We added "The Untouchable" and "The Mind Sculptor" for winners of the appropriate decathlons and "The Champion" for anyone who has won an Arena Championship.
These aren't the right things to build achievements around, but we felt they certainly deserved titles
Love the nice, clear writeup. Looks like you've done this before!
I'm passing this report on to our QA team for verification
Good list; I especially appreciate the detail around why you want these things and the reasonable, friendly tone. Some quick thoughts:
01) Expanded comment selection - As others have pointed out, this needs to be carefully handled to avoid generating more annoying/spammy situations for players. We'd like to find a way to give the good parts without also bringing the bad. We feel like we've got a handle on that; you'll want to check out the State of the Game that drops in a few days.
02) Two more seconds - To do what you want (give the "Good game" response) we'd also have to hold an opponent that already conceded in the match for another two seconds. If a player concedes, they want out quickly and we don't want to get in the way there.
03) Allow us to friend opponents - As others have pointed out, in other games this is most often used for toxic, rather than friendly, reasons. We would like to deliver the good parts here, but absolutely don't want to inflict the bad parts on playe...
Read moreIt's a bit niche but I would love for alternate win conditions to be more prominent. It's confusing for new players when you just randomly explode at 50 health, and a more prominent graphic would really improve how great it feels to go off with [[Revel in Riches]] or [[Etrata the Silencer]]. Something more than a half-second trigger on the normal stack that you don't even have time to read – sometimes I don't even know if I was allowed to win or opponent conceded!
This is maybe my second-biggest "as a player" want for the game. And I'm also the jerk that has to keep pushing it further down the schedule. One day.
As a player with a very limited income who is only able to play via a free to play method can you explain why when in this update when you address the fact that you have removed the free entry for so many events your replacement to address this is 48hr event's on a Monday with the ability to use the precons you let us have
With each monthly update it feels more and more like if player's like me don't want to play standard 24/7 you don't want us playing.
I personally feel that the very first option of these being brawl pre cons when there has been a large vocal push back is insulting to those people
Will you at least let us have "workshop" event's where we can play with our own collection
We find that events where we provide precon decks get much higher player participation than events that require bringing your own deck (like 2x-3x). For now we're thinking of the Workshop events as precon-focused, but that could change.
Overall, we're trying to find the right balance of events with & without entry fees. We're not there yet, but we'll keep experimenting.
When will you add custom keybindings? LSHFT+ENTER is an incredibly cumbersome key stroke.
These are on our list, but we don't have a defined timeline for them.
It would be nice to have the standard shakeup ban more cards than it currently does. It ends up missing a few each time, or there becomes one strongest deck because it mostly seems like banning one or two cards from the tier one meta decks but isn't enough to really shake things up.
Totally agree. Honestly (and this is silly) we're currently soft-capped on the number of cards we can ban by what fits well in the event description. We also need to lock in the ban list early, which often leads to the misses you mention. We're working to address both of those issues.
Are there any plans to help out those of us who haven't been onboard since beta to get caught up in order to participate in historic or, later, Pioneer? I started with M20 so I barely have the wildcards to keep up in that format much less crafting older cards. I get that I was late to the party - but I'm sure I'm not alone.
As we did with DOM, we will continue to run flashback drafts of the older sets so players who missed them can pick cards up that way. We'll keep an eye on this as well, and see if we need more.
Hello, some eternal format questions I'm burning to ask the Arena team:
• What is the intended difference between the Historic and Pioneer formats? (Will these formats merge? Will Historic eventually become Pioneer + older cards added in anthology releases? Is Historic intended to be a lower or higher power format than Pioneer?)
• Considering how Arena currently points players towards standard as the "most accepted way to play" by permanently limiting the availability/reward for other formats (e.g. time restrictions for Historic Ranked, economy restrictions for Historic non-ranked, time & economy restrictions for Brawl), I am very intrigued by the State of the Game section where they mention that "MTG Arena's formats, goals, and outlook are clearly changing from the Standard-only direction we originally built the game on... Magic is more than any one collectable card game. It's dozens of formats and event types that cater to a diverse player base, from Brawl brewers to Standard Spikes." Can the team please elaborate on how this outlook applies to Historic & the upcoming Pioneer release? Currently, Historic has paywall, calendar and economic restrictions to the point where support for the format appears grudging at most. How can even the most dedicated Arena player justify dropping $1000 and a bajillion wildcards on Pioneer staples when it currently seems entirely possible that Pioneer will be offseason Thursdays only - with a 10,000 gold entry fee?
