The History of Magic: The Gathering Online
mtggoldfish.com
mtggoldfish.com
From MtG and its everchanging sets, significant expense, multiple formats and awful online experience/UI came Hearthstone. A card game that tens of millions have gotten into. It looks fantastic, takes no initial investment, and costs a fraction of what a MtGO deck costs to go from nothing to a top tier competitive deck.
Other examples:
- Roguelikes -> Diablo
- RTS -> Warcraft & Starcraft
- MMO -> World of Warcraft
- DotA/2 -> Heroes of the Storm
- Team Fortress/2 -> Overwatch (not yet released)
It's an interesting case study on a company that's succeeded in taking genres usually reserved for a niche audience and bringing them to the masses. It's not a company without flaws and missteps, but it's an interesting lesson in bringing existing markets to a wider audience. I wonder if there's something more general that can be gleaned from their strategy to products outside of games.
I wholeheartedly agree that Blizzard has not made one bad game yet. On the other hand, we don't need to hype up their success: several of their recent games have been kind of a ... flop, notably Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2. Both had really good sales on release (not necessary great on Blizzard scale), but the longevity is definitely nowhere near the long time plan they originally have. Starcraft 2 was supposed to become the king of Esport, yet LOL took the charge and firmly stay on top with a significant gap. Diablo 3 Real-money Auction house has to be shut down, and even the mighty WOW lost more than 3 millions subscribers in the last 2 quarters. Hearthstone, however is indeed an amazing success.
World of Warcraft is especially an interesting case, seeing that all the 2nd most popular MMO has never came anywhere near the popularity of WoW, it's questionable whether MMO is an actually viable genre in the long run. Note that most other MMO in 2nd place come and go in waves, never lasting more than a few months to a year. The one with the most consistent number of subscribers (and growing) is Eve online, which is firmly in a niche and does not even have 10% of wow players.
I would not call Diablo 3 a flop, by the way. The game has sold over 30 million copies, and the console releases and post-real-money-auction-house balance changes have supposedly made the game great (I'm not a fan of the genre so I don't know first-hand).
Anyway, no need to get into too many details on the particulars. They've had enough breakout successes and "unicorn" level games that there's something about the strategy and execution that sets Blizzard apart.
From what I can observe, it's some mix of the following:
- Simplifying down the core gameplay to something that players can grasp quickly, without compromising complexity (that can be safely ignored for the initial stages).
- Making the core gameplay loop fun and repeatable without being repetitive.
- Making players feel rewarded for playing and purchasing. (see Hearthstone's "won the game" screen and opening pack animations)
- Keeping the games deep enough so that even top, professional players never hit a skill cap.
Diablo 3 is an excellent game on both PC and Console. The balance changes that they made were a significant improvement, and I'd consider the current D3 one of Blizzard's great successes as gameplay goes. It greatly expanded on Diablo 2 with completely new and fresh mechanics that have been an absolute blast to explore as a gamer. It was a little too unforgiving before those balance changes, with bumpy progression and a difficult skill cliff, and overly reliant on the auction house (not intentionally in a gimmicky way; it's just how it turned out when AH prices dropped ridiculously low due to surplus supply). It's great now though. Diablo 3's artwork is beautiful, and to achieve it they developed an innovative new style which they presented at GDC 2012:
http://gdcvault.com/play/1015306/The-Art-of-Diablo
(This is what I mean by "fresh" by the way: something new and interesting that you haven't seen before, even in an industry that tries it all. The painterly style was definitely fresh, and even in the years since then I haven't seen an imitation. I suspect it's too technically challenging, requiring a custom engine and a different way of designing environments.)
I guess you can tell that I'm a fan. I think you hit on all the things that Blizzard does well: repeatable without repetitive, simple but deep with high skill cap, where you discover new things about the game mechanics yourself over time. Diablo 3 is especially fun because of its multiplayer coop. It's great to get the S.O. or friends in the same room and collaborate, especially on console.
