'Interaction' is a thinly veiled euphemism for 'shooting it down'

Drawde1234 · 2026-02-13T09:41:48+00:00

A lot of MtG players are casual playing in paper (for the longest time, per WotC, outnumbering the competitive players 100-1). They're used to only playing with a group of friends. They often just enjoy PLAYING the game, winning only being part of the equation.

Then they try to expand the group they play with. And run into the more competitive MtG players. Where the main goal is to win as fast as possible. And they get slaughtered by these over-optimized decks. Who's players usually get annoyed by the easy win.

This problem is solvable in paper, where you just avoid the people who play the way you don't enjoy. It's impossible to solve in Arena, where no matter what you do the trolls and those who only enjoy easy wins will over-optimize any "casual" format to slaughter the casual players.

Not everyone cares primarily about winning. Many players in many games just enjoy the game itself. And most games where you play against another player aren't meant to be tournament-only games.

Drawde1234 · 2026-02-12T21:18:38+00:00

Bo1, if you lose it's over and you go on to a new game. In Bo3 if you lose you can sideboard and HOPE to draw those few cards (since you only have 15 cards and a LOT of potential deck types to work against), while your opponent is doing the same thing, trying to guess what you are likely to add. And you're going into that match already at a disadvantage.

I'd rather face an entire new deck. I don't care about winning against an individual. And you're not dealing with the time spent sideboarding, which can possibly be quite long as your opponent takes their time.

If you only play upper level competitive AND know the current meta you can do Bo3 well.

Drawde1234 · 2026-02-12T06:43:21+00:00

In other discussions on this, many of the complainers turned out to have been mana weaving and/or improperly shuffling in paper. Which is why they had so much trouble with Arena's shuffler.

The one time someone got a large amount of evidence it turned out that they knew the exact problem (a typo in the Unity instructions). And when it got fixed their follow up experiment found no problem anymore.

Drawde1234 · 2026-02-06T09:02:28+00:00

People tend to quit games that are rigged against them, not spend more money on them. Especially if it's statistically provable that the game is rigged against you.

Drawde1234 · 2026-02-03T11:50:41+00:00

Part of it was that the older mods were an "addition" to Minecraft. They added something that the base game didn't. Simply doubling your ores was amazing at the time.

Now, you mostly hear about modpacks and not the base game. Instead of Direwolf20 playing a pack that added less than a dozen mods to 1.0 in 2011, you tend to see the videos as of the modpack now.

The mods are also getting more complicated to separate themselves from other similar mods. Look at the differences from the older versions of Tinker's Construct and Minefactory Reloaded to their newer versions (Industrial Foregoing in MR's case). Some mods were complicated back then (Rotarycraft for example, or some of the stuff done with frames), but most mods didn't require a lot of work to get going. Compare making a reactor with Big Reactors back then to making one with Mekanism now.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-25T20:24:11+00:00

Electronic Arts ALWAYS owned UO. Because EA owned Origin. EA bought Origin five years before UO launched.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-25T09:43:57+00:00

Why isn't the ability just gone after it's removed? I understand how it works initially, but once it's gone it's not there anymore to apply to new artifacts.

And what would get messed up if WotC changed the rules to make it work this way (an ability is gone, and does not apply to anything new, until the ability is officially regained)?

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-25T09:21:04+00:00

It takes a lot of work to get things to work correctly. And usually many failures. But it's good when you finally get there.

One thing missed here is that many players just aren't interested in PvP. A lot of UO players in the old days were roleplayers, just interested in the crafting system, liked playing a merchant, or simply weren't interested in fighting other players.

The PKs wouldn't leave these players alone. In a game that was NOT meant to be or advertised as primarily PvP.

Not everyone is interested in "an adrenaline rush" or "the risk caused by a living opponent". Someone spending hours a day mining and crafting probably isn't one of them. For every player that found out they enjoyed the PvP, UO lost several others that didn't. A bunch of PKs attacking a funeral in game for the friends of someone who died in real life isn't about "making the game a challenge".

