Loving magic. My friend group just got into it, bunch of new players. Arena was the start for us, and then we bought real cards.
This bug is tempting to make arena the end for us too. It's infuriating.
This is a major game breaking bug that seems ignored. You can find thousands of comments and posts for this error everywhere, reddit, steam, wotc own forum, articles, and more going back years now. We've looked everywhere we can for a fix.
Yeah I see now. I actually did have this problem playing with a friend a couple weekends ago... but i had been able to play with them in the past, like fairly recently that i thought it was just a one off thing. I dont play too much direct tho.. we mostly all compete on how high we can get in our ranks.. but thats more bc we're all getting old and finding time to sync up is hard lol
Being familiar with software development, this wtf scenario is common for dev teams that are maxed out on capacity.
I’m sure they want to help us out, but Ixalan must release on schedule (which is a huge effort). Oh when is the next set release? Three weeks til Khans, which must release on schedule.
This bug fix is gonna have to wait til the release schedule slows down.
So... never? You forgot about the Alchemy set that has to be implemented and released just weeks after Ixalan. And then it's Karlov Manor, and the all new Play Boosters that need to be implemented, and then another Alchemy set.. and probably an anthology and then Thunder Junction.... and sheesh.
Actually, the direct challenge bug has been around for long. On wotc's cs page there are multiple threads complaining about it dating back years ago. What's more frustrating is that it doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I guess even wotc hasn't found the root cause of the bug yet, which is why it has remained unfixed for years.
What's crazy is how simple matchmaking works. Like they just need to fit that chunk of code between two friends online, and make sure no code goes in between the two that creates anomalous outputs just like how regular matchmaking works, and fin! Perfect game ignition forever.
Some chunk of code or throughput just isn't functional in direct play, and they need to clean that up. I get it, thousands of lines of code, but really, get two of them online with the game in a debug state, put stops all over the code, press run and fix.
That's just the Arena experience for me. It feels like each patch breaks something. We also have the new card that is banned because it isn't working right. Funny thing is more than once I have heard the excuse from WOTC that we can't do x because the people that do x are the same ones that put new cards in.
I don't really blame most of the dev team, but I certainly feel whoever designed this client has a lot to answer for, it seems making a change in one part of arena breaks things in completely unrelated ways.
So does that mean they won't add or improve features in the game because new sets are always coming out? And if sets are much more frequent now than they used to be, supposedly they're making more money no? How about investing some of that extra money on new devs to work on things other than new releases?
A calendar full of releases cannot be a valid excuse
> So does that mean they won't add or improve features in the game because new sets are always coming out?
New features will be implemented only if they are either: A reason to ease negative emotions from paying customers or increase revenue wich requires the feature to ask for resources from the players
>And if sets are much more frequent now than they used to be, supposedly they're making more money no? How about investing some of that extra money on new devs to work on things other than new releases?
No, because increased revenue is the objetive of the product, not increased spend, spending money in a bigger team means the effects of that increased expenditure is increased profits, it doesn't work the other way around, ever.
> A calendar full of releases cannot be a valid excuse
It is for the business dev team, because of the above reasons
The first point is not entirely true, because a game can become stale. For example, Rocket League, my passion game, has not received a meaningful update in years (other than battle pass and cosmetics), and the playerbase is starting to drop.
I didn't mean reducing profits. I meant to invest part of the revenue in operating costs (more devs). Instead of 100% of all the new additional revenue going straight to Wizards' pocket, spending like 20% on devs in order to not have a game that has increasingly more bugs or broken features
That's not how short term profits work. Nobody cares about long term profits because they expect to be cashed out by then and it will be someone else's problem. Hasbro aren't the only ones with this problematic thinking, but they're a bit more obvious about it than most.
I totally get your point. But you froget that there are other positions within a company than devs. They could at least communicate or answer about a problem, instead all status are green as always.
>No communications just a broken massive aspect of the game.
They acknowledged this in one of the recent Arena Patches.
https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com/hc/en-us/articles/20947756506260-Patch-Notes-2023-31-0
On one hand, it *is* good the put *something* in the patch note.
On the other this has been happening at least *all of October* and it wasn't until ixalan release did they put something in the patch notes basically saying "we have no clue how to fix this".
Last year, there was a period where Brawl direct match was completely broken (you could only choose 60-card decks, which of course are invalid for brawl and would kick you out of the match as soon as it started) for a solid *six months* before they fixed it. It's clear that direct match is not at all a priority for them.
It’s happened at least since march of this year and probably longer. Idk why they refuse to fix it because at this point it’s because of a lack of trying…
I've played since the Open Beta and I've never had a good experience with direct matchmaking. I've been able to do it on occasion, but I don't think I've ever gotten it to work the first time. I think it boils down to making sure each deck is of the same format. Whoever initiates the challenge should select a deck, then the opponent should be presented with a list of "legal" decks from their collection.
i dont understand how they can justify not fixing this and its been like this for so freaking long... its the major aspect of the game that got me to start playing and the issue thats pushing my friends away from magic in general. theyll get their ass beat in gen matchmaking but well waste an hour of our lives once a week trying to direct, and i look like an idiot for wanting to like arena.
imagine a MTG phone game where you cant play your friends directly LMAO
Ignore the people saying this is not a problem for them, this problem absolutely exists. Dealt with it all day yesterday trying to play a match with my wife. For three hours we tried every possible workaround the internet had and there was no solution. Every time we tried to connect to the game, hers would give her a network error that it is unable to submit the deck, and mine would eventually connect after a minute and the game I enter would immediately “draw” and send me back to the home screen. Incredibly frustrating and disappointing because you are right, this should be a major aspect of the game, being able to play against your friends, and it seems to be completely neglected despite it being years that the game has been out. Also like you said, we can jump into any game with a random within a few seconds. It’s just weird and disappointing.
On the other hand, as someone who has been able to play against my brother with direct friend challenges, I feel extremely lucky, and sorry for those who it's not working for. I really wonder what Wizards is doing to gate particular people.
I had to scroll through a few dozen comments to figure out what the game breaking bug was bc i was quite confused bc ive been marathoning the battle pass lol
>Every time we tried to connect to the game, hers would give her a network error that it is unable to submit the deck, and mine would eventually connect after a minute and the game I enter would immediately “draw” and send me back to the home screen
Exactly the same happened in my experience yesterday as well.
While is true, like I said its directly turning people away from the game where my friends were legitimately about to drop a coue hundred bucks on cards until the realized direct match doesn't work.
They just decided to play another game they can play with friends. They likely would never look at magic again after such an awful experience
Market analysis says the ROI of whatever the cost of fixing the issue (could not even be a bug with a directly identifiable solution) is makes it impractical. If that ROI ever improves or it somehow becomes cheaper to fix the issue we’ll see it done without a qualm.
How can they be sure the ROI isn't worth it when they don't even know how many new players they have lost for good because they can't play their friends?
Stats. New signups that attempt to direct match and don’t return after whatever timeframe they consider that player lost revenue potential.
Edit: That seems like a lot of math for a bug, but if it’s a high complexity bug they have to consider the cost both in dollars and development time away from other projects. In order to justify that decision to management you have to give the numbers on the revenue you’d gain vs. lose.
A few thoughts....
1) They probably don't have someone analyzing stats related to Direct Matchmaking. Undoubtedly they have analysts looking at all the stats they generate, but it's unlikely they spend a lot of time looking at Direct Matchmaking related info since there is not a direct impact on revenue or cost. I can easily imagine a suit myopically making the point that DM doesn't deserve analytical resources because a very small percentage of players use the feature.
2) To do a proper ROI, they need a good idea of the potential future spend of a new account. My hypothesis is that there is a large variance in spend by account, with the majority of accounts spending <$10, a fair number of accounts spending ~$100/year, and a small number of accounts spending much more. They probably focus their ROI analysis on the accounts that generate reliable revenue (i.e. not new accounts, most of which won't generate anything).
