Questions you'd like to ask developers and have answers

Delnai

Brigby said:

Delnai said:

I'd ask: "How does the library work?" It seems like it changed sometime in the last few months. And now we have this whole Aven Mindcensor thread where no one can figure out whether the card could be useful or not because no one knows for sure how this game works. 

@Delnai When you start a game, you create 40 cards in your library; 4 each of the 10 cards in your deck. When you get to the end of your library, 40 new cards are generated, as if you just started the game.

When you fetch or destroy cards past the end of a 40 card deck, it generates a new, appended 40 card library, then fetches or destroys cards from it.

Thanks for the reply! So if a library is appended due to a fetch effect (say, Saheeli's 3rd ability) and then cards are put on the bottom of the library (say from Seek the Wilds), are the cards put in the bottom of the original 40 cards or on the bottom of the appended cards?

Dodecapod

While I don't necessarily expect any meaningful answer to this, one serious question I'd like to ask the devs following a very frustrating exchange over the last couple weeks is why support is frequently so painful to deal with as a customer, and why it seems nearly impossible to interact with a thoughtful, engaged person throughout the entire process.

Tl;dr version of what follows - see last sentence

I have opened 4 major tickets over the months, and the only one that received a satisfactory (and still auto-generated) reply was one in which I was reporting an exploit with no request for any compensation or other action pertaining to my account; the other 3, which had to do with issues that might reasonably have resulted in compensation, all eventually ended (without resolution) from being delayed via redundant or vapid messages to the point that the issues in question became irrelevant.

In all honesty, I would like to support this game and its developers, both in principle and, to the extent that it's reasonably within my means, financially, but these tickets are among a few extremely salient negative experiences (the others being (1) cheating via the Android apk, which allegedly has been made less visible but never fundamentally addressed, and (2) the existence of critical, consistent bugs with no adequate compensation policy for deficiencies in the integrity of competition which are induced by these bugs) that have made it impossible to justify spending any money on this game for longer than either I or (I suspect) the developers themselves would otherwise prefer.

Cumulatively, the lack of acknowledgement from support regarding these experiences unfortunately suggests that at this stage of the game's life cycle, the predominant developer attitude towards players is adversarial rather than collaborative, which makes the choices very simple, if often unpleasant, for any players who encounter this treatment, namely:

1. Adopt a similarly adversarial stance, and attempt to extract maximum value from the game for minimum cost (in money, as adversarial developers are liable not to value a player's time), without regard for any impact on the game's sustainability even if informed of such.
2. Attempt a cooperative stance under the assumption that the developers are well-meaning but out of touch and/or understaffed, and reveal common player interests and assumptions that can later be exploited to induce good-faith purchases culminating in buyer's remorse due largely to lack of accurate and/or adequate information before those purchases were made (including, but by no means limited to, willfully misleading prima facie packaging on various offers).

The reality is that as much as I (and seemingly many others) would like for this game to succeed, for the players and developers to work together to make it as sustainable and enjoyable as possible all around while negotiating conflicting interests as fairly as possible, and to be able to provide (and receive, where applicable) views and information in good faith without reservation, I no longer expect any of those to occur in instances where players would tend to benefit in their ability to make accurate assessments of the value and expected lifespan of their purchases (whether those occur with money, in-game currency/resources, or time).

While I can only assume this means I'm not part of the intended audience for this game at this point, and can easily enough take my business elsewhere to find a more suitable entertainment purchase outlet based on that evidence, I also can't help but question who the intended audience is for undisclosed drop rates, obfuscatory in-game currency utility, and omission of crucial game news and information from in-game sources (e.g. advance notice of 4-hour recharge for ToZ, advance notice of event cycles several days before they begin, detailed PW level data for unowned or already-leveled PWs, support shields, a comprehensive rulebook, and a list of known unresolved bugs, to list merely a few of the myriad examples), as these appear at least superficially to be either grossly negligent or willfully fraudulent business practices, and I have yet to see any customers I'm aware of advocating for any of these over other alternatives.

It would be easy at this point to level destructive criticism, unenforceable threats, or an anger-induced diatribe about some of the issues in this game (and I both empathize and sympathize with many other players who have taken one or more of those routes), but at the end of the day, the biggest consolation for me in the face of apparent impotence to effectuate a mutually desirable outcome comes simply from understanding that when push comes to shove, D3H stands to lose much more of their livelihood from adversarial decisions among many and/or influential players than the vast, vast majority of players stand to lose from adversarial decisions among D3H, and that any negative policy precedents which D3H might have established are likely to detract from their own ceiling of notoriety and profitability far more than they do from my ceiling of enjoyment from this game in the long run, even if they ultimately fail to perceive that due to the remaining profitability of the moderate quality experience this game currently provides.

