3.3 Release Notes *Updated (4/3/19)

Matthew

Stormcrow said:

There's never been an infinite loop deck that relied on making extra matches AFAIK.

There are more than a handful of ways to make this happen in both Standard and Legacy. They involve the obvious culprits like Stitch in Time and Karn's Temporal Sundering. Chance for Glory is another card that allows it, though that is of course much riskier. Older cards, like Gonti's Aether Heart, also make this possible.

Wafflesauce

 @Brigby @Oktagon_Daiane

 

Ok, so let’s break down what this 18 second rule means, and what its consequences might be. Yes I’m happy that RNA and new walkers are coming, but this is a much more significant and long lasting impact.

 

First of all, it is directly telling us how the developers feel that the game should be played. One of the beautiful things about Magic is that it gives you the rules and leaves you wide open to explore where to go.

 

This change wildly affects many cards and shakes up their values. It is true that the value of some cards will rise, but only because others will be diminished or utterly nullified.

 

A large part of competitive magic, both paper and here, is to invalidate your opponent’s cards. We were able to do this by playing more aggressively and doing several things in an “Epic Turn.” The removal of the ability to have an Epic Turn, means that we will have to play more defensive cards in order to invalidate our opponents.

This will very likely cause a shift of PvP matches having significantly higher rates of removal and disruption, so that the game can be controlled and guarantee a win.

PvP matches having higher rates of removal and disruption means that these matches will be grindy-er and take much, much longer.

 

What would I have done if I was in your scenario?

1) I would have given small tweaks to cards that I knew enabled infinite combos. Infinite combos often work around very small margins. When those margins are decreased, the viability of the combo goes down. I.E. Make Sunbird not fill up stored mana. Make Path of Ancestry start with 6 shields, and remove one every time it triggers. Have Sanctum of the Sun only give you mana if your life total changes, i.e. doesn’t work at max life.

2) If committed to absolutely putting the brakes on infinite combos, do it so that it would only affect legitimate infinite combos. As many have said, 18 seconds has a very large potential to nullify a turn based on a single card being played. I think it would have been much wiser to set it at something like 60 seconds, where one can only hit that cap if they are starting to do degenerate things. Then, if necessary, slowly decrease that amount of time in later patches. This also would have gone over much better with the community, letting us “get used to it” first, and wouldn’t be the PR nightmare that it is currently shaping up to be.

3) Apply it only to the AI. The AI is already bad enough that these are hard to reproduce by it, and this would guarantee that others won’t get stuck in the loop.

 

I might very well be part of the reason this is being implemented. I currently have at least 3 unique standard legal infinite combos. In real life I have an extremely refined Flash Hulk cEDH deck. I’ve been playing Magic for 24 of the 33 years I’ve been alive. My absolute favorite thing in this game, the thing that pulls me in for hours, is tuning and refining decks, especially combo decks, getting them as optimal as possible. There is not another game out there that has such a wide pool of different combinations and moving parts, and I love it for that. But now there’s a wood chipper at the edge of my pool, and I’m going to have to worry about it when building a large number of decks. A design constraint that causes constant worry will lead to player fatigue, leading people playing less. Paper magic fixes this by banning cards. They’ve even banned Standard cards recently. They admit that it was a design failure, but you still have the ability to go back and tweak things.

 

I sincerely feel that the infinite issues could have been addressed by a better management of card values. If you track how often a card gets played, you’re sure to see that there’s a huge disparity range. Small incremental buffs and nerfs are FAR preferable to sudden dictates like this. With doing this, you can also instill hope in the community so that when people open a Charnel Troll, Druid of Horns, or Palladia-Mors, there’s a chance that they will be playable in a future update. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down (and no one likes opening terrible mythics).

 

I am extremely disappointed in this company for making such a far sweeping, value-changing, and overall impactful change without having a community discussion first, much like you did when implementing Legends with Dominaria. You told us your primary ideas and we told you what we thought about them. (Ultimately you went with what I advocated. You might want to try that again here.)

nerdstrap

Brigby said:

Hi Everyone. Thanks for providing all of this in-depth perspective and feedback of the loop system. I'll be sure to pass that along to the team for review.

