Planeswalker Points and You
Editor’s Note: This article is a result of collaboration between those signing at the bottom, and as such should be treated as a group effort, rather than being written by any one individual.
“Playing is good. Winning is even better.” – Mike Turian
“It looks like we are in for a very interesting lesson on incentives.” – Patrick Chapin
“If you’re not careful, your whole life can become a ****ing grind.” – Our Hero, Rounders
Mike Turian gave you the facts, or at least the facts we know. Now it’s time to look at what happens as a result – a smaller, weaker Pro Tour, bereft of many of the best players. Great news if you’re a Hall of Famer like us, but not so good if you’re anyone else, or even worse, live outside of North America.
The best guide for analyzing what will happen in the future is to look to the past. Magic had an ELO rating system that it used for many of the uses to which Planeswalker Points will now be put. The old system had the following incentives:
1) Your rating qualified you for benefits at thresholds, by far the biggest being PT invitations, but GP byes also being important. Thus, some players had strong incentive to care about rating, while most did not.
2) Ratings were zero sum, but their marginal value varied wildly, so often everyone was better off if one player won and the other lost.
3) If you compete in high level events, your rating will trend towards a high set point. If you compete in lower level events, your rating will trend towards a lower set point, since the win expectation curve was wrong and Wizards never decided to stop and fix it. Your goal was to play against the best possible opponents and avoid poor ones.
4) If you play matches where you are especially likely to win, you gain points. If you play matches where you are less likely than usual to win, for whatever reason, you lose points. Because Wizards used the same ratings curves as chess, where unlike magic someone really can be 90%+ to win a match, this meant players needed to avoid playing against players ranked significantly below them.
5) Playing causes your rating to fluctuate, whereas not playing makes it remain stable.
Players in different situations responded to this in different ways. Most of the time any given player would be indifferent to rating and would act as if ratings did not exist, other than to have something fun to look at every so often. Perhaps the status involved would help get that player motivated, but nothing more. For them it was all in good fun.
As players ratings climbed, they started to become eligible to get byes at Grand Prix tournaments. Byes are highly valuable, especially in multiples, so this could be highly motivating. As they climbed higher, players were close to qualifying for Pro Tours, and that was a whole different level. Once a player got close to that, they would radically alter behavior. Here are some common alterations:
1) Player would always play to maximize win percentage in a tournament. Fun decks would get discarded in favor of those that were marginally more effective. Experiments would be run in playtesting, not when points were at stake.
2) Tournaments where the player could not be at his best, for whatever reason, would often be skipped.
3) Tournaments where the player would face poorly rated opposition would be skipped.
4) If the player had an unusually high chance of winning due to the matchups in his bracket or the strength of his draft or sealed deck, the player would stay in the tournament even if otherwise the player would drop.
5) If the player had an unusually low chance of winning, for similar reasons in reverse, player would drop, even if undefeated. They would also avoid playing in smaller local tournaments against weaker competition.
6) Player would seek out tournaments where points could be obtained. In best case this was high-K events like PTQs or GPs. Sometimes this would include places where player would not be allowed to lose. Fraud occurred, from friendly help up to entirely fake tournaments and players.
7) Once the threshold necessary was achieved, even mid-tournament, player would sit on rating and refuse to play.
Thus, there was a rating-conscious class of players who tried to use the ratings to break into or stay in the Pro Tour Player’s Club (or “Gravy Train”), a group in the middle that kept track but didn’t sweat it, and a larger class who didn’t care.
Some of these effects were clearly good, but many of them are obviously stupid and bad. A player choosing not to play in order to maintain rating is bad for everyone, in Magic as in chess. I know back in the day there were chess tournaments I didn’t enter due to not feeling my best and wanting to keep my rating up – chess ratings are Serious Business – and that was when the rating meant nothing. I’ve also been known to sit on rating for months on end when I had to. Many Pros essentially gave up casual tournaments in order to maintain their ratings.
A lot of this was pretty terrible. Tournament attendance at Neutral Ground was often substantially lower than it would otherwise have been due to this problem. A WotC employee I will not name put it best when he simply said “Sitting on ratings is ****ing stupid.”
So what does this lesson teach us?
1) People respond to incentives.
2) People respond to incentives.
3) No matter how much you think people respond to incentives, and how many times you think you’ve taken this rule into account, they respond to them more.
4) While for the most part ratings encouraged players to play more rather than less Magic, the old system often resulted in people playing less Magic instead of more.
5) This was pretty f***ing stupid.
In short, the ELO system had some issues. In terms of actually choosing the best players it did a decent job, but it had rather bad distortionary effects on those who cared about it most. Luckily the primary way to reach the Pro Tour for most players was to qualify via a Grand Prix top 16 or a PTQ win, or by picking up Pro Points, with the ratings an afterthought in case they went on a hot streak without picking up titles. Thus the size of these distortions stayed comparatively small. Scott Larabee mentions that it can be so extreme as players taking a four month break for one bye at a Grand Prix, but I express skepticism that players would commonly choose to take such tradeoffs – and if they would, that only emphasizes points one, two and three above.
The ELO system could have been be fixed to work. Redrawing the curves to reflect Magic and not Chess win percentages deals with half the issues. The other half could be dealt with either through ratings decay, or preferably through letting people bank their invite for a future Pro Tour. Players could only ever have one banked invite at a time, and it would be used up if they attended a Pro Tour, even if they qualified through other means. This would have the nice effect of letting the Japanese player who qualified for PT Paris attend PT Nagoya instead. Rather than dwell too much on the road not taken, let’s move on and take a look at the new system.
Planeswalker Points (hereafter PWP)
The new system replaces ELO ratings with cumulative ratings that are periodically reset. There are lifetime ratings, but they don’t count for anything. In addition, it scraps the top 50 finish at Pro Tours and the top 16 finish at Grand Prix as methods of making the tour, instead folding those results in the ratings. This forces players to be far more conscious of the PWP than they were of ELO. ELO was optional. PWP is also optional, but your other options have changed.
The Quest for the Pro Tour
Let us assume a Magic player Alice who wants to qualify for the Pro Tour. Alice has the following methods available to her:
1) Win a PTQ, either online or in person.
2) Qualify through the accumulation of PWP.
3) Qualify through the PPC, assuming it or its replacement exists.
4) Be elected to the Hall of Fame.
That’s it.
That’s four tracks, and they have very different incentives. For the moment let’s assume that the Hall of Fame is out of her reach. If it happens, wonderful, but it’s not something one can count on.
Path 1: Win a PTQ
Alice’s path here is simple. Playing more PTQs is good. Winning a PTQ is what matters. This is what the old school road warriors did, going to a PTQ week after week hoping to win an envelope. Once winning is eliminated as a possibility, she will drop out or not as she prefers. Note that a Grand Prix now offers zero slots, so while on this path a PTQ is by far the best option. Alice would drop from the Grand Prix to play a PTQ instead. Also note that online PTQs give no Planeswalker Points. If she does especially well on this path and gets enough PWPs incidentally, she can transition to plan 2. Well, actually, she can’t, as we’ll see. I say this because science has shown that spoilers add to reader enjoyment.
