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f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  The Gaming Graveyard  |  Magic: The Gathering Online  |  Topic: No leagues till Q2 2009, still no redemption, trading still borked 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
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Author Topic: No leagues till Q2 2009, still no redemption, trading still borked  (Read 6733 times)
eldaec
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11839


on: October 10, 2008, 01:09:36 PM

Summary of dev blog (below)

Redemption : Meh, maybe 'soon'.

Collection Server (which will supposedly fix the trading problems) : We're thinking about hiring someone.

Leagues : Lol, not till next April, fools.



These guys crack me up.


Quote
Magic Online Development Update

Please forgive my absence from the boards over the past month. WotC has made an increased resource commitment to Magic Online, and our management team has been working hard to bring in more people into technical positions in the newly formed Magic Online Studio. I certainly owe the community an update on the feature development that we are pursuing outside of the scheduled card set releases.

Redemption – We are actively working on a redemption solution that is targeted to be available when we would turn on Shards of Alara redemption. We have all the development resources in place that we need to complete this work in time to turn redemption on for Shards and for all the other redeemable sets in mid November. The redemption process will differ from the old 2.5 process, but the user experience should be improved if anything. The user will simply order 1 to n redemption requests through the store, pay for shipping, and if the system can remove the cards from the user’s collection, the request will be fulfilled to the shipping address in the order. Users won’t be directly removing the cards from their collection as part of the order, as this could potentially affect system performance at peak times. The requests will be processed in bulk during our maintenance periods. We are still working out how the shipping fees will be applied. We will cover the whole process in detail well before Redemption is reactivated.

Collection Server – The collection server is suffering from high turnover on our server dev team. We are working to hire more software developers that will be needed to work on the collection server and leagues. I can’t give an ETA for the collection server until we staff up the server dev team with critical dev resources. A lot of requirements and design work has been done. We now need more devs onboard to implement. The developers that we have in place are working on smaller scope items on our list of system deficiencies. Currently this includes improvements in the performance of match starts, and re-tooling of the process that launches Game Servers. Both of these issues directly affect usability, and will allow the system to perform better under load.

Leagues – Same story here regarding dev resources. We are structuring the MOL studio to have the capacity to work on two major features at a time. Once we staff up the dev teams, I hope to pursue the collection server and leagues concurrently. I don’t have an ETA for leagues. They will not be implemented in 2008 at this point. Q1 2009 can be ruled out as well. The Production team (which isn’t just me anymore) is on the hook to have a complete dev plan, including rough schedules, in place for leagues before the end of the year.

Client Navigation and Usability – Short term, Adriana’s team is working hard to update the client skins in October. The new skins look great to me; Less is more texture and color-wise. Mind you, we are only talking about skins here. Re-skinning is going to be nice, but isn’t a solution for our primary usability issues. We are very close to having final prototypes for significant changes to the main navigation and scenes in the client. This will include a redesign of the deck-building and deck editor scenes, the trading interface, and the chats. Adriana’s approach to this has been very professional and by-the-book. The prototypes represent simple, solid and professional UI, based on input from users of all cross sections. Watching Adriana’s team work has been refreshing, and has made our previous UI design attempts look very amateurish. We will get screenshots of the prototypes in front of the community soon.

Unlike the server application projects, we do have the developers that we need in place to implement the client usability updates. This work will be the focus for the feature team that we have assembled for the rest of the year and beyond. I will have a more accurate ETA for the major UI changes after we get our hands on the completed prototypes.

The dev teams in the studio will be split into infrastructure, content development (card sets) and application teams in the new studio model. The infrastructure and content development teams are in place, minus an eCom developer. We have enough of our first app team assembled to get busy on the client usability improvement work. The content team continues to do great work, and to deliver on schedule. Interested software developers should check for job postings here. There has been an initial focus on filling the positions that are required to support a larger software development team, and also on a critical Visual Designer position on Adriana’s team. Those recruiting efforts have gone well, and the focus will now move to the development positions.

Thanks as always for your patience and interest. I hope the community enjoys Shards of Alara.

"People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular ­assurance or accuracy" - Lord Leveson
"Hyperbole is a cancer" - Lakov Sanite
naum
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Posts: 4262


WWW
Reply #1 on: October 10, 2008, 01:37:34 PM

TRANSLATION: THANKS FOR THE MONIES, WE'LL GET AROUND TO THE FEATURES YOU WANT EVENTUALLY…

"Should the batman kill Joker because it would save more lives?" is a fundamentally different question from "should the batman have a bunch of machineguns that go BATBATBATBATBAT because its totally cool?". ~Goumindong
Thrawn
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Posts: 3089


Reply #2 on: October 10, 2008, 01:48:10 PM

I can't believe people still even play MTGO with all the crap to put up with.

