MMDOC part 2: The good, the bad, the dying card game

I've played a great deal of Might and Magic: Duel of Champions in the last few weeks, and I've come to terms with three things. First, MMDOC is at its core some of the best CCG design I've ever played and I hope people steal their ideas. Second, the game designers who are currently working on it seem divided down the middle between actually "getting it" and just making horrible formats. Lastly, the game is dying and playing is rather bittersweet.

The game managed a small bump in player base following the huge overhaul to its gui, formats and economic system, then returned on its downward spiral into oblivion. I will go over the reasons the game might be dying at the end, but I kinda want to talk about what the game does well and what it doesn't do well.

First and foremost - since this is ostensibly a review blog - I have to strictly say no, you should not start playing MMDOC. It has been over a month since the last major patch, going on two, and the developers have reacted with reluctance, ambivalence and open hostility to feedback. I feel like MMDOC is akin to recommending someone play Magic Online, except with worse community interaction on the official forums and a better client. And the fact it is hard to imagine a game that is shedding players at a tremendous rate is going to be around for much longer.

F2P games are extremely reliant on both critical mass and the "certainty of longevity" I suppose. As the player base continues to dwindle, it becomes difficult to imagine that the revenue stream can keep up, as without new players you won't find new whales and without players keeping the queues going players will just play less and less til they quit. As that feeling of dread sets in the mouse doesn't want to go to the cash shop.

But let's talk about the good, before we get really negative:



Higher level play in MMDOC is interesting in many ways. The basic level game, with its lanes and events, offers a great deal of strategic depth that actually does somewhat carry over into the higher level games. Learning positioning and leaning on certain lanes works very well, and you end up with a very dynamic game some of the time.

I really like the lane system and it confuses me they didn't add multiplayer, given it is easy to envision a grid that spreads the lanes out against two opponents and then collapses as players are removed. It seems like a pretty easy set up, if a little bit difficult to visualize, so perhaps it is simply not something their engine is capable of handling. You could also obscure information and only allow players to see the field they can interact with, which would have been great. Oh well.

Multiplayer (that is, if you're confused, greater than two players in card playing parlance) has a consistent problem in most card games and one thing I was pretty impressed with is the swiss tournament format, which I've done maybe twenty or so since the patch. Perhaps a few more, I'm not certain. Swiss is inexpensive to enter, supported by daily quests and generally pretty quick fun. To tie this weird segue together, one thing I've always loathed about playing tournaments on Magic is how much time you spend waiting around. MMDOC's swiss tournaments show an understanding of how to spend player time.

I am less than impressed with MMDOC's jackpot tournament, though I think it is a good idea that all f2p games should consider, but in actual play it is rather mediocre. Essentially, it only rewards the top 30% of players, so it becomes difficult to justify and many of the games are excruciatingly long as people become absolute serious business about winning or losing. The jackpot only pays out gold, but I hope Hex or other games learn to copy this system. Anything with a f2p currency definitely should. Hell, make some sort of limited jackpot, where you open cards and play silly games for as long as you'd like. Similar to leagues in mtgo.

Well, leagues the ancestral format that is never coming back.

Card design in the new set, Heart of Nightmares, is sort of a mixed bag. On the most part I liked the set and found it mostly lateral, but it has a couple problem cards that just baffle me. The first one is Boneyard, which is pretty erratic and just really unenjoyable. The card costs 4 and constantly recurs 2 drops from your graveyard. If you ignore the lane, or can't push through the lane, you just end up swamped in vomit, creating really repetitive and dull game states. The card was complained about when the set first launched and the developer comments were so ridiculously out of touch it just baffled me. The game's resources tend to inform what a card is going to do. Cards that provide card advantage, by and large, have a fortune requirement. Boneyard does not.

They also said it was aimed at Open, a format they're basically killing, although they're killing the game in general so I don't know that it matters anyway. It is also sort of funny that Haven faction was supposed to be the "building" faction, but necro, stronghold and inferno all have buildings that gel more with Haven's tactics or just have more reasonable requirements.

The other big irritation card is Circle of Nine, which is interesting in how innocent looking it is and how in reality it is just brutally unfair. Circle of Nine allows you to circumvent four turns of resource accumulation. It is difficult to express the resource system of MMDOC in other game terms, but regardless, the card enabled several extremely stupid decks and is sort of funny in that the developers stated something to the effect of 'Stronghold faction is going to want lost of Might resource, and we're going to give them the tools to do it!'

