Limited Resources 249 – Block Structure, VRD, and MTGO Compensation

This week on Limited Resources Marshall and Brian talk about a bevy of subjects including the newly announced block structure for Magic, Vintage Rotisserie Draft, and MTGO Compensation. 

 

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Your Hosts: Marshall Sutcliffe and Brian Wong

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18 thoughts on “Limited Resources 249 – Block Structure, VRD, and MTGO Compensation

  1. The major issue with Brian’s plan “You can’t submit twice for the same bug” is that they might as well just hand every player 3 packs straight off, as the message rockets round the ‘net “Draft Floodtide, sideboard it in=>one-time 3 Free Packs”.
    Also, what about when you get that card as your last card because everyone’s passing it because bugged (and obviously they’ve already submitted their report and claimed their 3 free packs). That’s no more avoidable than the login bug.

    • For me, Floodtide Serpent highlights some big problems with MTGO and how bugs are handled.

      I expected Floodtide Serpent to be fixed long ago, but it’s been broken for months, and that seems ridiculous. It’s a playable card that takes advantage of enchantments in an enchantment-heavy set, so it would have seen play if it were working. As it is, many of us have seen it in play and may have won or lost games or matches because of its bug, so the integrity of drafts has been compromised. While the ideal solution would be to have issues like this fixed in a more timely fashion, I’d also like if Wizards let us know the status and estimated fix time as well. Maybe fixes are reported somewhere, but it seems like I stumble on most of them rather than finding them easily on the splash screen, like other games I play.

  2. Other people than me have problems with the radio-LR-show stopping every 2 minutes ?
    Has been happening to me the last 1-2 weeks.

  3. Question for Marshall and Brian:

    Pack 1, pick 1 comes down to Kird Chieftain and Lightning Strike being the two best cards in the pack.

    I took the Kird Chieftain because I have plenty of time to build around it at this point in the draft. I usually get the Kird Ape cards passed to me late in the draft when it’s too difficult to splash for them.

    However, I feel like passing the Lightning Strike sends much stronger signals that red is open to the person on my left.

    Whats your pick in this situation?

  4. I’m not done with the podcast yet, but I wanted to offer my 2ยข on the whole debate about the compensation.

    First and foremost, I’ll note that part of my issue with them not offering compensation based on the whole “2 ticket cost” argument that Marshall was making is that there are multiple ways to pay for entry into most events.

    To use the restaurant analogy Marshall used in the show about showing up with a restaurant with your bag that has a steak, a salad, etc., are you trying to say that this should only apply if your entry is 3 packs + tix? Because what if you paid a straight 15 tickets entry instead of the product + tix entry? Because that’s a whole lot closer to walking into the restaurant and ordering their food and not having it come out as you want, and wanting your money back.

    The second is that there should absolutely be a “repeat offender” penalty with some of the situations. I don’t know what the specific bug you were talking about was, but during the release of MED2, I found an absolutely exploitable bug with the card Barbed Sextant. It’s a cheap color fixer artifact that “sort of” cantrips, meaning it used the old “draw a card at the beginning of the next turn’s upkeep” verbiage.

    The issue popped up when you used the sextant to pay the cost of a spell, and then hit “undo” while still in the process of casting the spell (IE – Click the spell to play it, start to pay the mana using the sextant that sacrifices like Chromatic Sphere, and then click “undo” or “alt+u” in the old client). It wasn’t immediately clear what would happen, but say you did used and unused the Sextant like 7 times while casting the same spell.

    What would happen is you eventually play the spell (or not), pass the turn, and draw 7 cards during the opponent’s upkeep.

    I used this in a draft, and ultimately conceded to my opponent in the first round, which was the only thing that saved me from an MTGO ban. After talking with my opponent, I started to feel pretty bad, because *I* was robbing him of his entry fee. Sure, he might have been able to report it to get compensation, but the interaction destroyed his experience.

    There are rules against exploiting bugs in the player agreement we all just scroll down and click “Agree” whenever MTGO updates, and if someone repeatedly “exploits” a bug they know about for personal gain, even in a case in which “no one was hurt”, they should be penalized. I’m not advocating banning people who do it, but I would absolutely deny them compensation after repeated compensation requests for the same bug that is based around card interaction (Not something like the login issue). It effectively amounts to cheating, and the game doesn’t need more cheating going on.