There is a wealth of free labor and advertisement available to D3H from current players, even disregarding any financial and customer loyalty aspects, and using that massive untapped well as a proverbial sewage system is a travesty.

Formulator

Brigby said:
I'm afraid I'm not sure what your question is... The MtGPQ card seems rather similar to the paper version.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I was just wondering what could possibly posses JC and company to design such a terrible card and then pepper it in with masterpiece packs. Yes it's similar to its paper counterpart, but that's why it's bad... This is a different game. This reminds me of JC's convoluted explanation behind Depala.

Hibernum_JC said:

Here's the logic for her cost - I know it looks huge and crazy, but there's a few things to consider.

1- Tutor-like draws will become rarer and rarer due to various factors, one of them being that you can easily create a 2-creature deck with a tutor-like draw and just guarantee creatures. While we still want to potentially use these abilities, their cost has to be higher since the benefit they provide is very high.

2- Drawing and fetching cards in Red is expensive. Red's focus is on aggression and the logic being that refilling your hand (at least with Red spell and effects) is expensive in itself.

3- Overload 1 is incredibly cheap and VERY easy to fulfill. Combining that with Energize 2 whenever a Vehicle or a Dwarf enters the battlefield means you'll be fetching often and can tailor your deck to hit specific targets.

Nevertheless, we will monitor the situation and see how she plays out further. In internal tests she was performing pretty well, but these are only internal tests and real-world testing also gives us a much better outlook of the cards.

Somebody who actually plays this game and has minimum knowledge of set based game mechanics can determine if a card sucks within about 5 seconds of reading it. Yes it's important to implement characteristics of paper MTG into card design, obviously, but this game has been around long enough for the creators to know what doesn't translate to this format. With all the ridiculous changes and goofy currencies being force fed to players recently, poor card design remains a corrosive issue within the MTGPQ experience. See Aven Mindcensor.

I guess I just wanted to ask why.
 

Steeme

Formulator said:

Hibernum_JC said:

Nevertheless, we will monitor the situation and see how she plays out further. In internal tests she was performing pretty well, but these are only internal tests and real-world testing also gives us a much better outlook of the cards.

I guess I just wanted to ask why.
 

Good quote Formulator, I forgot about that one.

As a supplementary question:

JC is quoted above saying that "we will monitor the situation and see how she plays out further".

I have never in my entire lifetime seen Depala played in a single match.  I myself have tried playing with her for a bit (since I was "lucky" enough to draw her in a pack) but she was just utterly outclassed by anything else in my library.  You would be better off with just a bunch of vehicles which feed each other into a Boomship or Baralship.

So the question is:

Now that we've given it some time to prove that cards like Depala (and to a lesser extent Yahenni) are utterly useless and see no gameplay at all, why not revisit them and alter them slightly?  I mean, you could keep the same effects and buff their P/T a bit, or reduce their cost a bit.  Depala can cost 18, not 26.

This should also be seriously considered now that we've switched to "Standard" format.  I have a feeling that these cards were "balanced" against ridiculous combos like Startled Awake into Behold the Beyond, or Mirropool with Deploy the Gatewatch.

Corn_Noodles

Hibernum_JC said:

Here's the logic for her cost - I know it looks huge and crazy, but there's a few things to consider.

1- Tutor-like draws will become rarer and rarer due to various factors, one of them being that you can easily create a 2-creature deck with a tutor-like draw and just guarantee creatures. While we still want to potentially use these abilities, their cost has to be higher since the benefit they provide is very high.

 

And yet we have cycling.

Phase

I would be 100% for a balance pass on the cards in this game. We need to have done for Origins, KLD and AER and to some extent AKH what they did for the BFZ block cards and do a balance pass, nerfing overused, overpowered cards while buffing others. The fact that cards like Depala cost 26 mana is a travesty. It's ok to have bad mythics but not straight trash can garbage tier mythics. 

This should be a higher priority for the devs, especially now that we are stuck with these blocks for the next 6 months as "standard". It would increase player satisfaction across the board making lesser used cards more attractive and do a lot to freshen up the format we're going to be living with for quite some time.