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the Universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345


WWW
Reply #3 on: October 10, 2008, 03:59:37 PM

I don't think anyone from f13 is actively playing. If they are, they should really stop because at this point anyone with even the client installed is enabling these assholes.
Raging Turtle
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Posts: 1885


Reply #4 on: October 11, 2008, 05:06:38 AM

I WANT to play this game.  I have who knows how many thousands of cards, and if the damn thing was stable, they'd be worth more than a little on ebay.   I can see even myself drafting several times a month and played the occasional sealed deck tournament, which can be tough with my schedule, because I like the fundamental game. 

When they're driving people like me away, people who accept the nigh-idiotic pricing scheme and used to check magicthegathering.com every damn day even when I was too broke to buy cards (ah, college days), then I can't imagine there's much left beyond the hopeless addicts.  And those aren't the type of people who are going to bring NEW customers into the game.
eldaec
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11839


Reply #5 on: October 11, 2008, 07:32:40 AM

When they're driving people like me away, people who accept the nigh-idiotic pricing scheme and used to check magicthegathering.com every damn day even when I was too broke to buy cards (ah, college days), then I can't imagine there's much left beyond the hopeless addicts.  And those aren't the type of people who are going to bring NEW customers into the game.


What he said.

"People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular ­assurance or accuracy" - Lord Leveson
"Hyperbole is a cancer" - Lakov Sanite
Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335


Reply #6 on: October 11, 2008, 08:24:07 PM

These guys are such amateurs.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Johny Cee
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Posts: 3454


Reply #7 on: November 10, 2008, 06:14:22 PM

Well,  at least Wizards has got the crashing/disconnect problems solved.

I've been drafting ALOT the last week and a half,  all Alara/Alara/Alara.  After a bad run to start off,  it's mostly been free drafting the last week.  Rating is now about 1670.
eldaec
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11839


Reply #8 on: March 04, 2009, 09:24:09 AM

League development not yet started.

Redemption working again.

Some talk of making the UI not shit.

But everything's going so well!!!

Quote from: The Wollpert
It's been a while since we've communicated our broader plans for the program in a forum like this, so I and a bunch of others thought it was time to update everyone on what we're currently working on, and what the plans are for the rest of the year. Gordon sent me a long list of his notes that he was considering posting (and of course we talk daily), and rather than do two separate posts, I've taken his stuff and consolidated it here with mine.

For some of the folks not as familiar with the staff who I reference below, here is a cheat-sheet with some quick introductions!

Gordon Culp – Director of the Magic Online studio, responsible for most of the technical/dev stuff that we talk about.

Mike Gills – Community rep, tournament coordinator, MTGO organized play program manager type guy!

Adriana Moscatelli – UI specialist and the one who is responsible for overhauling Magic Online's current UI.

On to the news ....

Magic Online has been doing well ... great, even. Our daily average concurrent user counts are definitely rising. New player counts are rising. Tournament entries are rising. Stickiness with the program is up, meaning actual time spent in client is up. Pretty much every metric we care about is up, even trading. For that, Gordon and I both want to thank you all, especially the folks out there who take their own time to evangelize for us and help out the influx of new players that I spoke of. I know I'm only mentioning a few of the many folks out there who deserve it, but I feel like bubba0077 and hamtastic in the main forums and MTGKaioshin and temepesteye in the bugs/tech help forum have really gone above and beyond and deserve some public praise. Thanks folks!

In Gordon's last update he mentioned that we were working mostly on problems with the current system and now that we're close to properly staffed up we've made some good progress on these things. Redemption is up and running well again, and we've also made some good progress cleaning up some further items on or list of architectural defects in MOL Version 3. We have reduced the memory usage of the game servers considerably, and Conflux will likely bring a rewritten Game Server Host server to the production system (pending successful testing, of course). Conflux beta users will note that they will see the game table immediately upon connecting to a game, regardless of whether their opponent has connected to the game yet or not. The client connection to game servers in general has been cleaned up and is far less likely to cause situations where the user really can't tell what is happening with their game table. There has also been some progress made on the client-side collection state issues that have continued to plague trading. If these fixes are validated in the Conflux beta, I believe users will see some significant increases in the usability of the current client.

