I had a guy email me asking about my thoughts on Magic online. Is it doomed? Is Wizards going to abandon it for their bottom line? Is it safe to invest in the Magic online card economy?

My bottom line answer is that I feel extremely confident that Wizards would rather abandon physical Magic cards than give up the online form of the game. They won't abandon either, they're doing fine in terms of money. Yes the last few years go a little lean but the company isn't laying anyone off and they're making great strides to refocus the game.

That being said though, there are some things that need to be addressed. Five things by my count.

1. Fix the server problems. I don't know if it is just the vogue thing for companies to have server problems? Twitter.com is a tool which perennially went down but it has a stranglehold on its users and they can't really leave. Neither can Magic players. Having continual server problems is a bad bad problem. Whether they need to hire a new chief of technology to figure out how to handle the load issues or they need to spend more cash on servers to fix the problem, I don't know. But it definitely hurts the player's perspective when he logs in only to get booted three times or be unable to draft.
2. Make it more social. It feels like I'm playing Magic in he Get Smart cone of silence. The conversation interface is so limiting it seems as if it was just an afterthought during development. On top of that we have no personal images. Sure the avatars were necessary when you represented the draft table but why note allow people to upload their pics. Have an approval process and a reporting mechanism but let people make it easier to be social! Magic is a social game and the fact that most online games are played in silence sucks. Hard.
3. Integrate VOIP. Yeah the server struggles already but take your server out of the equation if you need to. Have the two users directly connect to verbally chat. It's not that difficult. I did a VoIP app in college and if I could do it as the poor programmer that I am, I know the staff can. Having VoIP in games would be awesome. No more of this vacuum for play, it creates real people on the other end. Sure let players disable it, but for the people who want to talk trash - enable it. Alright alright, I hear parental concerns already. Let parents lock it if they want to.
4. Open up the chat and setup a desktop app for chatting. This plays into point number two. Really you guys are nailing the game functionality in that it is the game machine, but you're falling miles short on the social aspect of what you're creating. You've already got the base of the chat infrastructure. I have friends on Magic Online, imagine being able to sit down to my computer and chat with them without opening the huge game. Oh Lee's getting into an 8 man draft? Sure I'm down. With one click I'm launching Magic Online. Open up and expand your system!
5. Cut the prices. Yes this is really the fifth thing on my list. It's ridiculous that you're charging $4 USD for something that you aren't really paying for production of. I think this is what makes #1 so infuriating, if I'm paying so much to just draft then you should be able to fix your servers. After that though, begin offering cuts in price. It's called a monopoly and it's bad to abuse the right.

So what about it? Three of these things are related to the lack of real socialness in the game. One relates to the infrastructure and frustrations there. And the last to the economics of the game. Nothing here is wildly crazy. So let's make it happen!

-- Trick