Path 2: Accumulate PWPs
This will be a harsh path. Alice is going after one of a hundred slots; for the moment let’s assume that reserving a few slots for each region is an insurance policy but doesn’t change the list that much; realistically the North American and presumably Europeans were locks anyway, so at most fifteen slots can change hands and the Japanese slots are also mostly safe due to their GP warriors. If no one alters their behavior from what they did in the past, the threshold will be about 1700 points. However, that’s a fantasy land. People respond to incentives, as noted above, and the tournaments available have changed. This number will go up. The only question is how much. Keep in mind that Top 300 used to be 1400 or so points. That’s a lot of people on the bubble.
Alice’s behavior on this track is incentivized to maximize her point total until it reaches the threshold where her invite is secure. It would obviously be great to win a PTQ along the way, but Alice will still need enough points to get her byes if she wants to grind for the next Pro Tour, so there’s no escape. Byes outright count as wins, and byes are great at earning the right to play more Grand Prix rounds, so being without them in a season is a severe handicap. With a Grand Prix almost every week, winning Trials isn’t practical as an overall solution.
Each weekend Alice makes a choice. She can fly to a Grand Prix, go to a PTQ (if one is available), go online for a PTQ (if one is available) or go for some other event. The multipliers on other events are relatively poor, but large events like Star City Opens are reasonable choices if they stay large, especially with one on each day. A PTQ grants a good multiplier, and likely is superior, although going to another event the other day is even better. Online PTQs are right out, of course, since they’re valuable time wasted for no points and even bigger fields than before now that those not grinding have fewer choices.
Alice’s best bet, of course, is to go to a Grand Prix. At that Grand Prix she gets the biggest multiplier, a whopping eight, and lots of matches to play some of which are hopefully byes. Her hope is to make day two, and hopefully win cash and glory, but she won’t sweat it. If she can’t, she’ll finish up day one and play side events. They’ve eliminated the PTQ on Sunday, but that is fine because all side events at the GP have a 5x multiplier! That means that she can go around entering side events, collecting participation points and then dropping to go enter other side events and collect more participation points. Depending on what pace is required, she may or may not be able to afford incidentally attempting to win some of these tournaments, especially limited events where her deck proves excellent.
Week after week, she’ll go through this grind. If she plays well, she’ll win a higher percentage of her matches, scoring more points. Making day 2 of more GPs keeps her in high multipliers, which is good, but decreases participation points and matches played, which is bad; in many ways the side events are actually the better bet as she gets more participation points, more rounds and easier opponents. If there is punishment here it is light.
At the end of the season, Alice and all her competitors for those 100 slots will compare their performances. Those who went to the maximum number of Grands Prix will have a prohibitive advantage, as will those with three byes. Those who got to start the season with a Pro Tour will also have huge head starts, as no one is kicked out of day two so most will get four or five hundred points; this alone is a huge source of threshold inflation.
The key question will be: Are there 100 or more people willing to grind at this level?
If there are substantially more than 100 players willing to do this, then everyone else is shut out.
Period.
Think about the points Alice will get if she goes full blast in with three byes. Suppose she lives in the USA. She’ll be in Austin, Orlando, Lincoln, Baltimore, Seattle, Indianapolis, Nashville, Mexico City and Salt Lake City. At each event, she’ll win her first three matches (since they’re byes). She’ll then play the rest of the Grand Prix day 1, let’s say 6 more rounds, and then play day 2 or play side events. Let’s be skeptical and assume her average weekend is a 3-3 day 1 after byes, for 6-3 and no day 2, then 6-3 in side events; this Alice isn’t actually all that great at Magic. The weeks there is no GP, she would go to a PTQ as the next best option.
She now gets: 9 GPs at 6-3, for 6 wins and about 8 participation points each, or 24*8 = 192. She plays in 9 sets of side events, for 6 wins per set out of let’s say 6 events, three of which are drafts (1 participation each), and three of which are major events (let’s say average 4 participation each), all of which is times five. That yields 15 participation and 18 for wins for 32*5 = 160 additional points. Doing this nine times yields 352*9 = 3168. FNM also has a 3x multiplier, so if she’s truly dedicated she’ll grind that too.
Now let’s look at Brian Kibler, so we have someone to blame for all this. He’s awesome. He made top 16 of the PT going 12-4. He goes to five GPs, top eights three and wins one! The other two he makes top 16 and top 32. What a season.
You’d think that, wouldn’t you?
His PT was worth 504. At the GPs, he won 17, 16, 15, 13 and 12 matches, but after that he does drafts with friends because that took all weekend. So he gets 73 match wins, 5 sets of participation points (let’s say 8 each again, times the multiplier), and an 8x multiplier, which comes out to… 2576.
That’s right. Alice gets the slot over Brian. Brian thanks the Godslayer that he’s in the Hall of Fame.
If you think a little tinkering with modifiers will fix this, my response to you is: Really? Alice had a horrible season. She won barely more than half her matches, won no money, earned no glory. She also didn’t do a lot of mysterious winning once she could no longer win the tournament, if you know what I mean. Realistically, Alice will hardly ever do this poorly; if nothing else she’ll make a few day 2s of GPs. Brian had a ridiculously strong season, going to five Grands Prix and winning not just more than half but most of his matches. Brian is probably being called one of the hottest players on the tour right about now. Plus we all love Ascension on the iPad and his Counter-Cat Zoo variant was really neat.
Thanks to the elimination of the PTQ and FNM at GPs, Brian managed to keep it somewhat close and has a shot at getting one of the slots depending on everyone’s behavior, but he is far from secure. The original version of this thought experiment had different assumptions and had Alice win going away; the good news is that fixing a few mistakes puts us within striking distance of the right result, although the 5x multiplier at GPs gave Alice a bigger edge than she had in iteration two. If you increase the multiplier in a non-linear fashion by rewarding strong performance, you can bring skill somewhat back into the mix.
At its heart, however, the points race is a pure grind. Those who grind the most get the slots. Think of the formula as something like this:
Points = (Matches * Win % + 3 *Byes * 3 + Participation) * Multiplier
For a GP, you can substitute 7-9 for Participation. Therefore, everyone gets 2-3 match wins for showing up! Then you get 3 more from your byes! Match win percent on the Pro Tour is never going to reach 70%. For a Grand Prix if you exclude Byes you might hit that, but no reasonable player is under 50%, and there’s five free wins to start you off if you come bearing byes from last season. The deck is stacked in favor of whoever comes more often.
The good news is that there almost certainly will not be 100 grinders with Alice’s dedication and ability to travel. The bad news is that what matters will not be how much players are like Brian. It will be how much they are like Alice, as Brian’s 2576 represents the high end of what is possible without a PT top 8 and may or may not be good enough.
Also, if you’re not American, unless you’re willing to fly off-continent, you’re only competing for your regional slots. In terms of the 100, you were never in it.
3. Qualify with PPC points
We don’t even know if such a thing will ever be possible again. If it is, Alice will need to get her points from Grand Prix events since there are only three Pro Tours and with so many Grand Prix the grinders who were shooting for the hundred slots will eclipse her if she doesn’t put up good results. The good news is that now winning is heavily rewarded, so she’d better deliver the goods. If she does, she gets to stay, and rewards for winning scale enough that she can likely pick and choose her events, especially since she knows what threshold she needs, although as is true today the marginal value of moving up the ranks pushes her more and more towards a similar grind.
