MTGO 3.0 Beta

[eldaec]

The v3 NDA has now been dropped.

In other news, drafts are now running in the beta, only they don't work, the client selects cards at random on a whim. This will probably improve my drafting capabilities, but I hear some people are unhappy because they prefer to select their own cards in drafts, such people just aren't sufficiently hardcore imo.
 

[schild]

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.

[Margalis]

I've been playing a lot yesterday and today because I can play with one hand while I hold an ice pack on my face with the other.

Drafts are all kinds of messed up. It randomly selects cards for you sometimes and drafts are constantly borked in the first round. It seems that anyone disconnecting or running out of time will screw up the draft. There is no indication of what is going on or if/when the draft will start working again. I've had a draft stop progressing then 6 hours later it starts up again. I still have a draft running from 2 days ago.

These are some pretty severe problems. I think I've completed a 4 man draft once or twice and an 8 man draft never.

[eldaec]

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.

On the subject of shit, playing the beta over the weekend led me to wonder why wotc designed the interface to have it's most predominant colour and texture be the colour and texture of poo.

People keep refering to it as 'marble' or 'stone' texture.

These people are crazy, I've seen stones, I've seen marble, I've seen poo. This interface looks mostly like poo.

It is really quite off putting.

[eldaec]

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=magic/magiconline/IIIlaunchblog

Launch blog has been updated to include responces to the most common concerns with v3.

Two points I fond espeicially worth laughing/crying over...

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.

Yes. They really said that the game user interface previously focussed too much on playability.

[Calantus]

I had to read that line twice. "Sorry guys, we had this really playable version but it just wasn't artsy fartsy enough so we scrapped it." And a big LOL at how the UI scales. Seriously guys, hire people whose job it is to design software. I don't know what you are using now, but if they are saying they're professionals they are terribly dishonest people and should be fired accordingly. *I* could design better software and nobody I work for wants me anywhere near the design phase. They have people who do just that. And like, supervise along the way. You should check it out, it seems to be a useful concept.

[Morat20]

I notice the Stargate franchise has created a collectable card game. Glancing at the screenshots, they seem to have managed not to totally suck at the interface. Of coruse, the game might suck -- haven't tried it.

[eldaec]

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.

[schild]

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?

[Mike_Lescault]

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.

Heya,

Yes it was me, although I changed my account so that it follows the same name convention as my Wizards forum ID does.

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?

Not really. But my job is to ensure that the dev team knows and understands the feedback that is coming from the community. In an ideal world that should be enough. In reality, there are alot of other factors that unfortunately come into play. We'll have to wait and see what next week's build brings.

[Margalis]

You probably recognize my handle from flaming on Wizards.com.

For Christ's sake, at least dial down the textures. Right now everything is ugly and hard to read. The chat text appears on a tan swirly background, other text appears on a swirly rock background. It's like a guy wearing plaid, striped and polka-dots. And all the textures are far too busy, too much saturation and too much color variance. Fixing the textures would be a huge gain for a minor amount of work.

I can't even bring myself to log on any more even though I love drafting RGD.

[Calantus]

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.

Hi.

[Raging Turtle]

RED NAME!  CONVERGE!  CONVERGE!

Incidentally, I've been playing a lot of Prismatic Singleton lately, and only spent 5 dolars on tix to get some cards out of the last few sets from the bots.  Good times.

edit: spelling is hard.

[Mike_Lescault]

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.

Well, to be fair, the fact that we don't make our monkeys dress in suits and ties doesn't make them unprofessional. Of course, how they act when they escape from their cages during feeding time probably does.

Seriously, when people on the forums don't like something, they sometimes tend to express themselves in dramatic and colorful ways. That doesn't make their points any less valid, especially when something we're working on isn't at the level it should be. So don't hold back on my account. =)

[hal]

Some one is listening, and encouraging feedback. Thats the most promicing thing I have heard yet. YAY

[Kitsune]

Listening is always good, yeah.  But there's no avoiding the unfortunate fact that WotC apparently gave a wheelbarrow full of money to a software team who couldn't cut it, and I bet WotC isn't going to be coughing up a new wheelbarrow to give to a better software team. 

MTGO is a fantastic idea full of great potential; who doesn't want to be able to find opponents to play a game against at any hour of the day around the world?  However, it's been horribly, horribly mis-managed.  Frigging Yu-gi-oh of all things has embraced the online play paradigm and done it better than Wizards managed with Magic.  The Japanese bastard child ripoff has free internet play on multiple consoles and (I think) PC as well, which begs the question of why the people making the better game haven't been able to put out one single digital version of it that wasn't full of bugs.

This is EXACTLY like the D&D character generator program, the one that WotC was making a lot of fuss over and released demo disks with the first set of 3rd edition rulebooks.  Years passed, nothing happened, and eventually a bug-ridden piece of crap was slithered out to wither in the market and fade from memory within a week.

Whomever at WotC is in charge of their digital stuff is in need of a corrective cudgeling, followed by a pink slip if they can't get their act together.  The entire client needs to be scrapped, an actual honest-to-God competent game developer needs to be brought on board, and the whole thing needs to be rebuilt from the ground up and done right.

Once that's done, Wizards needs to really support it.  MTGO has been stuffed in a shoebox for years now, and that's not helping anyone.  The digital future can be awesome for Wizards, but only if they embrace it and use it to grow the brand.  That means free play and good tutorials to hook in new and younger players, better integration with the paper game for the experienced players (as in, a way to use your cardboard for the online game ala Sony's upcoming Eye of Judgment game rather than mucking around with virtual card purchases), and advertisement and placement of the product to make sure everyone knows about it.

