my postmortum

loroku

Amen. And amen. And amen. You have to forgive me. I'm not familiar with the local custom. Where I come from, you always say "Amen" after you hear a prayer. Because that's what you just heard - a prayer. Where I come from, that particular prayer is called "The Prayer for the Dead." You just heard The Prayer for the Dead, my fellow stockholders, and you didn't say, "Amen." This company is dead. I didn't kill it. Don't blame me. It was dead when I got here. It's too late for prayers.
- Lawrence Garfield, Other People's Money

This game is dead. Killed by D3 / Infinite Interactive, I don't see a future where this game turns around. I can no longer justify even the time it takes to log in for free packs, much less QBs, much less anything else. So in the grand tradition, let's review our beloved's short life, and what it has managed to accomplish.

Very Good

Match 3

Universally, both critically and by players, the core match 3 game was a big hit. Hibernum took a complex, decades-old paper Magic formula and translated it into an interesting, challenging, modern, and most importantly fun match-3 game. It somehow managed to combine the simple, quirky fun of a match-3 with the complex, multi-layered strategy of MtG in a way that was rewarding and satisfying to play. Games were fast but the puzzle-based factor of "how do I manage to get out of this situation" was always close to the forefront, scratching that itch for a strategic, simple-to-learn / hard-to-master puzzle game that has been missing from the FtP market since the early days of Puzzle Quest.

10-card Limit

While this falls into the Match 3 perk above, it deserves a special mention: keeping deck sizes small was no doubt a key ingredient in making sure matches were fast and fun. It helped keep the game accessible, made deck shuffling easier, and kept the complexity down to a bite-sized amount appropriate for mobile games.

Card Translations

Although the 2nd set had some issues (see below), translating the feel of MtG into MtG:PQ was quite an accomplishment. Having access to the art assets certainly helped, but - especially with the first set, Origins - if you understood how Magic worked, you'd be able to understand how MtG:PQ worked. But at the same time, knowledge of Magic wasn't required, either. Modernizing and translating a behemoth is no small task, and they did it well.

Innovation

While the release schedule was a major issue (see below), you cannot fault the Hibernum team for their efforts in expanding the game. New PWs, new cards, new set - they had ideas for everything. And while not all the ideas landed, the time and effort they put into generating ideas to keep the game moving was evident.

Listening to (Gameplay) Feedback

The Hibernum team, even though they didn't talk much, absolutely listened. Bugs were quashed, rebalances made, and they changed an entire core mechanic of the game - the various costs per level of each PW power - to accommodate player feedback. In record time, even (depending on how you measured the time; see below). Hibernum_JC deserves special mention here for being willing to engage with the community with well-reasoned and clear arguments about what was and what was not a good change. Sometimes players disagreed, but no one thought that Hibernum had less than the players' best interests at heart when it came to gameplay and balance.


Neither Very Good or Very Bad

A Whale of a Cost

It's hard to really set a price on what IAP is worth, and every business has to figure out its model for itself. There are a ton of games out there offering their own models, and D3 has its own other mega-game - MPQ - to reference. All that said: the IAP pricing model was exorbitant. Extremely modest sums got you nearly nothing, and even outrageous sums got you very little. This combined with their drop rates (see below) set up a situation in which even dropping whale-worthy sums wasn't very satisfying, especially compared to how far that money might go in another app, and all the small fish were hardly incented to take a bite. I don't know how well this fared for the company, and we might never know: but from the outside looking in, it's hard to see how this could be a sustainable model. Big fish still need little ones to survive.

Innovating Unnecessarily

Void / Process / Ingest mechanics were absolutely an innovation. But they confused even long-time Magic players, and their non-interaction with colorless creatures also seemed puzzling and unintuitive. Combined with them being widely seen as overcosted, these mechanics didn't add much to the game other than unnecessary complexity.


Very Bad

Alpha Release

The game was shipped two months too early, period. Originally in what would generously be called an "alpha" state, the game was barely playable upon launch. Nearly nothing worked: massive bugs ruined the gameplay, mysterious resets caused rewards to be lost, and much goodwill (and free advertising via word of mouth) was lost as the team worked furiously for two solid months to bring the game into a playable state. To their credit, they eventually made it, and offered some level of apology. But the damage was done. FtP games need a big bounce when they launch and there was no reason to recommend this game other than its potential for far too long.

Too Little Too Late

Being permanently two months behind schedule can't be good for you. The game changed very little in the first several months, with the only real added feature being that Quick Battles gave rewards. This led to some players amassing huge quantities of useless currency while they were diving into the "honeymoon" period of the game, but otherwise finding themselves with little to do. More was promised, but specifics were few (see below) and not much happened past the point where something really should have.

