Hey all! A couple things to discuss here. First off, the decrease in packs. This was a typo on our part and has been fixed in the article, whoops! You will receive 30 Ikoria packs, not 25. Second, the gem decrease. This is intentional, due to the set duration being a lot shorter. Theros was unintentionally more generous (w...
Read moreHey all! A couple things to discuss here. First off, the decrease in packs. This was a typo on our part and has been fixed in the article, whoops! You will receive 30 Ikoria packs, not 25. Second, the gem decrease. This is intentional, due to the set duration being a lot shorter. Theros was unintentionally more generous (w...
Read moreHey folks! There's still a little time to go before we reveal anything about Ikoria. You'll see us talking on our social channels and Daily MTG leading up to the reveal, so it'll be hard to miss when it does happen. Until then, stay tuned.
Hey! Mishy here from Wizards.
Apply to the Creator Program beta on Stream Elements. That is your first step if you are in North America. If you are not in NA, reach out to your region's community team via Twitter!
Thanks!
-M
My streamer friend has been in email communication with WotC, after only one of the 10 codes they received for the 'stream 20 hours' challenge actually worked. After they messaged why 9/10 of the codes failed to work, they were told they'd reached the 10 code per account limit.
Thats not good, I've sent a request in to take a deeper look at the codes to make sure this is not the case, and if so, to fix! -Mishy
Hello! Mishy here hopping onto the Community Team's Reddit account (I can't believe they let me have access to this!)
Anyway, we have two different types of codes that are being rewarded in the Creator Program. Personal codes and community codes. Personal codes are gem codes, and these are meant to be redeemed on your personal account. A limit of 10 redemption should not be correct, but may have happened on accident. Thanks for reporting that during this beta as we are testing things, we'll get that fixed!
The community codes are ICRs, and those are limited at 10 redemptions per account (we are looking at renewing the 10 redemptions every set release), these are for community giveaway items. So, if you are not giving those away and are redeeming to your own account, you will have a 10 code cap.
Hope this helps, and again, thanks for reporting so that we can work on making this program better every day!
Is the current state of the friends list and direct challenge seen as acceptable social functions for a game in 2020? I was hoping they would be updated as the system seems rushed and basic.
Friends list is certainly only a start with friend messaging coming very soon. Direct Challenge keeps evolving as we add more functionality to it...starting tomorrow in fact with some draft-friendly changes.
We're getting to the basics, but we want to take it further through 2020.
- Cao
One thing that I think would be pretty cool is if I could buy codes for gems in Arena from my LGS. That way I could sell old cards I have lying around from drafts and use store credit to purchase gems on Arena. My LGS would get extra business, Arena would get extra business, and I'd be able to get more value out of my old cards that I'm not currently using. Win-win-win.
We have been working with our fellow WPN group on a variety of experiments around linking the two aspects together. Recently, we had in-store events that awarded Arena sleeves. We learned from that event and others like it, and we're using those learnings for new experiments in 2020.
- Cao
Thanks for the answer and the follow-up.
Thanks!
This is probably going to get buried but I was wondering if you could explain the feedback buttons that we occasionally get at the end of matches. The ones that ask how you enjoyed the match. What kind of data were you hoping to get from them and what kind of data have you gotten so far?
Yes, by far the #1 correlation with a person saying if they had fun is… if they won :)
More seriously, it let's us look for trends across events and match types. For example, with the perf problems from the summer, correlating the surveys and the frame rates we were seeing let us understand who was experiencing better games as we worked. We can also look at deck match-ups, roping, and other game behaviors that trend based on the survey.
It's a simple question, but it gives us context for other data.
- Cao
One of those learnings was that it’s challenging to keep our draft bots performing well when the draft format is always available. When we were using this rotating schedule (pre-M20), we were able to keep the bots in better shape.
So it's not a consumer participation issue, it's a technology issue? If I'm reading it right.
It's actually a bit of both. Better bots means better drafts. At the same time, we saw more engagement with variety of play. Specifically, more folks came back and played regularly when the scheduled was varied.
- Cao
I would personally like a free queue as well, but limited daily rewards really puts a damper on that concept.
If that is the alternative, a paid queue might be better, but it would be nice if the 'Brawl Hall" at least gave some rewards beyond the single card. Paying 10k just for the privilege of playing feels extremely bad; even just some minor further rewards would reduce the sting there.
When we were looking at an entry fee for Brawl (to balance it with Standard), we saw that 10k was about 40% of the rewards an average player would earn over 4 weeks of play. We are continually analyzing the usage at that price point. So far, about 75% of the number of Wednesday brawlers are playing Brawler’s Guild Hall all the time. We are still looking for other answers that maintain the game’s balance. One thing we haven’t tweaked yet is changing the daily rewards for Brawl. Also, a Brawl-specific Mastery Pass is something that we’ve been talking about together here, but it isn’t on the roadmap.
- Cao
Is there any plan to connect paper magic with arena? The idea of buying a booster pack and getting some sort of in game currency with arena would be a great way to connect the two ecosystems.
