I love this game. I love writing about it. Compiling lists about it. Evaluating it. Sometimes, I even play it. I'm an Accidental Player.

 It's been two weeks since the fatal July 16, when the V3 world came to an end, and V4 took over. My mood back then? Not good. My mood now? Mostly fine. Almost excited. But that's me: I like new challenges, I like to learn new things, it pulls me out of my default laziness. It's a healthy attitude to have.

 Of course, the MTGO community as a whole doesn't seem to share my point of view. And it's a pity, actually, because that's the point of view that makes you realize life's too short to cry, long enough to try (yeah, I'm of the generation that listened to that song.)

 So my mild irritation lately has changed target. And now my target is you. Yep, exactly you, fella. No need to hide. I see you. You're the one coming to my free events, taking my sponsor's prizes, and constantly whining about V4 because now you have to move the mouse in a different direction and that's soooo annoying. You can't just take it. Clicking "import deck" rather than "load deck"? Preposterous! How can someone put up with such a thing, amirite?

 Oh yeah, every time you're in one of my chat rooms and saying something that amounts to, "I hate V4 because I hate V4 because I hate V4", know that on this side of the screen I'm shaking my head and taking away a Respect point from your sheet (this process might be metaphorical). And it's not because I love V4. I don't. I think I will, eventually, but I'm not there yet (despite what the summary for this article says). It's way too soon, the software is way too rough yet (more on this below). But here's the thing: there's no choice. Ever heard the saying that starts with, "When life gives you lemons..."? And here's another thing: V4 has potential. V4 gets a lot of stuff right. And, to mention something that keeps being denied and it drives me crazy, V4 looks better than V3. Not "2014 visual standards" better, no. But still better than that late 1990s feel V3 had going on. We had just grown accustomed to it. But it was bad. I can't stress this enough: V3 was a bad, bad piece of software. It was embarrassing. What did you say? They could have just fixed it? Did you ever own an old, ragged shirt that had a special sentimental value to you? How many times can you patch that shirt before you have to resign yourself to the fact that you have to throw it away? Beside, MTGO is not your shirt. You just borrow it (it's even explicitly said in that thing they make us read and acknowledge every time there's an update). MTGO is their house, we got invited to it, to bring our cards there and play, and we're asked a one-time drink contribution. Now they decided to move to another house. We can't go, "No, dude, don't do that! You old house was fine!" as much as we want. But, you know, their money, their choice. (This metaphor is complicated by the fact that it's the house of the people who create those cards to begin with, and sell them to us, then invite us to play with them at their place. It doesn't affect my point.)

 So, we have been given this V4 lemon. To keep asking "Why, why, WHY?!", and analyzing all the alternative scenarios that didn't come to be isn't very helpful. Can we move to the stage of the grief where the grief has been accepted, please? Can we move over, just a little? If you're like me, and just want to find the bright side in everything, and keep going and help the others to keep going, what do you think feels more annoying, to have to re-learn how an old feature works now, or to explain that to someone and receive an insult to V4 as an answer? That insult is insulting to me, too, because I'm here putting together a list of the things that need fixing, i.e. spending my free time to the benefit of everyone, all while you're just whining and whining, and then whining some more. (Note: "You" doesn't mean everybody, fortunately. Keep up with the good fight, fellow bright siders!)

 See, it would be easy to write an article, which is still an article about what in V4 does NOT work, with an introduction that says "It's awful, it's the worst thing that happened in the history of ever!", winking at the reader and getting applause. Well, I'm not that guy. I believe in other principles. I believe V4 will be an acquired taste (I'm already starting to forget how and where things were in V3). I believe exploring new things, learning something new, challenging yourself is always a gift, what keeps us alive. I believe in constructive behavior. I don't believe in throwing a temper tantrum and stubbornly refuse changes no matter what. And I believe we're in this together, and we need to help each other. Venting shared frustration helps only to an extent. At some point, we have to move on and see what we can do, what needs to be done.

