MtG is getting a MMORPG

How do you feel about this?

Cryptic's the developer, by the way.

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I'm not so sure, they'll probably just trap your character in a wall because they don't like the way you saved the world.

How the fuck will it work, will it just be some generic ass RPG or what

Well, the snowflakers should be pleased.

If this is good it will be amazing.

Keep in mind I have no idea how it could possibly be good, but still.

Yes.

Cryptic essentially churns out F2P MMO after F2P MMO, each one more generic than the last.

I'm withholding judgment until I see the race options.

It's gonna be Kor all the way down user...

City of Heroes was good, though.

Can I play dress up with my OC planeswalker?

I'm a pretty easy sell.

Inevitably, yes. Creativity is not common in the MMO industry, especially the ones based off of preexisting IPs (look at TESO or TOR for how painfully generic they are). My money's on every player being some "Chosen One" Planeswalker with a typical hotbar selection of spells and summons.

Which is a shame, because there are definitely enough tribes in the MtG universe to have a pretty unique selection of worlds and characters, but we're doubtlessly going to get humans and elves everywhere.

I'll be happy as long as there's a genuinely large number of planes, if we're even planeswalkers that is.

And then it got replaced with Champions Online.

Yeah.

>if we're even planeswalkers that is
...oh, you're right. We probably aren't going to be.

There is nothing unique enough about any single plane of MtG to make the players anything other than planeswalkers.

If they're unable to explore the Multiverse in its entirety, then they might as well not make it a MtG MMO at all.

Honestly, that would be crazy if they could actually give players full selection from a wide variety of planes, all the races upon those planes, and then further specializations based on class and color.

I mean, granted some of that might just be cosmetic, like the difference between being a human from Innistrad vs a human from Ravnica, but it'd still be pretty sick to have that degree of customization.

Granted, that would be a pretty massive undertaking to have it all work and function. Like, say you start with Tarkir just as an example. You probably have 5 starting zones tied to the respective clans, each of which lets 3 different colors start there, cross-referenced with the different races that can start there, and then given a line of questing that can get you through tutorial stuff, and have you planeswalk somewhere else to continue leveling, while also having 5 or so more zones for players who started somewhere else and went to Tarkir.

It could be done, but I have a feeling that unless you had a large budget it would all have to be mostly cosmetic differences to be remotely feasible

The fucks that made Neverwinter?! That was the worst fucking MMO I've ever played!

I'll admit it had some neat ideas but they were all executed poorly. Also it was Pay-to-Win as fuck.

Shit, Neverwinter is the example I use for: "Just because you had fun with a game doesn't mean it's good." As a Rogue I was able to 1-shot players in PvP, from stealth. Also worst economy I've ever encountered, probably due to its Pay-to-Win nature.

I haven't played since a few weeks after they released the Feywild expansion or whatever. They perma-banned the largest guild in the game for using an exploit to bypass the time gate on the new content. The exploit? Sharing the weekly quest.

Wait, they just banned them instead of patching it out? That seems like the absolute worst way to try and retain a player base.

'Hey, here's this problem with our game. Instead of fixing it to show we care about making our game good, we're going to ban anyone that takes advantage of it'

>Craptic
>Owns a major MMO
>Don't know how it works
>Literally write content out rather than fix it
>Owns a different major MMO
>Unique, well-loved, solid for its launch era
>Ages... not so gracefully
>Replaced with generic WoW garbage that sucked all of the soul out

Now pair that with Wizards. It's gonna be awful. But you already knew that, right CoH/V? STO? NWO? MtGO?

To be fair, they spent like, all day doing the exploit. They did it dozens and dozens of time. And rather than roll their characters back and patch it they just felt like banning them.

It's funny because that guild was advertised as being THE P2W guild. Their description was something like "We have credit cards and we'll use them to be better than you," or some nonsense.

They probably banned anyone that used the exploit too much, but it's funny that the biggest guild pretty much evaporated.

