Magic the Gathering

Articles

Five Things for Magic Online

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ September 16, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

I had a guy email me ask­ing about my thoughts on Magic online. Is it doomed? Is Wiz­ards going to aban­don it for their bot­tom line? Is it safe to invest in the Magic online card economy?

My bot­tom line answer is that I feel extremely con­fi­dent that Wiz­ards would rather aban­don phys­i­cal Magic cards than give up the online form of the game. They won’t aban­don either, they’re doing fine in terms of money. Yes the last few years go a lit­tle lean but the com­pany isn’t lay­ing any­one off and they’re mak­ing great strides to refo­cus the game.

That being said though, there are some things that need to be addressed. Five things by my count.

1. Fix the server prob­lems. I don’t know if it is just the vogue thing for com­pa­nies to have server prob­lems? Twitter.com is a tool which peren­ni­ally went down but it has a stran­gle­hold on its users and they can’t really leave. Nei­ther can Magic play­ers. Hav­ing con­tin­ual server prob­lems is a bad bad prob­lem. Whether they need to hire a new chief of tech­nol­ogy to fig­ure out how to han­dle the load issues or they need to spend more cash on servers to fix the prob­lem, I don’t know. But it def­i­nitely hurts the player’s per­spec­tive when he logs in only to get booted three times or be unable to draft.
2. Make it more social. It feels like I’m play­ing Magic in he Get Smart cone of silence. The con­ver­sa­tion inter­face is so lim­it­ing it seems as if it was just an after­thought dur­ing devel­op­ment. On top of that we have no per­sonal images. Sure the avatars were nec­es­sary when you rep­re­sented the draft table but why note allow peo­ple to upload their pics. Have an approval process and a report­ing mech­a­nism but let peo­ple make it eas­ier to be social! Magic is a social game and the fact that most online games are played in silence sucks. Hard.
3. Inte­grate VOIP. Yeah the server strug­gles already but take your server out of the equa­tion if you need to. Have the two users directly con­nect to ver­bally chat. It’s not that dif­fi­cult. I did a VoIP app in col­lege and if I could do it as the poor pro­gram­mer that I am, I know the staff can. Hav­ing VoIP in games would be awe­some. No more of this vac­uum for play, it cre­ates real peo­ple on the other end. Sure let play­ers dis­able it, but for the peo­ple who want to talk trash — enable it. Alright alright, I hear parental con­cerns already. Let par­ents lock it if they want to.
4. Open up the chat and setup a desk­top app for chat­ting. This plays into point num­ber two. Really you guys are nail­ing the game func­tion­al­ity in that it is the game machine, but you’re falling miles short on the social aspect of what you’re cre­at­ing. You’ve already got the base of the chat infra­struc­ture. I have friends on Magic Online, imag­ine being able to sit down to my com­puter and chat with them with­out open­ing the huge game. Oh Lee’s get­ting into an 8 man draft? Sure I’m down. With one click I’m launch­ing Magic Online. Open up and expand your system!
5. Cut the prices. Yes this is really the fifth thing on my list. It’s ridicu­lous that you’re charg­ing $4 USD for some­thing that you aren’t really pay­ing for pro­duc­tion of. I think this is what makes #1 so infu­ri­at­ing, if I’m pay­ing so much to just draft then you should be able to fix your servers. After that though, begin offer­ing cuts in price. It’s called a monop­oly and it’s bad to abuse the right.

So what about it? Three of these things are related to the lack of real social­ness in the game. One relates to the infra­struc­ture and frus­tra­tions there. And the last to the eco­nom­ics of the game. Noth­ing here is wildly crazy. So let’s make it happen!

– Trick

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

Useful Author Links Follow the Author on Twitter Read more by this Writer! Subscribe to this Writer's RSS Feed

Last 4 posts This Week in Magic for 27 Feb. - 5 Mar. This Week in Magic 2/20-2/26 Pre Gaming Pro Tour San Diego This Week in Magic #12