WotC_Jay

Nothing to say there now other than that we still feel good about that “Summer 2020” timing. Also, as a Mac gamer since around 1986, I get it. We hope to have more to say here before too long.

We’re working with NVIDIA to ensure Arena stays available to players here.

Because we don’t want players to feel like they’re “losing out” on their constructed rank if they want to play both. If they were separate, a player that wanted to climb the ranks would need to pick one at the start of each season and stick with that. We think it’s better to allow them to go back and forth however they want, making progress on the same rank the whole time.

I can vouch that this is the same shawt from that account, and that he works on Arena with me. And also that he plays a lot of silly jank.

The refund process is now complete; anyone who bought at the 80% discount got refunded gold/gems to make up the difference to the 91% discount.

Working on it. There’s actually a few tech bits we need to do this (lands work differently than styles in various ways), but it’s something we’d like to do.

Likely, yes. If we do take it away, we would refund any wildcards spent.

Not sure how this happened, but it's a bug. We're investigating now, but 91% is the intended discount. We will run an automated process within a few days to refund the difference to anyone who purchased at the higher price.

On the Mastermind Emblem, do not craft this. It's a bug that it is available, and it is not usable in any format. It's an emblem we have been testing that you'll see in an upcoming event. (We implement all of these internally as cards.) It's not useful in any way in game.

Yes, do not craft this. It's a bug that it is available, and it is not usable in any format. It's an emblem we have been testing that you'll see in an upcoming event. (We implement all of these internally as cards.)

This should be fixed in the next update.

Ya, Offspring’s Revenge was the inspiration here.

Should be fixed in our May build; didn't make it in time for this one

It’s a bug; we’ll get it fixed soon.

Awesome find. Awesome bug. No plan to fix; it’s just more fun this way.

"I cannot possibly estimate what would lead to acceptable queue times, because I have no data on how many people are looking for a draft at a given time."

Until a few days ago, we didn't have any of that data for player drafts either :)

This is an interesting question, with both queue time & gameplay implications. Queue time questions we can sort out as we get more data, but the gameplay questions are stickier. In short: one of the key virtues of Draft is the variability from pod to pod. The more similarly each pod you're in drafts, the more repetitive the format will feel.

This is something we talk and think about regularly. For now we feel like non-matchmade is the overall better experience, but we'll continue to monitor and discuss here.

Just posted this in another thread, but we’re aware and looking at this. For player draft, we didn’t need these logs for our debugging purposes, but we understand that they’re also used for trackers, and we like the value those bring their users.

We’re looking to get that fixed; no definite timeline to give at this time. We put logs in for our debugging purposes, and in this case we’re getting our info in a different way. But we get that these are useful for trackers, etc. and we want to support that too.

Oh, good point! See my other comment in this thread for more info about why, but the first launch with this update could still be long. Shouldn't be any long updates after that.

Sure thing:
Background: Arena has a ton of different assets to handle all the cards, frames, indicators, VFX, etc. One of the things we need to do is ensure that none of these assets get corrupted, either during download or because of random weirdness with the hard drive. We used to check all the assets for consistency at every startup, but as the asset size continued to grow, this became too costly. Now Arena validates the assets on download, assumes they're good as they reside on-disk, but if it encounters any assets errors during gameplay it will flag itself to startup in "safe mode" next time. This means it will re-scan the assets to make sure none have been corrupted, then re-download any that are. This (as well as several other things) occurs while the client is saying "Checking for Updates".

The bug: In the original IKO release, there was an asset error that could be thrown in certain common circumstances (I think it was viewing a split-card). This didn't cause...