Diablo 3 has continued to trickle out new content over time for free after its expansion, Reaper of Souls, which has further helped to improve balance and make it interesting. I wish they would release more content though, since the game by its nature is ultimately repetitive. (Hard to justify financially with no recurring subscription. I would be very happy to pay for one if it meant more content!) There are rumors that Blizzard will release another expansion, which I will be super excited to explore if they do. I personally feel it's one of the best games ever made, and definitely the best action RPG. I don't think this quality of design can be boiled down just to a list of things they do well. It's definitely something more than that. They have an internal compass of what it takes to make awesome games, and they're willing to wait and iterate on their development as long as it takes to get there.
Heroes of the Storm I'm skeptical of. It's much more directly a rip-off than any other Blizzard game, and I haven't seen much fresh or new come out of it yet.
I've played an insane amount of Diablo 1, an unreasonable amount of Diablo 2, but when it came to Diablo 3, I barely finished the game one time and I that was it. I had an okay time playing it. The overall experience was just "meh".
And it's not because I was sick of playing video games in general. I still played an unreasonable amount of Torchlight 1-2.
To me, Torchlight offered a better "Diablo" experience than Diablo 3.
I know that a lot of thought went into making Diablo 3 playable beyond the end of the game. Online auction and all that. But it's hard to want to play more of a game when the game is barely enjoyable in the first playthrough.
By the way, they have substantially changed gear drop balance since launch. Back at launch, item stats were completely randomized, so it might take a lot of grinding before you'd find the +mainstat attribute that you want. One area where I think Blizzard excels by making hard choices in game design is recognizing when "the game essentially makes this option mandatory", and then taking it out to improve the fun. So for example, Blizzard has been removing or redesigning castable buffs from WOW due to the theory that having to cast these repeatedly is not helping anyone enjoy the game. So now those effects are just built into the classes instead. Similarly with Diablo 3, they embraced the idea that most players will see +mainstat is simply being necessary for any gear to be viable, and they altered the drop mechanic so that it's virtually guaranteed as a property on most gear. No longer do Barbarians and Demon Hunters see +int gear.
This was part of the path to eliminating the auction house. Previously, getting the right combination of every stat you needed at high level required a lot of RNG across a marketplace. Now, D3's item generation has been redone in some subtle and clever way. I think they are doing something akin to what Valve did with the AI director in Left 4 Dead. That is, D3 tracks how frequently good items are dropping, that seem like an upgrade for you, and makes sure they are in fact dropping regularly. It ensures you get a legendary item drop every few hours. (Yes, that frequent! The balance is different now so that that's not insane.) Thus players can expect to get frequent upgrades and regular new gear sets just by playing solo. This is a big improvement for casual players.
One where where I'd criticize D3 was elements of unintentional bathos. For example, the player character's interactions with Azmodan and Belial definitely veer into bathos territory. Azmodan is supposed to be one of the great evils of the world, what he says amounts to little more than, "I'll get you next time, wascally wabbit!" The dialog there is not great, but the story and graphics are fun overall.
I've recently started playing Torchlight 2 as well, but haven't gotten very far. How does it compare to D3? Or rather, what would you say it excels it where D3 stumbles?
That doesn't seem to be the case. Wow has 5.6 million players, but it's followed by a few games with 4-5 million players, and a number with >1 million. I'm not sure if that's just current players, or a running total.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_massively_multip...
To put it in perspective, WoW had 5 expansions, selling at $40-60 each at average of 10millions sales each (and you have to buy some of the previous one too), on top of the subscriptions and it's probably pulling in the minimum of $1-2 billions yearly revenue. It's not even a close call to the 2nd place ...
No trading - cards are bound to the account if I have card A and my friend has card B we can't swap cards with each other.
RNG - apparently Hearthstone is more RNG influenced then MtG the argument being this makes Hearthstone less skill and more luck based then MtG.
The thing I find most objectionable about Magic Online is having to duplicate your paper collection - which essentially means paying for the same cards twice, which is not something I'm all that keen to do. Not an issue for sealed tournaments like drafting but I'm not keen to invest in an electronic constructed format.
