One of the reasons I wanted to be have a tumblr presence is so there was an opportunity to speak in a more freeform manner to the highly engaged audience about Magic Online events and why we do things the way we do. Mishra’s Photoshop (I’ll call him MP for short) recently wrote an article on Channel Fireball, which I encourage you to read before resuming this. Go ahead, I’ll be here when you’re done.

I wanted to talk about some of his ideas and what our thoughts are on them:

1) Remove QPs from Casual Drafts & Add a Pack to 4-3-2-2

MP argues that a lot of players do not try to compete in the Magic Online Championship Series, so giving Qualifier Points (QPs) to those queues isn’t helpful. I agree many of these players who mostly play in these queues currently are unlikely to be chasing QPs, but one of the goals of the change to the non-seasonal QPs is to allow them to do so over time. Making this change but then taking away the QPs from these events would sort of be pulling the metaphorical rug out from under them.

One thing we did do was put more QPs in the 8-4 draft, so people who are more aggressively pursuing QPs will try to do so there rather than try one of the other queues where they are more likely to be picking on players who would prefer someone closer to their own skill level.

The argument for converting 4-3-2-2 to 5-3-2-2 has merit, but our fear is that this does a worse job of segmentation than the current queues. The players who are the least successful in 8-4 drafts find they would rather be in 5-3-2-2, so they move. Then this happens again with the new least successful, especially as their success rate has dropped with those other people having moved, and the cycle repeats itself. This is not effective segmentation. We want that queue to succeed for the people the 4-3-2-2 queue is currently serving, and that may (somewhat paradoxically) stop being true if the prizes are changed. That said, we haven’t ruled it out. We still do discuss it from time to time.

2) Create Two Entry Options for Each League

MP argues that there is not the player base to support two leagues for Standard and Modern. We think there could be, though there still remains some uncertainly. Right now the existing league (we’ll call it “friendly” as we do for flatter sealed prerelease events, where I assume MP got the names from in his suggestion) exists alongside 8-player queues and daily events. When adding a “competitive” league, we would remove these events as we did when we created the Pauper league. Of course, before doing so, we’d look to have a league offering that was appealing to the competitive players currently in the 8-player queue and daily events, but are dissatisfied with the current friendly league payouts.

MP’s proposal of having different prizes players can choose from to play together isn’t something we’re looking to do. While MP had no way of knowing this, leagues (and other events) are not set up technologically to have different prize structures for the same event that players can choose from as they enter. But, even if they were set up to be able to do this, it would do a poor job of segmenting. One of the good things about offering both competitive and friendly prize structures is that it splits the player base for people who have different motivations and skill levels. This is a good thing that I don’t want to lose by intermixing the players.

3) Trim Some of the Existing Queues

The four-booster sealed queue has a low fire rate, a higher-than-desired abandonment rate, and for most (though not all) players can probably be satisfied with the phantom sealed queue, which is a lot more popular. We also generally prefer to offer formats that are tested by R&D, which four boosters is not. So this is a queue on our radar to considering removing on the next time we take a look at queue offerings, though I know some players who really like it, and no decision on this has been made yet.

The Pack-Per-Win Swiss queue is not something we are planning to remove. Some players really value not being eliminated as soon as they lose but instead having a guaranteed three matches, and we don’t want to take that away from those players. Additionally, as discussed above with leagues, having segmentation for different prize structures is important to us and this supports that goal. The current draft format has enough players to support all three queues offered.

4) Get Rid of Daily Events

As MP’s quotation of me identifies, ending daily events is indeed something we want to do. But as I noted above when talking about leagues, we would not want to do that until we had sufficient league offerings in place for that format. Really my answer to the second point speaks to this better, so I invite you to read that!

5) Bring Back Premier Events

We’ve been doing some of this, and will continue to do so. The Power Nine Challenge seems to be doing good things for Vintage. We plan to expand these to Legacy and Pauper in 2016 as well. Should there be more than this for other formats? Limited, Standard, and Modern are generally well-served by MOCS and PTQ events, but I’m open to looking at this more for players who aren’t interested in qualification events as well. That said, we do plan to focus these on the Vintage, Legacy, and Pauper first.

6) Outside of Pre/Release Events, There Should Always Be a Special Queue

I have an article on Monday on MTGO.com on flashback events. Check it out! :)



[Edit: Here is that article.]

7) Change Prereleases & Release Events

I certainly understand that it can be frustrating that Magic sets release later online than paper. This is a bit outside my area as I focus on the events and organized play rather than the technology side of things, but I can say the teams have looked at it and at this time we are just not in a position to release sets earlier and still deliver the quality card set release that players expect and deserve.

In terms of event offerings, we know many players want different prerelease options than what we currently have available. We plan to take a fresh look at prerelease and release event offerings once sealed leagues are available as an option. Our recent survey data indicated there is room to improve our offerings in this space, and we’ll evaluate what we can do.

8) Run Four/Five Festivals Each Year

We have plans to do some in 2016 already, though exactly how many we’ll run (and when they are) is not yet settled. I do think at the right spots in the schedule though it makes sense to celebrate a format, so expect to see more than we’ve done these in 2016.

I won’t be able to respond to everything like I’ve responded to this article, but hopefully this will give you a good idea of where we plan to head. Looking forward to continuing the progress we’ve made with Magic Online events in 2015, and extend it to 2016 and beyond!



- Lee