I have many, many negative thoughts about WOTC.
General Changes to The Pro Tour Payouts
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
Laz
Developer
Laz
Developer
Ok. So a strategic decision was made to treat Magic more like a game for fun than a serious competitive endeavor.
It actually makes me wonder what the monetary value to the brand of having a 'pro-scene' was, because someone has clearly run the numbers, and it obviously doesn't add up. I can understand that, and I guess being able to say you have a half a million dollar tournament probably looks good in press releases.
It actually makes me wonder what the monetary value to the brand of having a 'pro-scene' was, because someone has clearly run the numbers, and it obviously doesn't add up. I can understand that, and I guess being able to say you have a half a million dollar tournament probably looks good in press releases.
Laz
Developer
That said, it still sucks, and seriously impacts a number of people who produce excellent content for Magic, and pulls the rug out from under a number of people who have put in a lot of time, effort and money chasing what is now revealed to be a lie.
I suspect that the Magic team (group? department?) likely didn't have the clout within Hasbro to be able to demonstrate that those people were genuinely adding value to the brand. This feels like it is partly a problem of their own creation, given coverage is atrocious, with little to no attention paid to the human side of the game. I am also completely unaware of any ability for these subject matter experts to feed back into the design and development process, given that they live and breathe Magic, you would think they might actually be a reasonable resource.
I suspect that the Magic team (group? department?) likely didn't have the clout within Hasbro to be able to demonstrate that those people were genuinely adding value to the brand. This feels like it is partly a problem of their own creation, given coverage is atrocious, with little to no attention paid to the human side of the game. I am also completely unaware of any ability for these subject matter experts to feed back into the design and development process, given that they live and breathe Magic, you would think they might actually be a reasonable resource.
The Sperling blog is the best one I have read on the issue. I don't think I can really word it better than he did.
That said, if you look around at DOTA or Hearthstone or CS or anything, you will wee the immense value that competently organized Pro Play provides to the community. Their whole competitive play structure is so greedy and short-sighted, the irony being that it could be sooo much more successful if they properly supported it.
That said, if you look around at DOTA or Hearthstone or CS or anything, you will wee the immense value that competently organized Pro Play provides to the community. Their whole competitive play structure is so greedy and short-sighted, the irony being that it could be sooo much more successful if they properly supported it.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
http://jonnymagic00.blogspot.nl/2016/04/pro-tour-player-club-thoughts.html
Jon Finkel has a pretty good blog post on this topic. This decision is... something. I bet the root of the problem is the thing Sperling keeps pointing out in his article. Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary.
Jon Finkel has a pretty good blog post on this topic. This decision is... something. I bet the root of the problem is the thing Sperling keeps pointing out in his article. Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary.
The major difference is MtG has no sponsors like Red Bull etc.
Which is actually a reason to keep Platinum as a way to earn.
My friends and I discussed this the other day and it's pretty much unanimous that this is a terrible decision on WOTCAHS's part. Just pulling out the rug from under them is just such bullshit. Those guys who grind GPs and produce quality content on the regular are great ambassadors for the game and they've just completely neutered. Like I honestly don't see a reason for any Asian or European players to continue putting in the time and effort on this game with zero payoff. I mean in total that's what, like $300-400K spread amongst the top tier pros? That's like a handful of people employed under the advertising and marketing department who can't give you anywhere near as much as these pros were doing. It's just bullshit and their statement made no damn sense regarding this change.
WOTCAHS produces a great product, but I feel like every business decision they make is ass backwards. They fucking suck.
WOTCAHS produces a great product, but I feel like every business decision they make is ass backwards. They fucking suck.
Honestly, I don't really think that competitive Magic is "Magic at its best". As Laz said, someone probably ran the numbers and saw that this is the case. Different from every other popular eSports (or whatever we are speculating that the higher ups want to complete with), Magic has an absurdly high price of entry. The monetary barrier of entry to competitive play is just too big for the average teenager grow up to be the Sumail or Arteezy of Magic (for those that don't follow the Dota scene, these are two of the top Dota players, and they are just on their late teen years). Magic can't possibly be as good as any other game in the eSports segment until this price issue is solved, so it feels like they will just cash out with the big prize headlines and focus on the tabletop aspect of the game instead.