What will Alice do?
Alice knows that there are no half measures. If she starts down the PWP path, all work is lost if she doesn’t cross the finish line. If she starts down the PTQ path, what good will making the finals a few times do? She’ll still be well short, having played in smaller tournaments with less rounds and smaller multipliers and well behind the grinders, even if it happens to start the season. There’s effectively an all-pay auction for those 100 slots. In the first season with PWPs, Alice will have to take a guess as to what the threshold number of GPs is to make it in; her performance is good for plus or minus one or at most two, and a lack of byes might cost her an additional tournament, which she’ll factor in. After a round or two of that, it will likely become clear what the number is.
Over time, it will be clear about what the top 100 threshold will be. At that point, a number of players usually between 90 and 110 will decide to take measures necessary to pass that threshold after seeing their PT performance. Some seasons those who cut it close will miss, while in others there won’t be 100 applicants and a handful of people will get invites they didn’t expect, although they are likely to mostly be players who were otherwise qualified but wanted to compete and thus willing to score in no man’s land.
The result is three or four groups. First we have the Path 4 people like us, who have Hall of Fame invites. Second, we have the remaining Gravy Trainers, assuming such a thing exists, who qualify by doing well at tournaments, but the road involves being a Grand Prix warrior and remaining vigilant at all times lest one fall from grace. Third, we have the Grinders. These players will do everything in their power to maximize their PWP, whatever implications that has, taking flight after flight to Grand Prix after Grand Prix and gaming side events and other tournaments. The first season will be rough without three byes, the second one they’ll have them. They’ll buy their way into the Pro Tour with that long, hard slog, and they’ll never be able to stop lest they lose their byes and have to start over without them. Finally, there will be the PTQ players who comprise the majority of each Pro Tour, who will occasionally break through to a Pro Tour but have a very difficult time doing more than that. Even if one were to win a Pro Tour, they’d likely be back to PTQs within a year.
Consider two of the best stories of the recent Pro Tour: Brad Nelson and Paulo Vitor Damo Da Rosa.
Brad Nelson is from North Dakota. He plays Magic Online all day, every day. He qualifies for the Pro Tour! Everyone is excited. Brian David-Marshall writes up stories about the grinder of all grinders, ready for action. He gets to Honolulu, plays his heart out, and finishes 9th on tiebreaks.
There’s a good chance we never see him again.
He lives in North Dakota. He can’t play any events during the week other than at most FNM, and it’s a small one. He has no byes and no appearance fees, and minimal reasonable places to play a PTQ. He can’t afford to go on a Grand Prix binge, so the points from 9th place, which aren’t that many anyway, go to waste. We never get his ideas, his decks, his good times or his epic Player of the Year showdown.
Paulo’s story goes a similar way. Before breaking through to the Top 8, his first five events were top 50 finishes that allowed him to remain qualified. Without that lifeline, he is even more shut out than Brad. He can try to be one of the chosen five from Latin America, again starting from nothing, or he can keep grinding PTQs. We likely never get his story either.
We are killing the next generation of Pros in the crib. We are killing the current ones after the PPC runs out, with lightning speed if it isn’t replaced but rather quickly even if it is. Only members of the Hall of Fame and the grindiest of the grinders survive. The thing is the grinding champions will almost never be the best Magic players. Magic is one of the rare sports where its top players almost always have more lucrative options elsewhere. Too many top players leave competitive play as it is, when the time commitment becomes difficult to balance with life and a job. Well, the time commitment just went through the roof and the chances of making the Pro Tour went through the floor.
In other news, players at FNM will get more points for playing in larger groups, so every travel area will experience a shift of players away from its small stores towards its large ones. In some cases this will kill FNM at the small stores, since the moment they can’t reliably get 8 people it’s all over. Note that being large doesn’t on average make matches any harder or easier.
In a perfect world, Wizards would go back to a system without Planeswalker Points, tweak the ELO system, and maybe make all ways to qualify a little bit harder to deal with PT size inflation. However Wizards has too much invested – the new system can’t be scrapped. The details are far from fixed especially in the medium and long term, so what can we do to fix the system that might actually happen?
Here’s the top of a practical fix list:
1) Keep the Pro Players Club and Pro Point system. This is more important then everything else. The last thing we want are the Luis Scott Vargas’s of the world needing to grind into every Pro Tour. We need our top players at the biggest events, and they need the security that consistent strong finishes will keep them qualified. Also, unlike PWP, the PPC looks back over a full year, allowing for a hiccup or two without immediately falling off the tour, like Jon’s 251st at PT LA2000 en route to winning Nationals and Worlds that year.
2) Participation points need to be severely scaled back, at a minimum for side events. Right now you can get multiple free wins from entering a tournament, and enjoy the main event multiplier on them. Participation points flat out shouldn’t get the event multiplier at all, but if they must then at least take that away from side events. Originally I assumed this was going to be fixed, but it looks like it isn’t. All side events at Grands Prix will have a 5x multiplier, so we’ll get to see what happens when a bunch of people who are experts at gaming systems realize that their point maximizing option is to sign up for and drop from as many side events as possible. We’ll also get the answer to the question: “Can I sign up for a side event while playing in Day 2 of a Grand Prix despite the fact that I have no intent in actually playing in that event?”
3) Instead of 3 points per win and 1 point per draw, go to N squared points for N wins, with draws counting for a third of a win (and fractions being retained). This rewards long tournaments, real Magic play and outstanding performances organically, and is the big proposed fix to the system.
4) Adjust event multipliers, at least to raise the PT. If you don’t do #3, adjust radically.
5) Scale up the multipliers for top performances. There should be a bonus multiplier for all performances that currently receive Pro Points.
6) If for some reason #1 is unpalatable, announce as quickly as possible that there will be an heir to the Pro Players’ Club at least to the extent that some players will qualify through top performances over the course of an entire season. Work out a system that lets players know where they are at. Details and thresholds can be worked out later, but current regulatory uncertainty must be contained.
7) At a bare minimum, top 32 of the PT and the finalists of each GP get slots. The GP slots should pass down to avoid collusion in the top 8.
8 ) Use ELO for pairings! This provides strong incentive not to game the system too much to get PWPs as you’ll kill your ELO which is both relevant and now highly visible (source of high status), while providing a solid reward to those who perform well. This can at least be done on the GP and PT level. Make sure to include some amount of randomness to make sure players can’t game the system too much, and to avoid players having the same matchups each week.
Wizards may have done the math, although many past seasons give absurd results in any number of ways. They clearly failed to do the game theory and then rerun the math. Like many game designers before them they have failed to notice that one type of behavior has been rewarded so far beyond others as to make the others irrelevant. I’m all for playing being good and winning being even better, but this system can be summed up as “Playing is very good. Winning is slightly better.”
Make your plans accordingly.
Zvi Mowshowitz
Jon Finkel
Kai Budde
Bob Maher
Luis Scott-Vargas
wow, probably the 5 best player ever played the game.. if this does not say something to wizards nothing ever would
Wow. The weight of the names at the end really drive it home. I hope Wizards takes a long hard look at this.
I can’t agree more, I see people constantly talking about grinding out points and that isn’t what magic is about. People were at states grinding out 0-3 records, but then finally dropped because it was ‘only’ a 1x event.