If it's shandalar but online, I would play that.

They did the same with STO players. They dropped an xpac with exponential XP demands and XP gates on content. Inadvertently, their XP rescale made one short patrol mission on one planet the best XP gain in the game. So everyone and their fucking cousin started grinding it, bringing sector servers to a screeching halt.

Cryptic's response? Limited acct bans, a mass XP rollback based upon an algorithm that caught people that NEVER WENT NEAR THAT PLANET, and they locked out that particular mission. Didn't normalize the XP and turn it back on. Years later still have the mission turned off, because presumably they don't understand what they broke.

Ladies and gentlemen: Craptic.

Out of all the stories you tell, you don't speak of Caturday?

What is Caturday in the context of NW? I didn't play the game until quite sometime after its release, so forgive me.

I wonder how they're going to fit summoning in this.

Daaaamn that would be amazing. Would be cool if instead of shitty ass regular mmo combats you had some kind of strategic game similar to magic. Or maybe if you did quests or fought things with your bare hands in order to get their card versions since from what ive gathered the libraries of a deck in MTG is like the memory of a planeswalker so he uses knowledge and memories of encountering say, progenitus to make a copy of it for duels.

That would be so sick to do quests to get specific "cards" or spells or whatever. like beating the shit out of embalmbed dudes to get "those who serve" or similar.

The cat part is mostly incidental. It's an absolutely massive clusterfuck though.

Simply put, the auction house wasn't programmed to reject negative values when they were entered as bids.
When you bid on an item, the system deducts the amount of Astral Diamonds you bid from your account. In the case of bidding negative amounts, a negative amount was deducted from your account - which meant that you actually got a positive value added to your account, causing you to gain money from bidding.
However, when the auction ended and you didn't win it, you would be compensated for your bid. In this case, you would be compensated for your negative bid, which means that the amount you earned from the negative bid would be deducted from your account.
So, people preserved their Astral Diamonds by either converting them into Zen (which is used for micro-transactions) or by buying one of the most high value products that could be bought with Astral Diamonds in the game at that time, the Cat companion. People then proceeded to sell their millions and millions of cats on the auction house, leading to a rollback, a series of bans, and a day forever known as Caturday.

I played Tactics and it was some hot garbage.
I have low expectations of this and will openly mock those who buy into it.

I do like the idea of it having a collection aspect. I mean, part of the deal with MtG is that planeswalkers go around seeing new creatures and spells from different planes, that allows them to summon or use them.

Having combat skills being based more around, say, drops from enemies that use those spells or fighting powerful creatures that drop an ability to summon them later could be really cool.

The thing to avoid would probably be just making it an online Mtg simulator though.

Also, I forgot to mention that the Dungeons were basically all done by players in the most exploit-y way possible. There's one in particular: it offered significant rewards but was only open for about 30 mins after a big co-operative team based event finished. Only the final boss gives any reward, so people figured out how to go out-of-bounds and run straight to the boss's door, where they'd die and respawn so all the mobs you pulled would fuck off. People were doing something that was supposed to take close to 30 mins in about 7-9.

Other dungeons include spots where the bosses cannot path to, but can still be attacked by ranged characters. The endgame dungeon groups consisted of 4 Wizards and one Rogue, with the Rogue "tanking." Since there's no WoW-style aggro mechanic, there's no reason to bring a Guardian Fighter. Just stacking CCs non-stop, and abusing Rogue's ability to go invulnerable every once in a while.

I think a good example would be comparing regular Yugioh to Dungeon Dice Monsters. same franchise and ideas but the mechanics are completely different while still being canon.

I kek'd.

Ah, I remember that now. Yeah, I wasn't actually playing during that point, but my coworker told me about that. He didn't mention cats, just people bidding negative amounts.

That shit is basic programming knowledge, or at least game testing.

There was also a period of time where PvP gear was tradable on the Auction House. Since there were so many fucking BOTS, this gear was exceeding cheap. It was also better than most gear you could get in dungeons, so it allowed many people, myself included, to skip a ton of content.