MaRo's last article mentions that the average MtG player has played for over 10 years and had a couple of breaks in between. I didn't run the numbers, but I imagine that there isn't a lot of people that would manage to spend 10 years with the game without finding other priorities in life, and competitive play is just not a priority for these players. This last year I'm coming back to Magic in a different country and a different mindset, and I can see a lot of people that are much more casual-oriented. Personally, I've never been good enough or had enough time and income to even dream of playing professionally, and I always saw FNMs, GPs and other tournaments just as a fun occasion to meet some friends and play some games. Id rather just focus on playing some drafts whenever I can, some commander now and then, and keeping my cube and my collection up to date. With these announcements, it feels like this might not be very far from the reality of most other players out there (though most others might have a modern or a legacy deck instead of a cube). Again, the amount spent with competitive players isn't justifiable if my own experience is an average description of your audience.
To me, this all points to competitive players just not being the target audience of Magic. I mean, even though design- and storytelling-wise the game tries to be as inviting as possible to people from any gender, ethnicity, etc, the reality is that we will only keep seeing 95% white dudes with a lot of disposable time and income playing the pro tour because it just demands a ton of money to keep up with the metagame. I just feel that the game is probably growing much more horizontally than vertically. The content on the mothership seems to reflect that as well, with a lot of emphasis on community-based content made to please very different archetypes of consumers ( much more than 3-4 years ago, at least). Hasbro might as well just stick to what they have learned over the years by making Magic as boardgamey as possible, reaching as large an audience as they can, and let just a trace of competitive play to entice the competition-oriented teens.
As with most of my posts, this took far longer than expected and was extremely painful, since I used my tablet to type this. So:
tl;dr: Magic is a shitty game to turn into an eSport, mostly because of price of entry. In the meantime, the people that probably make Wizards the most money won't ever want to play professionally.
MaRo's last article mentions that the average MtG player has played for over 10 years and had a couple of breaks in between. I didn't run the numbers, but I imagine that there isn't a lot of people that would manage to spend 10 years with the game without finding other priorities in life, and competitive play is just not a priority for these players. This last year I'm coming back to Magic in a different country and a different mindset, and I can see a lot of people that are much more casual-oriented. Personally, I've never been good enough or had enough time and income to even dream of playing professionally, and I always saw FNMs, GPs and other tournaments just as a fun occasion to meet some friends and play some games. Id rather just focus on playing some drafts whenever I can, some commander now and then, and keeping my cube and my collection up to date. With these announcements, it feels like this might not be very far from the reality of most other players out there (though most others might have a modern or a legacy deck instead of a cube). Again, the amount spent with competitive players isn't justifiable if my own experience is an average description of your audience.
To me, this all points to competitive players just not being the target audience of Magic. I mean, even though design- and storytelling-wise the game tries to be as inviting as possible to people from any gender, ethnicity, etc, the reality is that we will only keep seeing 95% white dudes with a lot of disposable time and income playing the pro tour because it just demands a ton of money to keep up with the metagame. I just feel that the game is probably growing much more horizontally than vertically. The content on the mothership seems to reflect that as well, with a lot of emphasis on community-based content made to please very different archetypes of consumers ( much more than 3-4 years ago, at least). Hasbro might as well just stick to what they have learned over the years by making Magic as boardgamey as possible, reaching as large an audience as they can, and let just a trace of competitive play to entice the competition-oriented teens.
As with most of my posts, this took far longer than expected and was extremely painful, since I used my tablet to type this. So:
tl;dr: Magic is a shitty game to turn into an eSport, mostly because of price of entry. In the meantime, the people that probably make Wizards the most money won't ever want to play professionally.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
I've never even attended a Gran Prix, let alone aspired to be on the pro tour. I'm a deck builder at heart and have spent countless of hours (ok, months probably by now) devising casual decks. These changes don't really affect me directly. However, competitive Magic is a visible part of Magic that can draw in new players, and I'm pretty sure the wealth of interesting content online partly exists because of it. So, I'm somewhat hesitant about this change, and fear that the pros are right that it's a net negative move for casual players as well, but the thing I find most jarring is that they tried to change the rules of the "game" (well, the grind really) three quarters of the way.
Tried to change? Yes! http://magic.wizards.com/articles/archive/news/announcement-concerning-changes-pro-club-2016-04-26
So, for now this changed from a net negative to a net positive. What? I wonder where that money came from so suddenly!
