Open letter to #Hasbro and #DaybreakGames

Open letter to #Hasbro and #DaybreakGames

An Open letter to the board and board members at #Hasbro and the management team at Daybreak Games, who currently run the MTGO client.

RE: The Magic: The Gathering Online client; MTGO client, customer and workforce attendance

enhancement initiative.

Proposed changes to the “Magic: The Gathering Online” (#MTGO) client.

Add: Daily quests for GOLD as exists on ARENA. 750-1000 gold per quest. (MAX 7000 gold per week)

Add: Weekly GOLD wins @ 250 gold per win, capped at 20 wins per week. (MAX 5000 additional gold from “WINNING” per week)

Add: GOLD can purchase Event Tickets @ 1000 Gold = 1 event ticket.

12,000 MAX gold per week = 12 Event tickets MAX per week. This bold move, or GOLD move, allowing the gold to be changed into Event Tickets, gives players the option to use the tickets to build out their collection, or enter a draft. Essentially, 1 free, weekly, 12 event ticket draft, to each player who has accomplished, 7 daily’s @ 1000 gold each, and also won at least 20 matches.

Add: MTGO customers are not just customers, they are highly underpaid employees who work MTGO as a second job, because they love their work, and it is their hobby. Their job? Get 12 free event tickets to hang out and play MTGO in part of their free time every week. Call it “Player rewards”. The real rewards are going directly into Hasbro and WotC’s bank account in the form of real world currency.  But try to tell that to the players, who will feel the rewards clearly all belong to them.

    With even these minor changes, the “MTGO” client becomes essentially “FREE TO PLAY” and could be added to Valve Corporations STEAM client, as “Free to Play”. Imagine, All of the different formats “OPEN PLAY” queues would begin to be more populated, more of the time, more often. Standard and Pioneer would quickly fill up, and remain fuller longer, as the greater worldwide Magic digital community showed up to complete their “Dailys”. The trick is getting them here, once they are here, the customers will spend money here. Players farming their “Daily GOLD” can be considered, “#ATTENDANCE”. The 12,000 Gold possible per week, at the value of 12 event tickets, inspires players to show up and fill play queues. The usability of the event tickets to purchase cards from the trader bots essentially makes these players “people that work for Wizards and Hasbro”. While they are not employees, they are hanging out, having a good time, and “Lending a hand.”

    LET ME EMPHASIZE. This ONLY WORKS if there is the GOLD for EVENT TICKETS system in place. You tried Play points. Play points is largely a failure. You tried Phantom, phantom is LEGITIMATELY INSULTING to players trying to build out their collection... These were greedy, ill-advised failures, that failed to reward the players. MY PROPOSED SYSTEM, rewards EVERYONE, IN EVERY WAY. All while ensuring that the community is larger, more diversified, and stronger than ever. BUT ONLY IF THE CLIENT IS ONCE AGAIN, THRIVINGLY POPULATED.

    MTG: ARENA will experience a small temporary dip in attendance as it shifts the balance of some of it’s PC dedicated player load to the improved MTGO client. MTG: ARENA will quickly shake off small losses, as both clients are already well established, by what they provide the community. ARENA will continue to be “home” to the majority of new players and Twitch streamers with it’s beautiful graphical interface, and excellent animation. ARENA will continue to be the ‘multi-platform’ and ‘mobile-option’ home, providing access to MTG digital on billions of non PC devices. ARENA will continue to be the “Free to play” model where casuals, fans, pros, and pilots alike can “unlock”, “the good decks”, and continue to individually make hundreds of dollars of in-app micro-transactions per year.

    MTGO will be “Home” to the deck testers and idea builders. MTGO will be the place where, after an initial investment of $200+ dollars for irreplaceable deck component cards, such as dual color lands and triomes, bulk drafted rares, mythics, and uncommons can be acquired and play tested at dramatically reduced rates. With tons of hidden gems available from the bot traders in the MTGO store for 1ooths of an event ticket a playset, rather than requiring 4 wild cards. MTGO will be THE place builders, article writers, professionals, casuals, and even filthy spike grinders can TALK to each other in CHAT, as it should be, sitting at a keyboard. MTGO will still be the place where some of “THE GOOD DECK” cards are worth north of 60 #EventTickets a piece.