 So, you don't like V4. Fair enough. But ask yourself: you don't like it because you honestly think V3 was strictly better, or rather because V3 just existed for 6 years? More importantly, did you take the time to learn how V4 works before deciding you don't like it? Did you use it consistently for the last two weeks? (Little known fact: open beta and V4 are essentially two different clients). Did you read the manual? Did you make comparisons? (I did.) I don't really care to know these answers from you. You should, though. Probably not just about MTGO changing clients, but about all similar situations in life where inner laziness suggests an approach that's just not productive.

 All right, introduction's over. Time to make some lists of things that I want to see fixed in the future (which probably means in the next 6 years. Yeah, bright siders get to be cynical, too). I'll check back to update this list regularly, each couple of months or so, and I'll also post it on the Official Wide Beta Feedback Thread (which now should be renamed, I guess). I'll start with...

THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT V4 AND I'M HAPPY ABOUT

1. The M key is amazing! What does the M key do? If you keep the M key pressed while tapping a land that generates more than one type of mana, you don't have to choose which mana you want, it'll instantly give you the first mana listed (for instance, Taiga will give you red, Tundra will give you white, Cavern of Souls will give you colorless). It's really great to save up time when you don't care which type of mana you're producing.
2. It's great to be able to attack with all your creatures with just one click. And once you do that, you still have a chance to remove something from the red zone. So, say you want to attack with all your four untapped Spirit tokens, but not with your Noble Hierarch. Once the Declare Attackers step kicks in, you go right click, "attack with all creatures", then click on the Hierarch to remove her from the attack. Quick, smooth.
3. Even better is the "tap this pile of lands" function. Right click on a pile of multiple of the same land brings up an option called, "All of these cards: T: Add [mana color]". Tapping lands is generally more responsive than it was in V3, but you'll still love to tap those 6 forests with just one click. That clock time is precious!
4. In V4, everything identical is stacked. It mostly applies to lands and tokens, the latter (along with the "attack with all" option) being a life-saver in Commander, where you may have done some crazy kickered Rite of Replication copied five times or summoned an Avenger of Zendikar with 20 lands, Doubling Season and Copy Enchantment on the battlefield.
5. The deck you choose in the Play Lobby is always the same you just edited. In V3, when creating or joining a table, you had to make sure you loaded the correct version of the deck, often resulting in mistakes. Now you can't do wrong, unless you do something like copying on the server the same deck with different names. Don't.
6. Speaking of which, managing the decks is easier than expected. You can just ignore the whole "saved on server" deal, just like we used to do on V3. Or better, you can take only the good parts of it, like always knowing what deck you're using. But for the rest, you keep your decks on the hard disk, and import them when you want to use them/work on them. Then you save them by right-clicking on a deck's name in the column on the left and choosing "export" (it's the same option you use to generate .txt decks, which is now quicker than with V3, where you had to save a new copy of the deck, give it a name — they're automatically named as the original deck now, an upgrade that apparently required 10+ years — and then you would have the .txt deck opened in the editor for no reason, so you had to re-load the original deck. Exporting is, again, smoother, and the correct way to go).
7. Generally speaking, the chat is currently terrible, but I appreciate that when someone sends you a PM, the window doesn't automatically switch, because that was VERY annoying in V3, leading to countless instances of people writing in the wrong chat because the client replaced it while they were writing. Also super-annoying and luckily gone is that stupidly horrible black block of text that popped up when someone wrote something on an inactive chat from a game you were watching. God, how I hated that! Since you couldn't kill it, you had to wait for it to wear off on its own, and you couldn't write in the meantime. Good riddance.
8. The filtering system in the Play Lobby: a case of something you have to get used to, as I found it annoying at first, but now I realize I'm able to ignore the matches I'm not interested in (for instance, the matches in the Getting Serious room that aren't from my PREs). Just remember to hit Restore Defaults if you're looking for something and can't see it, because maybe you set up a wrong filter/had a filter going from a previous time. Also, leaving and re-entering the room solves issues sometimes, as it refresh the room's status.
9. Always in the Play Lobby, I really like that now the games Awaiting Players are clearly separated from the games being played (that are filed under Current / Past Games). As a host, that's very useful to tell which ones of the tables haven't fired yet. I wish the completed games were in their own category as well.
10. I also appreciate how clear and streamlined the whole draft process now is. You can even tell which players you're giving cards to/receiving cards from, which is something of course you would get in real life, by just looking at the faces of those people sitting around the table with you.