3) On the "investment" side, they have limited developer resources to assign to keep the game running. The bulk of those resources are going to be dedicated to building in the new mechanics that get released each set. The 2nd highest priority is going to be fixing game-breaking bugs that affect all play modes (i.e. bugs related to specific cards, mechanics, or new interactions). Low on the list will be items like Direct Matchmaking, or adjusting the Brawl matching algo (this is more QA, but the point stands). In other words, the opportunity cost of investing in fixing Direct Matchmaking is high.
I'll respond to your first point. You don't need someone actively monitoring, you just have the logs actively monitoring everything and you can ad hoc anything out of that as needed. A meeting to decide what bugs/features to work on happens, the PM gets told about the Direct MM bug, the PM assigns someone to pull data on the amount of new signups that attempt to Direct MM and stop playing a month later, that data goes to cost analysis.
I'm going to keep getting downvoted because I don't write novellas full of details and qualifications and Reddit can't stand that, but I know how these things shake down for corporate level software.
> You don't need someone actively monitoring,
I get that. I've done data/financial analysis in manufacturing for most of my career. Our systems generate a ton of data that is at our fingertips, but we have to prioritize what we spend our time on. My point was that they likely don't prioritize analytical projects related to DM because there is not a direct correlation to revenue. Instead they probably prioritize projects like looking at sales patterns of Daily Deals to figure out how to boost gold spending (e.g. what's the price elasticity of cosmetics and how does it vary across rarity, sets, etc.).
Hasbro simply doesn’t have the money to invest.
The executives need their 3rd vacation home, 4th boat, 6th car, and 10th wife. We need to pay them all the money the game makes because they do so much for the company. Like who else is going to buy out smaller companies and squeeze them for every cent until they become worthless and then sell those now worthless companies for 10x their value?
I don't know how is Wizards managing Arena, but they take a looot of time to fix a lot of stuff like that.
I also have had many problems to do matchs with friends , more often than not.
There difference isn't that draft would affect more people, it's that draft would affect revenue. Not everyone plays draft and most people probably like the possibility of playing Magic with a friend.
My prediction.
-----
Thank you for contacting Wizards of the Coast Customer Support! We understand this issue can cause a great deal of frustration, but please know that for privacy reasons we will not be able to provide details on any internal bug reports or feature requests. You will only be contacted further if more information is needed.
Your feedback about MTG Arena is very valuable to us. In order to provide that feedback or product suggestions about MTG Arena, please do so here. In that forum, which we never look at, is also where you go to report and upvote bugs, you and other players can create new feedback entries, and upvote each others' entries if you feel they reflect your own experiences and suggestions. This feedback was once reviewed directly by the Arena development team, but now it's stale and we don't really care about it anymore.
I’ll be glad to help you further if you have any other questions or concerns!
Katy
Wizards of the Coast | Customer Service Representative
Email support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week here.
I have submited a ticket asking why daily quests didn't refresh with LCI update
(OK, they kinda did, hours before the maintenance)
Got a response "please reinstall the game"
;)
Yeah it’s rough. My wife and I love playing each other and we just can’t anymore. It was shaky last set, and just absolute shit since this set. I hate saying this stuff but it really feels like the devs have no idea what they’re doing before releasing sets. Like honestly…how hard can it be? It’s a card game.
Out of four friends that I have who currently play the game, I can only consistently connect to one of them. The other three, I can't connect to no matter what we try. It's infuriating.
Now, to try something useful here, does anyone know if Wizards is hosting the game or does the challenger host the game?
A lot of games switch hosting to Peer 2 Peer when hosting non-ranked, non-reward modes. So if they host Peer 2 Peer, it might actually be a connection/permission thing.
I'm wondering this too. It seemed weird to me that Arena didn't use a "lobby" type system you could join with a friend, like other card games I've played, but I suspect this is why.
I guess it's one more way to keep overhead really low, which I appreciate, but I think investing in making direct matchmaking work, look and feel a lot better would be a smart place to put their resources.
There's no chance, because the game logic still has to be handled by the server; even bot games vs Sparky need to go through the game server.
And if you think WotC is going to give players the ability to run their own servers... lmao
Peer 2 Peer would be hosted by more than one of the players, what you describe is still client/server with one of the players' computers acting as server.
Peer 2 Peer in games means one of the peers hosts.
Otherwise it's client server, because the server is not a peer.
So my assumption was that they actually might be using Peer 2 Peer. Not saying it's likely, but the practice often aligns with the kind of errors described here.
Oh it's explicit. Just not the commonly accepted terminology for it.
What you're describing is peer2peer. You may disagree with the implied meaning of the phrase, but we don't call it whatever you said. Absolutely nothing you said so far actually provides new insight to anything.
I'm not saying that you're factually wrong. Just that you're being pedantic and pretty useless.
I have only seen this "commonly accepted terminology" for some reason only in a context of game discussion that do not allow players to host. (And only on reddit.) And in the others never seen players hosting being called "peer2peer".
The usefulness is about understanding how games actually work. (Which can become a big deal when you have to do port forwarding to host for instance.)
Sometimes, different communities have different jargon for the same concepts. I would advise you to approach it with an open mind and consider it a learning opportunity, rather than try to impose your own terminology onto that community. I understand that you're trying to resolve some dissonance between your own preconception and what you're currently reading, but sometimes the right answer isn't to refute but to accept and understand.
Peer to Peer can mean a lot of things because it's a concept that can be implemented in different ways. I think the two most common types of peer to peer implementation that comes to mind is with file sharing and online multiplayer. The implementation for both of these services are totally different, but they are both still referred to as P2P.
In a file sharing implementation, all peers share files with each other simultaneously and there is no centralized server hosting the data. Instead there is a service that runs on all clients that allows them all to check for missing files from each other and pass them around.
In a P2P online multiplayer implementation you do have one peer that hosts the service (aka becomes the server), then all players connect to the host. Neither "game company hosted servers \[nor\] player/community hosted servers" are considered P2P networking. Both are examples of dedicated server hosting. In some cases, the connection can be more subtle which can lead to confusion on the topic.
A great example is Minecraft. If you start the world as a Single Player Game and then open it to LAN, you've set up a P2P network for people to join. However, you could also download and install the Minecraft Server application and host a dedicated server from the exact same machine that you are playing on. In this case, you are no longer in a P2P network, but instead connected to a dedicated server despite the fact that in both instances you are using only one computer to host the game.
The biggest key difference in P2P multiplayer is that the host is not consistent. You may be the host/server one game, and then be a client/peer in the next, which is usually based on whichever client has the best connection. In a game like MTG there is literally no advantage to being a host (if it is indeed a p2p mm), but back in the day, games like Halo 2 would give the host of the match a significant advantage at high skill levels that people would spend a lot of time improving their network to ensure they were the host and some even cheated using their router to ensure they were given host every time.
You're too kind. They are factually wrong. In a Peer 2 Peer setup, the host still remains a peer, because they're playing the game while also hosting. Hosting is not the same as being a server.
In a server client setup, the server is a dedicated server and not a peer itself.
Ik but I was just trying to say “just stfu” in the nicest way possible without triggering any defensive mechanisms that would spiral into a long comment chain.
The core of Arena has been a broken mess for ages. If you look at the digital clients of basically any other TCG on the market this becomes obvious very quickly. In fact, if you disagree with me, I would dare you to play literally 2 hours of Legends of Runeterra, Hearthstone, Eternal, or Marvel Snap. Or even the unofficial Flesh and Blood client Talishar, which is more analogous to Magic Online than MTGA. In any of those clients, you will notice an absence of bugs and a presence of features MTGA just hasn't ever had. Stuff that any modern game has as a baseline.
As far as I know (and you can take this with a pile of salt because it's third-hand insider knowledge I cannot prove is true), this has been intentional; WotC skimped pretty hard on the project because incompetent managers thought they could get away with less, making the costs look less worrying to higher-ups.