There's also the cluster fuck that was Enchantments I think they were called. Basically a gigantic money sink, which is where a big portion of Pay-to-Win comes up.

Just so you know, enchantments are now how all items in the game work.

At some point, artifacts were introduced, which are leveled in the same way. They give stats boosts and can be activated for unique abilities. Then artifact weapons were added, then artifact belts and cloaks, which don't have any special abilities but are higher quality than all other items when you level them to their highest.

Basically, Neverwinter's nothing but an unending grind at this point.

How much do you think card frames will play into the interface (like choosing your class and race is editing a type bar during chargen)?

Not even the same company

>banning the best paying customers
That's retarded on all possible levels. If you bring money in then you get treated with kid gloves, full stop.

I'm not terribly surprised that Wizards would choose a genre that has a predisposition for microtransaction shittiness.

I haven't met a new person who plays MMORPGs in years. Who the fuck plays this shit anymore?

So we'll get MtG fidget spinners ten years from now.
You know, when they're at the apex of their popularity and not complete and utter meaninglessness.

WotC is so on point with trends, it's like they can see the future.

I think they must see exploits as like a personal attack or something, given how poorly they seem to react every time.

Most companies react to their utter lack of testing before release by scrambling to release a patch before the bad press absolutely kills the sales. Cryptic just refuses to acknowledge they fucked up and leaves a ruin where there was once an exploit.

Mark my words, this garbage game will come out and all the useless Magic players will forgive its shortcoming as "oh they'll fix it". Cryptic has a track record of "fixing" problem as well as Wizards fixes things, in that they don't, and leave things to fester except unlike a card game the video game industry is way more fickle and significantly less addicting.

Cryptic isn't even itself anymore. It's owned by Perfect World, a Chinese company that is known for being dogshit through and through.

I bet Wizards just looked at Valve (same city/region) and thought, "Oh, well Valve used Perfect World to localize DotA, it MUST be a worthwhile company to use".

Wizards has been working with Cryptic for close to a decade on Neverwinter. So, they're jumping into this knowing what result they'll get.

Well shit, I didn't know that. Are you telling me Neverwinter was a success?

That is wholly and utterly disgusting. Jesus Christ.

Probably has more to do with that same company working with them in the past. Chinese owned video game companies push what somehow works there which is flavor-of-the-month pay-to-win garbage. And that's ignoring whether other companies would want to pick up the mtg licence for an mmo and all the money that goes into that

Champions Online had a great character creation system, from designing the character to building their power set.

Shame about the actual content.

Critically, it was a flop. Financially, I think it's Cryptic's most successful game.

Success is relative, if they made more money than they spent on producing, then on the company side of things it is successful. As a player, a successful game would be determined by money and time in and fun out.

Oh hey might be interesting. Can finally learn about that lore you guys are always claiming this game ha-
>Cryptic
Welp.

Well, there is ONE plane that could support people not planeswalking. Only one, though.
Dominaria

MMOs could be so good if MMO players weren't the target audience.

Here's what you can expect from an MTG mmo:

It will be free to play, and theoretically all cards can be unlocked by grinding some resource, but to do so it will take a decade of grinding 4 hours a day. This will be seen as good gameplay by anyone without a job who needs a distraction from the trainwreck of their life, and terrible gameplay by anyone who has a successful life.

Cryptic is probably the worst MMO developer going these days after Trion.

I can actually see an interesting way to translate MTG into an RPG.
Instead of classes you have colors, and the mana system in game reflects the color system in the card game. In combat you slowly gain "mana" colors, which let different color-classes do different things. Red would be aggro like RDW, very powerful early in the fight but peters out as everyone else gets their resources to do their "big" CMC abilities. Blue be control and have to carefully manage their mana. Green lets party members ramp and starts off relatively weak but gets stronger the more mana accumulates. Black would sacrifice resources for relatively powerful abilities, summoning focus perhaps? White is the "balanced" color.
Of course, suits and executives are going to be generic as all can be though. So generic Human/Elf/Orc and Fighter/Wizard/Rogue classes and DPS/Healer/Tank roles instead of the Aggro/Control/Midrange/Combo twist it could have been.

