Warcraft: the Gathering

[hngkong]

So what you guys are saying is that this is actually turning into MODO (Magic Online).

The Hearthstone client works though.

[Blossom]

So what you guys are saying is that this is actually turning into MODO (Magic Online).

Close.

[Cait]

Nah. Microprose's engine worked well enough, as far as card logic went. MODO's is bloated with a lattice of "What does [Card A] do to [Card B]?"

[Mongrel]

MODO is a joke in the MTG community because it's pervasively riddled with bugs, crashes frequently, has always had a pretty terrible interface with poor ergonomics, graphical quality no better than was available in the 90's, a bizarrely-conceived economy that's based entirely on a network of third-party WotC-owned bots (person to person direct sales are actually banned), has human moderators that fail a Turing test (that's not actually a joke*), and is generally an awful, awful program all round. It also seems to become worse with most interations (V4 is widely seen as significantly worse than V3, as was V2 over V1).

This is at least in part because WotC underpays miserably compared the industry for IT and related positions using "Work for a game company! Your dream job!" as bait to attract employees. This is confirmed by the endless Glassdoor posts by IT workers and programmers who slag the hell out of WotC's online division. Their most recent job posting for a senior MODO coder became something of a gag meme because it was posted in the midst of one of their periodic severe crises (the kind that take down entire online formats for months), yet was still well below the industry standard for pay and on top of that strongly discouraged applicants from outside the Renton area (they refused to pay for moving costs, which is one of the more hilariously short-sighted, penny-pinching moves I've ever seen for a job posting like that).

Basically, the only reason MODO survives at all is because people want to play paper MTG online and are apparently willing to suffer greatly to do so.

Most MODO players dream of the day that Hearthstone actually starts challenging MODO and stealing MTG players, because that's just about the only thing that might ever make WotC change.

*Here's a sample conversation one of my friends had with a MODO moderator (otherwise known as an ORC):

Q. A tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping. Why is that?

A. To file for compensation for an in-game issue, the tortoise should use the reimbursement form at http://wizards.custhelp.com/app/answers ... -reporting

[Blossom]

Basically, the only reason MODO survives at all is because people want to play paper MTG online and are apparently willing to suffer greatly to do so.

But ... but ... Apprentice. VASSAL. Why?

Also:

*Here's a sample conversation one of my friends had with a MODO moderator (otherwise known as an ORC):

Q. A tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over but it can't, not without your help, but you're not helping. Why is that?

A. To file for compensation for an in-game issue, the tortoise should use the reimbursement form at http://wizards.custhelp.com/app/answers ... -reporting

Without more context, this sure as heck reads like the sort of joke you'd make if you were a bored customer service rep for an internet card game about wizards.

[Esperath]

Also, apparently every fucking Rivendare/deathrattle interaction is coded manually. When Rivendare first came out, there was one card that just didn't work with Rivendare (I think it was Cairne when reincarnated), because they had just forgotten to code that specific interaction, and had to be hotfixed.

. . . Okay so whoever coded the game engine should be god damn fired.

I mean, this basically started out as a pet project by two developers, so I understand why the code is so crunchy. However, they now have a large team working on Hearthstone and I REALLY hope that they're just rewriting the codebase from scratch in parallel, rather than just having the entire team banging their heads against the shit code that exists. ...Imagine suddenly having 30 people working on Dwarf Fortress.

Every single patch, the card repositioning bug resurfaces, and they spend weeks trying to put out that fire, which will just flare up again with the next update. Shit in a 1x7 array should not be that hard to push around (god knows how they had that fucking flooded board I posted a while back).

[Büge]

Basically, the only reason MODO survives at all is because people want to play paper MTG online and are apparently willing to suffer greatly to do so.

But ... but ... Apprentice. VASSAL. Why?

They're not "official."

[Grath]

Basically, the only reason MODO survives at all is because people want to play paper MTG online and are apparently willing to suffer greatly to do so.

But ... but ... Apprentice. VASSAL. Why?

They're not "official."

There's nobody to enforce the rules - so you get people doing something like "Turn 1 Gaea's Cradle, tap it, drop a Birds of Paradise" who then kick you out of the game when you try to correct them.

Also if you collect enough whatever on MODO, you can cash it out for a full blown real set of cards from a given expansion.

[Mongrel]

Right. They're just a deck program. They don't actually control the card mechanics.

Also WotC sending cease and desist orders as often and hard as they can.

[zaratustra]

I'm surprised Magic Set Editor still exists. I mean, Wizards used it for a while, courtesy of Alexis Janson, but it seems they've since dropped the idea.

[Esperath]

(mrgrgr)grgl

[Cait]

Yeah, Polarity Shift and buffs on the field is pretty hilarious.

[Esperath]

8/15/14

A Deathrattle minion that has been affected by Silence will no longer trigger Baron Rivendare when destroyed
.
The activation of Voidcaller's Deathrattle while Baron Rivendare is on the battlefield will no longer lead to more than 7 minions in play.

Oh right, forgot about that silence bug. If a silenced deathrattle card died in the presence of Rivendare, the deathrattle would still trigger once. :3

[Niku]

It's a good thing I'm on vacation while they have time to fix this shit. :3c

[Newbie]

So like a total noob, I completely neglected to get any screenshots when I happened to get matched with a YouTube sensation in ranked play tonight. Our match was pretty crazy, though, and he sent me a friend request afterward.



We both wished he could have gotten footage of that game, because at one point he had Kel'Thuzad and two Thaddiuses in play, while I had two KTs and the maximum possible complement of 1/1 spiders and totems—and I drew into Bloodlust, ridding him of his KT and most of his minions, but I attacked in a bad order such that I got spiders back at the end of the turn instead of my second KT, and my first was down to two health, so on his turn he played an abomination and Power Overwhelminged just for the 2 point sweeper. If I'd been a little more careful which minions I let die first, I might have had it.

This deck is fun.

[Esperath]

whoops

[Niku]

Molten Core was only a setback.

Back from vacation and having finished up Naxxramus, I overall really enjoyed the way the Adventure played and rolled out. All of the bosses were thematically appropriate to their WoW counterpart, the class challenges had some really fun deck set-ups, and the heroics were ball-bustingly hard (and unfortunately often negated by the cockblockiest of decks, the Freeze Mage) in a way that was a lot of fun to tweak decks against. Hopefully they've gotten the unlocking and purchasing kinks out of the way for the next go-round, but I really like this as both a gameplay addition and as a way of doling out new cards, and if they get into a cycle alternating Adventures with more traditional new-booster-block expansions as they're talking about doing next, I'd be very okay with that.

I do think they need to come up with a solution on the roll-out of class specific cards that doesn't involve some classes waiting a month to get their new hotness, though.

[Friday]

and the heroics were ball-bustingly hard (and unfortunately often negated by the cockblockiest of decks, the Freeze Mage)

Contrary to what the game would have you believe, each boss has 4, not 2, difficulty levels.

They are, in order of difficulty:

1. Normal
2. Heroic
3. Heroic without using Alextrasza
4. Heroic without using Freeze Mage or Alextrasza

[ocksi]

I still don't have the gold to open the last two wings, but so far, I haven't had to tweak the priest deck I use in ranked at all to do heroics (though one boss took three tries). I wish that meant I was good at deck-building, but I still get rolled in ranked endlessly.

[Niku]

I found some of the bosses to be pretty hilariously susceptible to Divine Spirit / Inner Fire combos. Though I still think no heroic was as fun as Maexxna was with an all battlecry deck.