Community and what it means to MTGO

MTGO has been around for 5 years, 9 months in live form 1.x or 2.x. Since 6/2002 it has been a strange phenomenon. Digital Objects for trade and sale. Digital objects in games that people "license to use from WOTC/Hasbro" yet in most folks held views they own them.

Its been a rough time since 2003 and the release of 2.x MTGO. MTGO has struggled due to its success with 1.x and also with 1.x flaws in design: hard coding each card's rules and a centralized master server as a bottleneck restricting growth. MTGO's team (post Leaping Lizards) tried to fix some things with 2.0 in 2003 but the crash was so horrid and nasty that they had to roll back. Ever since then 2.x has had its problems and crash/lag instability (past 3,000 or so users online at once).

Flash forward to April 2008. We're nearing the launch of MTGO V3. Its not the prettiest UI (I hate the vertical chat bar) and will launch without Leagues/Multiplayer (unless they fix that at the last minute).

Lets hope with the new 3.x infrastructure (cluster servers, better uniform coding for card rules/cards and expandibility) - we get growth in MTGO again.

What has held us together for the last 5 years of pain? Community. MTGO users on the forums and in MTGO have helped grow the community and keep it cobbled together. Critics and fans of WOTC both help make the MTGO Forums and MTGO itself a better place. I applaud one thing WOTC DOES right: They let us speak our minds on the wizards.com MTGO Forums (within some reason).

Regarding PDCWAR: Rise of Commonaria - we will be launching the Beta 1 Post V3. V3 is so close, I dont want a hangover between the downing of 2.x live and the launch of V3.

More news to come soon on PDC and MTGO!

Its been nearly 6 months...

....Since my last post. And I've come back to MTGO. We're close to V3 launch (shudder). It will launch without some V2.x capability but I hope in exchange we get much stronger stability and the ability to have more concurrent users live at the same time.

Lets hope this gets rolled out right. Since Optimus Worth (Worth Wolport) is the MTGO team manager - it should be okay.

And a big thanks to GSG, Z, AJ and ToM for welcoming me back.

I'm rebuilding my 4x commons so that I can build and play PDC decks again. I sold my entire collection off last fall in fear of job loss/layoff.

Concerns on V3

MTGO live is currrently at version 2.x. There is a new version of MTGO coming out called V3.

I have concerns how the user interface, chatting, chat rooms and gameplay/card viewability is handled.

I think they are going to release it live without fixing some core concerns. My only hope is that:

A) They consolidate both the 2.x live and V3.x beta teams together for more resources on one project.

B) With the added resources they work and ramp up fixes/updates each week fixing as much as possible.

C) That we do not lose a signifcant portion of the MTGO userbase during this change.

D) That MTGO/WOTC communicates things well during this painful change/growth process.