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?'

[Mr. Right]

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?'

That's the first thing I tough when I saw the eye of judgment but if you think about it would actually kill the drafts and leagues.  The 2 concepts are irreconcilable.

[Kitsune]

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.

[Johny Cee]

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.....

[Kitsune]

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.....

See, that's my point.  If MTGO was scanning real cards for play rather than having players purchase virtual cards, it would get people into the stores and buying the cards.  This in turn would make the stores very happy and hopefully give the magic community a shot in the arm.  'Cause I dunno about other places, but where I live the 'magic community' is a few scary-looking guys huddled in the corner of the game store, not exactly an exciting and dynamic demographic.

A well-done MTGO with a big following means more traffic into the stores, more traffic in the stores means more opportunities for players to meet each other and sit down and play, more gameplay means more cards bought.  The players get a better game and more people to play against, Wizards and the game stores get more sales, everyone's happier.

[Edit: In retrospect, I see where I may've been confusing.  'Free play' for beginners refers to a few preconstructed decks to get started and learn the ropes.  People who want to build their own decks would need to go out and buy cards in this particular fantasy scenario.  MTGO already has a little demo section, which is good, it's just pretty sorely lacking in good tutorials.]

[Mike_Lescault]

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.....

I think it's always been true that game companies who sell things retail always want to avoid alienating the retail outlet. It's hard to convince someone to give you shelf space if they're afraid people are going to buy the product in other nontraditional outlets. WotC is very committed to supporting hobby game stores, but I think we can all agree that the market has been changing. Back 10 or 20 years ago, you'd find plenty of 12-15 year olds kicking around the local hobby game store checking out what's new and cool. That demographic today tends to be more focused on text messaging and online social networks. The net result is that the type of crowd you'll find in the hobby gaming store tends to be "greying" and most young and new gamers aren't being introduced to their hobby that way.

WotC has a new Digital Initiative underway that we should be announcing more about in the up coming months. A lot of the what you guys have mentioned here is stuff that has been discussed and considered. When all is said and done, we want to try to find a way to support retail and digital in a way that not only isn't mutually exclusive, but where we're able to promote the two together. It's not going to be without some significant challenges, but hopefully we can work with the community to find the best ways to have things work.

[Mr. Right]

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.

I should have precise : That's the first thing I tough when I saw the eye of judgment but if you think about it would actually kill the ONLINE drafts and leagues.  The 2 concepts are irreconcilable. You can't scan a physical pack to play a draft online.  

[eldaec]

Wizards v3 launch blog covering how the v2 -> v3 switchover process will work, and some notes on some minor UI improvements.

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.

As a note for those not trying to connect to beta, the beta client has already been tweaked here and there to improve usability.

And if you were to accept wotc's belief that the current UI is basically an acceptable concept, you'd have to concede that they are making progress on the things that they do recognise are a problem (circumstances where cards are completely unreadable or where draft picks just don't work).

This level of progress is of course a double edged sword.

On the one hand it shows the development team are able to make progress and based on current progress, I suspect the team will comfortably fix the things that wotc recognise as a problem in time for 10th ed.

On the other hand I suspect it is getting less and less likely that v3 will be delayed long enough to make the UI anything other than horrid.


Ultimately, the real problem here is that v3's designers have not recognised that magic is a game about magic cards, and that all the other noise just distracts from that.


On the 'good news' front. Players have started preparing alternative texture packs, usually lots of nice high contrast solid or near-solid colour. They can't do anything about the enormous amount of wasted space, and you'd need to overwrite the brown-smudge themed textures every time the client updates, but they are good enough to stop the client inducing as much eye strain as it currently does.

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

For Mike,

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.

[Mike_Lescault]

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.

Yeah, you're right. I mean, why have *anything* as the background that can mess with viewing the text? What's the most important thing here? Being able to read the text!

The reason I worded it the way that I did in the blog was just to (perhaps lamely) cover my tail. "Updating the chat dock background to improve the contrast..." was me trying to say that we're fixing that issue, without saying we're going to "do X" when the devs-on-the-ground might end up going with Y. (Which of course would result in another pebble being tossed on the "we can't trust what they tell us" pile, something we can ill afford.)

[eldaec]

Heh, well put that way I understand why you'd write it like you did to play safe ;)

[eldaec]

Mtgo devs are stirring on the official boards, and suggesting that the v3 new-beta will be arriving either next week or the week after.

v3 forum trolls everywhere wait with baited breath to see if the new version "focusses too much on playability".

[eldaec]

...or maybe the week after that.

BETA II  - THE REVENGE OF THE BROWN - July 23rd.

[schild]

I expect suck. Of course, we do have a member of the boards here who could tell us. WITH SCREENSHOTS.

[eldaec]

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.

[Morat20]

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's very brown.

[Raging Turtle]

Slightly better, but why the hell wouldn't they move the avatar and color icons under the card picture like it is currently (I think)?

[Margalis]

I can't even tell that it's a new picture...I guess the cards are bigger or something...would need a side by side comparison.

[cmlancas]

Magic suitcase was arguably better than this, imo.


It looks like it is from 1994.

[eldaec]

It looks like it is from 1994.

Frankly, "Rise of the Robots"^tm is offended by this statement.

[Yegolev]

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