In this edition:
- Modern Horizons 3 Streamer Event June 5
- Modern Horizons 3 Historic and Brawl Pre-Bans
- MTG Arena Matchmaking and You
- Card Styles Button Returns
- Explorer Best-of-One Play-In This Weekend
- Currency Update for Players in Japan
- Event Schedule
I appreciate that they acknowledged the Brawl weighting system -- ignoring it would have been a real mistake -- and I'm satisfied with what they said about it.
I read some of the discussion about it on Reddit, and people were angry (because there are always angry Magic players on Reddit), but it seemed like most of the frustration was that the system isn't accurate enough, not that it exists.
Personally, I'm upset in the first place that Magic cards are so imbalanced that a weighting system is necessary, but given that they are, I'm glad such a system exists, at least for casual formats.
They talk about continuing to make changes to the system. The main change that I hope they'll make is to allow negative-weight decks to validate. Then I can take some of the useless utility lands out of my zero-weight Mycotyrant deck.
I also think most of the frustration was due to the improper weighting on cards. I think that indicated to people that they don't give a shit enough to keep them current or perhaps they don't have the resources to, both of which are bad news for players.
For me, the best change they could make would be to display the MMR/Deck Strength numbers everywhere in matches. The way you can see the Elo in all chess matches I think helps people understand why they're matched up against their opponent. Having everything in the dark makes people come up with conspiracy theories.
I think it's probably for the best that we can't see those numbers. For one thing, being able to see your MMR would turn casual games into ranked games, effectively. Plus there's the fact that both numbers are really just the developers' best guess, subject to a lot of fluctuation and not guaranteed to be accurate at any particular point in time, not to mention that you sometimes get paired way up/down if the system can't find a match fast enough. I think publicizing MMR or deck weight would lead to a lot more complaining and bad feelings, while not significantly improving the quality of your games.
Just out of curiosity, they must be using this for unranked and the play queue right? If not, there has to be something else they're using for those matchups because I still never see a wide deck/player disparity even in the unranked queues.
The article says:
Interesting that they exclude casual Bo3. What exactly does that mean? I could see an argument that deck weighting is less important in a format where you have access to sideboards. But they must still do player-skill-based MMR, right? Casual play would surely be a nightmare without it.
We know from the Reddit spreadsheets that they have separate weighting for Standard Brawl and Historic Brawl. I'd bet that each format -- Standard, Explorer, Alchemy, etc. -- has its own set of weights. The reason we only know the weights for Brawl is because only commanders can have negative weights. So no Explorer deck, for example, can ever fail to validate because of a negative total weight.
I think they have to be doing some player-skill-based matchmaking in those queues. I think it would just be really un-fun if they didn't, and I'd bet Arena is optimizing for player hours over anything else. Nothing ends an Arena session like getting dunked on multiple games in a row in a ranked queue lol.
I never thought about that but I'd bet you're right and I'd hope they're getting updated a lot more regularly than the Brawl ones.
This is probably a lot easier for me to say than it would be for the programmers to implement, but: the weighting system seems to only judge cards on an individual basis. I wonder how feasible it would be to weight card combos. Like -- Aftermath Analyst isn't too scary by itself, but if you see it in a deck with Nissa, Resurgent Animist, that's a different story.