Winning should matter far more than playing. People should never be punished for playing, but winning needs to be far more important
I read this, understand completely, and totally agree with everything on here. I hope that Wizards is open to working on the parts of this system where they missed the mark.
Even if you miss the top 100, you will be high enough to get 3 byes for GPs which will greatly increase your chances to make the top100 in the next season.
Yeah they completely changed the game. The cost to qualify is ridiculous without winning a ptq. This game is really expensive cash and time wise, yet they want their top players to invest more. I think they clearly misstepped with the current system. Well said LSV et al. I hope they fix it, not because I plan on qualifying anyway, but because I want the game to remain healthy for years to come and I see this retracting from it.
And then Alice qualifies and attends the Pro Tour which she promptly loses most of her rounds and decides this isn’t a productive thing to do. And it balances itself out in a few seasons.
Thank you for not letting this all go unrecognized and continuing to fight for us.
Scale planeswalker points based on ELO. The higher someone’s ELO, the more PWPs earned. This way FNM durdles grinds aren’t very effective sources of points, while PTs are excellent sources. The exact scaling mathematics must still be calculated to balance between grinders and good players.
meaningless co-sign.
i have lost my standing nationals invitation due to this system change. I cannot afford to grind and do a PhD. but I would love to be allowed to annually play for a chance to represent my country based on my half decade of strong results.
WOW… THis is a great article. Exacly what I was thinking… The 5 best players I can ever think of…. SEND THIS TO WIZARDS!!!! One should be rewarded by winning not by playing.
wow…
Wasn’t Bob Maher DCI suspended for Ratings fraud?
Yeah, my eyes popped when I saw the star power in the last five lines too. Well written guys.
Cute article but the solution doesn’t actually solve the problem. Here’s the problem:
Forget LSV, Brad Nelson, and Alex Bertoncini. These people are not who the new system is designed for. In order to understand the problem, you have to think of the other, majority of people like myself. People like me do not live in the Continental USA and can’t attend GPs or SCG events easily, so we have to grind FNMs or other small events to get our rating.
Your proposed solution is to get more people playing Magic by adjusting ELO for large events. I don’t play in large events, so when I’m a 1900-rated player and I go to FNM and lose to a 1450-rated player (true story, btw), I lose 15 points. Repeat 5 times over the course of an FNM and all of a sudden I don’t even have a GP bye anymore, because of a single FNM.
People weren’t “sitting on rating” by not attending GPs or SCG events; it was FNM and other smaller events that were suffering. Returning to ELO and redrawing the curves and doing ratings-based pairings is a good idea, except that you then have to keep the entire DCI ratings database stored locally on every DCI Reporter in the world, lest your Internet connection randomly die or something, and this is infeasible.
I, like you, am concerned about the PWP system, but addressing it by focusing only on PTQs and GPs is folly. The majority of us don’t play in those and couldn’t care less; for those people you have to fix the system in such a way that it functions for any event, all the way from a simple 8-man draft up to GP Madrid.
What? You guys don’t want to play Magic: the Gathering… First Massive Multiplayer IRL grinding game!?!?!
Maybe you can get XP for successfully conning your friends into road tripping, so you can hit an extra PTQ or 2 next season.
I hope people are mass tweeting/emailing this article to the Wizards powers that be.
Interesting article. A few thoughts:
A) We haven’t really seen the system develop, and Wizards has reserved the right to tweak it. I think you should have sat on it, or at least re-evaluate in 6 months. Let’s see what actually happens in 6 months after we’ve had a PT or two under the new system.
B) The problem with your hypothetical grinder is twofold. One: it’s approximately a million dollars to do. The second is that if you play that much, but actually win in large events instead of lose, you get even more points. So imagine Brian Kibler going to all the same tournaments as Alice? Kibler would rack up a ton more points. If you, say, average 10 wins a weekend instead of Alice’s 6 and play no side events, you earn almost the same number of points.
I agree with a number of your ideas.
#3: I haven’t analyzed this specific proposal, but in similar ideas I considered with an exponent, the top end is TOO important and players can’t dream of the PT through FNM. This may fit your purposes 100%, but it does’t align as closely with WotC’s goals and you miss the message. Instead I was looking at a system that, before multiplier, adds the number of wins you had. So if you go 6-3 at a GP, you get:
Multipler*(Participation + Number of Wins + Match points)
8*(8+6+18)=256.
Compare to 208 under the old system.
#4: Agree. I would see about GPs at 9, and the PT at 13 to start.
The solution I think also works very well as a piece of this is to give bonuses like the Top8 of a PT extra to points to several important thresholds. Maybe Day2 of a GP, top 32/16/8 of a GP, Top 100/50/32/16 of a PT. These could be either a flat set of points, a higher multiple for those rounds or even a higher multiplier for the event. Imagine “If you make the Top 32 of a GP, the whole thing has a 10x multiplier.”
@Lyle – the point is that while the new system is designed to help people like you, it will instead help the [# of slots] people who grind the most strenuously as described in the article above.
“addressing it by focusing only on PTQs and GPs is folly. The majority of us don’t play in those and couldn’t care less”
We’re talking about earning GP byes or qualification for Pro Tours here, so I’m not sure how the “don’t focus on GPs and PTQs here” argument works.
It does seem pretty weird that someone can win a GP and not even be close to making the PT…
If nothing else, if Wizards doesn’t make some changes people will be able to look back and say “the best players said this would ruin Magic.”
PT top 50 still qualifies you, i believe. You missed that.
Rather than #3, I recommend a fix originally brought up in the Wizards forums. Scale a person’s points by the share they got of the maximum possible for that event. So, if you go 4-0 in a four round, eight person FNM, you get (12+1)*(12+1)/(12+1)*3 = 39 points. If you went 1-1 drop, you get (3+1)*(3+1)/(12+1)*3 = 3.7 points. This way people are never penalized for playing (an objective for PWP), but doing well is also important. I believe this option is better than #3 because 3-0 results in a better result than, say, 3-3.
What does it mean for GP slots to ‘pass down’?
This is really interesting and exciting. Let’s hope that something will be happening, and soon. I really appreciate this piece of work, this kind of feedback from high profile players towards Wizards is invaluable to the community and to the game as a whole.
I thought PWP grind was instated to kill the pros and get all-random PT all the time? If it’s not, then clearly they didn’t think about it at all.
Another way to get tons of points: working at a store that has 2 events every night, registering in both, + PTQ the weekends = Qualified for life.
I hope people game the system so bad they have to drop it…
Also, if you guys are right and they didn’t intend to kill the pros, I really hope to know what we have to do to stay on the tour.
I am happy that I have recently gotten out of magic in terms of having lots of money tied up in valuable old cards and caring about tournament level play. Even though magic is a great game, it seems like WotC has been mismanaging their product over the last year or two in a fashion which has increasingly driven out people who are not committed to grinding 100% of the time.
Absolutely amazing article. I hope Wizards listens.
Well said. I’d cosign this petition to change PWP.
The biggest downside to the PWP system, as compared with ELO, is the loss of attainability.