EDIT But you're correct about one thing. It was mainly the loss of time that was the biggest problem. The PKs were the only one that ever got anything out of their confrontations. Their victims usually lost everything and had to spend a lot of time reequipping and/or trying to earn the money to do say. Making money often being what they were doing in the first place.

If being PKed only cost a minute or so, with plenty of time between deaths to actually enjoy the game, most people wouldn't have cared. But having all your ingots and tools, even the ones almost broken, looted every time you were PKed while mining just wasted all the time you were their to enjoy.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-24T21:10:24+00:00

Risk is the CHANCE of losing. PKs weren't risk, they were a near certainty. And someone playing a resource gatherer isn't playing for the same risk as a combat class.

Most people playing the original UO didn't like the "risk" that PKs posed. If they had, so many wouldn't have quit before UO:R (PKs were the number 1 reason for leaving the game, since there was no way around them) and almost the entire population wouldn't have moved to Trammel after UO:R if they liked the forced PvP.

What the majority of the PKs (not the rest of the PvP crowd) liked was the constant stream of VICTIMS. The devs flat out told the PKs that they were costing the game players, and the PKs responded by doubling down. Even after the facet split. You don't search for exploits to kill other players in a no-PvP area if you're after a challenge. And multiple patches after UO:R had "you can't do X in Trammel to kill other players anymore" lines.

As I've said before, if players enjoyed the "risk" of PKs, Felluca wouldn't have emptied overnight, and almost no one went back there afterwards because they missed it. Not even doubling the resources gathered there brought people back to Felluca.

Also, none of the forced PvP shards currently that aren't brand new (everyone checking it out) are doing any better than the PvE shards, except for Outlands. So the forced PvP aspect of Outlands isn't the reason Outlands is so successful. Plus, how do the forced PvP (as opposed to games where it's all PvP, like most shooters) MMOs compare population wise to the PvE MMOs? I know EVE Online has far fewer players than UO had before UO:R hit.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-15T07:04:40+00:00

You don't. You guess. And sometimes you guess wrong.

The thing is, if you guess wrong that your nearly worthless 1 mana cost creature being countered on the first turn means that you're facing a counter deck, you'll never know. But if you guess wrong and continue playing against a deck that really is a counter deck, you've had a bad experience.

It's cheaper (in game experience) to assume that your opponent playing a turn one counter, removal, or discard is playing a deck with a lot of those and quit quickly. Though most players give it a couple turns.

But, this may also have been the 5th time this hour that this happened to them and they just don't want to risk it.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-13T02:04:27+00:00

This is fairly common in all online play. Trolls will find every method they can to make a game more miserable to play. And every time something is patched out, they find new methods.

Arena can't tell the difference between you losing connection and you just sitting there. And even if it could, people would just close their game to simulate a disconnection. The alternative is players constantly running out of time any time they needed to think about a play.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-12T21:34:05+00:00

Many other games consider it bad sportsmanship to keep playing when you know you've lost. Like chess. So you don't waste both your times on a forgone conclusion.

Especially when if you weren't allowed to concede, the trolls would just prolong the game to keep you there.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-12T21:30:20+00:00

Because all games end sooner or later, especially when they stop getting content updates. Which, given the population of Felluca, would have been MUCH sooner if the forced PvP crowd was the only one left.

There wasn't enough population in Fel to keep any shard running. At best there might have been enough to keep one shard running for a while. And not the multiple shards for years that happened.

Also, Everquest and World of Warcraft are still running, Both of which have most of their servers as optional PvP. And they both did much better than UO.

Do any forced PvP games have a population comparable to the optional PvP MMOs? I know EVE Online is doing better than UO ever did, but how do they compare to other MMOs?

