

The History of Magic: The Gathering Online - Adrock
http://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/the-complete-history-of-magic-online

======
ericdykstra
Tangential, but this is such a great illustration of how Blizzard as a company
has succeeded time and time again in taking nearly impenetrable games and
genres and turning them into something that new players can enjoy, while still
retaining enough depth to make the games interesting for advanced players.

From MtG and its everchanging sets, significant expense, multiple formats and
awful online experience/UI came Hearthstone. A card game that tens of millions
have gotten into. It looks fantastic, takes no initial investment, and costs a
fraction of what a MtGO deck costs to go from nothing to a top tier
competitive deck.

Other examples:

\- Roguelikes -> Diablo

\- RTS -> Warcraft & Starcraft

\- MMO -> World of Warcraft

\- DotA/2 -> Heroes of the Storm

\- Team Fortress/2 -> Overwatch (not yet released)

It's an interesting case study on a company that's succeeded in taking genres
usually reserved for a niche audience and bringing them to the masses. It's
not a company without flaws and missteps, but it's an interesting lesson in
bringing existing markets to a wider audience. I wonder if there's something
more general that can be gleaned from their strategy to products outside of
games.

~~~
bigger_cheese
I play MtG a few of my MtG friends have recently started playing Hearthstone.
From what I've gathered talking to them key differences are:

No trading - cards are bound to the account if I have card A and my friend has
card B we can't swap cards with each other.

RNG - apparently Hearthstone is more RNG influenced then MtG the argument
being this makes Hearthstone less skill and more luck based then MtG.

The thing I find most objectionable about Magic Online is having to duplicate
your paper collection - which essentially means paying for the same cards
twice, which is not something I'm all that keen to do. Not an issue for sealed
tournaments like drafting but I'm not keen to invest in an electronic
constructed format.

~~~
Ntrails
It isn't just that hearthstone is more RNG influenced per se, it's that it is
an incredibly shallow game tactically. Part of that is the discreet turns
(which also makes the online game considerably more playable than mtg ever
managed with endless "breakpoints" in play to confirm no response), but also
the actual complexity and interactivity is flat out lower.

------
MrGando
I've been playing MTGO since the end of v2. Someone should write a book about
how badly managed this game is. The guy in charge of the thing "Worth" has o
real technical background whatsoever, and you can see how that affects the
vision and goals of the product.

It's a disgrace. And should be a software case study.

PS: been playing MtG since 1995

~~~
Everlag
It doesn't help that transitioning to digital is hilariously difficult.

Even with a properly managed team, moving 20+ years of edge cases and odd
interactions for a turing complete game is going to be difficult. The fact
that they need to come up with a usable ui on top of that only adds to the
suffering. Its not unsurprising that what they currently have can only be
considered working in the most generous and utilitarian sense.

Don't mistake me for covering for Worth: a top quality group led by management
who knew what they were doing would be much farther in both correctness and
UX.

~~~
Lazare
What's interesting, I think, is that MTGOs failures have been basically 100%
on the other side. They've been plagued by a nightmare lack of stability and
scalability, to the point where they've had to shut the game down, roll back
the database to restore corruption, aggressively limit logins, and for long
stretches of time simply not hold the events which are the main attraction
(and money maker) for the game.

On the other hand, the actual cards just work. The hard part for them, it
seems, is "operating a game that more than a few hundred people want to play",
not the rules engine.

------
Yhippa
Very good recollection of the history of this game. I've been playing since
2002. I really wanted to keep up with this game but WotC just made it
difficult to with each successive release of the game which tended to be worse
than the previous one.

I have no idea what is going on over there. People had to have been throwing
money hand over fist to allow them to fail so badly and keep going.

It frustrates me to no end that we don't have anything playable on the web or
all over mobile. DotP and Duels Origins don't count. I feel that this type of
thing should have been figured out.