Exactly. Not being able to redeem your digital collection out to paper cards means you are completely at the mercy of WotC for the value of your cards.
Um, no. Yes, my physical MtG cards vary in price, but unless WotC actually reprints or bans a card, they tend to stay in a fairly predictable range.
I could come up with many more examples but the true proof to me is that of the loyal consumer. I know of no one who has only played one blizzard game. If you play WC3, you instantly get a visceral feeling that you can trust their other games to be equally good. Even decades later, as Hearthstone reflects, Blizzards DNA is still shining through. So it is with Apple and their products[0]. Though no one and nothing is perfect, you can sense the maniacal focus behind the scenes.
[0] If you consider the years where they've had proper leadership. (i.e. disregard the pepsi years)
It's a disgrace. And should be a software case study.
PS: been playing MtG since 1995
Even with a properly managed team, moving 20+ years of edge cases and odd interactions for a turing complete game is going to be difficult. The fact that they need to come up with a usable ui on top of that only adds to the suffering. Its not unsurprising that what they currently have can only be considered working in the most generous and utilitarian sense.
Don't mistake me for covering for Worth: a top quality group led by management who knew what they were doing would be much farther in both correctness and UX.
And still, it would make a great case of analysis... I see it as one of the biggest -and saddest- failures in Digital Gaming (if not the greatest), of the last 20 years.
On the other hand, the actual cards just work. The hard part for them, it seems, is "operating a game that more than a few hundred people want to play", not the rules engine.
And that's the problem. Everybody sees these as "edge cases". And that leads to failure. You can't simplify the back end engine, each card needs to be fully general and you need to carry around all its characteristics. At that point, you can execute all the actions you need because edge cases aren't. But, if you take even a single shortcut, it ripples outward and causes bugs everywhere.
And, the less said about the GUI designers, the better. The GUI is without a doubt the worst gaming GUI I have ever experienced.
I have no idea what is going on over there. People had to have been throwing money hand over fist to allow them to fail so badly and keep going.
It frustrates me to no end that we don't have anything playable on the web or all over mobile. DotP and Duels Origins don't count. I feel that this type of thing should have been figured out.
I also wonder what internal conversations were going on about the Hearthstone ascendant. I keep hearing that they're not trying to do the same thing and that they're not truly competitors but I see a whole generation of kids and adults that have moved on to that. I like the deep play of MtG but Hearthstone just feels holistically better.
Reports have indicated that Magic Online is around 17% of Magic's revenue ($43 million out of $250 million).
I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better, but it still isn't cross-platform or system friendly. It's a shame, because the basic game shone through the cruddy front-end and the servers actually enforced the rules well.
From what I've read, the recent versions of MTGO are worse. Yes, worse than the client made in 2002, with fewer features and a worse UI.
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/2gz8k2/an_average...
There was one day where v4 was down, so I got v3 to try to keep playing. For all the people saying v4 is a step down, I want a hit of whatever it is you are on. v3 seemed worse than apprentice, which I am pretty sure I played on windows 95 when it first came out. I think the commentary on features/UI is almost completely dominated by people who are curmudgeonly and view any change as bad. I can't really speak too much to previous version stability, but right now things are good.
Oh god no.
Yeah, version 1 was bad, (Leaping Lizards was clearly in over their heads) so Wizards stepped in and made everything utterly worse.
First they made a half-assed attempt at a "version 2", which they bungled so badly they had to actually shut the game down while they recovered the pieces. But this, rather than convincing them that they hadn't a clue how to write or operate MTGO, instead convinced them that they needed to double down. For version 3, they decided rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Sort of an unholy amalgamation of second-system effect, NIH syndrome, and the coding skills you'd expect from a company that had never made a computer game before.
Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad, stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2. It took them 5 years to launch it, more to make it playable, and when it was done, it was so bad I stopped player literally because I couldn't stand the client any more.