And then they gave the best resource bonus card to Academy and gave them an epic that massively benefits from it. Cool.

That being said, if you took out Boneyard entirely and nerfed Circle of Nine to being reasonable you'd probably have a really great set. Most of HoN is playable, with few truly dead or worthless cards, and I really like the art direction. Although I will admit it is extremely weird to look up the original art for a card and discover it seriously looks like they shooped the art to give a demoness with already big breasts even bigger ones. Classy!

The new gui is also, on the most part, quite nice. The out of game layout can take a little bit to get used to and I do feel like they could have set it up a little better. You need to go through multiple steps to reach where you want to be, which can come off as just unnecessarily frustrating when they could have put in quicker hotlinks in a different pane with less explanation. The game continues to look great in play, and while it doesn't look quite as polished as Hearthstone, I feel like the presentation doesn't take away from the game while looking good enough. Meanwhile MTGO continues to look like a spreadsheet from 1996.

I do find the lack of a real combat log irritating, and various interactions could use a bit of help. The game is often too afraid to really put big symbols on things, and wastes a great deal of screen space on fluff, but it does look good and play well. There are two running bugs with the UI to my knowledge - one is, sometimes games will fail to start. This happens about one in fifty games. The second is that UI elements on cards, which are superimposed over the art, vanish. I've had this bug happen once, but I've read it happens a ton on the ipad client.

So now let's transition into the bad:

One of the big additions to MMDOC to was a daily quest system, which may very well be the lynchpin killing the game or maybe not. Who knows. The daily quest system offers up to 3 quests a day, which are a mixed bag. I like many of the sillier ones, but the main quests are the third tier "win 5 games with X faction to get 3 wildcards". The problem is, it is very difficult to support all 6 factions, both from the perspective of the development team and players who aren't dropping insane amounts of money on the game.

But, of course, these are daily quests right so obviously you would simply wait til tomorrow and then whatever, just forget about it. And therein lies the rub; The developers did not make them daily quests. If you can not complete a quest - say, because you don't even own a deck from that faction - the daily quest is locked and does not ever change. In fact, they were rather coy about this, sort of half acting initially like it was a bug and not intentionally trying to funpain its way into getting people to spend money.

They have basically come out and said they will eventually let people have a 'forfeit quest' button, as opposed to a re-roll button, while presenting the argument that daily quests are "optional" and you shouldn't feel like you should be entitled to completing them. This is basically one of the stupidest arguments I've seen in gaming history. I don't mean that with any shred of hyperbole, because I really struggle to come up with a level of brain damage necessary to say that.

First off, when a customer is complaining about your product, "screw you" is not a great bit of feedback to their response. Why even say it at all? How is that constructive? Sure, I'll tell people who complain 'consider sucking less' but why would a developer ever feel like saying that unless they have no clue what "talking to customers" entails? The goal of every single line of dialogue and letter when talking to a customer is to soothe, entice and befriend that customer. I never understand why people take customer feedback so harshly. So what? Some dude is yelling at you. That is what they do. You're at work, getting paid, meanwhile he is making stupid posts on the internet. Care.  You want their money. Every interaction has that goal; satisfy the customer, take their money, nothing else matters. (And EA's research has clearly shown a player who complains is in the pool of people who spend or could spend) Second, daily quests were pushed in WoW (probably copied from somewhere else) as a way to help reward players for logging on, to help keep the game numbers up. Players who log on and have a little bit of fun tend to roll that into other fun. Daily quests as is are likely a big part of why people just stopped logging on.

Third, the entire new economy is based on daily quests. They nerfed leveling up and reduced login rewards, made it harder to get things without wildcards and then tied wildcards to daily quests. They also increased the prices of everything that you can still buy, which for some reason, isn't much. And it is true they are, ultimately, optional. But it is a game, and logging in at all is optional, and clearly people have selected the option where they don't log in.