Tried to change? Yes! http://magic.wizards.com/articles/archive/news/announcement-concerning-changes-pro-club-2016-04-26
So, for now this changed from a net negative to a net positive. What? I wonder where that money came from so suddenly!
I have no opinion about this.
I think a big difference is, eSports largely relies on having a large number of eyeballs on the product. The Pro Tour mostly serves as an abstract pillar of competitive play, and I honestly think that without the PT, people at my local shop would spend less on the game.
I have no numbers to back this, but I would guess that, per player, Magic players spend a lot more than those who play / follow other eSports. The reason sponsorship works in other eSports is because the large number of eyeballs that can be directed towards products. It's kind of a key distinction, and WOTC probably gets a decent ROI on the stipends they give out.
I agree with you totally. The Pro Tour is great to create demand for the cards on sale right now. The players and the judges (members of another program that has a series of unhappy members right now, from what I've read and talked about in the last month or so) are perfect ambassadors for the game. Still, supporting the Pro Tour and supporting the players so they can live out of that can tip the scale to different sides of the create demand / have ambassadors scale. What I imagine they could try doing in the future is making sure that they support more ambassadors for other target audiences, like cosplayers, collectors, etc.
I think the "abstract pillar of competitive play" is the most precise description Ive ever seen for the Pro Tour, and I feel like this is a most honest description of what they are turning it into. The problem, as they might've figured it out already, is that you can't just cut the paycheck of 30 players like that. It's like Richard Garfield said: When asked about why some alpha cards were so unbalanced, he explained that they expected players to buy a few packs at best. If players were just buying a ton of packs and building decks out of 30 moxen or lotuses, that was a good problem for the company to have. I just think that, right now, having competitive players has become the nice-problem-to-have. Since Magic was released and they saw the success of selling booster packs, they've seeded the idea of competitive play in Magic, until it started making a lot of money from non-competitive folks. The game could sustain itself with so much certainty without a clear competitive mindset, that the ELO ratings were removed for a more geek-centric generic points system. The player rewards system was no longer needed, since they managed their retention problem through other means, and it was cut as well. Also, prizes for Pro Tours haven't increased and tournament attendance has been in an all-time high, maybe showing that these two don't necessarily correlate. Wizards just needs a long term plan to educate players that Pro Tours are important because diverse decklists proves that the game is good enough that any investment you make in the game leaves you closer to a "perfect" version of the deck. We can think that metagaming is awesome, that last minute deck that takes the tournament is the best thing to read about, but for how many years do you have to dedicate yourself to the game to get to appreciate this kind of minutia?
It's super late and I probably left a ton of shortcuts explaining my reasoning, and made a good number of assumptions as well, but i'll resume the reasoning behind my wall of text as this other, more organized, wall of text:
- Wizards makes game. Revolutionizes the game industry by creating the technology of the booster pack.
- Game sells millions of boosters due to people wanting more and more cards.
- Players start competing because that's what people do, eventually (being a player vs. Player game and all)
- Competition drives demand for cards, so programs that reward competition are created
- Years of changing the core principles of the game direction leads to a point that competition is no longer the primary attractive to your average consumer buying boosters.
- It seems like users really cared about that Urza guy, and all those stories they were telling through the flavor texts. Planeswalkers are created. Narrative becomes a central way for users to experience the game.
- The reality of competitive games is so that Magic can't possibly be as good as the competitors due to a series of issues. The form the game monetizes being one of those issues. (Pesky boosters)
- Wizards tries to slowly fade out these competitive programs to focus on more attractive offerings to their consumers.
- Hiccups in this transition causes the user base to mobilize due to unforeseen connections to something that the users are not ready to let go yet.
cosplayers... as a marketing resource...
corporate-funded cosplayers...
cosplayers... being sanctioned and rewarded...
is this what u want
is it really
cosplayers... as a marketing resource...
corporate-funded cosplayers...
cosplayers... being sanctioned and rewarded...
is this what u want
is it really
... Yes?
Grillo_Parlante
Contributor
Look...if you're cutting payouts to your "pro players" who are supposed to be a big draw to your giant quarterly marketing event trying to pass itself off as a legitimate tournament...that is not a good sign for the health of the pro tour. It also doesn't look great for the future of the game if this a sign of them scaling down on their e-sports, as its essentially an admission that hearthstone or <insert other> modern game is heavily pressuring them in a demographic they need a presence with: the competitive gamer.