 And now...

THINGS ABOUT V4 I'M NOT HAPPY ABOUT
(aka: The Laundry List of Fixing)

 PART 1: GENERAL ISSUES / HOME

1.  Since V4 has the capability of remembering settings, make it remember ALL settings (e.g. I always want to visualize all non-foil versions and quantity 0-20+ on my editor, and now I have to re-set it every time I launch the program, just like with V3; I thought V4, unlike V3, was about remembering ALL settings, not just some of them. Make it so).
2. The visual flair that, I'm sure, is what makes people say that V4 looks bad: it's because of the poor color pattern that've been chosen, which among other things causes a selection to look almost invisible in half of the rows, because it creates white selected text on an almost white row. Solution I wish and see coming: more customizations. Skins, themes, color patterns, what-have-you.
3. Notifications are annoying to most people. There's a way to disable them, but they're not ALL disabled, either by functionality or bug. Make it so.
4. In Home, the buddy list has to be switchable to list form. The avatars mean nothing, as people constantly change them (and it seems the client has a hard time keeping track). And it just takes a lot of room, and it's hard to browse. Realize people have HUNDREDS of buddies. Maybe we should also get the chance to organize them, while we're at it, since your BFF and that bot you have some residual credits on can't be on the same plane.
5. In general, always design and test with extreme cases in mind. It's like in the game: larger-than-life scenarios happen. More so, they aren't even that uncommon. Don't assume people will have a couple dozen decks. There are people who have several hundreds. The way the decks are organized now is practical for two dozen. Is it practical for 600? And there are people who'll have move 25,000 cards at once between accounts. Obsessive deck builders and professional traders exist.