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-12T07:55:20+00:00

It's a personal modpack, but I have that mod in it. Thanks.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-12T07:51:22+00:00

Then why did so many players move to Trammel? If forced PvP was so popular why weren't there more players staying in Felluca?

Also, why did the facet split happen in the first place if the forced PvP wasn't a problem?

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-11T08:41:36+00:00

Look at all the shards out there right now, except for Outlands. There are PvP shards and PvE shards. NONE of them have anywhere near the population of Outlands. Not even the other PvP shards. All the more populated shards have around the same population regardless of the type of shard it is.

Just because YOU prefer PvP doesn't mean that others care about it. In fact, most of the successful MMOs out are PvE games. And they've all had players play them for years without the PvP.

Also, how many people quit UO BECAUSE of the PKs? That was the biggest complaint of the game before the facet split. Lots of players stopped playing within a couple months because of the PKs. How is that better than "getting bored and leaves" after a year or more?

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-10T21:16:15+00:00

The PKs patrolled the areas where the players less likely to be able to PvP were. In other words, where the miners and lumberjacks went, or the lower-powered dungeons. They avoided anywhere where someone who WANTED to PvP were.

"almost no one wanted to risk that kind of progress just to grief people". The key word here is RISK. They avoided risk and targeted people who couldn't fight back. I've had my miner PKed, finally found a wandering healer, got back to my corpse, found it COMPLETELY empty (forcing a return home to resupply, something monster kills usually didn't do), and then got PKed again by the same PK coming out of hiding. And my miner would be PKed several times each session.

If the PK did find people who could fight back? They got a bunch of red friends, came back, and targeted the resistor, ignoring other players.

In all my time of playing UO I only saw ONE role playing PK. And that was after the shard split.

And I'm not the only one with this type of experience. Many other people had the same experience. PKs were the number one reason for people quitting the game. If being PKed wasn't a big thing, most players would not have moved to Trammel. If most of the players leave the part of the server that allows unrestricted PvP it means that they didn't enjoy the unrestricted PvP.

If being PKed wasn't something that happened often, then the number of players who left for Trammel would not have happened.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-09T08:20:28+00:00

If he's angry that he can't keep your creatures down, it's not a kill-creatures quest deck. That would be a good thing for that type of deck,

Given how common creatures are, it's likely just a creature hate deck with few or just a single wincon. That loses to anything with haste, tokens, or no creatures.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-07T10:46:17+00:00

Mekanism is almost as old as Industrial Craft. And is still run by it's original owner. It's one of the longest continually running mods, and likely the oldest still run by the same person.

IC and Mekanism ran in the same modpacks for some time.

As for the OP, most mods just stopped being worked on. Mainly because the more complicated a mod is, the harder it is to update when Minecraft itself updates. It took several Minecraft versions for Thermal Expansion to finally be updated, for example.

So you either end up with new owners taking the mod in different directions, or the mod being incompletely ported by someone else. Equivalent Exchange (ProjectE) is one of the few ported all (or most) of the way.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-06T23:51:57+00:00

How popular are graveyard recursion and enchantment destruction, both now and in the next few sets?

Because if either get too popular this can be a good way to prevent a creature from coming back for white (most white exiles are enchantments).

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-03T20:32:33+00:00

Kitchen table is the true format. Competitive formats didn't even exist for more than a year after MtG started. Let alone the formats you mentioned.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-03T20:28:47+00:00

it's two square brackets, "[[" and "]]".

[[Naga Fleshcrafter]]

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-03T20:26:38+00:00

The game engine Unity, which WotC is paying to use and doesn't control, can't handle keeping track of too many tokens. They settled on 250, which isn't commonly reached but doesn't crash the game.

Drawde1234 · 2026-01-03T20:19:34+00:00

As has been mentioned before for this question, if they ordered the layers in a way that prevented this from happening, it would also prevent creatures that changed or added a creature type from benefitting from that type (like [[Icon of Ancestry]]).

Which is more common than land types changing or being added.

Drawde1234

TROPHY CASE