We meet weekly with the tabletop team to talk about this. There so many cool opportunities we are exploring. How would you like to see it?
Seriously, we want ideas because this is one of the major things MTG can offer that's pretty unique in the CCG space. So let's hear them!
- Cao
Agreed, people seem to love this new format but its growth is stifled by this entry fee. I honestly believe this would be the most popular way to play on MTGA if it didn't feel like WotC was trying to prevent people from playing it.
We know there’s a lot of folks who love Brawl. Arena is for Brawlers, but it’s also for a lot of other player types. If we made Brawl available 24/7 with full daily rewards, it would impact other players by shifting the focus away from the other experiences we offer. And if Brawl became the focus, the fundamentals of Arena’s economy would have to change, and players may feel forced to play Brawl to play most efficiently.
- Cao
Read moreHi. Here as a "tool" developer, with a question that's a bit more geeky.
A few months ago, ya'll pushed a change that completely changes the log file format that various tools rely on to get game information. This caused a lot of churn and required us to make many updates in a very short amount of time to restore functionality.
You've started including sample "log files" in your patch notes on occasion, which is nice, but leads into my question:
Will WotC consider putting out public "API" documentation for the log file, and the various events within, as well as keep it up to date when patches change the format?
Right now, to develop a tool, someone must start by reverse engineering the logs, or by building off of someone's already existing work. With a publicly available and updated API and documentation, developers of tooling would have a much easier time maintaining their applications, spending less time worrying about updates rand...
We love that folks are developing tools using our logs. The recent change was made to improve performance because we were logging way too much. With that change, we also implemented QA steps to verify the log quality and make sure the changes get clearly communicated. We have talked about an API a lot, but it isn't on our 2020 roadmap.
- Cao
Are older sets eventually coming entirely along with their draft formats?
Our goal for 2020 is to get the most relevant backlist cards into Arena to support Pioneer and Historic (both for constructed and limited). There are a lot of cards that don't meet that bar, so we're waiting on those to give dev time to the more important ones. We'll see over the next year how remastering shakes out and go from there.
- Cao
Any idea of when Arena is coming to Mac?
Last time we talked about it, we said it would arrive after Epic Games Store. That's still the plan. It's just not going to be "soon" after. Catalina (the latest macOS) requires 64-bit, which MTG Arena doesn’t support yet. So there’s background work to do first.
- Cao
Read moreMy take for the question on the ranked draft schedule change.
The mentioned drop in participation is indeed curious. I assume it means lower popularity of draft overall, not just the latest set. And then here's what would be interesting:
- How big was the drop? How it was measured, in absolute values or relative to the game population?
- During this period of having two drafting sets in parallel, important things happened: a) Brawl and Historic ranked release; b) rotation — people may have opted to buy more packs and get cards quicker than usual; c) Game release — more complete newcomers may naturally mean lower relative draft popularity. What made you think the paralysis of choice impacted participation more than these things?
- They say, bot preferences created an unpleasant draft "meta" both for M20 (with bows) and even more for Eldraine (with mill), did you consider this as the reason for the popularity drop?
- What does worry me is that...
We take a lot of data into consideration. We have both a WotC BI team and an Arena data team analyzing and acting. Ultimately, we're making the best decisions based on what we see.
We waited 6 months to get lots and lots of data. And we also took some good learnings from Eldraine on how to better update our draft bots. The bottom line is, it's in our best interest to give you lots of reasons to play Draft. So this is not a decision we make lightly and will monitor things very closely.
One of those learnings was that it’s challenging to keep our draft bots performing well when the draft format is always available. When we were using this rotating schedule (pre-M20), we were able to keep the bots in better shape.
- Cao
It was recently announced that there was an outsource of some Arena dev work to another company, are you able to say what they will be working on and what does this open up the internal team to work on? Should we expect to see more major features roll out in the coming months?
We didn't make any major changes to who is managing Arena's development. We are working with Skybox Labs to help bring the game to more platforms. And we are working with R&D to make sure our Pioneer and Historic play experiences are really fun.
Should you expect more features rolling out in the coming months? Yep 😊
- Cao
Can you please explain the rationale behind the 10,000 gold entry fee for the brawladays event. In addition, is this something your team plans to keep in place long term?
Chris Cao here borrowing a community account.
To answer Brawl, we need to go back in time a bit. We originally built MTG Arena for Standard players. Now we're moving beyond Standard, and that means going places which aren't exactly balanced for our Standard-focused rewards structure. That means we need to experiment to find the right balance, which is what we're doing with Brawl.
We haven't found the right balance between availability/entry fees/rewards with Brawl. That's why we're testing all three right now. Direct Challenge play is outside of daily rewards and the most social and casual way to play Magic in the game currently. The Wednesday Brawl queue is testing availability balance. Brawl Hall is testing earn vs rewards balance. In fact the 10K cost was set after simulating earn rate vs consumption rate of an average player. We haven't gone down the path of a permanent queue with no entry fee that limits daily rewards, but it is something we're exploring. Wh...
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