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Admin
The real WTF is that people shell out hundreds of dollars a year to keep playing the same game. And if you don't shell out the cash, the person who did will win.
Admin
Maybe I'm an idiot, some would argue so, but I can't see how an online version of a pen & paper game (scorekeeping) is so incredibly difficult to scale out.
A massively multiplayer game requiring low lag times is different than an algorithm that both computationally, and data-wise, is pretty straightforward, and only involves the two people playing (as near as I can tell).
You other commenters make it seem like a ridiculous proposition to get right, but it hardly seems difficult to implement.
Jeepers. How completely lame. Then again it's a lame game, so who cares.
Admin
Great link to the launch blog. It had to be hard to come out and say that they had no idea what they were doing when they started. I love the next line: "We now have the right people in place to argue that we do have that core competency, but V3 is constrained by being designed and built in a time when we clearly weren't there yet." Translation: Hey, we learned a lot by totally f-ing up the first version, and we've since hired a few guys that can code their way out of a paper bag, but we're basically stuck with this giant turd sandwich and the bigwigs have told us that we can't just start over. It was designed and built by a collection of VB monkeys and guys who thought HTML was a programming language and now we're basically just screwed. The good programmers that we hired know that this piece of junk is a dead end and are looking for new jobs as we speak because they don't want to maintain this nightmare.
Perhaps the most telling thing about the entire post is that the post author's avatars shown at the bottom are clearly crude 3D models. Especially great is the cross-eyed emaciated tiger from 2004. I think it has a piece of painted rebar for a tail. It apparently could have been the mascot for the development of MTGO3. The second avatar might actually be an attempt at a graphical representation of the result, instead of a tiger they ended up with a horrifying, grotesque mutation with limbs everywhere, an arm growing from out of the neck, a superfluous distorted squash on an arm, and a tiny tiny tiny human skull for a head misplaced on a pseudo-neck growing from the left shoulder. Hey, at least it has stripes.
Admin
The real WTF is:
Admin
That's a pretty glib response considering you weren't there.
But 1st, a couple of corrections. :)
Let me illustrate some lessons I've learned being a contractor these 10+ years. Here's why I would correct during an interview:
In general, I've found that honest, non-confrontational, direct communication is best during an interview (and before [and after]). And if that doesn't get you the job then either you really weren't qualified, or they don't value those qualities and you wouldn't want to work there anyway.
So let me ask you this, Dudley H.:
(random example) Your interviewer says, "So in C#, when your method returns the addition of 2 integers the return value must always be a float." Apparently, you would then say to your interviewer, "Yes sir, you are right." Correct? :)
Admin
I discovered this site from MTGO's forums. The entire time I was reading the soapbox, including Development Disasters, Worse Than Failure, and Agile Pyramid, I was thinking MTGO is a perfect case study for these pitfalls.
The wtf is that Wizards had a business model that had people gladly paying ten times what you pay for a monthly subscription on an MMO, and all that for a card game simulator. Yet, through their own hubris they have thrown that all away. They killed their golden goose to make a little pate de foie gras.
Five years after they decided to rewrite the code they have finally released a downgrade that is almost universally despised, that has many fewer features than the original beta, that still crashes, that looks like a turd, and that still isn't scalable. They recently announced they have to redesign the database to prevent lockups during trading, just two months after going live. They should have caught this in beta, but they couldn't get enough people to play for free on the beta.
Last August I was in the beta for the first time and saw their home grown scroll bars that occupied 95% of the scroll space to display 10% of the information. You literally could not even see all the names of people who were in a room, even moving the scrollbar one pixel at a time because there were only 10 pixels of movement available for 15 pages of names. That's a wtf if I ever saw one.
Once I saw that I realized these people would never deliver on their promises and sold off all my digital cards.
Admin
Well, that depends on how you play the game in real life. If you just play casually with friends, then sure. If you ever play at a serious tournament, however, you find that there are very specific rules as to how everything interacts, and there's no "agreement" or "disagreement" issue, but rather how the rules say the things interact.
And I know I personally played Magic online for the round-the-clock, constantly running tournaments. And having the program being able to make sure that all moves are correct is way superior than trusting that some random stranger is not trying to pull a fast one on you. And then if you did have a rules disagreement, it could sour the whole game (or whole tournament) really fast.
Admin
Admin
Thanks Dudley. Much appreciated!
Admin
On a completely unrelated note to Virtudyne (ahem), even though Virtu-I mean Simdesk's website has shut down, they still haven't gotten rid of the web pages themselves.
See: http://www.simdesk.com/about.php The FAQ: http://www.simdesk.com/faq.php And their store: http://storefront.simdesk.com/ Even videos: http://storefront.simdesk.com/gettingstarted
To be fair to Simdesk, they apparently realized, after making only one sale of their Office-killer (completely unrelated to Virtudyne's Office-killer, of course) they decided to pour their resources into an Exchange-killer instead.
Admin
Ya know if you find that the interviewer is so loaded with factual errors, that you feel you need to correct them, not only will yo not be working there, but you likely already come to the realization that you don't want to
Admin
I may be naive, but since the problem was the number of people on the server couldn't just have added a router layer between the server and the clients and then just add some more servers? Seems to work for others. Oh well, good riddance!
Admin
There are over 9,000 cards in the Magic universe lul wat?
Admin
Talk about Second System effect. The obvious solution is to rewrite it again. Maybe they could call it Tragic: The Garnering...