In expectancy theory, there are three parts. A person has to
1. Believe he CAN attain the goal.
2. Believe the goal will result in the reward.
3. Personally value the reward.
2 and 3 are shoo-ins. We trust Wizards WILL reward the top 100 performers just as described. Likewise, for many of us, a Pro Tour qualification and plane ticket is very valuable.
But #1?! I know that I quite literally CANNOT fly to hardly any GPs. I am actually quite certain that I have ZERO ability to attain this PWP status. By contrast, while there are many flaws in the ELO system, at least some unknown player IF he played better Magic than any other player in the world would almost certainly achieve a top DCI rating… sooner or later, even if he didn’t grind or play often.
Man, what an alarmist bullsh*t freakout article. Who wrote this hunk of crap?
What? Oh. Oh…five of the most influential minds to have ever touched a Magic card. Well. Hmmmm. That certainly changes things.
PWP measures how much you play, ELO at least TRIED to measure how good you are? Why can’t they make a system that does that?
The article seems fairly well thought out, with one glaring exception:
“Instead of 3 points per win and 1 point per draw, go to N squared points for N wins…”
This has all sorts of problems, the main and most obvious being that long events are disproportionately rewarded. A player winning half his matches in a sixteen round tournament is rewarded just as much as someone going undefeated in an eight round one, and nearly twice as much as someone who sweeps a six round one (36 points for 6-0, 64 points for 8-8), despite the latter two being significantly more impressive. This very article makes the point that playing well should have more standing than playing often, but such would not be the case if this suggestion were adopted.
More subtly, awarding N-squared points also has a greater problem with high variance (i.e., random chance plays a significant role in selecting winners and losers). Consider Alice and Bob, both of whom play in two 16 round events. Both of them are better than average players and win twenty of their thirty-two matches. However, Alice had her wins split evenly between both events, going 10-6 in each event for a total of 200 points. Bob, on the other hand, went 13-3 in the first event and 7-9 in the second, for a total of 218 points. Bob gets nearly 10% more points just because his wins happened to be distributed more optimally than Alice’s, even if Bob and Alice are in actuality perfectly matched. Random chance has awarded Bob an extra 18 points. The larger the tournament, the more of a problem this becomes.
Planeswalker points is just a lame system anyway, regardless of whether you want to qualify or not. If you play once or twice a week and win often, you end up with the same amount of carebear points as the idiot who turns up to every event at the local store and complains about how he always gets mana screwed or flooded. The PWP system does not benefit magic, and I have pretty much lost interest in the game, as now there is no real sense of achievement.
@TheDarkestConfidant
top 50 a Pro-Tour does NOT qualify for the next, and neither does top 50 Worlds.
It’s too bad that Luis did not have this letter in hand when invited to the secret meeting to discuss PWPs before the public announcement.
Let’s be clear. PWP is a rewards system and has nothing whatsoever to do with rating. For most people, it offers little to no incentive. Not everybody realizes this yet, but they will. The article makes this point very clear, as have a number of other articles.
I think Magic SHOULD have a rating system, and that rating system SHOULD be used to award byes and invites. That’s my personal opinion, and hopefully WotC will eventually be convinced of this.
That said, the ELO system is a good one, and is, to a large extent, self-calibrating. This is an important fact which is often lost in the argument. If a group of players play enough games against each other at a low K-value, they will eventually reach an equilibrium where their ratings do successfully predict their relative win % against each other. In fact, the old WotC ELO model works very well at rating casual FNM players who only play against each other. That is until they go off to play in a GP or PTQ.
I feel like I could write 10 pages on how to properly implement ELO, but the key “fixes” to alleviate the problems described in the article would be:
1. Use a lower K-value. Chess uses a K-value of 10 for professional events where players are ranked over 2400. The K-value at a Magic GP or PT was much higher so that a single tournament success was likely to leave a player significantly overrated. When you are overrated with an incentive to keep your rating high, you will obviously want to avoid playing against properly rated opposition, especially when their ratings are much lower.
2. Award byes and invites based on peak rating within a given time period rather than on your exact rating at a specific point in time. Keep the incentive to try and build rating without the risk of immediately losing something you just acquired.
Those are the two key elements. Some of the following tweaks would also be good ideas:
3. Use a staggering of the K-value for new players. K-value should be attached to the player, not the event. FIDE (chess) uses a K-value of 30 for new players until they play enough events, then 15 until they reach a rating of 2400, then 10 for the remainder of their career. Since not all new DCI members are completely new to the game, their first few events will have more impact on their rating so that they settle more quickly into an accurate range.
4. Only allow competitive events to effect rating. Regular REL events like FNM, prereleases, and side events should not affect rating since they are judged at a much lower level of rules enforcement, and under far different tournament conditions. Blitz games do not affect Classical rating in chess, for example. Instead, use a reward system like PWP and prizes to promote the game. The lack of rating impact also allows serious players to play at a more casual level to help promote the game without them jeopardizing their competitive status.
5. Either implement a minimum activity requirement during each season to earn invites or byes, or some sort of ratings decay for inactive players. I prefer the activity requirement so that players with serious commitments in other areas of their lives can take some time off to focus on work, school, or family, and still come back to the game for a season or two as time permits.
Glaring issue with the N-squared math:
12 wins versus 13 wins with, say, a 3x multiplier (since you’d obviously need to rework multipliers) is a difference of 432 points versus 507. For one win that can readily be chalked up to variance. Yet that one win is worth an extra 15%. Yeah. That’s bad.
There are other ways to do it that don’t involve powers. I honestly believe that the correct way to do it is to award points for wins, points for participation (per round participated), and bonus points based on the event “level,” event size, and overall percentile placement. In other words:
Joe enters an 800-person Grand Prix. He takes 64th after playing all 13 (?) rounds and going 9-3-1. For that he gets 13A participation points + (9B win points + 1C tie points + 19D percentile points – assuming 20 percentile divisions) multiplied by X. Or something along those lines. It takes more than 5 minutes late at night to come up with a working formula. Anyways, that’s just an idea.
“3) Instead of 3 points per win and 1 point per draw, go to N squared points for N wins, with draws counting for a third of a win (and fractions being retained). This rewards long tournaments, real Magic play and outstanding performances organically, and is the big proposed fix to the system.”
Sounds good on paper, but would TOs start running events with very large numbers of very short rounds (say, 16 rounds, 20 minutes each) to attract players?
Thank you for writing this. I’d gladly cosign it. I’d enumerate my problems with the system, but most of them are adequately addressed in the above letter.
I’d add only that FNMs have become very easy to game, and if you don’t live near a store willing to run multiple FNMs with 7-round, round-robin, 1-game-match draft queues with 25-minute rounds or some similar nonsense, you won’t make the FNM championship regardless of how well you perform. There is an invitational tournament incentive, but little to no regulation on getting there. FNMs need to be normalized if this is to be a meaningful event or even an attainable goal for upwards of 90% of the FNM-playing population.
I’m always ‘that guy’ when it comes to this, but it’s Elo, not ELO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpad_Elo
it just bothers me D:
<3
Anyone who knows a bit about how things operate at WoTC will realize two thigs:
1. They WILL read this. They WILL discuss it. They DO keep their finger on the pulse of the player base, and the five signatures at the bottom will swing the weight considerably.
2. They don’t act unless something is proven to be degenerate/ bad for the game, so do not expect any changes any time soon. The wait and see attitude is king.
