"Save your money, man. Save your money, too. Hit single don't last very long, yknowhatImsayin'? I mean, I been lucky in this game too. There's gonna be another cat comin' out, lookin' like me, soundin' like me, next year, I know this! It'll be a flip-side to what you did, somebody else tryin' to spin off like some y'know... series."
Cypress Hill - Rock Superstar
"Our community would be nothing without you, which is why we would like to invite you to share your thoughts on everything MTG: Arena and help us shape the future of Magic. Click the link below to take the survey!"
- Wizards of the Coast
Oh, ye noble squires of Hasbro, such olde-fashioned courtesey! Though, being as I be such honor-ed companee, mayhap in stead of clickething yon spam, ye yourselfes mayst for a span repair thine odiferous posteriors to mine own lycanthropic abode wherein I shalt verily merrily expound thine faults in muckle detail:
Detail the first:
STOP MARKETING TO RETARDS!
End of details.
MTG:A's current overwhelming flaw is partly inherent in CCGs' microtransaction business model pioneered largely by MTG itself: in order to sell, every single card must be more amazingerer than the last!!!!1 Which inevitably leads to escalating until every single usable card is either an "I win" button by itself, or an all-purpose "you lose" way of cancelling such buttons (e.g. destroy/exile) throwing out all the buildup and effect chains that made MTG enjoyable in the first place. This problem should be dampened by MTG retiring card sets every few months, but it obviously doubles as a selling point power fantasy. The whole reason we bought those stupid cards as tweens was the idiot dream of opening a pack to find some rarity letting you effortlessly beat your friends into the ground and lording it over them, right? And the friends get to sit there and take it... right? Awesomesauce.
As reference point, let's take Diablo, guiltiest purveyor of "action" R PGs, a genre/series predicated since its second installment increasingly on gambling addiction, rolling the dice for ph4t l3wt with every kill. A decade ago I was marginally jazzed for #3's release, but immediately gave up the notion* a few seconds into one of the first hype videos released, showcasing the barbarian, which in the words of its imbecile narrator exemplified Blizzard Entertainment's design philosophy: "there's no such thing as too much power" - in which case they wouldn't need a game at all, just a literal button labeled "I win" subtracting $50 from your credit card.
Balance is intrinsic to all games. Everyone plays on the same board with the same value pieces and the same number of moves. Imbalance, unfairness, is cheating, and cheating is not just a hollow phrase but a principle biologically hardwired into our interactions. Both sides will try to maximize their own gains, but if either gets too far ahead, the interaction can collapse. This works well enough for Diablo, wherein one side does not, in fact, exist. It's PvE. Diablo's not a real dude. Cheating against him by picking an overpowered player character spinning to win isn't unfair, just pathetic.**
But especially in PvP cheaters depend on a population of players willing to play it straight whom they can exploit, and one feature of cheating in the natural world is that as a rule, it must remain in the minority. The higher the incidence of cheating, the more your designated victims are motivated to cease the interaction altogether. Counterstrike's "AWP map" was never particularly popular, because AWPers wanted non-AWP-ers to exploit. A game revolving around the one single overpowered option gets boring fast. What game publishers have done is shift the very definition of gameplay in favor of legitimized cheating, spoon-fed winning options, so heavily as to skew into overt parasitism, with an overwhelming population of griefers or dead weight exploiting a handful of honest players.
After all, someone has to play a support to support the morons' higher K/D ratios. Someone has to pick the weaker, more interesting option to make the cretins spamming the simpleminded flavor of the week feel big about themselves for taking a free win. Someone has to organize the raid. At least one and a half out of five players must know the fight. A population full of parasites is dead on arrival.
In the real world, parasites persist because host organisms cannot avoid them. But can you as purveyors of online entertainment keep your designated victims captive? To some extent, yes, via gambling addiction, status symbols or other reward stimuli... but gradually, as with every predatory gimmick, the populace acquires resistance, gamers grow inured or have been realizing they can find that instant gratification elsewhere. Like Angry Birds. And so, genre after genre of multiplayer games (MMOs, RTS, MOBAs, etc.) are increasingly discussed in terms of their failure.
By maximizing parasite appeal, they drove away their pet parasites' hosts.
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* The stupid bubble-gummy aesthetic didn't help.
** Even there you have to account for competition and game style diversity, but leave that topic for some other time.
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