devtrackers.gg
He Stomped me for 2 to the face before conceding, which implies... the Devs have daily quests to knock out just like the rest of us? :O
Ha! You beat Lee? I will have to tease him tomorrow. Let me guess, he was playing mono-red? :D
Yes, Arena devs don't get cards for free, we have to play or pay for them just like everyone else. "We are the players that make the game" is on the wall in the studio.
I think it kinda sucks that you don't get any freebies... I understand that getting everything for free would just make the game pointless, but c'mon. Give the guys something.
Mostly, this is about fairness to the players. We already have a lot of unfair advantage from playing with the cards sooner than the public, we don't need to add freebies on top of that.
On dev environments (where it's just employees) we can have as many WC and Gems as we want. So we have a lot of fun testing the events and sets before the players get to them. But on production, I personally enjoy trying to collect 1x every card every set (I love Brawl). See you out there!
That's pretty cool :)
But what if you want to see if certain cards/decks are broken and such.. to see how the game is played out between the top decks in mythic. (In the normal world outside testing environments)
One thing that's hard as a designer is recognizing your own bias, and accounting for it. I may play in ladder one night and see the same deck multiple times, and that deck might having amazing draws every time. It's super frustrating! But, that doesn't really mean the deck is too strong - humans just like to make patterns out of randomness.
We look at the large amounts of data to make those sorts of recommendations and work with Studio X (the part of the company that makes the cards) to figure out what is too oppressive to be in a format. Playing against the real meta definitely helps you figure out what you want to look for in the data.
Personally, I don't play meta-decks in ranked. I usually play this weird Bioessense Hydra deck I have, because I love it and it's fun until gold.
Ha, thanks for the game! I conceded because I was mana screwed, believe it or not my hand was nothing but copies of [[Light Up the Stage]] (and I wasn't gonna get damage in) and [[Anax, Hardened in the Forge]]!
Personally, I don't "play to quests", I just acquire them naturally, maybe I'll go an extra game or two to finish it off.
While the team occasionally has gotten gems as a thank you, I'm glad we have to play through the game the way everyone else does. Not having the normal play experience is a good way to lose touch.
Is Arena staff allowed to participate in any magic events like MFO, MCQ/MCQW or the various tournaments being run on MTGmelee? I believe the paper folks are barred from it but wondering if that also includes the arena team.
Nope, we can't participate in tournaments, but we can do FNMs under a few conditions. I haven't played in a big tournament since 2001 when I was very into L5R, so it doesn't affect me too much.