We're pretty happy with the system's performance under the aforementioned steadily increasing user and activity loads. I see some particularly good signs from the Magic Online economy when I go over the data with our analysts. Our efforts to promote Constructed are definitely working, and overall card values are markedly up since even a few months ago. Lots of things happened to help here, redemption, pauper, 2 & 4 person queues, promos, more new players .... The list goes on. The tournament team that meets regularly to address these sorts of things has helped greatly, and Mike G. has done a great job of leading that team and listening to all of you.

On our larger development projects (Leagues, UI, and collection server), we have been working diligently to do more and better specification and design work before digging into the development.

In the future, we will be able to give a rough idea of when users can expect all of these features to be complete and/or in beta. Gordon previously ruled out Q1 2009, we can also rule out Q2 at this point. Not the news everyone was hoping for, probably. We're in the same camp, but things have proven a bit harder than originally thought, and some of our specs were inadequate for the new philosophy, so revisiting all that has taken time. We are also still very much exploring the outsourcing of specific modules (like Leagues) to outside vendors and integrating their work into our system. It's important to keep in mind that a good portion of the total work in software development is the completely upfront creation of a concise and tight technical specification (a.k.a. spec or spec doc). One of our tech writers likes to quote that it takes (on average) about 15 minutes to fix a problem with a spec before code is written and two dozen hours to fix it after. Pretty crazy.

The collection server is still being spec'd and designed. This will be pretty major open-heart surgery on the system, and we simply have to have a very tight plan to get it right. With that in mind, we have and will continue to put more effort and priority into improving trading in the current client and escrow system with our upcoming set releases. We believe Conflux will bring some relief to the traders out there, big and small. Gordon is hoping to get some third-party trading bots operating in the Conflux beta so that we can work any issues directly with the bot developers before Conflux goes out. As of press time, we should have some bots running in the beta and generating data for us.

Our third major initiative is a significant upgrade to the client's usability. As with Leagues, we have been carefully documenting and spec'ing out this work, and we will soon be actively working on implementing the new design. We are talking a lot about how to balance an open communication plan with managing expectations. We want to build confidence in our UI design and dev capability in the community without painting Adriana's team into a corner by releasing screenshots of prototypes and such too soon. Mike G. and other community folks will be providing details about our plan to keep the community up to date and confident that we aren't going to deploy a sub-standard usability experience again.

The UI work is going to take awhile, so we will be continuing to apply minor improvements to the current client. Our plan right now is also to ship leagues in the current client. I promise that when we have something we're comfortable showing on the UI that we will, and with enough time to solicit and integrate feedback. We've already run multiple testing passes on actual Magic Online players to get things started, and without speaking for her too much, Adriana is very focused on community feedback.

You may be wondering, "What am I going to see first of the three major initiatives?" It's still a little too early to tell, and we're just wrapping up specs on some of them. I don't really want to get into timelines anymore, since we all know how well my countdown timer went over. : ) I can promise two things for sure: we'll be hard at work until everything is finished, and the second they are, we'll let you know. As I said before, the UI specifically is something you guys should be able to see (and comment on) pieces of along the way. I'll try to wrangle Adriana into writing something up about the experience and status when she feels it's OK to start saying stuff.

Please don't take the above as us resting until the three major features are ready. There should be continual updates, upgrades, improvements, bug fixes, and the like for the rest of time. The Conflux beta has a little something for everyone in this regard, and while I know nothing is quite as enticing as Leagues or a new UI, hopefully folks can find some enjoyment in at least a few of the new features in the mean time. Mike G. and company are in the final stages of preparing the rollout of the rewards program that ran into some roadblocks at the eleventh hour. He should have news on that relatively soon, so I won't scoop him too much ... but if you guys look at your promo tabs/binders you can see all the cards we've got the ability to give away, and there are more coming. Some pretty cool stuff in there, and it's not just for show! You folks will be able to get your hands on the coolest stuff in there soon enough.

That's all for now. I'll update any progress as information warrants, especially on the major features talked about above. Thanks again for making Magic Online great. We're riding some pretty impressive momentum right now, especially given the global economic climate, and that's all due to you folks. Until next time ....

"People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular ­assurance or accuracy" - Lord Leveson
"Hyperbole is a cancer" - Lakov Sanite
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