Abenjes

why! omg why! do PVE events like Fateful showdown need to last for 4 **** days........ **** is the reason behind this.......  2 days at the most

Matthew

Brigby said:

As of right now, I'm personally unaware of any future plans for adding in additional guaranteed-Mythic acquisition methods, aside from the current Elite Packs. 

@Brigby

I mentioned this in another post today, but admittedly, it was dripping with a lot of scorn and frustration. I'll reframe it for you here with a little more civility, in hopes that you might actually give it some attention.

Elite Packs. It costs a ridiculous amount of currency, either in-game or actual cash, to even obtain one. Others have broken down the actual stats on both the fiscal and temporal investment required to reach that point, and I'm no math whiz myself, so I won't belabor that portion of the discussion. My gripe, and my actual, legitimate question for the development team is here:

Will there come a point where the Elite Pack will grant a customer a NON-DUPE new card? Given the ridiculous amount of time, effort, and for some, cash that it takes to reach the point where one can be purchased, I don't think this is so terrible of a concept to implement.

First off, speaking from the customer's perspective, it will distribute a ton of goodwill to D3's increasingly bitter player base even though it's painfully obvious that ranks pretty low on their list of priorities. Secondly, (and more importantly to D3/Hibernum, I'm sure) it might even drive people to purchase any offers that come into the vault with jewels attached to them. D3 seems dead set on wringing us for all that we're worth, and this might be a good way for them to convince some players to start spending again. If we knew that what we were buying would guarantee us new and exciting content, it would be very hard to say no to those offers.

But what about masterpiece cards, you say? Well, let's look at it like this. Mythic drop rates are abysmal but that's probably a necessity, given how much of a game changer some of them can be. Masterpiece drop rates are waaaaay worse, but again, that's probably a necessity. So what happens if a player already has all of the mythics in the current Elite Pack? I think they should be guaranteed a non-dupe masterpiece, again because they have already clearly devoted an inordinate amount of time and resources to this game to reach that point. And again, this would almost certainly drive the sales back up.

Brigby. We're all adults here. Or at least, most of us are. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. While I understand you have your obligations to the company, and there are more than likely restrictions on what you can do and say in this environment, the simple fact is that we are being disrespected by D3's actions. It's very clear to the community that the shifts we've seen over the last few months are what amount to a gradual shakedown. In light of that, for crying out loud, please, let them know that as loyal as we have been to this game, we deserve better treatment.

Brigby said:

Formulator said:

Question Mark

@Formulator I'm afraid I'm not sure what your question is... The MtGPQ card seems rather similar to the paper version.

I think what @Formulator is getting at with this question is that this card had a lot of potential, but ended up being a complete flop. It's very difficult to translate something like the paper version of this card over into a suitable PQ version verbatim, as it appears to have been done. In fact, it really is almost a verbatim translation. However, the problem with the card is that it's nigh unusable in this form for PQ's purposes.

In a discussion in chat today, another player mentioned making the creature's second ability trigger off of an "Activate 1" gem rather than the death of one of your own creatures. From a balance standpoint, this would make much more sense, because it would make this card both a force to be reckoned with, and also give the opponent at least a passing chance at preventing the card's ability from triggering. As it stands, it's already difficult enough to fill one's board with creatures in black (not known for it's mana generation capabilities). So having to lose one of them in order to trigger this marginally useful ability seems to render the card itself marginally useful at best.

Captsquee

I'd like a better understanding of quick battle myself.  I've been playing since February and I had a few events I was hitting top 10. Averaged in the top 50ish if I casually played.  Quick battle was a huge boon to me as a new player.  I've read the reasoning before but isn't it rather illogical to not expect the vets to be in the highest rankings?  I only have heroic nissa and Chandra to do in story and they are both at 90%. I don't have planeswalkers to level and have their rune deck slots open as well.  Not enough crystals to buy a new PW either.  Past the 4 wins I have no reason to play unless events are up. That really stagnates things and makes me less interested in the game. 

Froggy

Formulator said:

Question Mark

Aside from the other commentary and requests to have this creature modified in it's abilities, I believe that ONE way to play this is in a Tezz2 build, using syndicate trafficker and Blightcaster and a truckload of supports. The vamp will ramp pretty fast, but in all honesty, it would not be my first creature of choice. I am merely pointing out that it is possible to make this card great. But not the greatest by a long shot.

