Great question! Before I begin, as a caveat, I want to remind everyone that this blog is something I do on my own, speaking only for myself, and isn’t something that I do on the clock or on behalf of Wizards.

Now that I’ve said that, I’m going to be somewhat blunt here.

The single biggest misunderstanding here is that there can be any understanding. Nobody should be under the illusion that you can actually understand how a highly complex piece of software works without studying the code itself. Especially when that software has been running more or less continuously for fifteen years without being taken down, and the game rules engine is more complex than a lot of the systems NASA works with.

Many of the problems that we’ve faced come from old assumptions that got broken at some point: mana symbols are only one color (but only until Ravnica: City of Guilds), colorless mana is strictly inferior to colored mana (but only until Oath of the Gatewatch), game objects are represented by one or zero cards (but only until Eldritch Moon), etc. Who knows what kinds of assumptions will turn out to be false in the future? I mean, even I only know the next few years of Magic. What assumptions will we be challenging in 2020? No idea!

When I started on MTGO, I thought I knew it all. I’m a pretty smart cookie and I’m used to being one of (if not the) smartest people in whatever room I’m in. So I used to say things like “Well it seems simple if we just use this logic here,” but in my naivete, I only got blank stares from the Cardset team. Sometimes laughter. I’m mostly pretty sure they were well-meaning with the laughter.

These guys are smart. These guys are clever. These guys are working on some very difficult challenges and when they hear “advice” from someone like me who doesn’t know how the code works that much, it’s almost like listening to a child solve bigotry by saying “Well why don’t you just be nice to them and they’ll like you?” Or a first-year psych undergrad talk about deep insights into the human mind. Or someone brand new to Magic telling you that it’s such an easy game and how can you be so invested in something so simple. It’s not that the people offering those ideas aren’t potentially themselves very smart and capable, but people naive to complex problems generally don’t even have the framework to understand how complex the problems are and how little they actually understand.

There’s a perception from some parts that people solving the problems are incredibly stupid, and that the problems are easy. In reality, we have some fantastic people working very hard, and it’s the problems that are incredibly hard.

I think it’s fair to have high expectations for us and for the Magic Online team as a whole. I also think it’s just as fair to be very clear about the nature of the problems we deal with on the completely inflexible timelines that we deal with.

TLDR: The player base doesn’t even know what it doesn’t know, but thinks it knows anyway.