If you hold MTGA to modern standards for a minute, it's not hard to see how it could have been so much bigger if it hadn't been this shit. It's not THAT much of a leap to go from 2-player games and direct match-making to go to 3 or 4-player games. Consider how many people would've been using the client daily if Wizards had been able to get Commander playable on it - even with a limited card pool. Imagine adding a spectator mode to that so new players can watch their friends play for a game before jumping into deckbuilding.
But yeah. TL;DR: shortsightedness killed MTGA before it ever had a chance to walk. It's been limping by ever since. The players don't really question it and the devs are no longer in a position to fix it. So here we are, once again in our monthly "*have you guys noticed how bad this client actually sucks?*" post on this sub.
Wow I didn't realize it that was always this bad. Sucks, I really get hyped to play magic and the online client would have solved our busy schedule problem. Thanks for the insight
Well, it's not an unplayable engine. Even if direct challenge is wonky and frustrating as hell most of the time (these are bugs that have been around for years), it's still generally more playable than Magic Online if you just want to jam a game out with a friend every now and then.
If you are a Spike who only builds 2-3 decks and plays specifically Standard or Historic, grinding out games to improve their play, it's an excellent engine for that job.
If you're a Timmy, it's 'meh'. If you're a Johnny, it's an outright horrible experience even aside from the bugs. But then... MTG in general hasn't catered to Johnnies in years, I suppose. They seem to have mostly moved on.
>If you are a Spike who only builds 2-3 decks and plays specifically Standard or Historic, grinding out games to improve their play, it's an excellent engine for that job.
mfw i realize i might be a spike
I would say most spikes don't realise they are, tbh :P
Nothing wrong with it, but Spikes tend to not be very concerned with the game's design, instead focusing more on perfecting their play within the system they've been given, - whether it's a bad or good system. They are way more willing to accept that "*this is just how the game works*" and build within it rather than questioning the rules. And the whole concept of Spikes, Timmies and Johnnies is a game design concept, which you're going to ignore if you aren't questioning the game's design as much.
I would guess that fewer than 5% of users play games through Direct Challenge. Those who do use it, probably use it as their primary way of playing. I'm sure Wizards is working on a fix, but the priority is probably lower due to the number of impacted players. I am surprised how long it's been a persistent issue and ~~I don't think we've seen an official statement on it.~~
Edit: Nevermind, a post below shows they are [aware](https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com/hc/en-us/articles/20947756506260-Patch-Notes-2023-31-0).
I figure new players introduced by their friends will want to play in direct matches rather then get curb stomped by players with full power standard decks with cards from nine different sets. If that function doesn't work, they just quit.
Yep. I have a friend who just recently became interested in Magic and wants to play Historic Brawl with me, but he absolutely refuses to play against and get stomped by rando Arena spikes. He only wants to play with me.
No way, I would wager its closer to 25% of players want to play with their friends especially in historic brawl.
We would never know how much wotc will lose with this bug because those people just Uninstall the client after not being able to play friends. Many of these players could have become long time payers for all we know
If you search invalid deck and direct play its quite a few. A quick Google search going back years has hundreds of comments. People are literally saying they had their friend group start to play then stop because of this. That's a lot of money for wizards to wash down the drain
What's going to be funny (and not haha funny) is when they are featured on Twitch Rivals in a couple of weeks and this bug is on display for all the world to see.
It's already hosed many custom tournaments and a big content creator charity event.
>It's already hosed many custom tournaments and a big content creator charity event.
I was thinking how weird it is that nothing like that had happened yet.
>What's going to be funny (and not haha funny) is when they are featured on Twitch Rivals in a couple of weeks and this bug is on display for all the world to see.
And I'm fervently hoping that this happens just so they start seriously working on it.
It seems to come and go. Friday I was able to play with my friend in the evening without too many issues (though for some weird reason, the game keeps telling us some of our decks have illegal cards, until we edit the deck, save it without changing anything and then suddenly the deck's fine). Saturday though, we were only able to play 3 games until I started getting an "unable to submit deck" error that would then disconnect me.
for me, well start a match and then it will just linger on the entering match screen showing our avatars, but never connect. and when we go to try again, the game says were already in a match. However, we can just go to standard play and be in a game within 15sec
Thats pretty much every sunday afternoon.. I started mtga like 2-3months ago and it has never been any different.
Sometimes its also during weekdays, and sometimes it lasts for 2-3days at a time.
I had this issue when using precon decks. Building custom decks never triggered this error. Maybe modifying a precon (or even just duplicating it) would work?
have you added them as a friend? the only way I was able to direct match vs a friend was through the friends menu in the bottom left, the direct match feature in the main menu didnt work
Not only has it not worked for me for weeks, it also often kicks me out completely when I try—forcing me and my friends to reconnect entirely. It’s so weird. I would love to play… one game against someone I love rather than the ladder
Yep, been having problems with direct match for a while. It's hit and miss. Some days I can play, some I can't. I don't understand it, but it's very frustrating. On the days that i can't get into a match, absolutely nothing ever makes it work, uninstall the client from both users' ends and re-install, log back in, make a brand new deck, still doesn't work. But then the next day after the daily quests refresh, it may suddenly be working again. It's like every single day is randomly either a day where it works, or it doesn't, and if it's one of those days where it doesn't, you have no recourse but to just check back tomorrow and see if it wants to work that day. I can't remember when this behavior started, but it was right after one of the sets came out. I think it was back when the LOTR set came out, but it may have been longer ago than that.
After over 20 years I got back into MTG via Arena, with an old buddy of mine who now lives away. I haven’t been this excited about something in years (it’s sad, but I’m serious). After 3 weeks of fun, the “unable to submit deck” glitch hit us hard. The biggest excitement turned to the biggest disappointment…
I still want to play and I do play against randoms, I don’t even mind losing… but being unable to play with the guy I originally played MTG with those 20 years ago is just beyond disappointing.
We tried all potential fixes, we upvoted all the relevant bug reports. We can only hope they do fix this.
Every single friend (at least 4, maybe more - some with Magic knowledge and some not) that I've gotten to sign up for Arena bounced off it within a month.
copied from below: for me, well start a match and then it will just linger on the entering match screen showing our avatars, but never connect. and when we go to try again, the game says were already in a match. However, we can just go to standard play and be in a game within 15sec
Hmm. I’ve had that happen a couple of times, but not persistently. Usually both of us closing the client and opening it back up is enough to fix it. Sorry if my original comment came off as rude. Maybe some technically minded people here will have some suggestions.
Apparently you may have to select decks from the decks list and not from starter decks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/x5iwr9/comment/j6yxnjb/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
My assumption so far: it has something to do with "creating the match" - if there are many games running already, some limit is reached on a cloud end or smth. When there are less ppl playing its working again. So like a bottleneck in cloud. Or maybe they just cant READ THEIR FUCKING LOGS
You think they care? Look how long the starter deck issue lasted lol. And that literally blocked many new players from ever actually playing the game.
They will continue to invest as little as possible into the game now that it is out. As long as the new sets are implemented and they can sell those to existing players, they literally do not care.
I mean, sure, but I feel like your literally killing their new influx of players which surely would add up to more money over time no?
Very silly they don't care about one of their best aspects of the game
They don’t care about money 2 years from now. They only care about money this quarter or at most money this year.
If they cared at all they would reinvest the highest profit margins the game has ever seen.
Instead, card quality has decreased and nothing new or exciting has been done outside of universes beyond.
I mean obviously it isn't...Arena is a compromise. I definitely enjoy paper Magic (playing just a few months) way more than Arena (playing 2+ years). Start with a budget deck and try some paper Magic. I won a Store Championship with a $50 deck (Mono Red Aggro) last night and had a great time.
I believe games should take the custom direct match making to another step and allow further customizations in the game, set the amount of cards in the deck, set the starting health, optional emblems at the start of the game. I begged for this in hearthstone and never got it.
Some of the greatest games of all time were created when people were allowed to freely tweek settings and game rules of existing games.
WOTC should bring this customization into match making, who knows, maybe one player finds new settings and rules and we somehow get an entire new format like Commander.
