Hi,
I’ve decided to step down from MTGPQ competitive play. Meaning: I’ll cancel my VIP and play whenever I feel like it.
As such, I thought I would write some feedback to the dev team so they can understand why, and perhaps how they could win paying players like me back.
To me, MTGPQ is a diversion that I want to play during free time - on the bus, on lunch break, and so on. It’s not a part-time job. However, playing competitively requires so much time that it may as well be. Let me define competitively: It means being in a top 10 coalition, trying to get top 10 coalition and/or top 5 individual in every event. When playing a game like this, I’m looking for a challenge: When I sit down with it, I would like to concentrate and focus on the game, and encounter challenges that require me to think, reason and plan, and when I do so well, win and achieve the goals I’ve set for myself.
MTGPQ was like this in the beginning. With a limited card pool, it was a challenge to simply get enough decent Vampires, Werewolves or Spirits to build a good deck for Terrors or EC, and maybe make top 25 or top 50, with a loss here and there. However, now that I’m platinum with access to every card in Standard, the goal is to build a deck that can consistently (>99%) win and achieve all objectives, and then repeat a very simple formula to achieve that goal in each game. Yes, there are games that challenge me, and there are games that I underestimate and thus lose, but they are far and few between.
Recent events like RAW, TDW and most agregiously, TE have showed me how ridiculously grindy the game has become. I estimate that TE requires 4-5 hours of play per day in order to clear all nodes. It’s just not sustainable.
Here are some thoughts on what it would take to get me back:
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Solve the issues of “the last charge”. Noone, regardless of time zone, should have to wake up in the middle of the night in order to stay competitive. This should be trivial to fix - let the last recharge happen 12-24 hours before the end of the event, rather than 4 or 6 as today.
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Increase the difficulty of games. Too many events have a “top 5” with easily 20-50 players sharing full marks. I realize that making the AI smarter can be difficult in general, but there are some trivial improvements that could be made:
- Make it choose matches optimally. Given knowledge only about the state of the board, the AI should be able to choose the best match to give it the most amount of mana and/or new swaps.
- Avoid bugs like the AI choosing itself or its own creatures for burn spells, or the opponent’s creatures for pump spells.
- Let the AI start the game.
- Fix matchmaking so it relies on previous event prowess rather than how many cards you have.
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Reduce the number of nodes that you need to play in order to compete for top prizes. Roughly 4-5 per day seems right to me.
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Come up with some overall reason to do well in events - I think “seasons” sounds like it may be a solution to that, but who knows (and why is it taking so long?)? It’d be cool to be touted as the “season winner” of MTGPQ or something. The prize could be some kind of avatar mod or whatever.
One specific solution I have for 1-3 is the following event structure:
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All nodes in all events (including TG) have the same point structure: X points for a win, Y points for capturing each of several fixed objectives: “Flawless victory”, “Cast no creatures”, “Dealt more than 50 damage in a turn”, and so on.
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An event node additionally has a deck building restriction: “Only common cards”, “Only cards from some sets”, “At least 4 Merfolk”, and so on.
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An event node, when won, scores points for the win, plus all of the objectives. However, only the best score for a node counts towards your event total.
This kind of structure would achieve all my hopes for the game I think:
- There’s always a challenge! How can you achieve even more objectives? How can you refine your deck or play to do that the next time you play?
- You can get decent points (but maybe not max) for playing each node once, so for coalition play, it’s probably “ok” to do just that.
- If the last charge is inappropriate for your time zone, that’s probably ok - hopefully you can use the previous charges to achieve the point scores you’re looking for.
Anyway, good luck to the team in building up the game to be great (again?), and to all the players. I’ll still play and follow along, so hopefully some changes to the better will happen and throw me back in.