 PART 2: COLLECTION

1. Things I didn't get: What's the difference between "Item" and "Name" in the list view? Why I can't turn off the "Item", "Edition", "Wish", "Premium" and "For Trade" columns? What's the purpose of the X at the end of each row?
2. MAJOR ISSUE: You can't easily add cards you don't own to decks and not at all to binders. This strikes me as a problem that stemmed from the wrong assumption that players build decks with the cards they own. They don't. It doesn't work that way. Here's how it works: you select cards from the entire pool available in the format you've chosen, make the best deck you can come up with, THEN acquire the cards you're missing (or at least, make some compromises based on budget AFTER considering what the best choice would be). On top of that, I came up with ways to use the binders (the ones you create aside from Wish List and For Trade, I mean), and all of them involve using any card, not just those that I own. This limitation needs to go away, stat. Decks already alert you about cards not in your collection, that's enough for avoid any misunderstanding.
3. BUG: Please solve the issues with deleted decks that inexplicably come back, decks you find duplicated on re-log, and other problems related to whatever happens in the part of the server where we store our decks and binders (I'm still not sure what exactly I'm supposed to do with the latter, but they're apparently more bugged than the decks).
4. The categories aren't really manageable. When you choose a format for a deck, the relative category is automatically created and the deck stored there. Fine, but what if I want that deck to belong to another category (say, "Favorite Decks"), and I don't want to have two copies of that deck? As they are now, the categories are a weird mix of system folders and user's folders, containing the same files.
5. Why is there an add deck/category/binder inside every category? It seems like a waste of space, considering the same buttons are in the column on the left, and conceptually, you don't create binders and category inside a category, so the presence of those buttons there is confusing. 
6. Speaking of which, you should be able to create sub-categories. I have 200 Modern decks, I'm not going to import them all to end up with a unmanageable 200-deck list. I need them to be ordered according to sub-criteria, so I want to be able to, for instance, create a "Pod deck" category under the Modern category and put all my Pod decks there.
7. BUG: Decks inside categories sometimes end up sorted randomly.
8. Not a fan of deck labels, but since they're there, and the client keeps asking me to choose one every time I create a deck (which is an obstacle to fast import, by the way), at least give us some more meaningful ones, like a label for each dual-color combination (you can use the Ravnica Guilds symbols) and tri-color combination, plus one for colorless and one for four/pentacolored. Planeswalker faces don't really help me to visually establish the identity of a deck.
9. Why the big preview card has that weird highlighted text? Please remove that, it's annoying and useless.
10. In the deck's analysis, the Average CMC is missing. It was useful to me, I'd like it back.
11. When a deck is sorted by CMC, why are 0-cost cards shown before the lands? I'm fine with them being a different category (they were assimilated to lands in V3, which isn't correct), but conceptually lands should come before everything else.
12. In the same setup of deck sorted by CMC, I believe there's some issue with alphabetical sorting? I get the piles are sorted by color, then alphabetical, but sometimes that's not true (on the other hand, I never really understood what V3 was going for with its sorting).
13. MINOR: I wish there was a way to prevent for Limited decks to be saved and automatically stored in a Limited category. Limited players surely like to keep track of those, but for whom only occasionally play Limited, that's a category more that clogs the deck management.
14. As said before, I wish the client remembered the way I sorted both the pool and the deck. For instance, I personally want my pool to always show all non-foil version of each existing cards separetely. And I'm pretty sure about 90% of the players look at their decks by CMC, to evaluate the curve, so that should be the default.
15. MINOR: The two sentences that show up in the sideboard's background ("Your sideboard is where you put cards you don't want in your main deck. 60-card decks typically contain 25 lands and 35 spells, about 22 of which are creatures") is essentially wrong (it should quote the Comprehensive Rules and say, "Your sideboard is a group of additional cards you may use to modify your deck between games of a match"; the first sentence, as it is, describes your collection), and is aimed to beginners only (25 lands are "typical"?  And 22 creatures? Where did you get these numbers?). Can we fix/get rid of that, please? If a player doesn't know what a sideboard is, then they don't know a LOT of other things that would need explaining, and they can just read the rules for that!

 PART 3: PLAY LOBBY

1. In the match listing, "open slot" should disappear when the game starts: those slots aren't open anymore.
2. MINOR: In the list of the formats, Legacy Tribal Wars should go in the same category as 100 Card Singleton and Prismatic, not at the bottom with Freeform (I guess that happened because Tribal Wars wasn't initially meant to be in V4). Actually, while I appreciate that we finally have the main formats listed in an intuitive order (Standard, Block Constructed, Modern, Legacy, Vintage), everything else should go in one category as "specialized format", with only Freeform and Freeform Vanguard at the bottom, as the "anything goes" formats. My this is probably my mild OCD speaking (still, you should employ someone with mild OCD. It would improve a few things). (More about a structural issue with Tribal Wars in V4 here.)

 PART 4: TRADE

1. MAJOR: You can't tell how many of a card you're trading you own in list view, a.k.a. the view most people would adopt when trading. That's a big issue because it can lead to wrong trades.
2. We need a way to move large quantity of cards quicker (select all and drag only move 1 copy per card, what if you have to move 2500 tix between accounts?) (Yeah, this is on behalf of all the bot owners I know, but I also recently sold a big chunk of my collection for tix, and taking 400 tix means clicking 40 times on "add 10 of this". The option to "add every copy of this" would solve this problem.)
3. The For Trade binder has a limit of 50,000 cards. And you can't have more than one active trade binder (that could even been useful). So bot owners need to limit themselves to 50,000 items, which is an issue because when the bot buys something new, and you've reached the limit, you have to go there, select which cards to take out, which cards to put in trade. As you can imagine, that's far from ideal.
4. We should be able to sort the previous trade partners list, which is a useful feature. Also, manage it by delete unwanted ones, put notes, and so.
5. Trade should have a personalized display list: no need for card text or P/T when you're trading.