    Who knows what prices the digital rares and mythics of the last few years will be worth. As more and more players migrated to ARENA to play the 8-man drafts launched in April 2020, the sets released on the MTGO client all went under-drafted, causing a shortage of availabilty of many digital MTG cards on the MTGO client. The shortages of all of the rares and mythics from this time WILL drive the demand and the price of these high demand Pioneer and Modern format cards to incredible values. RECORD VALUES. Card availability from the under-drafted MTGO client sets; from April 2020 to CURRENT, until it is fixed somehow, perhaps via remasters and special sets; will be far more rare than card availability will be AFTER attendance implementation. 

    After the Daily GOLD system is established and thusly, "Attendance" is established, thousands of more players will begin to repopulate the MTGO client and fill out multiple draft league queues once again.  THIS MOVE RE-MONETIZES ALL SETS FROM IKORIA THROUGH CURRENT until GOLD ATTENDANCE IMPLEMENTATION MAXIMIZATION. (At some point after GOLD implementation the community growth would be “maximized”; this is “GOLD ATTENDANCE IMPLEMENTATION MAXIMIZATION”, aka G.A.I.M.. Attendance will be so high that these sets could be re-released as one or two month draft leagues running concurrently with the present release. THE MONEY IS JUST SITTING ON THE TABLE. Go pick it up. GAIM ON WAYNE! GAIM ON GARTH!

    While internally it will be “GAIM”, externally it will be remembered as “THE REBIRTH of MTGO”; akin to the reception of the introduction of Draft leagues. The Standard “Open Play” queues would be constantly full of all manner of decks almost immediately.

    Open play on the MTGO client has deteriorated greatly since the early 2010's into a toxic, “Tournament practice ONLY,” wasteland environment. I dared playing a non tier deck I had made in the pioneer Tourny practice queue, as the free play queue was empty, and after one close match, (my first!) I was somehow blocked from playing again in any queues for the night. It is a TOXIC, self defeating environment. More so in the years since Arena introduced Player vs. Player draft queues, causing the MTGO community to dwindle to record lows. Even long time stalwarts of the MTGO community such as MTGO-traders.com went months and sets without updating their prices for new sets. I have seen some slight, struggling, resurgence in open play numbers recently; like a sprouting seed in the forest struggling to lean into the sunshine, somehow. And MTGO-traders.com stays on top of things again. MTGO is weathering the storm, but it still needs some help.

    With the addition of GOLD, there will be a great resurgence in both draft and ticket purchase attendance, and especially in the “Open play” area attendance as people seek to complete their daily gold quests for free. Of course mostly all of the time the “free” players will end up losing to the people who have spent more on more established decks through either grinding or paying. But that doesn’t matter. Just the providing of the opportunity to these people will be met with adoration as queues fill up. Getting 20 weekly wins for most people will take 40-60 matches. Many will fall short. As a 46 year old father of 4 I may have completed my 7 daily quests and 15 weekly wins on ARENA one time, ever. My 15 dailly wins? I’ve ever even tried. But just the existence of the possibility will encourage the grinders to come back to a product they never wanted to leave.

    The addition of gold as an attendance driver is not quite the same as earnable cosmetics, pets, and packs in the ARENA “XP” model. It is targeting different audiences. Much like monetary maximization of separate types of Magic such as Commander, Pauper, Sanctioned, and Casual in both paper and digital. There is no “XP” to earn, or unlockable levels. The simple using of earnable “gold” to provide regular and repeatable access to actual event tickets is really all that is needed. This simple change would be a major attendance driver for the MTGO client.

Many of the players who started out in digital Magic on the MTGO client and are familiar with it, would come back to MTGO to at least do their daily’s. In addition, many newer players from Arena would come try MTGO out. The amount of tickets that would be sold as people decided to “finish” building decks or play one or 2 “Extra drafts” per week, would be impressive and reflect greatly in analysis of quarterly profits for the foreseeable future.

Additional Proposed Changes to MTGO:

Add: 2 minute player activity timer of some variety. Something like this is easily implementable and exists already in ARENA in the form of the timeouts system.

If there is anything Board members in a boardroom respect, it is maximizing labor and profit.

This does both.

Reddit: Rasage_Moussant         X: @DemoPracticly,  @Lectric_sun

MTG ARENA: short.order.p2a77#17153

MTGO: lectrician