GAME UPDATE HIGHLIGHTS

• MTG Arena Gets Social – Our Friends List lets you gather your friends and easily challenge them to matches!
• Pre-orders for Theros Beyond Death: Multiple ways for you to escape your fate. See more details below under "Store"

SOCIAL

FRIENDS LIST

Developer's Note: The next time we talked about Friends List we wanted it be absolutely certain that it would in-game and playable. ... and yes, it's finally here! Since the November update, we’ve been refactoring services to make sure Friends List can scale to meet player expectations. For context, were were looking at a system success rate (sending, receiving, accepting friends) from about 80% last November to 99.5% at scale (scale, meaning a heavy use of this system during peak gam...

It is probably no longer available because resurrecting months old threads is frowned upon. Sorry about that!

@Zlehtnoba:

@PlayMtGA#60713:

@Zlehtnoba:

Rules engine and card coding are the trivial part.

Only someone, who never saw rules, can say...

I read the rules through, when I started playing, in 1998 :grinning:
Rules are a formal system. That is easy, compared to what Lexie mentioned in one of her replies: making sure the interface is intuitive and appealing for problem cards, and checking that some non-foreseen interaction in code does not break the game in corner cases, or slows down the client too much. Plus exceptions for the autotapper and priority passing for high-impact cards (like Wicked Wolf and Legion Warboss), and so on and so on.
(And all the cards are already coded, for MtGO. All the text, oracle, everything, proofread. And for new sets, there must be procedures in place to convert between the internal design database, to printers, to MtGO...

They will not be available on December 12, sorry about that! It will be much later.

@Siyano#45342:

from archiel (is big post) to WotC_Lexie saying "That's not how any of this works, unfortunately. I wish it was that easy! "
Am I Missing something in coding? I mean the moment you did an instant shock type card and a sorcery one, you basically did the coding for basically ALL deal damage card, you just need to change the number.
Same for everything else, vanilla creature, creature with only evergreen ability, etc...
So unless they code very badly putting more card should not ask so much of work as it seem.
So I wonder what is the real reason? obviously money, they have no reason to do all they sets in few week

A 2/2 zombie may not take a lot of time, but consider cards like Finale of Promise. That is a complicated card to begin with+you have to make sure it correctly interacts with every other card+behaves correctly in specific situations+interacts with the stack correctly+the visuals...

@archiel:

@TopoftheStackMTG:

They haven’t hired enough people to keep up with the demand. The devs are working very hard but it feels like nothing is happening. Wizards needs to support this game more. They are neglecting it probably to make more money off MTGO and Paper.

On other hand people claim that they're investing and supporting Arena too much and that it's hurting Paper and well... MTGO was already undead for years, so nothing new there...
Anyway... the biggest problem about new/old sets is implementing mechanics properly, once that's done for a single card that has it, then all that's left is messing about with resources and values, which can easily be done within a week by a single person if all resources are ready. And most mechanics were already implemented just haven't been named. Let's take Ravnica sets for example, what's the difference between Afterlife and Doomed Dissenter's effect, that ...

@TopoftheStackMTG:

They haven’t hired enough people to keep up with the demand. The devs are working very hard but it feels like nothing is happening. Wizards needs to support this game more. They are neglecting it probably to make more money off MTGO and Paper.

Our devs do work very hard, and a LOT gets done. There is never a dull moment around here haha. Unfortunately adding cards isn't a simple task, let alone "problem" cards that take a while to implement.

That being said, we're hiring! :smile: https://company.wizards.com/content/jobs.