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By: runeliger, Sebastian Park
Mar 25 2009 10:47am
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All the lag that plagued Magic Online last week is gone. What the hell? I guess Magic Online Version 3 is better than version 2! Well with the lag gone, Hosts Sebastian and Erik can talk about the issues and announcements of the MTGO world.

MTGO News

Lag headlines again this week, but in a different manner. Instead of talking about its detrimental effects, this week the topic centers around how it's all gone! And the playerbase is still intact! This is all good news in my book.

Two major events impacted the Magic Online world this week. The first is the March 20, 2009 Banned and Restricted List Announcement. Although paper formats were left untouched, MODO-exclusive formats received some minor touchups (mainly the semi-nerfing of both the Reaper King and Nekrataal avatars and the preemptive restriction of Demonic Tutor).

The other event was the Unofficial Format Review and Constructed Prize Update. Within that announcement, Kaleidoscope, a new extended-based multi-color only format, was announced and Prismatic was sent to the chopping block. Standard Vanguard will now receive queue support, pauper will get more Weekend PEs (but still no Daily Events), and 100-card singleton will not go the way of Prismatic and thus stick around as long as their is support. Other important changes included Extended queues now paying out in Shadowmoor, and the restarting of Standard 8-man queues (for the Qualifier Points everyone wants).

In terms of products, Balance was announced (unofficially. But seriously, how can that spoiled art not be balance) with the announcement of From the Vault - Exiled.

MTGO Events

Extended seems to have entered its lull with both of the daily events not firing over the weekend (and not firing by huge margins of over 10 people). This is probably a result of the Extended PTQ season slowly coming to an end (As Magic Online's extended community dwindles when PTQs aren't occuring).  (Editor's Note:  I believe the real reason for Extended not firing is it not pays out in Shadowmoor packs maybe?  Source: MTG.com forums)  Classic, however, did fire with 27 people.

The Standard Weekend PE fired with a large turnout (as expected). Conflux Championship events (all four of them) averaged between 100-200 players each and did very well. On the otherside of the coin, MVW Big Sealed Events did somewhat poorly compared to the amount of prizes offered, but hey it's Mirage Visions Weatherlight afterall.

As part of its apology for the lag that occured during the release events, Mike Gills announced the Magic Online Customer Appreciation Week. Events include the return of Triple Conflux drafts, ticket only RGD drafts (woot!), and a foil textless Lightning Helix to anyone who buys $20 USD amount of items from the store. Master's Edition 2 and Mirage Visions Weatherlight will continue to have its Nix Tix events and its product will be kept on sale during the duration of this appreciation week.

The Week's qualifier tournament:
TPF I (Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, Future Sight) qualifiers!

The Weekend PEs this week:
Saturday March 28 2009 - ME/ME2 Championships
Sunday March 29 2009 - Pauper

MTGO Prices

(Pillars of the Paruns) jumped like mad this past week, a direct result of the Kaleidoscope format announcement. That said, it doesn't really interact well with this guy, so this may be all hype. In other news, the Magic Championship Series continues to drive up prices, with Conflux back on the rise. Pick up your cards while you can still afford them!

PureMTGO News

Should we switch to a forum based system? Or is the comment system sufficing our needs? You tell us!

Favorite Article of the Week

Erik - Block o' Shard X  - Rasparthe, Tony Knibbe
Sebastian - Free-For-All PREs - Metagame & a Tournament Report! - Felorin

How to Contact Us

Sebasitan Park (runeliger) - airizel AT gmail DOT com
-Also at www.airizel.net
Erik Friborg (Hamtastic) - erikfriborg AT gmail DOT com

 Thanks for listening!

8 Comments

Why dont they do all the drafts as ticket only? by Anonymous at Wed, 03/25/2009 - 15:23
Anonymous's picture

If they can do RGD as ticket only, why cant they just do that for all of them...

Say at least for as long as the packs are sold in the store, and the after the packs are no longer sold in the store, switch those drafts over to pack-only.

Is it that they are trying to avoid the appearance of gambling? Because if so, I don’t see how having some ticket-only drafts fits in to that.

