Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

There have been a lot of good suggestions here. Familiarity with the cards will definitely help. For the timer, direct/friend challenge games and not games against Sparky don’t have a timer.

On general assistance for the visually impaired, please let me know more about what would help you here (and the things currently there that help; your comment in sound cues is already making me think about ways we might be able to make them more useful). I’m really interested in anything you could share on this (either comment here or PM me if you’d rather). We definitely want to make the game accessible to all players, but it’s hard/expensive to get good insight into every different case.

Glad you’re enjoying the game, and please tell me more about how we can help.

Hey, glad you're enjoying it!

That mostly matches our internal data from earlier today: https://twitter.com/MTG_Arena/status/1205570343898759169

I see no lie here.

For sure. We use a fair amount of object pooling, both with GameObjects (like cards) to avoid instantiation costs and with Unity-agnostic data types (like Lists) to avoid allocations.

This person knows what's up! We've had a few of the event handler one. :D

DID SOMEONE SAY NERD OUT?!

I can do that. :D

SoneEv is pretty much correct with their explanation.

As a programming team gets more familiar with the problem they are solving, they learn better and better ways to approach it. It's always a careful balance between adding new features and "cleaning up" what you've done in the past. Too much cleanup and you stop making progress. Too little and you start moving too slowly make any progress.

Another manifestation of this is when you start hitting scaling limits. For example, Arena has a lot of rich visual effects and situational graphical elements. We have an elaborate set of rules for which one to play in a given situation. Hand-coding is inefficient because it's hard to maintain and limits the work to only engineers. So we have a flexible data system to specify all the rules. Our first system was fine when we had a few hundred visual assets and a dozen variables that affected them. But now we have thousa...

Even the determination of "is default food" is nontrivial, let alone "somehow worse". With a cursory look, I can count 21 different fields on a card that could somewhat-reasonably differ from Food to Food, and that's not even counting stuff like "can't block" (wouldn't you be upset if this system autoselected your normal [[Gingerbrute]] and not the one that's [[Trapped in a Tower]]?)

As for the other scenarios, those are places that we have indeed put in the work to do heuristics for selection (some of which will disagree with a strategic situation!). For Proliferate, we have a simple "good/bad" list for counters, and the rule is "if it's mine, preselect it if it has any good counters on it" and "if it's my opponent's, preselect it if it has a bad counter on it and no good counters on it."

I don't disagree with you that we could improve some play experiences by increasing the number of places where we propose automatic selections. I do think it'll be a worse experie...

No, because "least special" is a pretty undefined concept :P. There may come a day when we use some heuristics to propose fast-and-loose recommended selections for various prompts, but our current philosophy is that it's bad player experience for SOME prompts to do stuff like that and others not to. #wotc_staff

Before we asked you "Do you want to sacrifice a food" before having you select a food. Now we just have you click a food or decline, saving a click. You still have to click your food if it's the only food you have (unless it's autotap eating it). #wotc_staff