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I want to start off by saying that I love Magic, and I love Arena. As a longtime Mac user for professional reasons, I'd been hoping that a native client would come out since Arena was first announced. I was thrilled when it finally launched, but the reality of using it has been extremely disappointing.
(Also, please no comments along the lines of "just play on a PC"; that's not constructive.)
Members of the WotC dev team post here all the time. Just now, I saw responses from them to posts about the "revealed cards become hidden again" bug, and about receiving wildcard repayments when cards become banned. Other recent responses have been about a bug with Tolarian Kraken, the deckbuilder, and the UX of the post-game "Did you enjoy this?" survey. I think it's safe to say that most of us really appreciate these responses, since they let us know our issues are seen and being addressed. I know none of the devs owe us their time outside of making the game, but I'm hoping that since there's so much precedent they'll be willing to join the conversation about the Mac client as well.
Every day there are several posts here about how the Mac client gets stuck validating assets every time it's opened, and several posts about how once you finally load into the main menu, the client will often crash more or less immediately. Sometimes you can play a game and it'll crash right after that, sometimes it'll crash when you click anything from the main menu at all. The validating assets screen is particularly frustrating, because while for a handful of people it only takes a few seconds to clear, it seems like for most of us having this issue it takes anywhere from 5-10 minutes. It appears to happen across a variety of hardware and OS combinations. (For me, I'm on a 2017 iMac running 10.13.6. It takes about five minutes to get through the validating assets screen.)
Personally, until these issues are solved, I've been playing on GeForce Now, which starts up in less than a minute and has never crashed for me. I know not everyone has that luxury. I submitted a support ticket (with logs!) about the validating assets problem on June 25th when the Mac client launched, and that ticket still hasn't received any response.
I'm sympathetic -- software development is hard! -- but I (and the other Mac users here) would really love if the devs could speak to this. I'm certainly not expecting anyone to say "Yes, it'll be fixed in an hour!", but any light you could shed would really be appreciated. Are you aware of these issues? Are there any resources currently being devoted to the Mac client? Can we maybe look forward to improvements in next week's scheduled update? Thanks for your time and your hard work.
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