Cryptic's website supposedly describes the game as an Action RPG, which makes me nervous since it's adapting a turn-based card game.

What I'm desperately hoping for is a faction-free game with, at most, 2 or 3 planes that are fully fleshed out on the scale of Vanilla WoW Continents, and player-characters who have extensive cosmetic/minor gameplay customization options so you can effectively make a character from any plane in Magic's lore, and highly customizable gameplay/character advancement based on collecting "cards," that give you summons and spells rather than any kind of static level-up skill and talent system.

I doubt I'll get any of those things though.

Could be neat to do for character portraits and the select screen, but I don't think you'd want to go too far with it. After all, this would presumably still have to function outside of cards.

I'm expecting, generic action MMO in the most generic fantasyland plane they can think of to start off, then some weird planar chaos anomoly happens and suddenly things are overlapping. Then Jace shows up and tells you that he needs your help to fix it, and then you go through 50 levels of random locations and creatures from across the planes.

Taking bets on how likely they are going to release new, rushed content to line up with each block release.

MMOs just seem like a bad idea in general, and will probably end up a waste of money.

>the more you pay the better you get, no time or skill needed.

That would be terrible.

It would be better for the MMO to focus on "Meanwhile" story lines and quests. What happened on Zendikar between RoE and BFZ? We have broad strokes, MMO could give a few specifics.

What's going on with the resistance on New Phyrexia?

Did Ajani's preaching against the Gods on Theros have a meaningful impact?

etc.

Magic's story is awful, who cares?

In theory an MTG MMO has a wealth of potential, but in practice it's going to be Tortanic with an MTG skin.
And a fucking MMO. Of all the genres, an MMO. The only thing I can think of as for the why is the board of wrinkled old fucks that serve as directors over at Hasbro just heard about their grandkids playing that new fangled em-em-oh and boy that's just the bee's knees we ought to get in on that with that there card game the kids like.
I sometimes wonder if working at WotC, you can see these things coming from miles away, but you're powerless. It's like you see your best friend standing on some train tracks and in the distance a locomotive is coming, but no matter how much you yell he can't hear you nor can you move to push him out of the way. All you can do is sit there and watch as something you love dies a horrible death.

make something like shandalar, you stupid fucks

It's kinda funny but as much as they are done these days, a MOBA wouldn't have been a terrible idea. All the characters have distictive styles and abilities they favor that could easily be turned into such.

>I sometimes wonder if working at WotC, you can see these things coming from miles away, but you're powerless. It's like you see your best friend standing on some train tracks and in the distance a locomotive is coming, but no matter how much you yell he can't hear you nor can you move to push him out of the way. All you can do is sit there and watch as something you love dies a horrible death.
No, they probably take bets on it. Or perhaps that'd offend the cultural sensativity sheboon, so they bid 'stickers' in the back of the canteen.

God I wish I could hate some people to death.

Cryptic is infamous for possessing a profound distrust from its own clientele.

It's a shame my days of playing every garbo mmo that comes out are over. I'm probably not touching this.

>I sometimes wonder if working at WotC, you can see these things coming from miles away, but you're powerless.
Based on the Glassdoor reports and taking a grain of salt, I bet this is what it's actually like.