• Commander/EDH is obviously an extremely popular format. With Historic Brawl being explored with an upcoming event (a massive step towards full EDH), do the Arena team have any thoughts on allowing EDH format/decks in Arena?
• Arena has some delicious eternal cards hidden away - the Momir Vig & Theros Vintage events let us play with Black Lotus, Griselbrand, Jin-Gitaxias etc. Are there any plans to make these craftable for use with casual games in our friend lists?
Thanks heaps for your consideration and for the work you've done. I love Arena and am keen to see what you guys come up with!
Historic & Pioneer - We'll see where this goes, but the general direction we're thinking is that ultimately Historic will be the place where cards from across Magic's history can be played. Mostly the "Historic becomes Vintage" version from the other thread.
Historic availability - Right now Historic is available through the Play queue and Competitive Events. What we're trying to do with bringing the Historic Ranked queue up each quarter is to say that during this time, Historic is the focus of MTG Arena. Why it's not live all the time is we want to balance with Standard being the focus the other two months. But we're early on in the lifespan of Historic. We haven't even completed a full cycle of turning the Ranked Queue off and on again. We're going to see how players engage with it in mid-March.
Commander - Making something "feel like Commander" takes an awful lot of cards. The current cardpool may also not be deep enough to make 100-card singleton decks that feel different enough...
Read moreThank you for your response. Quick follow up question. How are you improving the bots? How are we not going to get an Eldraine 2.0 where the set is great to draft with people but the bots force all drafts to go the same.
There are several things we're working on to improve the bots. One of the biggest is tweaking our tech so we can upload bot modifications more quickly and easily. We're also very eager for the additional data that Human Drafting will give us here. Also, the "two weeks on, two weeks off" structure we moved back to for THB draft will give us more time for balance and refinement on the bots to keep them working better.
I understand why some store items might be gems only, but why are some cosmetics only available for purchase with gold? Gems are generally considered the premium currency and the one that gets WotC actual money, yet gold is the actual limited resource. Why not offer either option for those gold-only items?
This is almost always for minor, technical reasons. We're working to solve those.
We originally built MTG Arena for Standard players. Now we're moving beyond Standard, and that means going places which aren't exactly balanced for our Standard-focused rewards structure.
I am honestly curious why something like Brawl, which utilizes the standard card-pool, requires a separate reward structure? What makes it fundamentally different than "normal" standard play that dictates a different reward structure?
In Ranked Standard, the goal of most players is to play the most-effective decks, which change nicely as the meta develops. In Brawl, many players are looking to play the decks they find fun, which change much less. For example, I Brawl as Vraska, and it's going to take something pretty massive to move me off of that.
Can you please elaborate on the deck sharing? I would like to teach my father how to play the game. He lives faraway from me and I wanted to share some cards with him and play with direct challenge. Will I be able to share some decks in the future although he doesn’t own those cards?
That's exactly the kind of thing we want to enable with our deck sharing!
Decks that use a large number of activated effects (like the various cat-oven decks) tend to be fairly miserable to play against, purely due to the amount of clicks needed to resolve a turn. Are there any plans to speed up this process? Is there even a way to speed it up?
This is something we continually work on. The rules of Magic make it tricky/complex sometimes to smooth things out where we'd want to, but we'll keep working at it.
I understand the logistics of why you would not want to go through programming every card in all of the Pioneer sets (although for a while I thought that the rules engine of Arena was specifically designed to make this not a problem?) and I think most everyone is happy with the idea that skipping some cards will make the sets come out faster. But do you have a concrete plan to add cards into Arena in an 'emergency' contingency?
Just for the sake of a random example, it is very plausible that in six years there is some card printed that combos with a random uncommon from Origins or Fate Reforged or some other set, but that wasn't included in the remastered pioneer set, and the combo is strong enough that it creates a tier1/2 archetype deck that lots of people are playing in paper and on Magic Online. Would there be a hotfix that puts the card onto Arena to make sure the meta of the format isn't fragmented across different platforms of play? If you would add the card, how early would the card be added? Would it happen after a PT weekend once the deck breaks out into the public eye, or would it take longer, or shorter? How popular would the deck need to be for you to consider adding the card, given that there are some pet decks that people play and take to FNM and Magic Fests which don't show up in more competitive play, but are still actively played by many people?
