dock backgrounds to improve the contrast to make it more readable

You see, the problem with this phrase is that it implies that the chat window still *has* a background.

Seriously, its a chat window, it needs to be blank space, it doesn't need a texture of any sort; any texture you add will look tacky 100% of the time. I hope by 'change of background' you just mean 'to a solid colour', but right now I expect to be disappointed.

New screenshots of new v3 UI...

http://www.wizards.com/magiconline/images/SS_sel5.JPG

...basically, it's the same, only the cards don't shrink to postage stamp size quite as fast.

It looks like it is from 1994.

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, does anyone have any ideas on how to make this UI not suck balls?

Well you can't. It was scrapped for being too playable according to the blog on page 2.

Well you can't. It was scrapped for being too playable according to the blog on page 2.

Tsk tsk. You've said that several times now. I'm unsure whether you're trying to be wry and clever, or if you're trying to confuse people into thinking the dev team intentionally wants something unplayable. Maybe you're secretly crying out for clarification over something you don't understand and it hasn't yet gotten through my thick skull. If so, show me the quote that has you confused and I'll try to explain. =)

The duel UI lay-out is ugly/inefficient.

The duel UI has gone through many different iterations. Some iterations were focused more on playability without capturing the right visual feel of the game, while others have been more artistically focused without necessarily addressing all the playability issues we'd like.

Edit: Bah, I can't even talk about it without being mean

Beta now pushed bavck to next week.

If you won't know until Monday that means it won't be ready Monday.

Is the kicker going to at least work properly? Last time to get it to update I had to manually delete files each time. It was really annoying so I gave up.

As promised, the readability of cards really has improved. And they've copied across the live accounts, so you can play with your own collection on beta now, which is nice.

Beyond that, nothing has changed.

The UI still looks terrible, still cramped, dated, messy, hard to figure out etc.

MO V3 UI Strike Team Mini Update

The team has been improving the UI for the past two months concentrating primarily on global display issues such as the display of magic cards, and the display of text.

In September I expect the following changes to appear on the beta client:

- Considerable improvement to card text alignment and legibility.
- Improved tool tip display.
- Significant reduction in the horizontal space used by the window frame.

Over the course of September and October I expect the following changes:

- Textures more appropriate for use as a background for text.
- Improved card art scans.
- Reduction in client download size
- More responsive client

While some of those will be ongoing efforts, I expect that starting in October to have more scene-by scene progress. Some scenes need some adjustments to have larger text or larger cards. Two scenes in particular need to be redone:

- In October I expect a new home page to be completed.
- In November or December I expect an expert-view duel scene to be completed.

I appreciate your continued feedback. It definitely makes a difference.

Erik