Overall as gamers designing for gamers, you would think they’d realize many are going to “game” this system for benefit. The fact that the Pro Tour game is now mostly based on who can spend the most seems pretty par for companies looking to enhance bottom line, but not for a game that has an amount of skill involved.
Sitting on ratings was pretty lame, but this alternative does seem miles worse.
An excellent article that needed to be written. I am a big fan of the Elo system, but if the PWPs are here to stay it needs a serious overhaul.
Elo is not an abbreviation, it’s the last name of the guy who came up with the system so it shouldn’t be capitalized. Also I think PWPs are fine except for the 50 from the PT not qualifying, that seems bad. The other things in this article affects only an extremely small percentile of Magic players worldwide.
This is one of the better articles I’ve seen in a while. I truly agree with the point that PWP stack the deck against smaller communities. For example, I live in southern New Mexico. We get 1 PTQ per season in Albuquerque and 1 in Phoenix. That’s it. Most people can’t afford to drive/fly to places like Dallas (which is 10-11 hours from here) or Denver (about the same distance). So people in my area get FNM’s only to grind points, which has caused some stores I know of to try and run multiple FNMs in one night.
The system is crap and at least in the old one you had something to strive for as you knew what your rating was worth. Now, lord only knows what value you will obtain from PWPs given it’s variable.
I know its irrelevant, but I endorse this statement as well. A lot of this needed to be said. I think the whole planeswalker levels thing is cute, kinda fun, but man, does it ever turn this game into a soulless grind.
I don’t understand why they would take away the PPC. And why they would take away Pro Points awarded at Grand Prix tournaments. At this point, players who play A TON of tournaments would get in, which is ok, since they are the money WotC wants, but also the excellent players not playing that much.
Clarification is needed!
Here’s a random idea: what if bye’s didn’t count for wins, in the context of PWP? I.e. if a supergrinder gets 3 byes, that’s a 3 whole rounds he can’t get any points from, so he’ll have to actually play well in his matches.
I think that would be a small step in the right direction. It would shorten the gap between the top 100 and the players who are starting from scratch. It also mimics the element of decay, because you have to work harder to maintain your status the more byes you get.
Wait, there are no more Sunday PTQs? Since when?
Cascade Games’s website says that the PTQ the day after GP: San Diego is still going on.
Love the article, hopefully change will be coming in future. I feel the new system is not going to work.
I am one of the ones that will scale back my time spent (and money spent too!) playing MTG after I play in Worlds.
I usually qualify for 1 PT a season through PTQs or Nationals. The dream of getting onto the Gravy train is over, I will still PTQ but GPs are no longer of any value to those not trying to qualify on PWP.
Jenesis, that is for this seasons GP. in 2012 GPs will no longer have PTQs day 2 (not sure why these are being marketed as the new public events once PTs go private)
SIGNED!!!!!
I really hope this spreads and the right people read this. You guys are smart, and this is exactly or along the lines of how it could be fixed immediately.
I started playing paper because of the PWP, I only played online before. I like the idea, but it has so many flaws. Especially not qualifying top 16 of GPs, and top 50 of PTs, seems so weird to me, just like not announcing the successor of the PPC, because if you think about it, all the pros that are not in Hall of Fame but still famous Pro Players with level 6 or up, pretty much are about to loose their job, because they won’t get the benefits if they don’t make it, something I didn’t even think about before…
This is the way to do this, please fix this Wizard or you will loose the entire charm of pro players, the dream of going to Pro Tour etc…
I also have one addition: Limit the amount of rounds a FNM event can be (at least how many rounds count for Points), because some stores have been running two 6 rounds events to give their customers a lot of points, while most stores like mine, despite being big, only do three rounds every time. That would also fix the problem of small stores being under pressure now a little bit (there is still a problem with the participation points though).
Signed!
The coldblooded part here, though, is that Wizards wants Alice to get the invite in the hypothetical you’ve constructed. There are a few that they would want that result.
1) Alice put way more money into the system than Brian did. Every tournament entrance fee, every side draft, every win-a-box she enters is a chunk of change that goes directly in the pockets of Hasbro. She personally may put 4-5x the money into the system that Brian does.
2) Interactibility. Brushes with fame are a powerful thing. I started playing again directly because a friend mentioned there was a sealed PTQ in town they’d be birding. I went, played, met a couple of famous personalities, and got the bug again. WotC can directly attribute every penny I’ve spent on Magic since then to that person. Because Alice is a super-grinder, that means that chances are decent that some kid who scrubbed out of the GP at 0-3 is likely to run into her in the side drafts and get stars in their eyes. Even better, because she’s not a stone-cold killer with 60 cards like Kibler is, the kids even got a chance to beat her.
3) Hobby as Lifestyle. This one is actually the most sinister of the bunch. Because Alice has made this her life, that time commitment means that it’s easier for Joe PTQ to excuse his own failure to make the Pro Tour. The current situation, in which the Rietzls of the world who put relatively little time into the game still have visibly massive success, means that Joe PTQ is facing his own failure every time he picks up his deck at a competitive REL. He knows he plays more than Paul, and yet he’s worse. Under our brave new world, he’s got an out, and a reason not to feel bad about himself or the fact he’s not improving as a player.
Now, are these changes designed to find the best players in the world? Absolutely not, and Wizards doesn’t care. These changes are designed to maximize marketability of Pro Players and total income from the playerbase, and when viewed in that light they’re pretty ingenious. I suspect that the only reason the PT has lasted as long as it has in the current incarnation is because Wizards hires so many people from the community and they fought to preserve the institution.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell. If one is to have any hope of qualifying for the pro tour (aside from winning a PTQ out of nowhere) one has to actually attend and play in 9 or 10 big events and side events. With entry fees, plane tickets, hotels, food, car rentals, and incidental expenses this can be well in excess of $25,000.
$25,000 for one season, three months of grinding.
I barely make $25k a year! Most of the players I know fall into the same range. It is literally impossible to reach the pro tour unless you are already wealthy or have a very well off sponsor. I play in FNM every week, I try to attend a draft at least twice a month, and I try to go to a big event as often as I can, usually one PTQ per season. I, who devote the entirety of my leisure time and spare income to this game I love, will never have a prayer of playing in a PT, simply because I can’t afford to grind the big events.
Why should the most devoted players be left out of the running to go pro? I’m not saying it should be easy, but I am saying your skill should matter more than your wallet.
I think an important thing to think about is this – qualifying for the PT is good and all, but probably won’t turn out to be as awesome as the grinders obviously think it is. If you’re going to all these events, burning cash and losing all the time, what are the odds of doing well at the PT? What are you going to do next season – grind again and watch yourself go 3-11 at the PT again?
Magicpokey: That’s the thing – you *aren’t* the most devoted player if you aren’t giving all of your money and time to play MtG, with that being LOTS of money and time, not just what little you can spare. If somebody spends $30k and 1000 hours on Magic in a year, and another spends $500 and 50 hours, the first player is more devoted, even if they’re both spending all of their time and money. Rich players can afford to be more devoted, basically.
I like LSV quite a bit, no real opinion of the rest of the signers.