Lets not over intellectualize this.
Lets not over intellectualize this.
But it is only a bad sign for the health of the game if you consider that competitive Magic is the best way for it to be represented, which might not be the case anymore. I agree that they need a presence there, but I disagree with how much presence they actually need. Having an actual experience related to an event might be much more in line with their new direction.
Think of the Markov Manor/Geralf's Lab/Abbey escape the room thing they had to promote SoI, for instance. That seemed to be super interesting and reaches a far greater group of people than just the PT competitive experience ever would. And personally, while I disagree with the sloppy execution of how they are phasing out competitive play, I agree with their quarterly marketing events to be more celebration of the game, than bring celebrations of the most optimal way to play the game.
CML
Contributor
The funding hasn't made Platinum a real thing—who would disagree with that? Especially after watching Enter the Battlefield, a celebration of Owen and Reid living at their parents' houses. Pro Magic is a cruel farce, the current system sucks, and I think they're trying to scrap it. Getting rid of (most of) the current crop of "pros" is an excellent first step. Do you really want Owen representing your brand?
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
CML
Contributor
What are the reasons Magic (per Sperling) makes a fraction of what it could? Because the spectacle is awful. What do they need to do to make the spectacle less awful?
—More money
—Divorce itself from HoF mugwumps like EFro and Huey
—Hire a digital development team and probably change the game
Anyway I've put together a lot of information and gossip and this is likely the start of trying to make Magic into an eSport, which I fully support even if it fails. Gotta clean house first. You can't just give Owen a real salary after he's proven he'll work for less, nor really should you. Wadds and James, you guys stopped by the Pro Tour and agreed it sucked, and it will suck no less because of defunding Platinum, but it might suck less without all the horrendous cliqueishness
Sperling claims that WotC is the worst of corporate culture and that the community is "great" but somehow misses that the community is terrible because it's like working for a corporation that doesn't pay you. The secondary market is infected by this cult attitude too. Come on, this forum exists because it's one of the few groups of contrarians in Magic but we aren't trying to commercialize, look at MTS and CFB and SCG and tell me that a sea change isn't needed
This is a slam dunk and it's really funny that Finkel, Kibler and Sperling don't get it at all
The easy part is firing most of the brand reps. The hard part is: how to transform the game into a Hearthstone competitor?
—More money
—Divorce itself from HoF mugwumps like EFro and Huey
—Hire a digital development team and probably change the game
Anyway I've put together a lot of information and gossip and this is likely the start of trying to make Magic into an eSport, which I fully support even if it fails. Gotta clean house first. You can't just give Owen a real salary after he's proven he'll work for less, nor really should you. Wadds and James, you guys stopped by the Pro Tour and agreed it sucked, and it will suck no less because of defunding Platinum, but it might suck less without all the horrendous cliqueishness
Sperling claims that WotC is the worst of corporate culture and that the community is "great" but somehow misses that the community is terrible because it's like working for a corporation that doesn't pay you. The secondary market is infected by this cult attitude too. Come on, this forum exists because it's one of the few groups of contrarians in Magic but we aren't trying to commercialize, look at MTS and CFB and SCG and tell me that a sea change isn't needed
This is a slam dunk and it's really funny that Finkel, Kibler and Sperling don't get it at all
The easy part is firing most of the brand reps. The hard part is: how to transform the game into a Hearthstone competitor?
CML
Contributor
I'm fine with Reid representing them. Good guyYou are right though that the current system sucks. Their proposed "solution" is even worse though, and on top of that they tried to rob people from money already promised to them. Out of the blue. I would be pissed too.
Sure, it's certainly cruel. But compared to the way they've treated Magic pros for the last decade, it's nothing. Why is anyone surprised?
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
You'ld have to make the games a lot more comprehensible. Magic is a complicated game, much more complex then Hearthstone, no matter which way you look at it. Glance at the game state of a game around turn 4-7 and chances are you won't be able to tell what's happening right then and there, even if that's just because it's damn near impossible to read the power and toughness of the creatures on the table, and because there's aura's and equipment hidden beneath those creatures. That's why it's hard to attract new fewers. Unless you already know the cards, it's damn near impossible to know what's happening in a match.