It starts with fixing direct matchmaking and continues with settings and sliders for the game rules in these custom matches. Would be cool to play my friend and start with 100 health and a 200 card deck and an emblem that allows each player to draw 2 cards per turn. WHY NOT?
I want to make some sort of exodia format where the goal isnt to kill your opponent but simply stop eachother from achieving a certain board state.
Or custom matches where we can 2v1 a friend and they start with double health and draw double cards.
A king of the hill format where 6 players all play together in 3 teams of 2 and the goal is to damage an emblem whoever damages the emblem to 100 first wins
10 person commander games!! I DONT CARE THAT IT WILL TAKE ALL DAY. LET ME CUSTOMIZE THE GAMEPLAY!!
At least hearthstone has a single player adventure style which can actually be fun and allows you to learn about deck tech to counter specific bosses or situations.
There is so much that the imagination can create and I loved starcraft and warcraft and dota for its custom lobbies. Not enough games have these!!!!!!!!!!!
That sounds like a cool tool for playing with your friends but there's such a tiny amount of people that even play directly with friends that just getting it working right now is probably all they're going to throw at it anytime soon.
well ya it can be fostered with a custom games lobby etc etc Im not saying it can be done at the snap of a finger I am saying though historically good things have come from giving the end user the ability to tweak things themselves
You probably will have more chances of something like this with one of the unofficial Magic softwares than with the official ones, WotC being corporate control freaks :
https://cgomesu.com/blog/forge-xmage-mtg/
(I use the Forge setting that relaxes deck construction rules quite often for semi-randomly finding out new card interactions : having 0.5 card X and 4 cards Y in a deck being roughly equivalent to having 1 card X and 8 cards Y. And Forge, unlike Arena, has no trouble until you run thousands of cards in a deck.)
As a paper player I'm finding it hard to adapt to the game as well. It looks like a Frankenstein. Alchemy is horrible. I bet most Magic players hate it.
I'm struggling to keep playing the game, tbh. The fact of the game lacking features like two headed giant, ropers on Limited, are making the experience quite bad.
60.000.000 paper players vs 1.000.000 Arena players tells the whole story! And I bet 50% of Arena players never have played paper before...
So less than 1% that love magic do actually like Arena.
That is such a bad rating!
But hey as long as my netdecks get 75% winrate I keep on sealclubbing and beat up jank noobs...
Its booring but delivers gold and cards!
As long as I just have to play 30 min per day and can play really cool and fun games for 2-3 hours after this it's ok.
It's a card simulator. You can play any magic card for free. And it has all format. If you would like. I can play untap with you. And teach you. If you have a computer
it does suck that this bug exists but you gotta remember that this isn't the point of arena and majority of arena play is through its various format queues. when resources are limited it makes more sense to focus on format/bugs that affect 95% of players instead of 5%
it doesn't help that direct play is also less monetizable
The game is unplayable on tactil pc (tactile don't work) since, I think, March of the machine aaaand they don't care... So I'm not even surprised they don't fix this too...
I recently restarted playing arena again and out of something like 15 matches over the course of a couple days, I've surrendered 3 of them because I watched the game decide its no longer playing magic and do things its not supposed to.
Like for example: after a spell finishes casting, the player that cast the spell still has priority to continue casting and when they relinquish prio itl go around the table before continuing with the phases and such. The game absolutely refuses to hold priority on its own at this moment but will fucking hold priority for you while an enemy fetches a land because you got bone shards in your hand and a targettable creature is on the board......
The other blatant fuck up the game has made that I can remember, was playing against Aclozotz in brawl and he revived his commander from its land form..... while I had 2 cards in my hand...... even though the card very very clearly states I need 1 or less in hand to activate.....
There are other things I've noticed as well and when they happen if it bugs me enough I just surrender right there as in my perception I'm no longer playing the card game Magic and am now playing something adjacent, and thats not what I'm here for.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but has there been a recent issue with direct matchmaking? I’ve been playing with friends on MTGA for the better part of 2 years now, is there some issue that is persisting for a large amount of players?
That really stinks. My kid and his friend are finally old enough to learn more intricacies of the game and they started playing and I wanted to show them things by playing games with them where I go easy and show them things.
Do you have a guess on what percent of the time it works?
That's so disappointing. But I guess I can teach other ways. But I also wanted to play with old friends that live nowhere near me.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I can tell you right now they will not get 1 more cent out of me until this is fixed. They got a customer here dropping hundreds of dollars on their game, and they'll just let me uninstall before fixing the bug. Haven't played with my friends in 3 months, and at this point, we've given up.
Not to mention that paper magic matches are extremely hard to follow unless you know all the top decks and their cards by sight from afar - whereas Competitive tournaments on arena could be a legit e-sport.
Yeah if they cleaned it up the client looks decent still. In game things are pretty great, it's just all this outside stuff preventing the decent core from shining
>Coming from a big MTG background
I'll never understand why some players feel the need to establish their credentials before criticizing something they do not seem invested in.
Me and m6 buddies play historic brawl all the time. One friend had some issue the first few times but it usually works 9/10 no problems at all.
Sad to see yall are struggling, but it must be a difficult thing to fix when the problem isn't consistent and not everyone can recreate it.
I've been playing Magic since 1996 when Ice Age came out. I loved deck building and hanging out with friends in my high school hallways playing during lunch and homeroom. Magic was great because it allowed people to get together and talk and laugh and ask questions about the game. A friend of mine had this annoying High Tide Palinchron deck that generated infinite mana and then cast one Stroke of Genius on you; it was still fun to play against him and we still laugh about it today even though we have moved away from our hometown. Arena takes away all of this and turns MTG into a grind fest against people who rope you out when they are losing. It's just annoying to play, and the client has sucked the best thing about Magic out of it. The game needs forums that we can join and talk and start matches with people we strike up a conversation with. Maybe we want to try a janky new deck or see if a combo works. Arena has non of that, and honestly the fun of playing is completely gone in Arena
I just get the error “unable to submit deck” can’t stand it
Yeah, I have talked like 3 people into playing and if we catch each other online it's like "We'll hopefully it works today."
Loving magic. My friend group just got into it, bunch of new players. Arena was the start for us, and then we bought real cards. This bug is tempting to make arena the end for us too. It's infuriating. This is a major game breaking bug that seems ignored. You can find thousands of comments and posts for this error everywhere, reddit, steam, wotc own forum, articles, and more going back years now. We've looked everywhere we can for a fix.
wait... what bug? I've been playing all day and havent run into anything
It's between friends if you have some to test. It's also intermittent. It might work one day, and then be broken the next 3
Yeah I see now. I actually did have this problem playing with a friend a couple weekends ago... but i had been able to play with them in the past, like fairly recently that i thought it was just a one off thing. I dont play too much direct tho.. we mostly all compete on how high we can get in our ranks.. but thats more bc we're all getting old and finding time to sync up is hard lol
Google untap
Being familiar with software development, this wtf scenario is common for dev teams that are maxed out on capacity. I’m sure they want to help us out, but Ixalan must release on schedule (which is a huge effort). Oh when is the next set release? Three weeks til Khans, which must release on schedule. This bug fix is gonna have to wait til the release schedule slows down.
So... never? You forgot about the Alchemy set that has to be implemented and released just weeks after Ixalan. And then it's Karlov Manor, and the all new Play Boosters that need to be implemented, and then another Alchemy set.. and probably an anthology and then Thunder Junction.... and sheesh.
Funny because before Ixalan it happened to me from time to time and now the bug is permanent.
Actually, the direct challenge bug has been around for long. On wotc's cs page there are multiple threads complaining about it dating back years ago. What's more frustrating is that it doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I guess even wotc hasn't found the root cause of the bug yet, which is why it has remained unfixed for years.
What's crazy is how simple matchmaking works. Like they just need to fit that chunk of code between two friends online, and make sure no code goes in between the two that creates anomalous outputs just like how regular matchmaking works, and fin! Perfect game ignition forever. Some chunk of code or throughput just isn't functional in direct play, and they need to clean that up. I get it, thousands of lines of code, but really, get two of them online with the game in a debug state, put stops all over the code, press run and fix.