Laeuftbeidir

Froggy said:

Formulator said:

Question Mark

Aside from the other commentary and requests to have this creature modified in it's abilities, I believe that ONE way to play this is in a Tezz2 build, using syndicate trafficker and Blightcaster and a truckload of supports. The vamp will ramp pretty fast, but in all honesty, it would not be my first creature of choice. I am merely pointing out that it is possible to make this card great. But not the greatest by a long shot.

In this idea, it's pretty much the trafficker that benefits. Add padeem and the construct, yahenni is useless in that build. I'd pair him maybe with some zombies, but that's pretty much it..
there is a cheaper, better common in amk compared to this guy: the black guy gets prevent damage and berserker when you cycle a card.

Brigby

Delnai said:

Brigby said:

Delnai said:

I'd ask: "How does the library work?" It seems like it changed sometime in the last few months. And now we have this whole Aven Mindcensor thread where no one can figure out whether the card could be useful or not because no one knows for sure how this game works. 

@Delnai When you start a game, you create 40 cards in your library; 4 each of the 10 cards in your deck. When you get to the end of your library, 40 new cards are generated, as if you just started the game.

When you fetch or destroy cards past the end of a 40 card deck, it generates a new, appended 40 card library, then fetches or destroys cards from it.

Thanks for the reply! So if a library is appended due to a fetch effect (say, Saheeli's 3rd ability) and then cards are put on the bottom of the library (say from Seek the Wilds), are the cards put in the bottom of the original 40 cards or on the bottom of the appended cards?

@DelnaiThey are put at the bottom of the appended cards. When a new library is appended, it is appended at the bottom, and it becomes your new library, so any effects that deal with the library deal with the new (potentially bigger than 40 card) library.

@Dodecapod While slightly unrelated to your exact post, I just wanted to inform you that my original reply to your PM did not successfully send, so I'm currently re-writing my response. Apologies for the delay.

@Matthew Respecting the wishes of your initial comment, I won't mention anything regarding Booster Crafting. When it comes to the idea of Elite Packs granting non-duplicate cards each time, that's an idea I've brought up with the team before, however right at this moment, there are no plans to implement that kind of a change.

Having said that though, we do understand the frustration of receiving a duplicate from a hard-earned Elite Pack, which is why we recommend sending in a support ticket to request a compensation Elite Pack. This way you get another chance at a roll, should you encounter a duplicate card from your initial purchase.

Matthew

Brigby said:

Having said that though, we do understand the frustration of receiving a duplicate from a hard-earned Elite Pack, which is why we recommend sending in a support ticket to request a compensation Elite Pack. This way you get another chance at a roll, should you encounter a duplicate card from your initial purchase.

The problem with this is that you yourself have already stated that once booster crafting is implemented, we will no longer be able to submit a ticket. That renders your point completely moot. Based on that statement, once we are able to craft our own boosters, the incentive to not spend my jewels will be drastically increased. I'm basing this on two factors, one of which is admittedly speculation at this point. However, that speculation is based on an increasing body of evidence that we are being set up for an epic fleecing.

1) As I mentioned above, you have stated that we won't be able to submit our Elite Pack dupe rewards to CS for a reroll once the dupe conversion system is implemented. Given how likely it seems for people to pull a dupe out of these packs already, having even one of the 7 mythic cards that are offered makes purchasing that pack a game of Russian roulette. This leads me to point two.

2) There has been a trend in how the player base is being treated with regard to in-game currency. D3 has slowed the flow to a pitiful trickle. I do get that this was not necessarily without a good reason from a business standpoint. But based on the rewards being doled out in events, and the increasingly apparent lack of concern for "a good player experience", I am hesitant to believe that booster crafting will be worthwhile. My suspicions are that it will be just one more way for D3 to drain us of our in-game resources, thereby increasing the attractiveness of the idea of spending money. In theory, I really wouldn't have a huge problem with spending money on the game, because I like it and I want it to stick around for a while. But not at the current price points. Which means my experience will be dramatically less enjoyable.

Call me a cynic if you want, but literally nothing has been done by D3 to give me reason to think otherwise. Unless there is some way to guarantee me that I will get the specific cards that I want at a reasonable rate, or that I will never have to experience pulling a dupe after spending several weeks at merely the shot of a new card, I will have little to no incentive to spend real or in-game currency on anything at all.

The funny thing about this is that you could completely avoid a pissed off customer base if you would just implement something like what I suggested in my earlier post. We wouldn't have to deal with an apathetic-at-best CS staff, and we wouldn't feel completely effing cheated by puling a dupe mythic in the first place. In fact, I believe it would be so well-received that people would gladly start spending money again at the prices you guys are currently charging. But I'm just a dumb customer, so what do I know?

babar3355

My question would be... why don't you developers bother testing the content before you launch cards, events, planewalkers, card offers, or anything else in this game?