Too Much Too Fast

While this critique might puzzle some (see what I did there?), when they did release content, they threw about 4 releases out at once. This was too much. Instead of whetting players' appetites and allowing the meta to examine and adjust to each new PW, we got 7 new ones in a few weeks - more than doubling the original number after months of nothing. This was on top of an entire (or not - see below) set expansion as well. This could have been stalled for greater effect, but there was almost a sense that if they didn't push it out now, it wouldn't get out in time: so let's just give them everything and hope it works. The result was little time to process, and little incentive to shift the meta. Combined with the Whale of a Cost problem, it also made the game appear more Pay To Win - a nasty curse for any Free to Play game to shake - thanks to some new content being extremely overpriced without a clear sense for its value.

Pulling the Rug Out

While communication was ultimately the most egregious issue, this one clocks in at second-worst to me. Were drop-rates mysteriously lowered at some point shortly after the 1.3 or 1.31 patch? The world will never know, but regardless the sentiment was in: this game doesn't feel rewarding. This contributed heavily to the Whale of a Cost problem, as no amount of money could make the game rewarding enough. It caused all other functions of the game - which, at their heart, are designed to keep players playing and keep them coming back for more - to fall apart. Playing a good match-3 game is fun, but without a sense of progression, you might as well be playing Bejeweled. Not to mention all talk of strategy was hamstrung by a lack of ability to get the cards you needed to make the decks you wanted. And the promise of doing something with dupes was never kept: a laughable solution was put in place that did nothing to solve the core issue of a lack of progression. And in the end, if you don't think the game is rewarding, what reason is there left to play? Gaining packs doesn't help if the packs are worthless, meaning all in-game currency is worthless, and there's no reason to spend money, either. And once the perception is out there, it's impossible to fix - without a whole lot of what this game lacked the most.

Crickets

Ultimately, all other problems can be solved so long as the expectations of players are managed. And so the biggest issue was sadly also the worst one of all: lack of communication.

The lack of communication hounded the game all its days (save one week, when players were flooded with new content). Players didn't know if bugs, features, suggestions, or concerns were noted, or if they were just shouting into the digital wind. Huge changes would come, but we never knew what might be fixed - or even, what was fixed, leading some to give up posting bugs because you never knew what had been addressed. Upcoming features weren't teased with enough time to build excitement. Changes weren't explained until much later, if at all. A burgeoning community - the lifeblood of ANY app - was never nourished or encouraged to grow. But the straw that broke many a camel's back was the release of a new set without actually releasing a new set: there are probably some players who understood that the entire second set wasn't available in packs immediately - but there were many who did not. Combined with several desperately needed interface changes, the game didn't communicate what was available - an extremely common pattern - and so players assumed like they always had, and got burned. It was a huge PR mess that would have been so simple to avoid if more communication was the default.

Drop rates were another contentious point - one never addressed officially at any time - but lack of communication contributed to the Whale of a Cost problem as well as Pulling the Rug Out to erode all perceived value from the game. Even the Alpha Release issue could have been alleviated with more communication. The closest the development team came to a response to this issue was that they can't fix or expand the game if they are communicating all the time. This is a classic and deadly rookie mistake. Communication with the players IS fixing and expanding the game. It's 100% as important - or, as evidenced here, MORE important - than the code itself. If a game cannot manage its players expectations, it is doomed to disappoint. You can't please everyone, but you can't please anyone without communication. It's a lesson MtG:PQ never learned.


So Long

In the end, MtG:PQ had a good life. It showed that there are some talented people out there who can make good games, if only someone would let them. And it showed that the Magic brand can still be stretched in all kinds of new and interesting ways, and that there is still value in what can be mined from this decades-old IP. But it also reinforced the now also decades-old narrative that there is no digital version of MtG worth playing. Every single incarnation of MtG brought to digital life has been an unmitigated disaster, and MtG:PQ did not break the trend. Only the official MtG:Online remains, propped up with an extreme amount of duct tape and band-aids, and failing most acutely in the one space where MtG:PQ could have excelled: quick, accessible gameplay. Alas, it was not meant to be:

And I don't know. You tell me. This whole dream, was it wishful thinking? Was I just fleeing reality like I know I'm liable to do? But ... it seemed real. It seemed like us. And it seemed like, well, our home. If not Arizona, then a land not too far away. Where all parents are strong and wise and capable. And all children are happy and beloved. I don't know.

Maybe it was Utah.

iSmartMan

I agree with a lot of the issues you brought up, with two very important exceptions.

First, I disagree that MtGPQ is dead. I'm a newcomer to the game (downloaded it last month, don't even have all the commons yet), meaning I wasn't around for all the past screw-ups you described, so they had no influence on my experience. Even after a month, it still feels rewarding to me to work my way through the Story missions. It sounds to me like the time has simply come for you to move on from this game to something else, which is an inevitability for every single player game in existence. The thing that determines when a game dies is the playerbase, and I wouldn't call this game dead until the day comes when I enter a QB pod that doesn't reach 3000 players before the round ends. You are entitled to your opinion about this game, and I respect and understand your decision to stop playing, but you have no right to declare it dead for everyone else who still enjoys it.