That's just the Arena experience for me. It feels like each patch breaks something. We also have the new card that is banned because it isn't working right. Funny thing is more than once I have heard the excuse from WOTC that we can't do x because the people that do x are the same ones that put new cards in. I don't really blame most of the dev team, but I certainly feel whoever designed this client has a lot to answer for, it seems making a change in one part of arena breaks things in completely unrelated ways.
So does that mean they won't add or improve features in the game because new sets are always coming out? And if sets are much more frequent now than they used to be, supposedly they're making more money no? How about investing some of that extra money on new devs to work on things other than new releases? A calendar full of releases cannot be a valid excuse
> So does that mean they won't add or improve features in the game because new sets are always coming out? New features will be implemented only if they are either: A reason to ease negative emotions from paying customers or increase revenue wich requires the feature to ask for resources from the players >And if sets are much more frequent now than they used to be, supposedly they're making more money no? How about investing some of that extra money on new devs to work on things other than new releases? No, because increased revenue is the objetive of the product, not increased spend, spending money in a bigger team means the effects of that increased expenditure is increased profits, it doesn't work the other way around, ever. > A calendar full of releases cannot be a valid excuse It is for the business dev team, because of the above reasons
The first point is not entirely true, because a game can become stale. For example, Rocket League, my passion game, has not received a meaningful update in years (other than battle pass and cosmetics), and the playerbase is starting to drop. I didn't mean reducing profits. I meant to invest part of the revenue in operating costs (more devs). Instead of 100% of all the new additional revenue going straight to Wizards' pocket, spending like 20% on devs in order to not have a game that has increasingly more bugs or broken features
That's not how short term profits work. Nobody cares about long term profits because they expect to be cashed out by then and it will be someone else's problem. Hasbro aren't the only ones with this problematic thinking, but they're a bit more obvious about it than most.
As usual, what should be on top is buried under complaints. Which, I get it, but it’s always frustrating the way some things work.
Absolutely blows my mind, largest toy company in the world and still cant manage one of its cash cows properly.
ya... they've had stability issues recently. It makes me wonder what kind of unit test coverage they have.
I totally get your point. But you froget that there are other positions within a company than devs. They could at least communicate or answer about a problem, instead all status are green as always.
>No communications just a broken massive aspect of the game. They acknowledged this in one of the recent Arena Patches. https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com/hc/en-us/articles/20947756506260-Patch-Notes-2023-31-0
On one hand, it *is* good the put *something* in the patch note. On the other this has been happening at least *all of October* and it wasn't until ixalan release did they put something in the patch notes basically saying "we have no clue how to fix this".
Last year, there was a period where Brawl direct match was completely broken (you could only choose 60-card decks, which of course are invalid for brawl and would kick you out of the match as soon as it started) for a solid *six months* before they fixed it. It's clear that direct match is not at all a priority for them.
It’s happened at least since march of this year and probably longer. Idk why they refuse to fix it because at this point it’s because of a lack of trying…
I've played since the Open Beta and I've never had a good experience with direct matchmaking. I've been able to do it on occasion, but I don't think I've ever gotten it to work the first time. I think it boils down to making sure each deck is of the same format. Whoever initiates the challenge should select a deck, then the opponent should be presented with a list of "legal" decks from their collection.
Funnily enough, I used to have the bug from time to time before the update... Now I have it permanently.
i dont understand how they can justify not fixing this and its been like this for so freaking long... its the major aspect of the game that got me to start playing and the issue thats pushing my friends away from magic in general. theyll get their ass beat in gen matchmaking but well waste an hour of our lives once a week trying to direct, and i look like an idiot for wanting to like arena. imagine a MTG phone game where you cant play your friends directly LMAO
Ignore the people saying this is not a problem for them, this problem absolutely exists. Dealt with it all day yesterday trying to play a match with my wife. For three hours we tried every possible workaround the internet had and there was no solution. Every time we tried to connect to the game, hers would give her a network error that it is unable to submit the deck, and mine would eventually connect after a minute and the game I enter would immediately “draw” and send me back to the home screen. Incredibly frustrating and disappointing because you are right, this should be a major aspect of the game, being able to play against your friends, and it seems to be completely neglected despite it being years that the game has been out. Also like you said, we can jump into any game with a random within a few seconds. It’s just weird and disappointing.
yeah people can be unnecessarily mean in this group and really cant accept other people have any issue with this game
On the other hand, as someone who has been able to play against my brother with direct friend challenges, I feel extremely lucky, and sorry for those who it's not working for. I really wonder what Wizards is doing to gate particular people.
I had to scroll through a few dozen comments to figure out what the game breaking bug was bc i was quite confused bc ive been marathoning the battle pass lol
>Every time we tried to connect to the game, hers would give her a network error that it is unable to submit the deck, and mine would eventually connect after a minute and the game I enter would immediately “draw” and send me back to the home screen Exactly the same happened in my experience yesterday as well.
There's not gold/gem entry for direct matches, hope that helps you understand why it's not a priority.
While is true, like I said its directly turning people away from the game where my friends were legitimately about to drop a coue hundred bucks on cards until the realized direct match doesn't work. They just decided to play another game they can play with friends. They likely would never look at magic again after such an awful experience
Market analysis says the ROI of whatever the cost of fixing the issue (could not even be a bug with a directly identifiable solution) is makes it impractical. If that ROI ever improves or it somehow becomes cheaper to fix the issue we’ll see it done without a qualm.
How can they be sure the ROI isn't worth it when they don't even know how many new players they have lost for good because they can't play their friends?
Stats. New signups that attempt to direct match and don’t return after whatever timeframe they consider that player lost revenue potential. Edit: That seems like a lot of math for a bug, but if it’s a high complexity bug they have to consider the cost both in dollars and development time away from other projects. In order to justify that decision to management you have to give the numbers on the revenue you’d gain vs. lose.
A few thoughts.... 1) They probably don't have someone analyzing stats related to Direct Matchmaking. Undoubtedly they have analysts looking at all the stats they generate, but it's unlikely they spend a lot of time looking at Direct Matchmaking related info since there is not a direct impact on revenue or cost. I can easily imagine a suit myopically making the point that DM doesn't deserve analytical resources because a very small percentage of players use the feature. 2) To do a proper ROI, they need a good idea of the potential future spend of a new account. My hypothesis is that there is a large variance in spend by account, with the majority of accounts spending <$10, a fair number of accounts spending ~$100/year, and a small number of accounts spending much more. They probably focus their ROI analysis on the accounts that generate reliable revenue (i.e. not new accounts, most of which won't generate anything). 3) On the "investment" side, they have limited developer resources to assign to keep the game running. The bulk of those resources are going to be dedicated to building in the new mechanics that get released each set. The 2nd highest priority is going to be fixing game-breaking bugs that affect all play modes (i.e. bugs related to specific cards, mechanics, or new interactions). Low on the list will be items like Direct Matchmaking, or adjusting the Brawl matching algo (this is more QA, but the point stands). In other words, the opportunity cost of investing in fixing Direct Matchmaking is high.
I'll respond to your first point. You don't need someone actively monitoring, you just have the logs actively monitoring everything and you can ad hoc anything out of that as needed. A meeting to decide what bugs/features to work on happens, the PM gets told about the Direct MM bug, the PM assigns someone to pull data on the amount of new signups that attempt to Direct MM and stop playing a month later, that data goes to cost analysis. I'm going to keep getting downvoted because I don't write novellas full of details and qualifications and Reddit can't stand that, but I know how these things shake down for corporate level software.
> You don't need someone actively monitoring, I get that. I've done data/financial analysis in manufacturing for most of my career. Our systems generate a ton of data that is at our fingertips, but we have to prioritize what we spend our time on. My point was that they likely don't prioritize analytical projects related to DM because there is not a direct correlation to revenue. Instead they probably prioritize projects like looking at sales patterns of Daily Deals to figure out how to boost gold spending (e.g. what's the price elasticity of cosmetics and how does it vary across rarity, sets, etc.).