To me though this just sounds like the pros like their little conclave of familiar faces, don’t want to lose that to the unwashed masses displacing them and don’t want to have to work harder or give up on the gravy-train. They want a “civilized” system where they can relax, drink their cocktails, gather a group of well-informed pros together and concentrate their skills on given formats in short time with effective results. Allowing them to monopolize the gravy-train for people already inside and keep it pleasant to stay there. The advantage of people in these play groups cannot be understated. If you read what they do before big events you start to understand that these are not individual performances, they are groups of people all working together to all stay on the tour with idea sharing and playtesting. If you’re not in a group like this, their preferred system is pretty impenetrable.
Ah why am i even articulating this, I don’t care about the unwashed masses anyway.
A very interesting change in opinion from the much more positive article about PWP a few weeks ago.
But there is one point where you are wrong: Wizards did do the math. It’s just business math and not game theory math: The Pro Tour is no longer for the best players, but for the best paying players, similarly as Airline Miles are for those that travel most, not those that like to travel most.
And I am pretty sure there are enough people that don’t do the math and are stupid enough to think they have a shot at qualifying (as you did in your first article and many comments over the internet show) that PWP will make a positive impact on Wizard’s bottom line. 🙂
Keep the pro players club and have gps award pt invitations again, maybe top 8 instead of top 16. Also make it so the top 50 at a pt qualify for the next pt. This allows the faces of the pt like lsv and Paulo to remain on the train and gives the weekend ptq warrior a chance to get on the train.
this game was invented by a man who is a master of game theory, wizards should have checked with him to see if the PWP system was sound for the game of magic.
Though I don’t care about the pros either so meh.
Yeah… the system needs to not reward participation above victory, especially in long tournaments.
I think the FNM solution is a good one; and maybe even the multiplier is about right… but the idea that day 2 and especially day3 of a GP has less value than simply 0-1, dropping every side event all weekend (or even 0-0, drop) is just beyond incorrect.
@Wodin You put into words what I thought way better than I did.
@Magicpokey You say skill matters more than your wallet, WotC says your wallet matters more than your skill.
I think this is a huge gamble by WotC thinking they can milk even more money out of their playerbase. They won’t attract that many players by making the game a huge one, and I’m sure it will turn off a lot of on and off serious players, who can inject thousands of dollars in the game one year or season, but have no time to play as much the next season or year and play less. Now, everything you earn one season is lost if you stop grinding, so why bother?
It’s like WoW, stop playing for a few weeks and you’re so far behind the curve there’s no point playing ever again!
At the risk of being branded a hertic since almost everyone else here is pretty much tripping over themselves to agree with this, allow me to play devil’s advocate for a minute or two.
This will be long. You have been warned.
First, the self-interest here is painfully obvious. Let’s see, some guys who for the most part, with or without HoF, would qualify for every PT on ratings and mostly (with the exception of LSV) don’t show up to GPs or SCGs, don’t like a system that penalizes them for not playing. Wow, shocking.
Let’s suppose for a moment that the HoF doesn’t exist, and the authors of this letter didn’t have automatic bids on that basis. What possible incentive would any of them have to play MTG other than at a PT? They’ll qualify on ratings for every PT event as long as they don’t endanger any of their precious ratings points at any event where they might face weak players, and could possibly lose. This is the BEST POSSIBLE system for them–they succeed by literally doing nothing. Any threat to this system in any form will be a Bad Thing(tm) for them. After all, these are expert gamers, and they can game the current system ad infinitum, with the added bonus that they do so by simply not showing up at all. Of COURSE they liked the old system better. In their shoes, who wouldn’t?
Let me say that again: the old system could be gamed, too, and these are the people gaming it. They don’t oppose the new system because it can be gamed, they oppose it because it has to be gamed in a way that they don’t want to game it. Why is one way of gaming the system worse than another?
Moving on, the whole piece is clearly written from the perspective of people who believe that getting on the PT should be a lot harder than staying on the PT. This the Harvard model; difficult to get in, but once you get there grade inflation makes sure that only a very small number fail out.
The assumption is clearly that such a system is intrinsically good and that the PT should work that way as well.
Why?
Why should there be a “gravy train” at all? Why shouldn’t you have to earn your place on the tour every time out?
To use an example from the article, consider Brian Kibler. Kibler, because he’s in the HoF, could sit on his lifetime automatic qualification. And if he didn’t have the HoF, I expect he could do so on rating, so he’s in a similar boat with the authors.
However, I would root for Kibler every time against any of them (again, except maybe LSV). You know why? Because Kibler PLAYS. He’s on the road for GPs or SCG events or something almost every weekend. And, unless he’s lying in his tweets, he often goes out to find an FNM beforehand. How cool would that be, having Kibler show up at your random FLGS for an FNM?
You can be sure that most Pros, ESPECIALLY Pros who maybe didn’t do quite as well on the last PT and need to keep that rating up, would not even consider doing this under the Elo system. That’d be ratings suicide!
Anyway, now let’s consider the hypothetical Alice vs. Brian scenario again. Kibler is a perfect choice here. However, this time we also take into account what else Brian does besides go to GPs and PTs. He hits SCG Opens and mostly does well. He hits random FNMs and probably generally does pretty well at those, too, I would guess. He actually attends a pre-release (an especially scary event under Elo because without byes, you might lose to someone with a REALLY bad rating and that really hoses your points). Suddenly, all these other bits means he’s pulled in another few hundred points and he’s now ahead of Alice, because he wins more.
Let’s say Brian and Alice both get to go to the PT. Because Brian is, well, Brian Kibler, he does much better than Alice at the PT. Alice can still qualify next season by grinding like crazy again–maybe, if she can afford it and hasn’t gotten completely tired of losing all the time–but Brian can keep essentially the same schedule and, because he wins a lot more, qualify again almost for sure.
Can people effectively buy a PT bid by playing all over the place and doing badly? Yes, it’s mathematically possible, as was pointed out. It also strikes me as staggeringly unlikely. Why? Because it’ll be an awfully expensive way to do it, and doing badly on the PT isn’t financially sustainable. What’s the central point made in the article about behavior? People respond to incentives. There is NO financial incentive for Alice to grind like that. She will earn essentially zero prize money and spend probably ten grand on airfare, hotel rooms, registration fees, etc.
Will people do it just for the thrill of being on the PT? Sure, maybe, once in a while. But until there’s evidence that this is actually a systemic problem, it seems grossly premature to say the system is “broken” just yet.
My strong suspicion is that what will really happen is that there will be a bunch of pros who would rather sit on ratings than play who will stop getting invites. They will be replaced by people who actually play a lot, and more than that, play and win. People who consistently finish high at GPs and SCGs and yes, actually play in FNMs will qualify. Furthermore they will generally qualify ahead of Alice because Alice ultimately cannot afford to go to nine GPs every season to attend a PT where she won’t do well because she’s not really that good.
While the math may say Alice could get on the PT, I think the $$$ math says that this will hardly ever happen in real life.
Finally, I would like to point out that the PWP system was generated by Mike Turian, himself a Hall of Famer and one of the top-rated (by Elo ratings) players in the world. I would be really, really surprised if Mike hadn’t also thought of a lot of this, so let’s give him a little credit as well before pushing the panic button.
OK, so that was an interesting devil’s advocate exercise.
