OKTAGON Q&A Session - June 2021 *UPDATE 7/8/21

Magic:PQ Support Team

ANSWERS

1. Have the developers heard the concerns of the players wherein a perfect finish awards the first place prize, but a single missed objective of two points or less can plummet a person down hundreds of positions? Further, the bottom bracket of prizes is often a small handful of runes, but can be as large as 250-3000, meaning that less than 10% of players receive a meaningful prize. Are there any plans to address this?Some suggestions the community has proposed, in order of what we'd most like to see:
Make the awards based on % of possible points, i.e. first prize 95% or better, second prize 90% or better, 80% or better etc.
Award prizes as percentile against current players. 90 percentile gets top prize, 75 percentile second prize, and at least 50, 25, and 10 before prizes go to garbage.
Decrease the bracket size down to 250 players or less.

Answer: Thank you for your suggestions! The development team is aware of the community concerns and is already searching for the best ways to improve this experience.

2. What is the plan going forward for spellbook releases of each remaining color? If we use the present gap of 6 months, we are looking at 2 years before all are released. The next sets will be gapped closer right?

Answer: Yes, Chandra, Ignited was the first Planeswalker and pioneered the Puzzle Masters series. The team is working on adding more Planeswalkers for each color to the collection throughout this year.   

3. I'm sure you've thought of these already, but if not, have y'all considered mixing up the daily quests?

Something to the tune of:

Defeat Heroic X using a mono-Y planeswalker.

Example: Defeat Heroic Chandra using a mono-blue planeswalker.

Defeat Story Node X using a planeswalker with level Y or less.

Example: Defeat Liliana, Heretical Healer with a planeswalker of level 10 or less.

Defeat Story Node X without casting Y.

Example: Defeat Alhammaret's Archive without casting creatures.

Defeat Heroic X with only Y cards.

Example: Liliana with only common cards.

Win 2 Training Grounds matches in 8 rounds or less.

Win 3 Trials of the Planes matches with a Mono-colored planeswalker.

And so on.

Answer: Thank you very much for your feedback. Your suggestions have been shared with the Design Team.

4. Is there a point to having planeswalkers rotate anymore? At least as far as the ones belonging to older sets, I think they should be permanently available 24/7. You could continue to rotate the ones from the last two sets. I have mentored more than a few new players, and sometimes we have this awkward wait for them to purchase the walkers they have been saving for. This has had the unfortunate side effect of them having to play some events with a suboptimal choice of walkers. So could we please have a much reduced rotation of walkers, so that much older ones are available to be purchased at more convenient times?

Answer: Thank you for sharing this. Are there any specific older Planeswalker that came up during mentoring new players? Please leave a comment below, if you like. Thanks again! 

Observation: We know that some of our answers in regards to questions about new features and questions and feedback related to your ideas seem repetitive. It has to do more with the fact that we often can't say much about upcoming features nor give an estimate on when these ideas could potentially come to the game.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hi everyone,

How are you?
Here's another Q&A SESSION.

We will answer the questions posted by June 23th, so please send your questions and doubts HERE.
Make sure to submit only 2-3 questions maximum, this way the team is able to focus and will try to answer all questions in a given month.

Thank you for all the support,

Marcela.

QuiksilverHg

My question I submitted so others can see:

Have the developers heard the concerns of the players wherein a perfect finish awards the first place prize, but a single missed objective of two points or less can plummet a person down hundreds of positions?

Further, the bottom bracket of prizes is often a small handful of runes, but can be as large as 250-3000, meaning that less than 10% of players receive a meaningful prize.

Are there any plans to address this?

Some suggestions the community has proposed, in order of what we'd most like to see:

Make the awards based on % of possible points, i.e. first prize 95% or better, second prize 90% or better, 80% or better etc.

Award prizes as percentile against current players.  90 percentile gets top prize, 75 percentile second prize, and at least 50, 25, and 10 before prizes go to garbage.

Decrease the bracket size down to 250 players or less.