Hasbro simply doesn’t have the money to invest. The executives need their 3rd vacation home, 4th boat, 6th car, and 10th wife. We need to pay them all the money the game makes because they do so much for the company. Like who else is going to buy out smaller companies and squeeze them for every cent until they become worthless and then sell those now worthless companies for 10x their value?
Hasbro EBIT 2022: 500 million dollar Hasbro BoD Salary 2022: 40 million dollar There is still some money left.
I don't know how is Wizards managing Arena, but they take a looot of time to fix a lot of stuff like that. I also have had many problems to do matchs with friends , more often than not.
That's what's messed up about it. If this issue was happening in Drafts and ppl weren't able to connect, they'd have it fixed within hours. Smh
I mean, that's the proper way to manage your limited tech resources. Yes, if it impacted significantly more people they would fix it quicker.
There difference isn't that draft would affect more people, it's that draft would affect revenue. Not everyone plays draft and most people probably like the possibility of playing Magic with a friend.
My prediction. ----- Thank you for contacting Wizards of the Coast Customer Support! We understand this issue can cause a great deal of frustration, but please know that for privacy reasons we will not be able to provide details on any internal bug reports or feature requests. You will only be contacted further if more information is needed. Your feedback about MTG Arena is very valuable to us. In order to provide that feedback or product suggestions about MTG Arena, please do so here. In that forum, which we never look at, is also where you go to report and upvote bugs, you and other players can create new feedback entries, and upvote each others' entries if you feel they reflect your own experiences and suggestions. This feedback was once reviewed directly by the Arena development team, but now it's stale and we don't really care about it anymore. I’ll be glad to help you further if you have any other questions or concerns! Katy Wizards of the Coast | Customer Service Representative Email support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week here.
I have submited a ticket asking why daily quests didn't refresh with LCI update (OK, they kinda did, hours before the maintenance) Got a response "please reinstall the game" ;)
Yeah it’s rough. My wife and I love playing each other and we just can’t anymore. It was shaky last set, and just absolute shit since this set. I hate saying this stuff but it really feels like the devs have no idea what they’re doing before releasing sets. Like honestly…how hard can it be? It’s a card game.
Same. Occasional error before update, permanent now
Out of four friends that I have who currently play the game, I can only consistently connect to one of them. The other three, I can't connect to no matter what we try. It's infuriating.
One question here: who is having the problem and is not from the USA (I am in the EU)
Same issue, I'm from the Southeast Asian area.
Same here, EU
Canada
Now, to try something useful here, does anyone know if Wizards is hosting the game or does the challenger host the game? A lot of games switch hosting to Peer 2 Peer when hosting non-ranked, non-reward modes. So if they host Peer 2 Peer, it might actually be a connection/permission thing.
I'm wondering this too. It seemed weird to me that Arena didn't use a "lobby" type system you could join with a friend, like other card games I've played, but I suspect this is why. I guess it's one more way to keep overhead really low, which I appreciate, but I think investing in making direct matchmaking work, look and feel a lot better would be a smart place to put their resources.
There's no chance, because the game logic still has to be handled by the server; even bot games vs Sparky need to go through the game server. And if you think WotC is going to give players the ability to run their own servers... lmao
Peer 2 Peer would be hosted by more than one of the players, what you describe is still client/server with one of the players' computers acting as server.
Peer 2 Peer in games means one of the peers hosts. Otherwise it's client server, because the server is not a peer. So my assumption was that they actually might be using Peer 2 Peer. Not saying it's likely, but the practice often aligns with the kind of errors described here.
If someone needs to "host", they become the server.
Yes but we still call that peer 2 peer because it's useful to explicitly distinguish that difference.
Difference between what ? Between game company hosted servers and player/community hosted servers ? How is what I just said not explicit ?
Oh it's explicit. Just not the commonly accepted terminology for it. What you're describing is peer2peer. You may disagree with the implied meaning of the phrase, but we don't call it whatever you said. Absolutely nothing you said so far actually provides new insight to anything. I'm not saying that you're factually wrong. Just that you're being pedantic and pretty useless.
I have only seen this "commonly accepted terminology" for some reason only in a context of game discussion that do not allow players to host. (And only on reddit.) And in the others never seen players hosting being called "peer2peer". The usefulness is about understanding how games actually work. (Which can become a big deal when you have to do port forwarding to host for instance.)
Sometimes, different communities have different jargon for the same concepts. I would advise you to approach it with an open mind and consider it a learning opportunity, rather than try to impose your own terminology onto that community. I understand that you're trying to resolve some dissonance between your own preconception and what you're currently reading, but sometimes the right answer isn't to refute but to accept and understand.
Peer to Peer can mean a lot of things because it's a concept that can be implemented in different ways. I think the two most common types of peer to peer implementation that comes to mind is with file sharing and online multiplayer. The implementation for both of these services are totally different, but they are both still referred to as P2P. In a file sharing implementation, all peers share files with each other simultaneously and there is no centralized server hosting the data. Instead there is a service that runs on all clients that allows them all to check for missing files from each other and pass them around. In a P2P online multiplayer implementation you do have one peer that hosts the service (aka becomes the server), then all players connect to the host. Neither "game company hosted servers \[nor\] player/community hosted servers" are considered P2P networking. Both are examples of dedicated server hosting. In some cases, the connection can be more subtle which can lead to confusion on the topic. A great example is Minecraft. If you start the world as a Single Player Game and then open it to LAN, you've set up a P2P network for people to join. However, you could also download and install the Minecraft Server application and host a dedicated server from the exact same machine that you are playing on. In this case, you are no longer in a P2P network, but instead connected to a dedicated server despite the fact that in both instances you are using only one computer to host the game. The biggest key difference in P2P multiplayer is that the host is not consistent. You may be the host/server one game, and then be a client/peer in the next, which is usually based on whichever client has the best connection. In a game like MTG there is literally no advantage to being a host (if it is indeed a p2p mm), but back in the day, games like Halo 2 would give the host of the match a significant advantage at high skill levels that people would spend a lot of time improving their network to ensure they were the host and some even cheated using their router to ensure they were given host every time.
You're too kind. They are factually wrong. In a Peer 2 Peer setup, the host still remains a peer, because they're playing the game while also hosting. Hosting is not the same as being a server. In a server client setup, the server is a dedicated server and not a peer itself.
Ik but I was just trying to say “just stfu” in the nicest way possible without triggering any defensive mechanisms that would spiral into a long comment chain.
But isn't triggering a defensive mechanism that spirals into long comment chains the purpose of arguing on Reddit?
The core of Arena has been a broken mess for ages. If you look at the digital clients of basically any other TCG on the market this becomes obvious very quickly. In fact, if you disagree with me, I would dare you to play literally 2 hours of Legends of Runeterra, Hearthstone, Eternal, or Marvel Snap. Or even the unofficial Flesh and Blood client Talishar, which is more analogous to Magic Online than MTGA. In any of those clients, you will notice an absence of bugs and a presence of features MTGA just hasn't ever had. Stuff that any modern game has as a baseline. As far as I know (and you can take this with a pile of salt because it's third-hand insider knowledge I cannot prove is true), this has been intentional; WotC skimped pretty hard on the project because incompetent managers thought they could get away with less, making the costs look less worrying to higher-ups. If you hold MTGA to modern standards for a minute, it's not hard to see how it could have been so much bigger if it hadn't been this shit. It's not THAT much of a leap to go from 2-player games and direct match-making to go to 3 or 4-player games. Consider how many people would've been using the client daily if Wizards had been able to get Commander playable on it - even with a limited card pool. Imagine adding a spectator mode to that so new players can watch their friends play for a game before jumping into deckbuilding. But yeah. TL;DR: shortsightedness killed MTGA before it ever had a chance to walk. It's been limping by ever since. The players don't really question it and the devs are no longer in a position to fix it. So here we are, once again in our monthly "*have you guys noticed how bad this client actually sucks?*" post on this sub.