    However, I absolutely think that people should be able to file for compensation for a relatively meaningless issue that pops up for card interaction, and here’s why I feel that way:

    People who play MODO push money in one way or another into the game, and it should work. The fact that the new client has so many bugs is more indication that it was not ready when we were all forced onto it. So many things have been broken from Ponder to Tangle Wire to Gifts Ungiven and others. Bugs that, by and large, were not present in the previous version.

    I’m not railing against the new client, per se, but it is absolutely the responsibility of WotC to provide us a functional client, which means that the card interactions should work. If they don’t, that’s on them, and the players should not be effectively punished because of this. It doesn’t matter to me if the bug caused you to lose, or it was largely insignificant, and you go on and win. The bug is there, and it shouldn’t be. Having to fulfill compensation requests should provide them incentive to actually fix the cards that are the issue, rather than just deny compensation, leave the bug in place, and keep on keeping on.

  5. Gotta say I agree with Marshall about the Shotgun Lotus coverage guys. It’s great to see them having a good time and I like the assumed higher level the coverage uses. But when I got back from dinner the day they were streaming and one of the commentators was out-of-it drunk, it was just not as much fun for me to watch anymore. Yeah, okay, half of the twitch chat was egging him on and as he said, they’re doing the stream for fun. But when he’s spending half the time staring blankly at the monitor, I almost felt I was better off just muting the stream. I was there to watch magic.

  6. Wotc was paying out 12 packs total regardless, but because the person who experienced the bug won wotc can wipe their hands clean of their error. Hypothetically, if this bug only happened to players who ended up winning, wotc would basically be saying that the game is functioning satisfactorily and nothing is wrong, rather than taking responsibility and offering compensation for the ruined draft experiences. Perhaps 6 tickets comp if you win at least 3 packs.

  7. Pingback: MTGNW | Limited Resources 249

  8. I know by the end of the MTGO compensation part, Marshall ended up siding more with Brian than at first, but when you were discussing how you still get to “keep the cards” you brought in, I think something was overlooked. For that hypothetical pack where you missed all your picks, you could easily have lost out on being able to pick up a planeswalker or a couple small money cards that were enough to pay for the pack itself. Who cares if you get to keep a bunch of random cards in total worth a fraction of a ticket?

    I also had a question – I’ve experienced a few times in mtgo where it kicked me out, both during draft and playing. In these cases I’ve always been able to log back in within the next minute or two. If that happens to me during the draft portion (and there has been at least once where I missed some of those first few picks of a pack that are pretty important), do they generally always easily compensate for that? I’ve never bothered to report, but on the show you made it sound like it’s a pretty straightforward process.

  9. Regarding incentivizing people to hunt for bugs by providing compensation for the bugs… that is essentially what companies with the power to fix bugs in their software actually do. Companies like Google pay people MILLIONS of dollars to discover bugs for them… and these are average people they’re paying, like you and me (see website).

    For WOTC to trade a few packs of cards for knowledge of a bug would be cheap by most testing standards. The problem comes in from WOTC’s inability or unwillingness (or both) to fix the bugs. The amount of bugs and errors that cost users experience, time, & money borders on criminal — and if I didn’t have to check the user agreement to login, it actually would be criminal. From my point of view, I should be agreeing to play a replicated, working version of Magic — that is what I should be agreeing to — and if that was what WOTC was willing to agree to, they’d have a massive class action lawsuit for how estranged their online experience can be from the real experience.

    The best I can do to hold WOTC accountable for their product is to not click on their user agreement… and the only way I can do that is to not play. It has been slightly over a year since I last played online, and listening to the continued complaints about MTGO strengthens my resolve.

  10. Even in Marshall’s analogy if I took food to a restraunt to be prepared. And they used those ingredient ts to make a different meal then what I asked I would expect to get compinsated for the price of my service as we’ll as the cost of my food and keep the meal they prepared even if it was wrong. When you take property to someone and pay for services to modify it in some way if they damage it they are responsible regardless. Even if they only damaged a portion and get the rest of the work done correctly sort of like getting a prize for winning they still compensate you for the damage done during the process.

  11. Pingback: The Ongoing Debate About MTGO Compensation | Quiet Speculation - Learn. Trade. Profit.

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