Admin
TRWTF is that at the same time there's open-source software available that does exactly what most fans want it to do -- enables them to duel over the Internet. Without paying $500 for a deck.
Granted, it could use a few features, and doesn't support more than two players at a time, but it's still light-years ahead of Magic Online.
Admin
Maturity and politeness in an internet forum thread! This is an historic occassion. wipes away a tear
Admin
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Well, I just wanted to say something about Vampire - the eternal struggle (CCG by White Wolf), the card game and its internet counterpart.
There you can build any deck and use any card only with your monthly subscription.
And it is based on a patched cardgame engine by a company that has made many "virtual" card games.
No 3D is used or really necessary, this game can be run with a decent internet connection and a PC made about 8 years ago.
Admin
WTF!
Admin
Been said before, but it probably bears repeating with some people complaining about the initial premise of MTGO: MTGO v.1.0 was a good game. Which makes the two subsequent downgrades all the more tragic and bizarre. Some people, like me, really hate monthly fees because what if we don't play the game during that month? Then I'd feel stupid and ripped off, cancel my account, and then not ever play again even if I had a sudden urge. Once you've bought some cards on MTGO, you have 'em forever even if you never pay WotC another dime. I've spent months at a time not paying a cent to them and just watching games, or playing with cards I already owned. And as for the comparisons with the freeware versions... I've played both Apprentice and MTGO, and I can assure you that MTGO is a much more fun experience and one in which finding opponents is much easier. Apprentice is maybe okay if you already have a known friend you're chatting with and want to play a game with, but horrible for finding matchups with random internet denizens.
As far as the difficulty in coding card interactions... that's absolutely there, yes, but I'd be willing to give a pass on them to a certain degree. Occasional bugs have popped up in sufficiently weird game states, but they usually get fixed. The problem has been in screwing up things that already worked - like completely redesigning a functional game client to be a miserable hard-to-read brown/green mess with unchangeably tiny font sizes. Half the point of a client-server model is that clients can do whatever so long as they can communicate with the server in a specified format. There was no need to come up with a new client at all! Or hell, if they did make a new client, they probably could have supported the old client interface, too. Rather than force everyone onto a new client that's pretty much unusable without extremely modern equipment, which is wholly ridiculous when this is a card game.
As for the lack of anonymiziation... this is all public information. Anonymization is for when someone on the inside is leaking code and doesn't want it immediately traced back to them; if a company force-downgrades a good license to print money, that's a public WTF. Seriously, they should have kept it at v.2.0 which while not scalable basically worked. The execs who gave the go ahead to launch v.3.0 when it still clearly sucked seriously screwed up.
Admin
Is this any surprise from Wizards of the Coast? The company that authored its OWN DDOS attack?
"Let's have a placeholder page counting down until the release announcement of D&D 4th edition, then have javascript simultaneously make thousands of browsers hammer our webserver at the same instant."
Admin
There's a homebrew yugioh online game that I downloaded for my son. Only to find out that the community was full of a-holes.
So I reverse-engineered their client and built my own. It was hilarious how easy that made it to cheat.
This probably makes me an a-hole, too. And I've never denied that.
Admin
I haven't played MTGO for at least a year. So does this mean that all the virtual cards and decks I bought online are now worthless? Dang.
I did think that I would someday trade them in on paper ones.
Admin
It was your arrogance that got you banned from the MTGO forums Bent. It was your arrogance in believing that your opinion is more important then anyone else's. You always though you were a big fish and apparently couldn't handle it when you were relegated to being just another forum schmoe.
I read the 10 page manifesto you sent to the MTGO team. Really, if you hold the same attitude as a business owner that you used while writing that letter then the real wtf is that anyone still works for you.
The new client may be ugly, but it's stable. And it's functional. It solves the most basic problem that the previous versions had: Scalability. Everything else is fixable. Take your head out of your ass long enough to stop kissing it and try to see reality for a change. Things are bad, but have been getting better. And it may take a while but Version III will eventually surpass V 2.5 in functionality and in appearances. So there's hope for it.
Unfortunately that's more then I can say for you.
Admin
Not worth working there, then. I corrected one of my interviewers; I was right, he was misreading what I'd written, and he admitted it when he saw his error. It was a point in my favor when they decided to hire me.
Admin
Admin
gccg is much better http://gccg.sourceforge.net/
Admin
And spelled correctly too. What is this world coming to?
Admin
Admin
What I heard about how the problem started was that after Leaping Lizard was done, the Wizards IT department started adding features, and it broke, because of one person in particular who left; and the rest is history?
Admin
v 3.0 died?
4 days down and counting!
Admin
v2.5 had major issues with lag time. It needed to be upgraded. However, v3 was not even ready for beta testing when it rolled out. Their first fix was to make the font readable. Previously it had benn a size 4 font size.
The program is missing several features v2 used to have. V2 was usabel, v3 in not.
A shameful embarrassment.
Admin
Amazingly, this alleged lack of stability only appeared after wizards took over development of the product from my company, and released a new version "2.0" which my company had nothing to do with, which immediately started crashing all of the time, instead of running for long periods of time.
We tested our software with many many more simulated users, tournaments, etc than were ever logged into the system at any time. I have no visibility into what caused their problems after we left the project, but from what I saw of the 2.0 code being written lets say I wasn't exactly surprised, and also not surprised that they weren't able to ever fix the bugs that they had introduced, or to overcome any limitations that they may have run into with the code we supplied them with. I know that we would have had no trouble evolving the code around any limitations that were discovered.