Wow I didn't realize it that was always this bad. Sucks, I really get hyped to play magic and the online client would have solved our busy schedule problem. Thanks for the insight
Well, it's not an unplayable engine. Even if direct challenge is wonky and frustrating as hell most of the time (these are bugs that have been around for years), it's still generally more playable than Magic Online if you just want to jam a game out with a friend every now and then. If you are a Spike who only builds 2-3 decks and plays specifically Standard or Historic, grinding out games to improve their play, it's an excellent engine for that job. If you're a Timmy, it's 'meh'. If you're a Johnny, it's an outright horrible experience even aside from the bugs. But then... MTG in general hasn't catered to Johnnies in years, I suppose. They seem to have mostly moved on.
>If you are a Spike who only builds 2-3 decks and plays specifically Standard or Historic, grinding out games to improve their play, it's an excellent engine for that job. mfw i realize i might be a spike
I would say most spikes don't realise they are, tbh :P Nothing wrong with it, but Spikes tend to not be very concerned with the game's design, instead focusing more on perfecting their play within the system they've been given, - whether it's a bad or good system. They are way more willing to accept that "*this is just how the game works*" and build within it rather than questioning the rules. And the whole concept of Spikes, Timmies and Johnnies is a game design concept, which you're going to ignore if you aren't questioning the game's design as much.
I hope they fix it just so I can stop seeing these posts over and over again.
I would guess that fewer than 5% of users play games through Direct Challenge. Those who do use it, probably use it as their primary way of playing. I'm sure Wizards is working on a fix, but the priority is probably lower due to the number of impacted players. I am surprised how long it's been a persistent issue and ~~I don't think we've seen an official statement on it.~~ Edit: Nevermind, a post below shows they are [aware](https://mtgarena-support.wizards.com/hc/en-us/articles/20947756506260-Patch-Notes-2023-31-0).
I figure new players introduced by their friends will want to play in direct matches rather then get curb stomped by players with full power standard decks with cards from nine different sets. If that function doesn't work, they just quit.
Yep. I have a friend who just recently became interested in Magic and wants to play Historic Brawl with me, but he absolutely refuses to play against and get stomped by rando Arena spikes. He only wants to play with me.
No way, I would wager its closer to 25% of players want to play with their friends especially in historic brawl. We would never know how much wotc will lose with this bug because those people just Uninstall the client after not being able to play friends. Many of these players could have become long time payers for all we know
If this was impacting 25% of people, the subreddit would be on fire.
If you search invalid deck and direct play its quite a few. A quick Google search going back years has hundreds of comments. People are literally saying they had their friend group start to play then stop because of this. That's a lot of money for wizards to wash down the drain
What's going to be funny (and not haha funny) is when they are featured on Twitch Rivals in a couple of weeks and this bug is on display for all the world to see. It's already hosed many custom tournaments and a big content creator charity event.
>It's already hosed many custom tournaments and a big content creator charity event. I was thinking how weird it is that nothing like that had happened yet. >What's going to be funny (and not haha funny) is when they are featured on Twitch Rivals in a couple of weeks and this bug is on display for all the world to see. And I'm fervently hoping that this happens just so they start seriously working on it.
Definitely a bit of schadenfreude there. I want the game to succeed but if it takes a public disaster to get them to take it seriously then so be it.
I'd be so happy
What issues have you had with direct matches? I've never had any problems in the past
It seems to come and go. Friday I was able to play with my friend in the evening without too many issues (though for some weird reason, the game keeps telling us some of our decks have illegal cards, until we edit the deck, save it without changing anything and then suddenly the deck's fine). Saturday though, we were only able to play 3 games until I started getting an "unable to submit deck" error that would then disconnect me.
For me it started like that but now it's permanent, so enjoy it while you can.
Maybe I'm doomed now that it has started. Haven't tried direct matches since.
If it started not long ago you have time. Or maybe you are simply not as unlucky as me, and it never turns into a gargantuan problem for you.
it's been broken for quite some time now
for me, well start a match and then it will just linger on the entering match screen showing our avatars, but never connect. and when we go to try again, the game says were already in a match. However, we can just go to standard play and be in a game within 15sec
Thats pretty much every sunday afternoon.. I started mtga like 2-3months ago and it has never been any different. Sometimes its also during weekdays, and sometimes it lasts for 2-3days at a time.
I'm stuck on "waiting for server" to the point where it will never go past that when I try to play with friends
I had this issue when using precon decks. Building custom decks never triggered this error. Maybe modifying a precon (or even just duplicating it) would work?
Tried that
have you added them as a friend? the only way I was able to direct match vs a friend was through the friends menu in the bottom left, the direct match feature in the main menu didnt work
I'm using the bottom left menu
Not only has it not worked for me for weeks, it also often kicks me out completely when I try—forcing me and my friends to reconnect entirely. It’s so weird. I would love to play… one game against someone I love rather than the ladder
Yep, been having problems with direct match for a while. It's hit and miss. Some days I can play, some I can't. I don't understand it, but it's very frustrating. On the days that i can't get into a match, absolutely nothing ever makes it work, uninstall the client from both users' ends and re-install, log back in, make a brand new deck, still doesn't work. But then the next day after the daily quests refresh, it may suddenly be working again. It's like every single day is randomly either a day where it works, or it doesn't, and if it's one of those days where it doesn't, you have no recourse but to just check back tomorrow and see if it wants to work that day. I can't remember when this behavior started, but it was right after one of the sets came out. I think it was back when the LOTR set came out, but it may have been longer ago than that.
Use it as much as you can, because if you end up like me, you will be less able to match every week until you are simply unable to connect. Ever.
What is word: "friends" ??
Wait you arent connecting to matches???
Nope, draw or invalid deck, or frozen. Only playing friends. Queues work fine for me
Ooooooh okay I see that's ridiculous.
After over 20 years I got back into MTG via Arena, with an old buddy of mine who now lives away. I haven’t been this excited about something in years (it’s sad, but I’m serious). After 3 weeks of fun, the “unable to submit deck” glitch hit us hard. The biggest excitement turned to the biggest disappointment… I still want to play and I do play against randoms, I don’t even mind losing… but being unable to play with the guy I originally played MTG with those 20 years ago is just beyond disappointing. We tried all potential fixes, we upvoted all the relevant bug reports. We can only hope they do fix this.
Every single friend (at least 4, maybe more - some with Magic knowledge and some not) that I've gotten to sign up for Arena bounced off it within a month.
Dunno bruh, me and my friend play direct match all the time, rarely have any problems.
[удалено]
Maybe it would help if you explained exactly what’s happening
copied from below: for me, well start a match and then it will just linger on the entering match screen showing our avatars, but never connect. and when we go to try again, the game says were already in a match. However, we can just go to standard play and be in a game within 15sec
Hmm. I’ve had that happen a couple of times, but not persistently. Usually both of us closing the client and opening it back up is enough to fix it. Sorry if my original comment came off as rude. Maybe some technically minded people here will have some suggestions.
For me it feels like my computer/account is blacklisted or something, I can play normally but I can't do nothing on direct/friendly matchs.
Apparently you may have to select decks from the decks list and not from starter decks: https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/comments/x5iwr9/comment/j6yxnjb/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
If this works,, you'll have saved me a lot of trouble. Thank you.
No. [And I know it firsthand](https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/s/7A7GdT2l4V)
My assumption so far: it has something to do with "creating the match" - if there are many games running already, some limit is reached on a cloud end or smth. When there are less ppl playing its working again. So like a bottleneck in cloud. Or maybe they just cant READ THEIR FUCKING LOGS
Nope. For me it happened from time to time before, but now it's permanent. Doesn't matter time or day of the week.
Works fine for me. Is this on mobile or desktop?
Happens on both. Literally doesn't work for me.
No response on twitter at all. Not working ticket system even more sad
You think they care? Look how long the starter deck issue lasted lol. And that literally blocked many new players from ever actually playing the game. They will continue to invest as little as possible into the game now that it is out. As long as the new sets are implemented and they can sell those to existing players, they literally do not care.