You have the corporate lifers, basically the assholes who are responsible for holding the game back and are slaves to the corporate pressure. They don't give a fuck as they'll whip all public dissent away because these are the people who take credit for all the innovation by those with less seniority and joined the company with a sparkle in their eye while stiffing anything that would disrupt the status quo. These people would otherwise not make it elsewhere but have been around so long and have so much time devoted to Wizards that you won't actually be able to fire them plus being happy to make whatever shit salary Hasbro throws their way. Hasbro probably doesn't give a fuck about what they actually do as it's a cashcow either way and I'm willing to bet that every presentation made to corporate is to an audience that doesn't give a fuck. I'm willing to bet they presented the new "split" cards to them and whoever was listening had no fucking clue what Flashback was only that this new shit looks nothing like the old shit from a year ago; and whoever was around 5 years ago to know what Flashback was during Innistrad has moved on. And it's just this continuous pulling the wool over the eyes of the overseers who reap sick bonuses regardless of what these idiots at Wizards do.

If someone dictates that they need MTG assets for a video game, these morons in leadership jump up and deliver.

Otherwise you're on track. You have your younger staff who can only aspire to be lifers themselves. Some of them are the people who know this is a trainwreck - these people do not last long at the company because a) they realize it's a shitshow b) their ideas get stolen by their bosses c) they can make more money elsewhere.

It's almost like corporate culture sucks all creativity, life, and meaning out of everything it touches, and needs to be fucking burned to the ground because it'll forever corrupt what is beautiful and pure and turn it into trash.

I reached maximum contempt when a female friend of mine explained Pandora bracelets and designer products, vs what designer products meant decades ago. I can't fucking stand the idea that having something fun is so alien to these monsters, that they only see it as a source of revenue.

I like this post

WotC is really amazing at being so far behind the trend that it's kinda charming.

>tries to make a more casual MtG experience for beginners
>...way after hearthstone basically raped the entire market

>Hey, a good idea would be to make the planeswalkers (which people already are sick of by this point) into a super hero gang and make movies and shit
>...thousands of years after superhero market has been established and by the time the mtg movie is actually released I bet most people will be burned on superhero movies a bit

>announce an MMORPG
>after literally every other company on planet earth has beaten that horse, killed it, cremated it and spread the ashes across the world

I'm starting to get worried the WotC HQ is in like a time rift where they are constantly 10 years behind the rest of humanity and making shitty business decisions is the only way of communicating with the outside world for help

Cryptic's character creator is always awesome though.

5 years from now, Plainswalker MOBA.

That might be late enough to catch the moba renaissance.

>I'm starting to get worried the WotC HQ is in like a time rift where they are constantly 10 years behind the rest of humanity
They are; it's because they're trapped making blocks years ahead of time to keep up with the brusque release schedule. So when they do get a second to think of something else, they only know about what was popular years ago, since that was when they last saw the sun.

>making blocks years ahead of time

Why do they do this again?

I get the idea of being ahead of schedule but the way they describe making sets feels extremely counterproductive. As in if they have any problems it's way too late to fix it or adjust it.

It takes longer than a few months to design a set and it would be a wise decision to have a set or two saved in case development of another set takes longer

Because blocks take years to make. Same reason you preheat the oven before you're collapsing from hunger.

I suspect bureaucracy and logistics. It's amazing how much corporate bureaucracy slows down getting shit done; even the simplest shit that should take a day at most to handle winds up stretching into weeks or even months.
Then you have the logistics side where they need to print these millions and millions of bits of cardboard and allow for enough lead time for distribution centers to accrue a stockpile and then disburse it various shops and whatnot in time for the release date.
Smaller card games can get away with product cycles that're only several months, but I can easily see how WotC needs over a year to turn concepts that are ready for design/dev into something you can buy at the store.

I'm fairly certain what the product actually looks like doesn't make it to the Hasbro board. All they care about are financials, forecasts, and the direction at large - IE "Let's turn monetize MTG in new markets."
Then, once the meeting is over, the heads of WotC have to explain to their teams that they have to make a movie, a shitty MMO, and a hot new Planeswalker Clicker(tm) app for Android and iOS.
Hasbro is probably a significant reason why WotC is so fucking insane and inept these past years. Toy companies are actually incredibly conservative.