While I can't guarantee that any changes can be made prior to the 3.3 update going live, as I believe the build has already been submitted to 1st party vendors, I will definitely talk to them about revisiting the system and seeing where things can be adjusted.

I would advise them to postpone the release

Brakkis

Brigby said:

Hi Everyone. Thanks for providing all of this in-depth perspective and feedback of the loop system. I'll be sure to pass that along to the team for review.

While I can't guarantee that any changes can be made prior to the 3.3 update going live, as I believe the build has already been submitted to 1st party vendors, I will definitely talk to them about revisiting the system and seeing where things can be adjusted.

This right here is why things like this should be brought up before the patch is submitted and it's too late to make any kind of changes. This was a solution to a relatively minor problem in the overall scheme of the game and it was extremely poorly thought out. There are far superior methods of fixing this, again - minor, problem that don't outright tank an entire playstyle.

nerdstrap

Wafflesauce said:

 

@Brigby @Oktagon_Daiane

 
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I am extremely disappointed in this company for making such a far sweeping, value-changing, and overall impactful change without having a community discussion first, much like you did when implementing Legends with Dominaria. You told us your primary ideas and what we thought about them. (Ultimately you went with what I advocated. You might want to try that again here.)

This is why I see the death of the game as we know it. There have been too many bad decisions in the recent development of the game. The timer in and of itself isn't the killer (well maybe it is) but the pile of bad decisions is too much to overcome...

BATMAN1

It feels like we’re almost there. 

#NotAnothetDime, coming soon. 

Matthew

Brakkis said:

Brigby said:

Hi Everyone. Thanks for providing all of this in-depth perspective and feedback of the loop system. I'll be sure to pass that along to the team for review.

While I can't guarantee that any changes can be made prior to the 3.3 update going live, as I believe the build has already been submitted to 1st party vendors, I will definitely talk to them about revisiting the system and seeing where things can be adjusted.

This right here is why things like this should be brought up before the patch is submitted and it's too late to make any kind of changes. This was a solution to a relatively minor problem in the overall scheme of the game and it was extremely poorly thought out. There are far superior methods of fixing this, again - minor, problem that don't outright tank an entire playstyle.

One thing I forgot to mention in my own earlier post is mentioned here by Brakkis. The overall impact of this problem, however annoying it is, is minimal at the absolute worst. Personally I can't even remember the last time I've been caught by Greg in a loop of any sort. That illustrates that they either don't occur with any serious degree of frequency, or that when they do occur, I can simply hit the "quit" button to end them, or most likely both of these things. This decision makes it look like you guys heard a vocal minority complaining about something and decided to implement a nuclear option to address it. Terrible decision, and I really, really, really hope it is reversed.

madwren

I need to be able to do more than Like the post by Wafflesauce.

nerdstrap

@Brigby I think we all need a developer/designer response to our concerns BEFORE 3.3 drops or I legit see a mass exodus

Wafflesauce

madwren said:

I need to be able to do more than Like the post by Wafflesauce. 

As a consolation, hearing this from you means a lot. Mad respect, or whatever the kids say these days :P

octal9

Wafflesauce said:
 

As a consolation, hearing this from you means a lot. Mad respect, or whatever the kids say these days :P

I believe it's along the lines of "that's lit thanks fam, stay woke"

I have a number of thoughts about the timer but need time (MORE THAN 18s ) to organize them. It's a staggeringly surprising decision by the team.

//Removed Profanity -Brigby

Brakkis

Just a quick addition. Loops were so rare to encounter that they weren't nearly a big enough issue that this "solution" should have even been part of Oktagons efforts.

When they did happen thing thing players wanted most was a way to stop them, manually.

Not to save ourselves. If the loop starts and we know for certain that we're going to lose but the loop just won't stop itself (Zendikar Resurgent + Locust God), we can forfeit. Just open the menu and quit. You know you've lost.

Rather, when we know we've won and we can swing for lethal but the loop is going to go for another 10+ minutes because you either didn't put in a stop card or because you're just not drawing it, we wanted a way to just say "Okay, stop. Now swing".

Stormcrow

Brigby said:

Apologies for the confusion, but I was just informed by our QA team that the timer was recently changed to 18 seconds. I have updated this in the post to reflect this change.

Brigby, can you ask the QA team if they have tested how the timer interacts with the following cards?