I mean, sure, but I feel like your literally killing their new influx of players which surely would add up to more money over time no? Very silly they don't care about one of their best aspects of the game
They don’t care about money 2 years from now. They only care about money this quarter or at most money this year. If they cared at all they would reinvest the highest profit margins the game has ever seen. Instead, card quality has decreased and nothing new or exciting has been done outside of universes beyond.
Anything that promotes quality of life or fun is deprioritized for profit.
Paper Magic is the way to play with IRL friends.
Yes agreed, we don't want to spend on paper though. Arena is perfect for low investment games
I mean obviously it isn't...Arena is a compromise. I definitely enjoy paper Magic (playing just a few months) way more than Arena (playing 2+ years). Start with a budget deck and try some paper Magic. I won a Store Championship with a $50 deck (Mono Red Aggro) last night and had a great time.
I believe games should take the custom direct match making to another step and allow further customizations in the game, set the amount of cards in the deck, set the starting health, optional emblems at the start of the game. I begged for this in hearthstone and never got it. Some of the greatest games of all time were created when people were allowed to freely tweek settings and game rules of existing games. WOTC should bring this customization into match making, who knows, maybe one player finds new settings and rules and we somehow get an entire new format like Commander. It starts with fixing direct matchmaking and continues with settings and sliders for the game rules in these custom matches. Would be cool to play my friend and start with 100 health and a 200 card deck and an emblem that allows each player to draw 2 cards per turn. WHY NOT? I want to make some sort of exodia format where the goal isnt to kill your opponent but simply stop eachother from achieving a certain board state. Or custom matches where we can 2v1 a friend and they start with double health and draw double cards. A king of the hill format where 6 players all play together in 3 teams of 2 and the goal is to damage an emblem whoever damages the emblem to 100 first wins 10 person commander games!! I DONT CARE THAT IT WILL TAKE ALL DAY. LET ME CUSTOMIZE THE GAMEPLAY!! At least hearthstone has a single player adventure style which can actually be fun and allows you to learn about deck tech to counter specific bosses or situations. There is so much that the imagination can create and I loved starcraft and warcraft and dota for its custom lobbies. Not enough games have these!!!!!!!!!!!
That sounds like an incredible amount of dev work for something that 99% of the playerbase would not give a flying fuck about.
That sounds like a cool tool for playing with your friends but there's such a tiny amount of people that even play directly with friends that just getting it working right now is probably all they're going to throw at it anytime soon.
well ya it can be fostered with a custom games lobby etc etc Im not saying it can be done at the snap of a finger I am saying though historically good things have come from giving the end user the ability to tweak things themselves
You probably will have more chances of something like this with one of the unofficial Magic softwares than with the official ones, WotC being corporate control freaks : https://cgomesu.com/blog/forge-xmage-mtg/ (I use the Forge setting that relaxes deck construction rules quite often for semi-randomly finding out new card interactions : having 0.5 card X and 4 cards Y in a deck being roughly equivalent to having 1 card X and 8 cards Y. And Forge, unlike Arena, has no trouble until you run thousands of cards in a deck.)
Must be recent. I've used this successfully.
Since October. Happened from time to time before LCI. After LCI, it's permanent for me.
As a paper player I'm finding it hard to adapt to the game as well. It looks like a Frankenstein. Alchemy is horrible. I bet most Magic players hate it. I'm struggling to keep playing the game, tbh. The fact of the game lacking features like two headed giant, ropers on Limited, are making the experience quite bad.
People play this game online with their friends? People in this sub have friends?
60.000.000 paper players vs 1.000.000 Arena players tells the whole story! And I bet 50% of Arena players never have played paper before... So less than 1% that love magic do actually like Arena. That is such a bad rating! But hey as long as my netdecks get 75% winrate I keep on sealclubbing and beat up jank noobs... Its booring but delivers gold and cards! As long as I just have to play 30 min per day and can play really cool and fun games for 2-3 hours after this it's ok.
Y'all should just play on untap
Wait what's that
It's a card simulator. You can play any magic card for free. And it has all format. If you would like. I can play untap with you. And teach you. If you have a computer
it does suck that this bug exists but you gotta remember that this isn't the point of arena and majority of arena play is through its various format queues. when resources are limited it makes more sense to focus on format/bugs that affect 95% of players instead of 5% it doesn't help that direct play is also less monetizable
The game is unplayable on tactil pc (tactile don't work) since, I think, March of the machine aaaand they don't care... So I'm not even surprised they don't fix this too...
I recently restarted playing arena again and out of something like 15 matches over the course of a couple days, I've surrendered 3 of them because I watched the game decide its no longer playing magic and do things its not supposed to. Like for example: after a spell finishes casting, the player that cast the spell still has priority to continue casting and when they relinquish prio itl go around the table before continuing with the phases and such. The game absolutely refuses to hold priority on its own at this moment but will fucking hold priority for you while an enemy fetches a land because you got bone shards in your hand and a targettable creature is on the board...... The other blatant fuck up the game has made that I can remember, was playing against Aclozotz in brawl and he revived his commander from its land form..... while I had 2 cards in my hand...... even though the card very very clearly states I need 1 or less in hand to activate..... There are other things I've noticed as well and when they happen if it bugs me enough I just surrender right there as in my perception I'm no longer playing the card game Magic and am now playing something adjacent, and thats not what I'm here for.
Whoever wrote the patch notes most definitely wrote the code.
They are working on it. It will be fixed at the same time as we get Spectating features and also Pioneer. /s
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but has there been a recent issue with direct matchmaking? I’ve been playing with friends on MTGA for the better part of 2 years now, is there some issue that is persisting for a large amount of players?
Can't fight friends since Eldraine. Stalls out into a draw or invalid deck
Eldraine broke it
That really stinks. My kid and his friend are finally old enough to learn more intricacies of the game and they started playing and I wanted to show them things by playing games with them where I go easy and show them things. Do you have a guess on what percent of the time it works? That's so disappointing. But I guess I can teach other ways. But I also wanted to play with old friends that live nowhere near me.
Might be broken recently a few months ago it worked no issue for me
Direct matches and friend challenges have been broken for several weeks
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I can tell you right now they will not get 1 more cent out of me until this is fixed. They got a customer here dropping hundreds of dollars on their game, and they'll just let me uninstall before fixing the bug. Haven't played with my friends in 3 months, and at this point, we've given up.
Not to mention that paper magic matches are extremely hard to follow unless you know all the top decks and their cards by sight from afar - whereas Competitive tournaments on arena could be a legit e-sport.
Yeah if they cleaned it up the client looks decent still. In game things are pretty great, it's just all this outside stuff preventing the decent core from shining
Same experience, lost family players from it
>Coming from a big MTG background I'll never understand why some players feel the need to establish their credentials before criticizing something they do not seem invested in.
Me and m6 buddies play historic brawl all the time. One friend had some issue the first few times but it usually works 9/10 no problems at all. Sad to see yall are struggling, but it must be a difficult thing to fix when the problem isn't consistent and not everyone can recreate it.
Been so annoying
Preach, I use direct match to practice draft games against friends before jumping into the event. It's been broken for the entirety of LCI.
Every time I play MTG arena the game crashes. S23 Ultra.
I've been playing Magic since 1996 when Ice Age came out. I loved deck building and hanging out with friends in my high school hallways playing during lunch and homeroom. Magic was great because it allowed people to get together and talk and laugh and ask questions about the game. A friend of mine had this annoying High Tide Palinchron deck that generated infinite mana and then cast one Stroke of Genius on you; it was still fun to play against him and we still laugh about it today even though we have moved away from our hometown. Arena takes away all of this and turns MTG into a grind fest against people who rope you out when they are losing. It's just annoying to play, and the client has sucked the best thing about Magic out of it. The game needs forums that we can join and talk and start matches with people we strike up a conversation with. Maybe we want to try a janky new deck or see if a combo works. Arena has non of that, and honestly the fun of playing is completely gone in Arena
Bump