I suspect that it's a holdover system form the 90s where shit DID take super long to get to print. And honestly, It's not that much faster since they gotta deal with SO MANY artists. They'll basically be stuck two years behind the curve until the end of time unless they decide to do what they were doing before they got popular and did their own thing. Remember Jacetice league would have been in development in theros, which is JUST AS magic got super popular

I support that Wizards has a 3-year lead time for each of their sets because that ensures that all points of the distribution and development process has sufficient slack to compensate for any problems. You're correct in thinking that stores have to place orders (and schedule events) for this stuff months ahead of time means that you can ensure that there are no fuck-ups in regards to getting product to where it needs to be.

That being said, for all the slack they can't seem to make a decent product or make anything that involves computers not break.

~

Even if they don't give a shit about the cards it's a good presentation tool to give them a visual that you're actually doing something unique. They don't need to go into detail but making up stupid frames and wildly different settings for background is as much for the player as it is to whoever is looking over Magic in Hasbro.

The visuals are a good lead in to the boring shit like numbers. It's just the way our brains are wired, you lead with the juicy colors and stuff then follow with the numbers.

You're right that card frames probably don't make it into the presentation but you do lead with images.

For example, I would open with, "The Greek-mythology-themed set we did a while back was a success (who cares if that's true or not, it's something even a soulless individual can relate to); we are expanding on that success by introducing a Egyptian-themed set" and show some pyramids or some shit then follow that with the numbers and shit.

It's easier to for people to swallow facts when the message essentially is bundled in a package that says, "We made a lot of money doing that, now we're doing something very similar and it's also going to do money." It shows that you made a good decision, did well, acknowledged why you did well, and you're going to do well again, and if it doesn't, that's 3 out of 4 you got right.

Do you care to share that opinion of Pandora bracelets or link to some article to read?

Does it boil down to fucking charm bracelets made from dogshit materials made in south-east Asia sold for way more money than it should be and makes a killing because people have shit taste and no sense of craftsmanship?

>most generic fantasyland plane they can think of
Shandalar?

Honestly, with the ogre ruins and slivers Shandalar would be nice to see more of.

arent there slivers on a shit ton of planes? must admit the ogre ruins would be sweet.

Frankly they should have just published the magic the rathering rpg some fans made 1d4chan.org/wiki/Magic:_the_Gathering_RPG
Is that thing any fun, by the way?

As far as I'm aware it's Rath, Dominiaria and Shandalar. Of the 3, I don't see us going back to the first two for a full set/game any time soon.

I'll admit, if it's got a half decent single player campaign (Like STO or TOR) I'll likely play it until I run out of stuff I can do without raiding.

I still think it would've been really fun to have a Battlefront II style skirmish game during Scars of Mirrodin, with Planeswalkers and Praetors as hero characters.

Why can we never get good MtG games?

About eight years too late, Wizards.

Neverwinter was an ok Free To Play MMO when it launched. Not sure how decent it has been for the last couple years, though.

A ravinica RPG with choose your guild
Nah, not going to happen.

>defeat a vampire to use it as a summon
>battle someone with a equipment and learn to use the equipment as a card
I seriously hope Cryptic is watching this thread.

That was like 10 years ago.

>we have expnasive lore
>maybe let's make an rpg
>nah, it's gonna be another wow killer
It's gonna be shit, don't hype yourselves

Have you bothered to read the thread?
Not a whole lot of hype to be found here.

>Set on Guildpact era Ravnica
>Where combat damage still uses the stack

20 bucks says you play as a human from Earth on their first Walk.

It's pretty hot garbage.

Bad UI, boring dungeons, boring mechanics, poor art direction. There's no reason to play it over anything else; I'd take Runescape over it.

If they are they've probably already tied a noose to their ceiling because their glass psyches can't stand any form of criticism.

I will be ignoring it as I have ignored every mmo since the genre emerged.

Welcome Xer, what are your pronouns?

>Admin 3 (He/Him/Himself) : Suspension for 1 week, used incorrect pronouns. Hate speech is not allowed here

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