And I don’t see why it couldn’t be 3 packs+2 tix or 15 tix, to still allow people to use their prize packs.

Actually, they would need to by one million words at Thu, 03/26/2009 - 10:03
one million words's picture

Actually, they would need to build the queue accept either payment, and that's messy. Otherwise, you would need two queues - one for pax + 2 TIX and one for nix pax. Two queues woudl mean needing twice as many people to get them to fire.

You could do all TIX, but then the price of pax would fall badly, since no one would buy packs, except pack busters. Right now we have a couple hundred drafts a day, each paying out 11-12 packs. No way there are that many pack busters around to buy the packs.

feedback by Anonymous at Wed, 03/25/2009 - 18:17
Anonymous's picture

I prefer the feedback the way it is and agree with the above poster

I think the comment system on by blandestk at Wed, 03/25/2009 - 20:51
blandestk's picture

I think the comment system on the site could use some improvement. I'm not sure if going to forum-based comments is the answer, but the way the comments branch and reply is somewhat troublesome to me.

I agree with the above commenter on the RGD drafts/all drafts. I love that RGD is back, but I agree that it should be either tix OR packs to enter. There is no way there will be enough RGD floating around from these drafts to fire nix tix drafts in April.

Also, I don't really think Figure of Destiny will be that defining that Pillar of the Paruns won't be a superstar. Pillar will be huge.

Also, on the lag, if they can fix it like they did and the version was able to correct the problem, doesn't it mean that the people on the back end dropped the ball somehow?

Great Episode! by J127T at Wed, 03/25/2009 - 23:11
J127T's picture
5

Another great episode as usual. I was just as happy as anyone to see the immediate lag reduction and then the Customer butt-kissing, I mean, Appreciation week. I have already taken advantage of the free promo card offer while building my pauper deck for the weekend, at least one that I might play, probably gonna test two and see how it goes. I also plan on participating in the RGD NIX PAX events a time or two as well, will be a good way to build up some kaleidoscope cards. To get back on track, I do think that something needs to be done about the comment system. I like the way it differentiates between comments and NEW comments, but they also seem a bit cluttered and slightly unorganized. I'm not sure forums are the right answer, but it may be what we need, although I'd like to see another option or two as I like the immediate connection between the comments and articles as things currently are.

Printing cards by bubba0077 at Wed, 03/25/2009 - 23:42
bubba0077's picture
5

The way v3 prints cards when the boosters are created is actually done to REDUCE the lag. Those 15 digital objects need to be made either way. Pre-v3, those cards were all created on the fly when the booster was opened. This means that when you opened a booster, you had to wait for those 15 DOs to be created and added to the database. In v3, all of that overhead can be taken care of ahead of time, so when you open a booster they just give you the next packet of cards and only need to change the ownership of those 15 DOs.

Good to know! by hamtastic at Thu, 03/26/2009 - 09:23
hamtastic's picture

I remember that old lag from V2 that would happen during release weeks that was likely due to just that, thousands and thousands and thousands of packs opening and generating unique id's. I remember the dealers complaining especially badly because you could only open six boosters at a time and the lag would make it agonizing.

With that said, I certainly see the intent behind the new way. My concern (and it may be unfounded/ignorant) is that instead of getting lag during peak opening times we're got lag 24/7, despite low numbers and low events firing.

It's possible that the mythical database clean-up was targeted at some other aspect of the DB issues, but I'm at a loss as to what fits all the symptoms of the lag we experienced that's vastly different between V2 and V3.

Well, the current lag by bubba0077 at Fri, 03/27/2009 - 00:26
bubba0077's picture

Well, the current lag problems are unrelated to the method of populating boosters. Now, large sealed events DO still hit the system hard, because you still need a large number of DB calls to assign all those DO to the correct owners. However, it is better than it would have been with the old method, since the DOs are at least already created.

The seeming "24/7" lag is caused because the lag builds up during the busy times as all those DB transactions get queued. For whatever reason, once requests get significantly backed-up, the system never seems to be able to catch up, even though it seems like it should during lower volume periods. This is why the lag can suddenly disappear because of a downtime.