I just have so much trouble buying the whole "we didn't anticipate people using his +1 on enemy creatures!" because Arena literally warns you when you target your own stuff with it, so at least the people who programmed the set were thinking of it as primarily good for that.
Firstly, that warning is automatically generated because it makes the target lose all abilities. Remember that code for MtG: Arena is generated via parsing the card text. Virtually nothing is hand-coded for exclusively for a single card.
Secondly, Arena usually starts implementing a set weeks after the set is "locked in" because the printing pipeline is longer than digital's. We give feedback about what's likely to be easy or hard to do during the design process, but it's set pretty much in stone before we start committing code. I look forward to the day when Play Design can iterate on a set in Arena, but that's still petty far out. #wotc_staff
.. shouldn't it be really easy to bring in, say, all the RTR cards forward if this is the case? I can pitch in if it'll help.
You could apply here if you'd like! We do have an open position on the Rule team.
As for bringing in old sets, it's really equivalent to bringing in a new set for a lot of them (roughly as many unimplemented sentences and keywords). And RTR is actually one of the worst: Overload is a pretty yucky mechanic for a system that expects cards to do what their text says. #wotc_staff
Can you elaborate on that? I'm genuinely curious how a mechanic as logically simple as Overload(if cast for alternate cost, change target to all) would be 'yucky'.
I'm Canadian unfortunately and unwilling/have no desire to move south, but I'd volunteer time remotely if it will bring non-standard formats to Arena faster. The disparity between Online and Arena makes me sad.
Sure, I'll try to summarize. Most of what I say below could be changed to make Overload work; my point is that that work hasn't been done yet and is pretty nontrivial.
The Games Rules Parser (GRP) reads the exact text on the card. So, for [[Cyclonic Rift]], it sees two abilities, "Return target nonland permanent you don’t control to its owner’s hand." and "Overload 6U". It parses those abilities independently. That is, for [[Mind Rake]], its first ability is literally the same as [[Mind Rot]]'s. They literally use the same code, there's not a Mind Rake version and a Mind Rot version.
Not only that, but there isn't any text on the card that says "Return each nonland permanent you don't control to its owner's hand." So we'd need to recognize that that is a text that we need to create. And then that needs to be an ability that Cyclonic Rift has access to (i.e. is loaded into the game when Rift is), but that it doesn't actually have (until you cast it using Overload).
As I said at the start, these problems are solvable. I'd expect it to take at least a week of work, maybe two, just for the Rules Engine to make it work correctly. Not to mention including all of the other window dressing that we perform for keyword abilities in Arena, such as "badges" on the card that react to the state of the game, etc.
Also, I cannot stress enough that although tricky keywords and tentpole mechanics are a sizeable amount of work, the real cost to doing a new-to-Arena set is the one-off cards. A typical set has around 35 or so cards that need to involve significant changes to the GRP to parse correctly. The very first card of RTR has this problem! [[Angel of Serenity]] reads "When Angel of Serenity enters the battlefield, you may exile up to three other target creatures from the battlefield and/or creature cards from graveyards.", which is a new syntax to Arena for selecting permanents. These things add up! #wotc_staff
Is the fact that Wicked Wolf’s ETB doesn’t yield priority automatically hand-coded? I lost a game recently after using Agent of Treachery to take control of a Tolsimir, Friend of Wolves and then casting Wicked Wolf my next turn. I didn’t turn on full control because Wicked Wolf doesn’t pass priority automatically.... but apparently Tolsimir does. I did have food on the table to use.
Yes, it is. We added the work for Wicked Wolf specifically because of the interacting abilities. I'm still trying to convince our designers that holding for any fight-resulting trigger is a good idea. #wotc_staff
If it helps, you have my support for the change!
Is there somewhere I can find a list of all custom priority holds? I think Goblin Warboss has one?
Relatedly, I couldn’t figure out how to pull off a complicated play recently. I had Warboss and the red Cavalier in play, and Warboss had summoning sickness. I wanted to activate Cavalier’s ability after the token had been made (to buff the token) and before declaring attacks (so I could attack with Warboss). I ended up giving up trying to make it work because I had lethal anyways, but is there a way to hold priority there? I couldn’t seem to put the stop down because the bar hadn’t changed to “combat mode” yet.
Fortunately, we got to do one better for Legion Warboss: all cards that trigger when a certain step or phase occurs will give your opponent priority for the rest of the current step/phase if you put it into a legal zone for that trigger this step/phase. This also means that stuff like Arclight Phoenix entering your graveyard before combat will give your opponent a chance to react.
There is not a list of all the weird things that we do for Arena's default priority. It's already pretty unwieldy to describe and it changes with almost every release. If there's a frequent case that you think we don't handle, feel free to suggest it!
As for your complicated play, my recommendation is to open your Settings. Under Gameplay there should be an option called "Show Phases", which always shows the "phase ladder". You can toggle this setting by hitting the 'L' key in game (for "ladder", I guess?). This will allow you to put a stop at the beginning of combat any time. Alternatively, you could enter full control before entering combat. Cool play! I doubt we'd make getting priority there by default any time soon (unless that sort of interaction becomes way more popular). #wotc_staff
Do you guys have remote employees? No one in their right mind is going to give me a signing/relo bonus big enough to cover the sunk cost of getting out of a brand new FHA mortgage, but the skills alignment there is top notch and I never thought a job at WotC would be in the cards for me.
I recommend applying if you think you're a good fit. #wotc_staff
Is it true that the older sets that were already in Arena don't work anymore with the current rule set?
No, those sets still work. The level of polish on them is lower than the bar we've had since open beta though. #wotc_staff
What about the logistics of bringing back older sets already on Arena? I'm dying for Amonkhet sealed/drafts. And as much as I'd love a mastery pass/God avatars/sleeves to go along with it, that takes extra resources beyond a set that was once on the platform. For the cards themselves, how much work would that be?
For rules correctness, the work for the sets that were in the Closed Beta is almost nothing. For getting the quality of those sets to match that of those that are in the live game, there's at least a couple weeks of work. But the big hurdle I think is in answering the question "what's the best way for players to get access to these cards", which is a reasonably tough question that happens to be entirely out of my domain. #wotc_staff
Interesting. As long as the GRP is parsing the entire card before acting I can't see the issue with simply redefining the target(s) when the Overload cost is paid, but that could just be a limitation in the language. Also the exiling creatures from play and/or graveyards already exists on many cards we currently have in arena, it's just mixing the yard and board that muddies the current way the GRP actions the card?
Either way your response is much appreciated. If you guys ever open an office in Toronto (Ontario, Canada, that is) then I'll be first in line to help you guys out ;)
It's not a matter of "redefining targets" - there ARE no targets when you cast the spell using Overload. Which has a lot of implications: target verification is gone when validating whether casting the spell this way is legal, it's skipped when we resolve the spell, it no longer is a spell that "could target" anything, and of course when we resolve the spell it no longer consults what targets were selected when applying the effects of the spell. Those are huge differences that can't reasonably be made on the fly; the right way to do this is to separately parse the "target" and "each" version of all the abilities that could be on the card, and somehow have casting the spell using overload use that alternate parse.
As for the Angel of Serenity, my point is that the sentence structure is novel. The behavior isn't new, I'd expect fixing this precise card to take a half-hour at most (probably going up to an hour to include writing tests). But again, this sort of thing adds up, and not every novel card is that simple. And, hey, I've certainly underestimated how hard to fix things are before :P #wotc_staff
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