My thoughts on Developers and Theory-crafted content

THEMAGICkMAN

Hey again!


When I posted my "What Objectives Do We Want" thread it brought something to my attention. The developers are trying to produce content that we want, and that we have asked for -- look at OGW legacy event (cmon A-Mad) and the harder objectives and the cheater purges (Yes I know that since you asked // Alve [gonna Redact that?] is still sitting up in perfect for like the 8th event in a row, but he's the only one). And we have disliked a fair amount of these additions, despite having asked for them for quite some time, but why?
well thats because the Devs have just been working off of theory, what they think we'll like and want. We said "harder objectives" and they gave us that, did they not? We said old Pve events and they gave us OGW, and for the first 2 run-throughs it was awesome! but now I see a lot of people not bothering. If we want something we can't just say one sentence about it and expect it to come out perfectly, we need to give it details, fully describe what we want - ZW2007's post about Planechase is a perfect example, he's clearly detailed what he was thinking of and went through all the ins-and-outs of it.

But there's another, better solution.

while having detailed descriptions is great it will not compare to our thoughts of what we actually have played and done with new additions. at the moment it feels like every single MtGPQ player is a BetaTester, every one. Take the original Emrakuls Corruption for example. Its fairly obvious that it wasn't tested much beforehand and so the Devs left us to give our thoughts on it. then they changed it. I'd be willing to bet that within the next few weeks the speed objective on encounter 3.1 of Revolt Against the Consulate will be tweaked. Having your entire playerbase test your half developed content is NOT a good business plan, people will get sick of playing badly thought out content and only having it changed every month or so, its just not good for the longevity of the game.

my suggestion?

have proper Beta Testers.

here are some details, a group of, ohhh, lets say 30 players, some from high level Platinum Tier levels of play, some mid-level gold tier players and some low-level silver tier players would test new events, sets and content before they are fully released. This would GUARANTEE more thought out, well designed content. Because people have played the content pre-release the developers could make some quick changes to make the content better overall. This would mean:

no stupidly broken infinite turn combos
no near-impossible objectives
no tedious, draining objectives
no boring annoying events
other bug fixes and changes would happen faster and more often.

now yes, I have PM'd the devs about this, and @Brigby replied and told me of a bunch of the roadblocks to this idea. There are quite a few, let me tell you that. and so fair enough that the devs haven't done much about the half-made content up to this point, but NOW is the time to do something about it.

Why now?

because for the next couple of months there will be a content drought, the next paper magic set doesn't come out for a couple of months and PQ's new set will likely be about 3 weeks after that. So when that content drops, we'll want it to be good, VERY GOOD. If its a repeat of KLD I can see a lot of people losing interest in the game. I personally don't want that to happen, as I want the community to grow larger and stronger. (awesome community BTW ) So to make this next major release a good one I sincerely hope that there are beta testers for it. Yes, a Beta Tester program would take quite some time to set up, but there's over TWO MONTHS of spare time coming up, that would be the PERFECT time to set something like this up. It would be more than worth it long-term. yes I also know that the releases would take more time to develop and release but:

Quality Over Quantity

Who's with me?

buscemi

THEMAGICkMAN wrote:

Who's with me?

Literally anyone who has ever set up a professional business making software.

Matthew

I like this post, and I completely agree with it. I just think it's a shame we as the audience have had to come up with this suggestion on our own.

My only addendum to what you've said would be to ask the folks at D3 to take a long and serious look at the quality of their Random Number Generator. In a deck with forty cards, you shouldn't be drawing the same card 3 times in a row in every game. Similarly, with 134 mythic cards and 229 rare cards (That's the current count so far, from Origins through AER), the duplicate drop rate for those cards should not be nearly as high as it seems to be. It makes for an incredibly frustrating experience when you spend 2 weeks worth of crystals to get 3 duplicate mythics in your big box, or god forbid, you spend real money for similar results.

wereotter

THEMAGICkMAN wrote:

Why now?

because for the next couple of months there will be a content drought, the next paper magic set doesn't come out for a couple of months and PQ's new set will likely be about 3 weeks after that. So when that content drops, we'll want it to be good, VERY GOOD. If its a repeat of KLD I can see a lot of people losing interest in the game. I personally don't want that to happen, as I want the community to grow larger and stronger. (awesome community BTW ) So to make this next major release a good one I sincerely hope that there are beta testers for it. Yes, a Beta Tester program would take quite some time to set up, but there's over TWO MONTHS of spare time coming up, that would be the PERFECT time to set something like this up. It would be more than worth it long-term. yes I also know that the releases would take more time to develop and release but:

Quality Over Quantity

Who's with me?

Closer to three months when you take that timeline into consideration if not even longer than that. Amonkhet launches April 28th and if it's three weeks after that to get it in Puzzle Quest, and with updates happening on Thursdays, we're probably looking at May 18th if it's just under three weeks or May 25th if it's over three weeks for this set to launch in-game. That also assumes that Amonkhet doesn't introduce new mechanics that take some work to implement into the game that may delay its launch.

That said, I absolutely support this idea, and think that a good cross section of players from all skill levels would be ideal. It's important that the content in the game not only works properly, but is accessible to the largest number of players possible.

ZW2007-

wereotter wrote:

Closer to three months when you take that timeline into consideration if not even longer than that. Amonkhet launches April 28th and if it's three weeks after that to get it in Puzzle Quest, and with updates happening on Thursdays, we're probably looking at May 18th if it's just under three weeks or May 25th if it's over three weeks for this set to launch in-game.

With AER, it was less than two weeks from the time it was released in paper (1/20/17) to the time it was added to PQ (2/2/17). Granted AER was a small second set that shared mechanics with the previous set. If WotC has a vested interest in PQ (which I think they do), they will likely share Amonkhet with the development team at D3/Hibernum early on so they can repeat that quick addition to the game. It's possible that cards for Amonkhet are already being developed for PQ. I predict we see Amonkhet released in PQ on May 11th. Given that, I don't think we'll see any change from the current status quo because they will be hard at work on Amonkhet.

THEMAGICkMAN

For the times, I was just working off a rough estimate, I didn't look it up. But thank you for correcting me