Format balance in Standard, which is sort of the other bad thing, is less than I had hoped for. There are six factions in MMDOC and to my understanding only four of the six are tier 1 in the extant format. The two tier 1 academy decks, as well, are based around abusing Circle of Nine. The other issue is that standard didn't really clear out as much of the annoyance as it could have. One of the key cards I don't like is Mass Rage, which basically turns off most of the game and reduces interactivity to nearly zero. I've never even bothered to try to learn how you beat mass rage, since it is just horribly boring and dumb. I really don't understand why you'd ever choose to push a card that reduces player interactions. It would be like WoTC reprinting stasis. This is a two decade old lesson.

Mass Rage (the deck) also currently exploits a bug which has been known for two months and I believe as of the time of this posting hasn't been fixed. It is possible I missed the hot fix, but they didn't post about it beyond "it is coming".

The other issue is that the more casual a player is, the more they tend to want to play big monsters and smash them into each other. For whatever reason standard has way too much spell based removal, with most of the top decks being pretty much entirely based around casting big spells to plough through opposing forces. This is ... Sad. HoN includes several larger men, but on the most part Standard doesn't really use most of its creature pool, because creatures are just way too fragile. You do get to see the huge Djinn Cloudshaper in Hakeem and Myranda decks, but they're doing so by reducing its cost to at or below the removal spells that kill it. The last game I played, a Hakeem deck I was beating went to 10 magic (jumping 5 points in a turn) and then played two of them for free. Ehhhhh.

Still not getting that "Stronghold is going to have the tools thing". Though I do think free spells are pretty dumb and rarely work from a development angle, I am mostly blaming Circle of Nine here. My point is mostly that it doesn't really count, but also that the game just straight doesn't hit the marks it is hoping for.

And yeah, as someone who played Haven, Sanctuary and Inferno primarily before the big patch, the fact two of my favored factions just went out the window is less than exciting. You can still play Haven in Open, but Open ... Well, we'll get to that. Sanctuary got quite heavily nerfed without any real reward.

So I guess we get to the ugly - why is the game dying? - and this is a complex question to answer. The player base, by all accounts, is seriously down and continues to drop away. I'm not really certain I'm qualified to answer, but I'll give my personal opinions on what is driving people away.

The economic changes are just not great all around, and I don't necessarily mean the idea to strip free players from getting a premium currency, which is one of the changes. Basically free players no longer get the exact same stuff as the not-free players, and honestly I don't really mind. The problem is, they took apart the economy on every level. Gold is easier to acquire somewhat on days where you roll good dailies, but gold from actually playing is reduced and gold is less valuable as the things to spend it on are more than their equivalent predecessors. Wildcards previously dropped from packs, but were changed to dropping a set rate from doing third tier dailies, most days. The amount of wildcards gained from the quests is probably higher (per day) than gained from buying packs was, but you no longer get the "dump" of wildcards from buying a box every once and a while from leveling. Still, since gold and wildcards are tied to daily quests, it feels like daily quests are mostly to blame.
  
The thing is, if the daily quest system worked in a reasonable way and was tuned better, I don't think it would do what it currently does, and I think that is that is currently turns off casual players. They might score a couple bucks here and there on frustrating people, but I don't think the monetization system of annoying people works overly well in the long run. I've read a little about 'funpain' but the daily quest system is just a recurring annoyance, as quests can take a long time to complete and sit there locked if you don't want to do them.

Game balance, like I said, is laid out by the daily quest system. Rolling a quest to play a faction you don't have a great deck for - I never really finished that solid an academy deck, so playing academy was always the daily I didn't want to do and ultimately just stopped playing over getting again and again - but rolling a daily for a faction where there just isn't a good deck at all is a nightmare. I'm still in my old age something of a spike (the mtg term for a player who cares more about winning than flavor or style) so I don't mind playing whatever faction is good, but game balance being so weak has to have a negative impact on the players who like those factions.

For me, the whole "forced to play a faction due to bugged dailies" was the point where i had been considering paying into the f2p system and decided otherwise. I think a good rule in life is the minute a game developer presents a pretty obvious attempt at extorting you to pay up or suffer, never give them your money. I don't know how the larger player base reacted, but that was it for me.