I also wonder what internal conversations were going on about the Hearthstone
ascendant. I keep hearing that they're not trying to do the same thing and
that they're not truly competitors but I see a whole generation of kids and
adults that have moved on to that. I like the deep play of MtG but Hearthstone
just feels holistically better.

~~~
ubernostrum
_I have no idea what is going on over there. People had to have been throwing
money hand over fist to allow them to fail so badly and keep going._

Reports have indicated that Magic Online is around 17% of Magic's revenue ($43
million out of $250 million).

------
AndrewStephens
I used MtGO version 1 as a filthy causal player and had fun, but the whole
experience was very frustrating. For a game that involved occasionally moving
a few rectangles around the screen, MtGO had huge (and ever increasing) system
requirements for the time and never really ran well even on my fairly well-
spec'ed machine. As I recall it also had some weird limitations on screen
modes which led to stupidly crowded playing surfaces.

I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better, but it still isn't cross-
platform or system friendly. It's a shame, because the basic game shone
through the cruddy front-end and the servers actually enforced the rules well.

~~~
Lazare
> I hear the recent versions on MtGO are better

Oh god no.

Yeah, version 1 was bad, (Leaping Lizards was clearly in over their heads) so
Wizards stepped in and made everything utterly worse.

First they made a half-assed attempt at a "version 2", which they bungled so
badly they had to actually shut the game down while they recovered the pieces.
But this, rather than convincing them that they hadn't a clue how to write or
operate MTGO, instead convinced them that they needed to double down. For
version 3, they decided rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Sort of an
unholy amalgamation of second-system effect, NIH syndrome, and the coding
skills you'd expect from a company that had never made a computer game before.

Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter
crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad,
stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2. It
took them 5 years to launch it, more to make it playable, and when it was
done, it was so bad I stopped player literally because I couldn't stand the
client any more.

Apparently there's a version 4 now, but it's basically just 3.1; they didn't
fix any of the core issues. If they could bring back something that looked and
worked like version 2, I might start playing again, but really, every version
they released was some form of pathetically bad. There's literally a half
dozen half-assed shareware deck builders from 15 years ago that had better UIs
than any MTGO client has ever had. :(

Even before Hearthstone, I used to wonder what might have been if Wizards had
signed a deal with a "real" developer like Blizzard to build and run the game
properly. With the launch of Hearthstone, I think we know. Oh well.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter
> crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad,
> stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2.

From the players' side, v3 was just much, much, much worse than v2. But I'm
pretty sure WotC realized that. I've heard, though I can't personally attest,
that the reason they stuck with v3 was that v2 ran on a single server, and
they didn't know how to fix it.

~~~
Lazare
I'm not sure if the entire thing was literally a single server, but there was
clearly some immense scaling issues with the Leaping Lizard/v2 codebase.

One of the many huge problems with v3, however, is that they opted to combine
a complete rewrite of the server with a complete rewrite of the client _AND_ a
complete UI overhaul.

I don't know what the wire protocol for v2 looked like (probably crap;
everything else was), but I struggle to imagine a scenario where they couldn't
have rewritten the server code to allow scalability without needing to touch
the client, or at least with minimal changes. (And let's not forget that v3
scaled like crap too, at least at first.)

Mind you, Wizard's wouldn't be the first (or the thousandth) team to inherit a
crappy code base, throw up their hands, announce that they simply couldn't
_possibly_ salvage it, and ask for permission to rewrite it from scratch. It's
just most successful places learn to say "absolutely not" well before they're
operating at the scale Wizards is. (Or they fail miserably and go under.) I
think what makes MTGO so fascinating is that's it's one of the worst software
development disasters I've _ever seen_ , and yet it's still a success...of
sorts.

~~~
thaumasiotes
It's a success because of IP protection for Magic. Nobody else is allowed to
make their own version of MTGO.