Ampersand

@Oktagon_Support
When will the June Q&A be up? We are well past June 23rd so I imagine there has been time to thoughtfully consider and answer the submitted questions.

Magic:PQ Support Team

Hello @Ampersand,

We closed the Q&A session on June 23rd, after that date, the questions are selected and sent to the team, normally they ask for two weeks to answer them, but this time can vary from month to month according to the team's availability.

Once the team has answered all the questions, I will post them here for you! 😁

Thanks for your patience,
Rebeca.

jtwood

Ampersand said:

@Oktagon_Support
When will the June Q&A be up? We are well past June 23rd so I imagine there has been time to thoughtfully consider and answer the submitted questions.

Like you, I misread that as "we will answer questions by June 23rd" and not "any question submitted by June 23rd will get answered". Oops

jtwood

Answers are posted (or were posted 4 days ago)

Mburn7

jtwood said:

Answers are posted (or were posted 4 days ago)

Guess that depends on how you define what an "answer" is

Scydrex7

Thank you for answering my question regarding the planeswalker rotation. Since you ask us to mention walkers that have turned up while I have been mentoring relatively new players, we have usually identified walkers that work very well regardless of player collection.

A non exhaustive list would include PWs such as 1) Garruk, Cursed Hunstman; 2) Angrath; 3) Kiora; 4) All of the Nicol Bolases; 5) Ral; 6) Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, 7) Koth; 8) Garruk Unleashed; 9) Sarkhan Unbroken. There are other walkers, such as Karn, that while really strong overall, aren't necessarily ideal for players just starting out. There are numerous versions of Jace, Liliana and Nissa that are also available, but since we already have the 5 Origins walkers featured, I do not know if you would also want to provide the option to select those.

I suggest you make walkers in this list be featured permanently, along the Origins walkers, so that players have access to them as soon as they have accumulated the resources neccesary to purchase them.

Even better than just taking my suggestion, you could run a poll. Something like: Name three tricolor, three dual colored and three monocolored PW that the community would like to see available permanently.

My original suggestion was to make all PW introduced in sets prior to the last two (meaning Zendikar and previous sets) be available at all times. But if that is not feasible, then the above suggestions could work as well.

soultwist

Scydrex7 said:

Thank you for answering my question regarding the planeswalker rotation. Since you ask us to mention walkers that have turned up while I have been mentoring relatively new players, we have usually identified walkers that work very well regardless of player collection.

Not my Question obviously but Nicol Bolas the Ravager was released in July of 2018.  I decided I should get him around April/May of 2019 and I had to wait until October before he showed up.  That really felt like forever and I don't see how it benefited anyone, since there have been 37 PW released since that day in October I'm sure its way longer now.

BongoTheGrey

+1 on having all PW available al the time. Maybe the new ones, lets say the ones released on the last X sets could rotate to force you to be ready when that one hits the vault because it is a novelty. But what's the idea behind having to wait for months to get a PW that was released years ago?

ambrosio191

The reason for rotating Planeswalkers is the same reason card sets rotate in the vault.  There are too many of them to show all at once, so they only show the most recent and maybe a set or two prior.  It takes a long time to rotate through all of the available options now, and the problem is only going to get worse as more cards and planeswalkers are released.

There are nearly 100 planeswalkers at this point. having them all there at once can get overwhelming, at least with how the vault is currently structured.  Even if there was a known rotation (which there isnt to my knowledge) it would still take months to rotate through all of them.

OmniTron

jtwood said:

Answers are posted (or were posted 4 days ago)

Where..? I can never find anything I'm looking for with this forum organization...

jtwood

OmniTron said:

jtwood said:

Answers are posted (or were posted 4 days ago)

Where..? I can never find anything I'm looking for with this forum organization...

They put them in the original post. That doesn't bump or update the thread, though, so it's easy to miss.

In the past, they have been good about posting a comment to mention the update. That might have slipped in the transition, but I'm sure they will get back on track with it.

Magic:PQ Support Team

Hello guys,

I really forgot to mention the update, sorry 😥
Thanks for the warning, next time I won't forget!

Rebeca