Can Magic Online Recover?

Recently there has been a huge shake-up on Magic Online.  Last weekend both the Magic Online Championship tournament AND a large Pro Tour Qualifier crashed before finishing.  Wizards rolled out the usual compensation announcements but that didn’t satisfy a large portion of the players. In particular, one Brian Kibler. See his post about the debacle here.

Seemingly in response to all this rage directed at WotC, they shutdown all major Magic Online events.  The only events running now are 8-player queues, 2-player queues, and the two makeup events for the MOCS and PTQ.  Yowsa.  It was a strong response, but was absolutely necessary.  The stability of MTGO *must* be fixed.

I remember the last MTGO PTQ I played in… Oh yeah, it crashed as well. I believe I was 5-2 when it crashed, so I didn’t have top 8 aspirations or anything, but I would have liked to play until the end.  I had to block out the entire day to play in the event, because let’s face it, every round goes to time (and I swear it’s longer than 52 minutes or whatever it should be).  I wasn’t very angry, however, because they were issuing some packs and I wasn’t in contention anyway, but I realized how upset the top 8 hopefuls had to be.

I completely understand Kibler’s frustration and anger over the recent crashes.

I think that a message needed to be sent to WotC/Hasbro that the game in its current state is unacceptable. I for one am thankful that WotC actually paid attention this time and did something about the problems. I remain hopefully optimistic that they will find the root cause and fix it. FIX IT….

FIX IT!!!

Can Magic Online recover from these problems? Absolutely. Wizards has kept their property to themselves all these years and will likely continue to do so.  Will they bring in another company or at least hire more people? I sure hope so. Other online games work with essentially no interruption these days. I played WoW back in its hay-day and we experienced the growing pains of that game, with servers going offline weekly.  I only seem to remember that happening for about a year, though, and Magic Online has been crashing like this for years.

For now I’ll continue to mess around with Standard decks casually and I’ll see what they are able to do with the larger events. I, like a lot of players, will wait out the first few big tournaments that come back and see what happens.  I’ll be back eventually because I can’t really play paper Magic anymore and I need a place to play.