------
minimaxir
Magic the Gathering Online was basically the entirety of online gaming in my
teenage years (the rest was World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, ahem). The
server problems and managers mentioned in the article triggered a lot of
nostalgia, as it taught me back than that online servers are not made of magic
and ponies, and QA is actually something companies should care about. I did
actually get invited to a few beta tests for new MTGO sets, though. :)

I gave up in college after I learned that Magic the Gathering is actually
kinda expensive.

------
Lazare
For another take on MTGO, see:

[http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Do-You-Believe-In-Magic-
Onli...](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/Do-You-Believe-In-Magic-Online)

------
stevecalifornia
My friend and I spent about 5 years making an online collectible card game. We
started around 2003, around the same time that MTG was reporting scaling
issues. Their scale issues inspired me to architect a game server that was
horizontally scalable-- theoretically infinitely.

Our game, from the start, was built to: 1) playable from the web with no
client (1mb flash, I suppose) 2) bi-directional socket based to avoid polling
and be snappy 3) server is scalable horizontally 4) adding complex cards and
rules will not require a client update and would be easy.

We managed to complete all these goals and produce what I still consider to be
our magnum opus of software development.

The scaling worked by having socket servers provide the end-point to the
client, and then behind the socket servers were chat services, game services,
trading services, card building services and deck services. So, lets say we
had 4 socket servers running: you and I might end up on different socket
servers, but we could still play against each other because all the socket
servers are doing is relaying your commands to a game server that is running
our game. In order to scale, we just add more servers. (Also, if we get
disconnected you can reconnect easily. Also, spectating is easy.)

My friend came up with the idea of making the Flash front-end use generic
commands. So instead of the server telling the front-end "Ship A attacks Ship
B for 5 damage" it says "Draw a red arrow from Card #123 to Card #456 and
display a red number 5". This allowed us to make cards that did all kinds of
crazy things without having to do anything to the client. To implement a card
that does damage to all of a player's ships you just have to update the server
to send the command "Draw a red arrow from Card #123 to Card #456, Card #789,
etc...".

Finally, the core game engine on the server was an event loop. Thus, making
new cards and rules was super easy because all you had to do in code was say
"I want this new card to subscribe to the Player Draw Card event, and in that
event code: "if drawer is this.owner, draw twice the amount as regular and
then this.sendtograve." I was continually blown away by what crazy cards we
could make up and how little code it took to implement.

As we were creating this game our day jobs became more and more serious and
when we finally had the final version complete we both agreed to burn the code
and resources to DVD and put it on the shelve. The idea of starting a new
journey in marketing and building a company was overwhelming. (Just three
months ago I got it all running in the cloud with very little effort for
nostalgias sake).

I still think about pinging WOTC and asking if they'd like to see what we have
and maybe make use of it. I knew WOTC had an online version of MOTG but I had
NO idea it had so many rough patches or I would have been down in front of
their office with a sign asking them to look at what we have.

If anyone from WOTC or other would like to see or talk about the game, feel
free to message me.

~~~
wyaeld
You should put up a youtube screencast or demo of your game. It'd be a great
portfolio piece at work, seems like some solid decision-making

------
Hosohoso
I still remember buying full boxes of cards starting with Antiquities and made
a lot of money selling rares from Legends boxes later. What a time.

------
cornhomb
[http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episode-609-the-
curse-of-the-black-lotus)

------
praptak
I've had a glance at MtG and my first thought was that this thing must be a
nightmare to code with all the cards that change rules of the game. Anybody
care to comment whether that's the case and how well did they cope with the
complexity?

~~~
nkassis
That part of the game (game rule logic) usually works (with some bugs) but the
UI suffers from extremely poor UX and is unresponsive. This is endemic
throughout the game including area where game rules aren`t being evaluated.

Add on poor server stability that causes players who paid to participate in
events to get kicked out and loose due to the issues and the experience is
horrible.

It`s a credit to the quality of the card game that such a crappy experience is
even played at all.

------
CurtMonash
I remember arguing in the Magic Usenet group as to whether such a thing was
even possible. I was on the "Yes" side, touting the virtues of object-oriented
programming.