The other issue is that game balance, the dailies and the economy all eventually get topped off by the issues with Open. Open is the "all cards" format, and the developers handled its existence in basically the worst way possible. Open support was dropped, you can slowly accumulate open cards via wildcards, but doing so is painfully slow on a long term scale. The thing, I think they falsely believed they could copy "legacy" in Magic, where players are willing to pony up thousands of dollars in the secondary market. This is erroneous, because part of why people are willing to spend so much is you can usually get a big chunk of your money back, or cut a profit, due to a secondary market which simply doesn't exist on MMDOC. You can't take 1+2+3=6 and go "yeah, I want some of that six too, but I've only got 1+2". It doesn't work. You have three, guys.

And that greed gets in the way of two things. The message was pretty clear - we're not supporting open, so every one who invested time and money into open, meh get out of here. So you have players who wanted to still play open feeling discouraged or forced into a new format. Inversely open is supported - At least, you can still play open tournaments, and the weekly formats heavily favor open, so if new people were coming in they would find a wealth of stuff to do. But that runs into the other problem - open presents a solution to the format issue. If a player doesn't like the fact Haven sucks in Standard, for example, they would be able to play Haven in Open or Weekly.

So they gutted f2p support for those formats, but they tried to entice people to play them and have from a development angle good reason to do so. Does that end up as something of a mixed message? You have one class of players who want to play a format but are finding fewer and fewer people to play with leading to a feeling of betrayal, and another class of players who would like to access the format but simply can't. The cost of entering Open as a pay format is simply too high to be reasonable - The f2p model breaks apart when they greedily imagine people are going to drop hundreds to play an under-supported format. Frankly, it comes off as bad business, one step away from swindling people out of their money.

There are other factors. As I have implied, the community interaction with the developers is poor at best. Most of the community managers seem to have a terrible grasp of their job - one of them wrote out a long emo post on reddit about how he didn't like posting there because people were mean to him. Tough luck dude, that is your job. Man up (Or Mom up, since your mother would handle this shit no probs son)- and bad CMs make for nervous players who quit. A bad record of communication killed word of mouth early on into the patch. Instead of people going "yeah buy this play it is great!" they become reluctant or openly discouraging. WoTC's influence on older formats tends to run the other direction - they allow the secondary market to do what it does, and when supply dwindles, they reprint what they can. People tend to encourage others to get into the older formats. You can't even do that in MMDOC, without saying 'yeah spend a big pile of money to try something you might not like'.

Ultimately, it may not even be their fault. Hearthstone launched this year, and Hex is open beta at least. There are other new DCGs showing up, I haven't looked into Infinity Wars but I've read it is solid, and there are likely others. There is both downward and upward press in the market space, and being a f2p game with a publisher that seems to be hamfisting things, as well as just not having a solid grasp on the revenue stream, can't be good at this juncture. The game is also really hampered by a lack of alternate means to entice freemium purchases. When I played PoE, there were tons of things to buy from them - pets, stash space, alternate art for gear, so on - MMDOC has very little of this after being on the market for two years. MMDOC is also busy right now trying to push its 'road to paris' tournament scene, but in the face of such dwindling player turn out it feels like an odd choice. People barely watch the magic pro tour. How much do they watch a game that is several decimal places smaller, with no secondary market or casual play to speak of?

Card games are a bit weird as f2p model since they are, above all else, extremely vulnerable to critical mass issues. MMDOC's queues took a matter of seconds when I started playing, and though they took a bit longer as they went, they are now reliably over a minute or higher at some parts of the day. As the number goes up and up doing your dailies on off-peak times becomes really punishing. Win 5 games, assuming poor luck, can be over an hour of playing. When you add in ten to fifteen minutes just to get into a game - And you can't do anything else in game while queuing, you can't work on decks or anything else - it starts to just feel foolish.

Anyway, this is a long one for a game I don't recommend, but I do think lots of good things can be said for it. Ubisoft should really get in there and fire some of the game's community managers, and forum moderation - well, most of them seem like good people but not really great at their jobs, so it's a little bittersweet - and probably re-think the whole "reducing the amount of content made available" idea. It's still a good game, and I do hope it manages to survive, but I feel like bleeding players at the rate it is, is going to get the team assigned elsewhere and the game shuttered.

But maybe not. If they release a major patch that fixes all the game's issues, or at least some of them, I reckon I'll give it another try. It is a nice looking, fun if kinda grindy game, but it is hard to want to grind when you're thinking "this system is set up to extort money out of me" and then even worse "this system may not exist in a matter of weeks at this rate"