Apparently there's a version 4 now, but it's basically just 3.1; they didn't fix any of the core issues. If they could bring back something that looked and worked like version 2, I might start playing again, but really, every version they released was some form of pathetically bad. There's literally a half dozen half-assed shareware deck builders from 15 years ago that had better UIs than any MTGO client has ever had. :(
Even before Hearthstone, I used to wonder what might have been if Wizards had signed a deal with a "real" developer like Blizzard to build and run the game properly. With the launch of Hearthstone, I think we know. Oh well.
I know it happens, I know why, but it's still so amazing...
From the players' side, v3 was just much, much, much worse than v2. But I'm pretty sure WotC realized that. I've heard, though I can't personally attest, that the reason they stuck with v3 was that v2 ran on a single server, and they didn't know how to fix it.
One of the many huge problems with v3, however, is that they opted to combine a complete rewrite of the server with a complete rewrite of the client AND a complete UI overhaul.
I don't know what the wire protocol for v2 looked like (probably crap; everything else was), but I struggle to imagine a scenario where they couldn't have rewritten the server code to allow scalability without needing to touch the client, or at least with minimal changes. (And let's not forget that v3 scaled like crap too, at least at first.)
Mind you, Wizard's wouldn't be the first (or the thousandth) team to inherit a crappy code base, throw up their hands, announce that they simply couldn't possibly salvage it, and ask for permission to rewrite it from scratch. It's just most successful places learn to say "absolutely not" well before they're operating at the scale Wizards is. (Or they fail miserably and go under.) I think what makes MTGO so fascinating is that's it's one of the worst software development disasters I've ever seen, and yet it's still a success...of sorts.
I gave up in college after I learned that Magic the Gathering is actually kinda expensive.
http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Do-You-Believe-In-Magic-Onli...
Our game, from the start, was built to: 1) playable from the web with no client (1mb flash, I suppose) 2) bi-directional socket based to avoid polling and be snappy 3) server is scalable horizontally 4) adding complex cards and rules will not require a client update and would be easy.
We managed to complete all these goals and produce what I still consider to be our magnum opus of software development.
The scaling worked by having socket servers provide the end-point to the client, and then behind the socket servers were chat services, game services, trading services, card building services and deck services. So, lets say we had 4 socket servers running: you and I might end up on different socket servers, but we could still play against each other because all the socket servers are doing is relaying your commands to a game server that is running our game. In order to scale, we just add more servers. (Also, if we get disconnected you can reconnect easily. Also, spectating is easy.)
My friend came up with the idea of making the Flash front-end use generic commands. So instead of the server telling the front-end "Ship A attacks Ship B for 5 damage" it says "Draw a red arrow from Card #123 to Card #456 and display a red number 5". This allowed us to make cards that did all kinds of crazy things without having to do anything to the client. To implement a card that does damage to all of a player's ships you just have to update the server to send the command "Draw a red arrow from Card #123 to Card #456, Card #789, etc...".
Finally, the core game engine on the server was an event loop. Thus, making new cards and rules was super easy because all you had to do in code was say "I want this new card to subscribe to the Player Draw Card event, and in that event code: "if drawer is this.owner, draw twice the amount as regular and then this.sendtograve." I was continually blown away by what crazy cards we could make up and how little code it took to implement.
As we were creating this game our day jobs became more and more serious and when we finally had the final version complete we both agreed to burn the code and resources to DVD and put it on the shelve. The idea of starting a new journey in marketing and building a company was overwhelming. (Just three months ago I got it all running in the cloud with very little effort for nostalgias sake).
I still think about pinging WOTC and asking if they'd like to see what we have and maybe make use of it. I knew WOTC had an online version of MOTG but I had NO idea it had so many rough patches or I would have been down in front of their office with a sign asking them to look at what we have.
If anyone from WOTC or other would like to see or talk about the game, feel free to message me.
Add on poor server stability that causes players who paid to participate in events to get kicked out and loose due to the issues and the experience is horrible.
It`s a credit to the quality of the card game that such a crappy experience is even played at all.