NightKev

I guess fixing that menace bug isn't a high priority since most people don't even realize you can select multiple blockers at once.

Talked with one of our other designers about this to get an idea of when it might get fixed.

Currently, you can't assign multiple blockers at the same time when the attacker has any restrictions (like menace). It's really lame, and people do want to get it fixed, but it also involves rewriting that part of the combat manager. So sadly, it's not a super trivial fix. That's the only insight I can give, sorry I can't be of more help.

Sedsage

Hey, thanks for answering OP!

I'd personally like to second "maybeboard" and "hide collection while dekcbuilding". It doesn't really matter when you're netdecking, but when you're trying to brew it'd make our lives so much easier to just throw all the cool cards you want in the maybeboard and use it to update your deck after testing or based on the meta evolution. And if we have a maybeboard with every card that could go into the deck, there's no need to show the collection anymore and we can use that space to visualize the deck so much better (this is specially relevant to people like me with a bugged mouse scroll wheel).

Anyways, sorry for rambling on about things you already know, just wanted to say these are features I've wished for since closed beta and I hope these were some of the things you were working on last week. Cheers!

I haven't been working on a "Maybeboard", but there's a cool feature that I'm testing around right now that would really improve deckbuilding. That's all I can say, for now, I still have to get it approved. :D

Wow, this was a lot of work putting this together. I love the passion you have for the game. It's always easier to start the conversation with images and possible solutions. Here are some answers to your questions:

1. We try to reduce information in the UX when we can, but keep it accessible. Magic is a complicated game, and having tons of extra things to look on the screen isn't always helpful for decision making. This is one of those instances where hiding it until pulled up is trying to thread that needle between over and under sharing information.
2. I'm not a rule dev: u/WotC_BenFinkel
3. This is to minimize crossing lines during a complicated blocking situation, but I will say it annoys me too sometimes. +1
4. Probably just to make this action clear (if it was land there is a different interaction, so players might get confused if they just drew a card)
5. There is no 5.
6. Cool feature. I'm sure others want this too, there is probably some infrastructure to build here for storing this data....

There are a couple of problems with companion and sideboarding right now. One is during a reconnect, one is with sideboarding in general with a companion. Both should be fixed with the May release.

Sorry, I can't offer any quick fixes - other than not playing a companion if you want to sideboard :( Thanks for your patience, the fix is on the way!

#wotcstaff

kuboa

Instead of folders (like everyone seem to ask in every thread like this) a custom tagging system would be better (since a deck could belong to multiple categories), but I'm guessing that'd be seen as too "fiddly" for the average user so I'm not holding my breath :)

What I think could be feasible though is a compact mode? Like how in the deckbuilder you have the option to choose between two card sizes, one big and one smaller, it would help if we could have sth like a list view in the Decks window. The boxes look very pretty, but gets hard to scroll and browse through when you have too many.

Even if none of these are doable, can you guys at least make the format dropdown menus full-height so we can see them all at once? The three-lines view is so unnecessarily hard to use. It reminds me of web sites from the 90s.

Yes, we like tags better than folders too; that's the direction we want to go in the future.

We've mocked up some compact mode ideas in the past, with smaller deck boxes, but I agree a list view (with tags and stats!) would be a lot more exciting, for me. But that's an entirely new page, so it's a lot harder to get the work scheduled.

Dropdowns should be easy, I'll see what I can do.

Hello!

I've been trying to add deck builder improvements as I can, so it's nice to see what people are interested in.

Deck status: We've got some features in the pipeline around "Wish List" decks as you call it, so I think we're on the same page there. We currently don't have any plans for a higher tier of favorite. Although I can envision how it might work from a UX perspective, I don't expect it to be a priority for us any time in the near future.

Deck number: I'm not a server programmer, however, I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with storage but with server bandwidth. The game is server-authoritative, which means we don't store any information on the client. So every time you ask for your decks we have to send you all of them. I think the current number of decks is designed not to take down our services if people are making lots of requests. (more basically, if people ask for too much data at once we end up DDOS'ing ourselves) On top of that, our deck manager UI would have...

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Yeah, I think the toggle's days are numbered.

It was initially designed to clean up the UI for new players. It's hard enough to decide which queue you want to play in as a new player, but 2x-ing every queue makes the decision even harder. Also, BO3 is MUCH more skills testing, another reason not to send new players there (other than game length).

That all said, none of us particularly like how it works right now, and there is a good design in the pipeline about how to fix that part of the UI. I can't commit to a timeline, but it is one of my priorities to get fixed as soon as I am able to schedule the resources.

harvestwurm

I have that same question. Myself and others have been asking after that on many previous posts on this sub where official WotC replies have been made regarding other patch and bug details, but there's been no WotC buzz about the chat problem. This seems like a pretty huge quality of life concern - IMHO they should be addressing things like this well before a non-gamebreaking bug that might mess up your bluff once in a while.

Fixed on my local computer now. I will try to get the check-in as soon as possible. Thanks for bringing this up, it had definitely slipped through the cracks.

harvestwurm

I have that same question. Myself and others have been asking after that on many previous posts on this sub where official WotC replies have been made regarding other patch and bug details, but there's been no WotC buzz about the chat problem. This seems like a pretty huge quality of life concern - IMHO they should be addressing things like this well before a non-gamebreaking bug that might mess up your bluff once in a while.