 PART 5: CHAT

1. MAJOR, VERY VERY UNBELIEVABLY MAJOR: A chat where you can't select/copy/paste text (email addresses, links, decklist) shouldn't exist in 2014. In fact, I believe it didn't exist in 1998 as well. This is so high priority that should've been done yesterday, and it would still be too late.
2. Similarly, CTRL-A to select the text you're writing is universal. In the current chat, you have to use the very slow SHIFT+arrows.
3. MAJOR: When you dock the chat window to the right, like I believe most people do, notifications cover the writing area. Can't they pop up at the top, rather than the bottom?
4. The "someone has told you something" alert is more discreet that in V3, and that's an improvement. The flashing on the CHAT button and on the arrow at the top,  to signify, respectively, "someone opened a new chat with you" and "someone wrote something in an opened chat window" are conversely a bit obscure at times. It would happen to me to be on another program, and I see the MTGO tab flash, I go there to check but can't tell why it flashed, so I have to check every single chat window to find out. A middle ground between the aggressively invasive V3 approach and this "whodunnit" mystery has to exist.
5. BUG (I think): When someone opens a chat with you but logs off before you can check it, you can't see the message and the flashing keeps going on indefinitely. The only thing you see is the name of the user who sent the message, and the fact that they're now off-line.
6. Beloved missing feature from V3: the automatic "Hello and good luck" and "Good game" sentences.
7. Beloved missing feature from V3: links to cards in chat. (By the way, the mana symbols, smiles and such are still there. They're all in the form [s*], where * is pretty much any letter or number. Mana symbols: W, U, B, R, G. Smile: S. Tap symbol: T. Untap symbol: J. Trophy: D. Have fun finding the other ones.)

 PART 6: IN-GAME

1. MAJOR: Any instance where you have to choose a target pulls up a large window that you have to move away because it's likely covering the card you want to target. It's super-annoying, needs to be changed to something else. Maybe just reducing the size of that damn window, or make it so you can target through it.
2. The "what's affecting what" system vastly improved since open beta, but we still need big, clear arrows pointing from source(s) to target(s), the chain of events can be really complex at times.
3. Where I'm firmly in the "this looks bad!" bandwagon myself is with the stack. The stack does look bad, it seems to employ stretched pictures, it's just unpleasant too look at those. And it's not really clear, sometimes you don't clearly get the order. I've no immediate solutions here, but I'd wish to see some alternative.
4. Counters on cards are too conspicuous, the loyalty counters especially cover a planeswalker's art on the battlefield forever, even when zoomed in (suggestion: put them in the bottom left corner, smaller). Magic is a game with a strong visual component, the artists' work and the characters' features shouldn't be treated this way.
5. BUG (I think): I get a notification of "playersname opened a chat with you" every time my opponent writes something in chat (and, again, the notification covers the writing area!), even if I've notifications disabled.
6. Maybe this is just me, but I have troubles counting piles of lands. At some point a counter shows up, but 4 piled lands aren't counted and I find myself squinting at the screen and counting them by hand to make sure I know how much mana I've available.
7. Beloved missing feature from V3: the option to disable the "Emptying your Mana Pool" confirmation box whenever you end a phase/step with mana in the pool.
8. Similarly, when there are no creatures on your side of the battlefield, the game shouldn't ask you to choose blockers. Sometimes F6 makes it skip that part automatically, but not always. The thing is: if you can create blockers at instant speed, you'll do it in the Declare Attackers step. If you have a Fog, you'll use it in the Declare Blockers step. In fact, you can't even do anything when you're asked to choose blockers. It should skip that part automatically every time you don't have eligible blockers.
9. Cards that make you choose a color of mana when activated (e.g. Fertile Ground, Verdant Haven), bring up a 2-row menu with that you need to scroll down to choose the colors listed at the bottom. They should be all easily accessible without the need to scroll down, as you lose time to activate the effect (i.e. tap the land enchanted with Verdant Haven).
10. MINOR: Solitaire has two "Turn 1".