//Removed Insult -Brigby

Mickleberry

gruntface said:

Mickleberry said:

My question would be this:

"How do I become a designer for this game?"

I thoroughly enjoy designing games and fan sets/expansions of games that I play. I've designed multiple fan sets of Magic: the Gathering based on Doctor Who, and am currently in the starting process of designing a Star Trek: The Next Generation MtG set.

I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to be a designer, especially after having read the designer interview from recent memory. I think I (and many others) would be valuable assets to the game's future.

Many of the designers and developers for paper magic are players-turned-creators nowadays. Maybe we could start doing that with this game?

Any links MB? I'd be interested to see those decks

@gruntface When I get a chance, I'll post something under the Other Games > General Discussion section of the forum. I'll hit you up once I've posted it.

Ohboy

Captsquee said:

I'd like a better understanding of quick battle myself.  I've been playing since February and I had a few events I was hitting top 10. Averaged in the top 50ish if I casually played.  Quick battle was a huge boon to me as a new player.  I've read the reasoning before but isn't it rather illogical to not expect the vets to be in the highest rankings?  I only have heroic nissa and Chandra to do in story and they are both at 90%. I don't have planeswalkers to level and have their rune deck slots open as well.  Not enough crystals to buy a new PW either.  Past the 4 wins I have no reason to play unless events are up. That really stagnates things and makes me less interested in the game. 

Simply put, QB rewards while less obvious worked on the same mechanic of giving out enough rewards to the new players who committee the time to allow them to get to the huge group of players that is mid tier. 

As a new player, this is the boon you were experiencing. Unfortunately, the top rewards like the old event rewards were too huge and this served to surpress everyone in this category to stay in this category. 

Any stories you hear that says this isn't true is based on the fact that those players got into top coalitions and reaped in the rewards that are keeping the rest of their ex-cohort in their place in mid tier, or they grinder the hell out of QB. 

This mechanic is so strong that whales really can't match it. They can spend the money to enable them to get into the necessary coalitions, or to grind the QB for top spots... But spending vast amounts of money to keep pace without doing either would not be feasible in the long run. 

So yeah, it's about money as well. There's no incentive to attract the big spenders. And eventually people in the mid tier would have to quit because their progression basically stalls. 

shteev

babar3355 said:

My question would be... why don't you developers bother testing the content before you launch cards, events, planewalkers, card offers, or anything else in this game?

//Removed Insult -Brigby

@Brigby nope, I still see the insult there in the post.

Steeme

babar3355 said:

My question would be... why don't you developers bother testing the content before you launch cards, events, planewalkers, card offers, or anything else in this game?

//Removed Insult -Brigby

I can answer this one, it's pretty easy.

Developers make code changes and do internal testing.  There is only so much they can do in a certain amount of time.  An individual developer can also only test what that individual is changing, which is pretty much called "unit testing".

Defects can happen either from unforeseen interactions with other code changes, or interactions with code that was not modified in a manner not obvious to the exact process that was modified, etc.  These unfortunately slip through the cracks.  Not to mention there are several people making independent code changes at the same time.

QA is responsible for not only testing individual defect fixes, but also regression testing before the delivery process.  Sometimes last minute code changes are required due to discovering defects close to the delivery date.  Whenever further code changes are made, this in turn risks breaking something else, and of course since you're so close to the delivery date, these might slip through the cracks as well.

I mentioned in another post that it's quite easy to poke sticks at the developers and trash them all day long, without actually knowing how the process works behind the scenes.  There's a lot of name calling and stone throwing going on, I'm sure we've seen it all before, but that's basically just coming from a complete lack of understand of "how the world works".

Volrak

It appears that the word "developers" is being used loosely in this thread, to encompass all technical staff involved in the design and production of the software.  (For example, the thread title + first post wouldn't make sense otherwise.)

At the core of Babar's comments lies a reasonable question or two, which could perhaps be stated without prejudice as:

• What is the basis of your decision regarding the level of resource assigned to QA?
• What would be the cost of increasing the QA resource?  I.e. if the QA budget was increased, which budget would be reduced to remain within the overall budget, and what would be the impact of that?

shteev

The term 'developer' is very often used as a synecdoche.

I can't believe I finally managed to use that word in a sentence.