Yeah, that sounds really lame. I will look into it and see what I can figure out.

Grimstar-

Is there anything on the radar about how laggy and stuttering Fabled Passage is? I know it's not just me because I saw it on Crokeyz stream as well. The UI for selecting the card from the deck just stutters in and out horribly.

I am not on the team that does deals with in-match animations, but I pinged that team to say this is still a problem.

Hello yugo, welcome to the Arena!

(Disclaimer, this is just a personal recommendation, not WotC sponsored)

I like to watch u/LegenVD on YouTube. He really talks through his thought process and it's very helpful for Limited or Constructed. https://www.youtube.com/user/LegenVD

Hello! I just confirmed this bug will be fixed in the next release. So, hang tight, the fix is on the way.

In general, because of all the work required in releasing an update - testing, staging, deploying, etc. - we usually only do one big release per month. That testing phase can actually take weeks after "stabilization" i.e. no more bug fixes, so sometimes things stay unaddressed for longer than we would like. It's definitely frustrating for us devs as well to have completed the work that's not live yet, but without proper testing, there would be many more problems.

Thanks for the feedback and keep on bringing things to our attention. I try to read through the posts here most days and make sure nothing has slipped through the cracks.

-d_a-v_e-

Just beat it! Must've been 15 attempts. I honestly think I need to go back and restart the whole thing as I think I missed a fundamental mechanic or something - the land cards you play have a function which I'm not sure about, you can click the cards in your turn and it taps them and adds a number by my players avatar, I don't know what it means but it must've helped!

Hi Dave,

I'm glad you stuck with it and finally beat the level! The big ideas that the Color Challenges are trying to teach are WHEN to cast your spells, but it sounds like you are stuck on HOW to cast spells.

I would replay the tutorial, as some have suggested, or you could watch this video that explains the basics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZyXU1L3JXk

Good luck!

Ykesha

Is Arena staff allowed to participate in any magic events like MFO, MCQ/MCQW or the various tournaments being run on MTGmelee? I believe the paper folks are barred from it but wondering if that also includes the arena team.

Nope, we can't participate in tournaments, but we can do FNMs under a few conditions. I haven't played in a big tournament since 2001 when I was very into L5R, so it doesn't affect me too much.

-Bullet_Magnet-

That's pretty cool :)

But what if you want to see if certain cards/decks are broken and such.. to see how the game is played out between the top decks in mythic. (In the normal world outside testing environments)

One thing that's hard as a designer is recognizing your own bias, and accounting for it. I may play in ladder one night and see the same deck multiple times, and that deck might having amazing draws every time. It's super frustrating! But, that doesn't really mean the deck is too strong - humans just like to make patterns out of randomness.

We look at the large amounts of data to make those sorts of recommendations and work with Studio X (the part of the company that makes the cards) to figure out what is too oppressive to be in a format. Playing against the real meta definitely helps you figure out what you want to look for in the data.

Personally, I don't play meta-decks in ranked. I usually play this weird Bioessense Hydra deck I have, because I love it and it's fun until gold.

Wylhjelm

I think it kinda sucks that you don't get any freebies... I understand that getting everything for free would just make the game pointless, but c'mon. Give the guys something.

Mostly, this is about fairness to the players. We already have a lot of unfair advantage from playing with the cards sooner than the public, we don't need to add freebies on top of that.

On dev environments (where it's just employees) we can have as many WC and Gems as we want. So we have a lot of fun testing the events and sets before the players get to them. But on production, I personally enjoy trying to collect 1x every card every set (I love Brawl). See you out there!

Televangelis

He Stomped me for 2 to the face before conceding, which implies... the Devs have daily quests to knock out just like the rest of us? :O

Ha! You beat Lee? I will have to tease him tomorrow. Let me guess, he was playing mono-red? :D

Yes, Arena devs don't get cards for free, we have to play or pay for them just like everyone else. "We are the players that make the game" is on the wall in the studio.

NobleHelium

A "sample draw" feature would allow some testing of manabases while being easier to implement.

Adding features that require new UI is actually a lot more difficult than tweaking Sparky's match parameters. That said, manabase testing is something I have personally used when building decks online before Arena, and I can see some utility in adding it. No promises of when (or if) we would work on something like that, but I will put it on the design backlog.

EvilSporkOfDeath

In the chess engine world, neural networks (which from my understanding is a self learning AI) have begun to outperform traditional chess engines. Have you considered developing some sort of self learning AI to improve sparky?

Most of our dev budget is going towards player-v-player interactions at the moment. It's definitely a fascinating subject, though. I wish I had the time and domain knowledge to mess around with it.

Cool idea! I have worked on her A.I. a bit and I can give you some insight.

The current version of Sparky needs to be taught how to use each card individually. We've done some work this year to make this easier, and more robust, so we could better make the Color Challenge games - but adding new cards to her decks usually involves a bit of work. This mostly revolves around telling her what are the legal targets. The bigger problem for your suggested feature: there are a lot of cards we don't use because she has no idea how to use them.

I would like to have the ability to "test" a limited deck against her. Especially, if I'm working with a wonky mana base. I've seen a few threads asking for that so I put it on our backlog. It will have to be costed and prioritized with everything else, but I hope it's simple to add. If it does get implemented, more than likely, Sparky will just be using her normal 60 card decks.

Hopefully, that answers your question!