• Hazoret's Undying Fury
• Day's Undoing
• Behold the Beyond
• Blue Sun's Zenith
  
• March of the Multitudes
• Path of Exploration
  

As well as the following planeswalker abilities:

• Huatli, Radiant Champion's 1st Ability
• Ob Nixilis's 3rd ability (particularly in combination with Behold the Beyond)
  
• Any ability which conditionally buffs all the player's creatures, e.g., Dovin's 3rd, Sorin's 3rd, Koth's 3rd.

I find it extremely hard to believe that they have thoroughly playtested an 18-second timer with the above major sources of lengthy turns (not an exhaustive list by any means, just some from off the top of my head). If they did test it with the above things and are still comfortable with implementing an 18-second timer, that tells me that the QA team and I have very different ideas about what this game should be like.

Mburn7

@Brigby I am really confused by the Timer decision here.

There was a beautifully well thought out idea proposed in the Suggestions Forum that myself and others have linked to and referenced in several posts about loops and how they should be stopped.

The basic idea was to give every card cast after a certain number each turn the "Do you want to cast this" confirmation box, and make it so that the AI will always select "No" (as it does with replacing creatures right now).

At no point was a physical timer mentioned, mostly because that will effect non-loop decks and strategies (I mean, right now a single cast March of the Multitudes or Blue Sun's Zenith will instantly end your turn.).  I mean, you just made Huatli Radiant Champion completely useless, since her first ability's loyalty gain frequently takes well over 18 seconds to finish.  Are you saying once I match a green gem my turn is over?  that can't be right.

I just don't understand where the team got the idea of a timer from, how they decided on the actual length of time to set it at (I would have gone with 45 sec or so), and why a change this major was not only implemented without any community feedback, but blatantly different from the ideas proposed by the community before.

Please Please help us out here and pass our reservations on to the dev team.

Scifibot

I think that it is long overdue that the dev team actually hires someone who plays the game and has a basic understanding of how things work and get them to sit in on the meetings where they try to figure out what they should be focusing on.

MtgPQPro

@Brigby, I think the issue is after whatever time is set the actions we have started end suddenly and our combos we're not effective.  Would here be an option to stop ALL animations after a set period of time.  Then allow all actions to continue unseen.  It would still ask us to make decisions during the entire process.

The issue is the animations take forever and on turns that take more than 25 seconds we see the same animations over and over and over again then loose to some crazy combo. 

NickBKK

I’m shocked and baffled how out of nowhere the team has come up and gone ahead with the 18 seconds rule. 

This is a HUGE change that affects  the nature and rule of game play, players experience, various cards and combos. Perhaps this is bigger than both the epic Baral nerf and rewards nerf combined, and Dev just seems carefreely decide to just do it.

There are more remaining problems greatly affecting players’s quality of life that we have been begging the Dev team to help, such as event timing and node recharging system. But they have been long ignored.

I’m feeling overwhelmingly sad and disrespected just talking about it now. I have to stop. Seriously, I feel like being slapped in the face.  

ElfNeedsFood

Well that's one way to get us to stop talking about this new leveling system...

jtwood

I don’t hate this timer out of the gate. I’d like to see how it plays out before judging it. 

[Deleted User]

ZW2007- said:

Brigby said:

Loop Prevention System
Card combos can be a fun and exciting way to win matches, but when it comes to infinite loops, it can be downright frustrating to endure. With the Loop Prevention system, there will now be an invisible 25 second timer that starts counting down after a player makes a gem match; the timer becomes visible during the last 5 seconds.
(If a player makes a Match-5, the timer will pause to account for additional actions the player can still make. Bringing up the Pause menu will also pause the timer.)

Once the timer reaches 0, the infinite loop is stopped and only one additional queued action will run following that. Once that's done, the player then progresses to the next Phase of the turn.

Not even the slightest bit surprised that this was implemented so poorly. I think this might be the bad game decision that finally seals the deal for me.

I feel the same. We only needed an AI side timer/limiter. Ive said this so many times; why does no one seem to listen? And this led me to distance myself from the forums.. so many good ideas are just wasted

P.s. Started playing a different game in between load times; mind you, a computer browser flash based game... Spent 150 dollars on that dying game cause it provided more value.