>Like Hearthstone, MTG Arena has "unranked" modes, but like Hearthstone, the majority of rewards and design is meant to force you into ranked modes.
Is it that the game designers sat down and deliberately designed a system to get you to play more ranked or did the players demand rewards for ranked (or the designers anticipated such a reward)? I've seen the latter happen in an online game. The players in World of Warships demanded more rewards after seeing the initial competitive game mode (team battles). Eventually the developers gave it to them.
That's very possible -- a lot of game features come out of that process.
But, I would say the responsibility of a designer is to be able to parse player feedback and disregard bad suggestions. If your players knew how to design a game, they would be game designers.
One of the big reasons design is so hard is because you're trying to understand another person's motivations better than they themselves do. Feedback shouldn't be ignored, but neither should it be implemented verbatim. Players just aren't good at sussing out their own motivations -- they'll tell you, "we want more rewards for ranked" instead of "we don't want to feel obligated to dip into unrelated game modes", or "we want to feel more like we're progressing towards something."
Players also aren't good at giving feedback about what feels wrong, their feedback instead takes the form of half-thought ideas of how to fix what feels wrong. Responding to that feedback means digging under it to find out the actual problem and addressing that specifically.
Note that this isn't just me talking. Rosewater himself has talked about this phenomenon a lot in his design blog on MTG, and he has a good quote on this[0]:
> The key is whether or not what the players want will in the end make them happy. Players ask for things all the time that if we actually gave them would make the game less enjoyable for them. We do spend a lot of time trying to understand what they players want, though, because when we are able to give players things they want, we do.
The point being, I have no doubt that if MTG Arena announced tomorrow that it was getting rid of ranked rewards and seasons, the playerbase would be livid. I still suspect an alternate system for rewards would be better in the long run.
Is it that the game designers sat down and deliberately designed a system to get you to play more ranked or did the players demand rewards for ranked (or the designers anticipated such a reward)? I've seen the latter happen in an online game. The players in World of Warships demanded more rewards after seeing the initial competitive game mode (team battles). Eventually the developers gave it to them.