Second, I disagree that every digital version of MtG has been an "unmitigated disaster". That's not to say that any of them are as good as face-to-face paper MtG, but if that's all that the digital versions were trying to duplicate, then they would have no audience because those people would already be playing paper MtG. If you want to draft at 3:00 in the morning, then MtGO is pretty much your only option. Personally, I got a surprising amount of mileage out of the most recent Magic: Duels game since I'm a skilled drafter, but I desperately needed practice in actually playing the game once I've drafted a deck, and Magic: Duels gave me a place I could do that for free. Just because they are inferior and different from paper Magic doesn't mean they have no reason to exist and are all automatically failures.

BassMuffinFIve

Amazing post. Spot on analysis of every single point.

In the end, this game seems to go no further than its predecessor, Marvel Puzzle Quest. They are both amazingly fun games, bogged down by stingy, insulting-to-the-player reward systems that ultimately make the player feel like they are wasting their time. No more than a prettied up Bejeweled.

The bugs and lack of communication are really the game-breaking part. How long has this game been out now? 6 months? More?? It was barely playable when I first started playing, and we are back to a frustrating game experience now with waiting 30 seconds to a minute just for your planeswalker screen to load or the quick battle screen to load after a victory. And what's with the blank events tab? This game was rushed, and it shows. Hard.

It shares the aesthetic beauty of Puzzles and Dragons, with just as many bad design decisions. And for those that don't know, Puzzle and Dragons was another match 3 game by D3 that had to actually shut down due to a dwindling player base and horrid design decisions.

Oh well. D3 gonna D3 I guess...

BassMuffinFIve

iSmartMan wrote:

I agree with a lot of the issues you brought up, with two very important exceptions.

First, I disagree that MtGPQ is dead. I'm a newcomer to the game (downloaded it last month, don't even have all the commons yet), meaning I wasn't around for all the past screw-ups you described, so they had no influence on my experience. Even after a month, it still feels rewarding to me to work my way through the Story missions. It sounds to me like the time has simply come for you to move on from this game to something else, which is an inevitability for every single player game in existence. The thing that determines when a game dies is the playerbase, and I wouldn't call this game dead until the day comes when I enter a QB pod that doesn't reach 3000 players before the round ends. You are entitled to your opinion about this game, and I respect and understand your decision to stop playing, but you have no right to declare it dead for everyone else who still enjoys it.

Second, I disagree that every digital version of MtG has been an "unmitigated disaster". That's not to say that any of them are as good as face-to-face paper MtG, but if that's all that the digital versions were trying to duplicate, then they would have no audience because those people would already be playing paper MtG. If you want to draft at 3:00 in the morning, then MtGO is pretty much your only option. Personally, I got a surprising amount of mileage out of the most recent Magic: Duels game since I'm a skilled drafter, but I desperately needed practice in actually playing the game once I've drafted a deck, and Magic: Duels gave me a place I could do that for free. Just because they are inferior and different from paper Magic doesn't mean they have no reason to exist and are all automatically failures.

I hope you are joking about the Magic digital games right? They are a running joke between everyone who has ever played them. I mean, each year the duels game comes out on Steam with less features than the year before it... each year they release a game that is straight up worse than the year before. And the first duels game were barely even passable, at BEST. The duels games are clunky, buggy, obvious ports from the console with little attention paid... to anything. MtG:O is fine and all, but the interface could be upgraded to something newer than something that feels like it is from 1995.

I'm glad you are having fun with MtG:PQ though

Rootbreaker

Less features? Magic Duels has a much more robust deckbuilding engine than the previous Duels of the Planeswalkers game. You have a much more significant collection now.

Sure, it's buggy as all get out, but they are getting more deck customization at the very least.

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

Moving to Feedback forum.

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

While constructive criticism is welcomed, claiming the game is dead, etc. is flame-bait/trolling and against forum rules. Forum rules can be found here:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4

The game is doing quite well and the team will continue working hard to improve and iterate until it is the best it can be. And then we will work on making it even better than that.

Please do not engage in extreme negativity and misinformation when posting. Locking thread.

David [Hi-Fi] Moore

BassMuffinFIve wrote:

And for those that don't know, Puzzle and Dragons was another match 3 game by D3 that had to actually shut down due to a dwindling player base and horrid design decisions.

This is completely incorrect. Puzzles and Dragons was made by a different developer (Demiurge) and published by a different publisher (Sega). D3 Go! and Hibernum were not involved with the game in any way. Please refrain from posting misinformation.