If I recall correctly, the remastered sets announcement used the phrase "only the most relevant cards." How can we tell what the most relevant cards are in a format that is only a few months old and, looking towards the future, what the most relevant cards will be in, say, 2028 after however many new Standard legal sets have been released?
This "emergency contingency" is one of the main roles we see Historic Anthologies taking once we start releasing the remastered Pioneer sets. If there's some immediate problem that comes up and it needs quick action, we'd likely suspend one of the problematic cards until we could get the "answer cards" delivered.
- What are you plans for cube? Will it be a standard, historic or some other cube? The number one feature I would like to see in mtga is a cube with human drafting.
- Can we do asynchronous human drafting, the same as eternal? It has all the benefits of bot and human drafting.
- Where is the most effective place to leave feedback for the arena team? It feels like there is no good system to leave feedback.
- Why are we not seeing the Theros board outside of draft and events?
- Could you share more data with the community on a regular basis? It seems like there are many questions that the community has that would be easily answered if we had information on things like popularity of formats.
- What is the recipe for the perfect burrito?
Cube: We'll play with a number of things, but we're planning to start with a Historic cube so we get the largest pool to choose from
Asynch human drafting: We've talked about this mode a lot, but right now we're focused on improving our bot drafting and adding human drafting.
Leaving Feedback: We gather feedback from our forums, Reddit, and other social channels. The forums are the most "official" channels.
Theros board: This is just a bug; it'll show up properly in the Feb release.
Sharing more data: We'll keep sharing the key points we think are valuable (like popularity of Bo1 vs Bo3). The full data gets really difficult to parse.
Perfect burrito: Anything with beans and rice makes me happy.
Read moreWhat are the plans for the vault, we were told over a year ago that the it was temporary and yet it is so here, without any mention of any kind of update. What are the plans for the vault?
We don't have any plans to get rid of The Vault. What we like about The Vault versus other systems we've tinkered around with is how it provides long-term value for your duplicate Commons and Uncommons. It’s hidden now on the main UI bar (until it’s ready to open) because an in-progress Vault doesn’t merit that kind of UI prominence. We should have a better way to see what your progress is, and it will likely make its way to the Profile page at some point.
Can you tell us any details of the remastered sets? Like, the philosophy of how they are being developed?
We're working closely with R&D on the remaster process for these sets. The key goals are getting the bulk of Pioneer playables out to players soon and making great Limited formats. Cards that saw little play in either constructed or limited are the ones we're likely to skip here.
Hey Team - thanks for doing this! I've been a MTG player since all the way back - circa Ice Age. I appeciate that nowadays, with the easy availability of posted lists and solved metas, the difficulty in creating a queue which would cater towards "casual"/"kitchen table" type play - in that, regardless of structure, the playerbase will quickly optimize lists. Nevertheless, most of my enjoyment from the game was and is around coming up with odd, off-meta brews - building around [[Arcane Adaptation]] is a good example - the only issue being that while cards like this are immensely attractive to a brewer, they are effectively unplayable in any competitive queue. While I recognize that there is effectively no way to render any play-queue non-competitive (nor a good description for what I would be after), I'm just curious what the current thinking around the Magic experience as it might pertain to the Timmys and Johnnys (the Spikes are covered). Outside of direct challenges with friends, is there anything I might look forward too which might be aimed towards a mad brewer approach to this lifestyle game? Just curious as to what sort of wild ideas could be being floated by the team in terms of maintaining the game's appeal to the different types you identified so long ago? Thanks.
We love the fun, brewing space as well, and we've talked a lot about how we can build events that work for those players. Standard Shakeup is one take at that, and we'll keep working on more. As you say, it's tricky to build a mode that doesn't encourage players to run the top-meta decks.
The Traditional bo3 draft event can feel very long to play. Experienced drafters with above average winrates play up to 6 bo3s and hence up to 18 games with the same deck. I also like watching streamers play limited, and I've seen streamers drop out of the event after a 3-0 so they can start a new draft and hence have a larger variety of decks.
How was the maximum number of matches in the bo3 event originally determined, and do you think this number is still optimal? Have you ever considered changing it? (Note I'm not asking about adjusting the rewards; one could conceive of a bo3 event with a maximum number of 3-5 bo3 matches, while holding the expected cost and rewards the same.)
We're talking actively about this (as in, Lee Sharpe and I were talking about it just a couple days ago). Nothing new to announce here yet, but it's definitely on our radar.
Edit to add: Please let us know what "feels right" to you here