Now, back on earth, I would agree that the formula should/could be tweaked a little to reward winning a little more highly, and participation somewhat less so. I don’t much like the n-squared idea for reasons already mentioned, but ideas like upping the multiplier for Day 2 of the GP applying to the whole GP sounds like a good step, and it wouldn’t hurt to bump the PTQ top 8 as well (though not as much). And the multiplier for a PT does seem a little low to me as well.
I also think the PPC is actually a good thing, too. I think there is at least some value for WotC in keeping the high PT finishers around a while so the masses (like me) can have somewhat consistent names to follow.
And yes, the proverbial deck certainly does appear stacked against players outside Japan and the U.S. (and maybe Europe). I think the Aussies and Latin American players do appear to be at a real disadvantage because of the lower availability of GPs. I can see that as a big concern going forward.
However, how about we wait for a while and see what REALLY happens before tinkering further?
First.
Balls McScrotum hit the nail on the head. Don’t expect any major changes until things have been PROVEN to be wrong.
It doesn’t matter if I agree or disagree with this article, mostly because it is the equivalent of getting involved in a land war in Asia. For a bunch of great strategist and game theory minds, it boggles me that you have chosen this route. WoTC is an aircraft carrier, and moves VERY slowly. Presenting an entire overhaul will only serve to get ALL of your ideas tabled until they see what actually happens.
I wish you had chosen one area and attacked on that front. This could have actually enacted change. My personal opinion would have been to start with the invitations from PT and GP top finishes. I know from much experience working/managing in a magic shop that most people are NOT grinders, and are pretty far removed from the pro tour. BUT most people do feel like they could run good for one tournament, and the possibility of qualifying for the PT through a GP was as much incentive or more than the prize money to make that 4-8 hour road trip.
At any rate, WoTC has shown willingness to change, it just doesn’t happen fast. This system will be messy at first, but will be cleaned up slowly, and end up with a system that works (for the most part).
I’ve been playing competitive magic for 5 years. I day 2’d PT San Diego, where I got to see LSV go 16-0 in person. I top-32’d GP KC. That is the extent of my high-profile tournament history. However, with these years of play I had achieved an ELO hovering around 2040 after the GP top 32. I never sat on rating, as I experienced only minor fluctuations when playing in the many, MANY local events I attended. The best part of playing locally was having fun while preparing and practicing for events that mattered – events that, if I won, I would qualify for the PT again, and if I did well enough, often enough, might get me qualified based upon my ELO. (After GP KC I was within about 50-60 points if I recall correctly)
Now, PWPS.
Now, all of my play is 100% irrelevant except for the finals of a PTQ. My years of effort have vanished into an irrelevant, nerdy level system that has names I can barely force past my own lips.
Why should I continue to play Magic? As of now, I will not play Magic any more beyond a few random, local PTQ’s with the hope that I might win, as I was good enough to do it once before. But the years and years of travel, brewing, testing; the thousands of smiles and kind words spread across the hundreds of players I’ve encouraged over those years, and, apparently most important to Wizards, the dollars that I spent at tournaments, in local shops, and on MTGO are now gone. Until and unless the system is changed.
TL;DR – Semi-competitive player gets f*cked by the new system, decides to basically quit playing competitive Magic because there is now literally no reward for doing so.
While I feel most of the content of this article have already been floating around the web since the announcement of PWP, it was nice to see it all in one nice tidy article, signed by some of the biggest names in the game.
While I do agree with most of the stuff in the article and think that the PWP-system needs some tweak and dials, I think the case of “Alice” in the article is a bit far fetched as it’s really the “worst possible scenario”. The number of players that can actually pull of a run like that economically and timewise are at most a handful if any.
I would like to applaud the signatories for taking the matter on in such a considered fashion.
This is not an issue that particularly affects me, since I never do any pro events, but from the moment the system was announced it seemed flawed at best and at worst yet another commercial decision masquerading as a game improvement.
I would occasionally look at my old rating and gain some satisfaction from a rating that had improved because it meant that I had improved. Now I don’t bother – an improved rating doesn’t mean anything more than I have spent more on the game.
Interesting article except the self-interest of top players instead of everyone who plays really stand out here.
Signed. I don’t understand everything here, but this illuminated a lot for me; I know I’m not the only one. Thank you very much for this breakdown from the ‘grandmaster pro’ point of view. As a fairly new grinder, attempting the Pro Tour Grind seems roughly impossible now on my budget where it seemed doable with the ELO / pre-PWP system, and it’s pretty frustrating that this game, that I’ve spent so much time and money on and that I love and enjoy so much, just became essentially impossible for me to excel at on the most competitive level.
I just want a clear response from Wizards. Please.
Excellent article! (Except for some flaws in the suggested improvements which others pointed out.) Let’s hope that Wizards takes the criticism seriously, rather than just tweaking a fundamentally flawed system which rewards grinding rather than skill. In the long run, the status of Magic as an “intellectual sport” is at stakes.
SunByrner hit the nail on the head.
This article is written by The Gentlemen who appear to be be shocked that they might actually have to play Magic in order to remain a member of their Gentlemen’s Club.
Screw the gravy train pros thinking that their exclusive Gentlemen’s Club is under threat.
Pro Tour invites should be given to the Top X players of the previous Pro Tour and to all Top 8 players of each previous Grand Prix. If those invites are not used, then they lapse. Back to the grind, like eveyone else for The Gentlemen.
Gentlemen, your reputation should only carry you so far before you become another faded star.
Honestly, WotC is just trying to make extra money. If people have an incentive to grind, then they have to spend more money. The more they play the more prize support stores buy meaning WotC ends up on top. It’s just frustrating after I came back into MTG with a mediocre 1640 rating from when I was younger and grinded both my limited and constructed ratings to a respectable 1800-1900 range in only 6 months playing no GPs, PTs, etc. I was on track to start playing in bigger events and really grow as a magic player and finally see where this work had taken me. I went from being ranked 20th in AZ to 300+ in lifetime points. Of course there were people who hadn’t played in years sitting on the first page in ELO, but now I can’t make it to as many tournaments because of “real life” obligations and lack of transportation/consistent money. It doesn’t reward my solid play, but instead it rewards people for their inability to spend money. I feel like I can’t be seen as respectable (in regard to rating) anymore and I’ll be stuck in the dredges with PWP.
Maybe wizards just doesn’t care about the pros. It’s not like they really owe you anything. Maybe they just want fat paper stacks and a fun game.
I for one no longer care to enter any tournaments.
I am a new player who wanted to increase my rating through playing and beating good people. I do not care about the PT circuit, but I still wanted a good rating. Once I realized that the rating now will be based on grinding, I no longer am interested in participating in any events. Having a good rating even among friends is incentive to play, but now it is not even indicative of winning so I have had very little reason to enter events.
Pro tip to Wizards, if you are going to keep this system, at least give incentive to play to people who don’t grind.
WotC must understand that the system is broken and it need to be fixed before it is launched.
Well written article, but I don’t think using Elo rating for pairings is a good idea.
It would mean that after 3 rounds, only one of the best (highest ranked) eight players in the tournament can be undefeated, because the best players play each other. If you do this in a grand prix, after three rounds one of the best 8 players already cannot make day two, while one of the worst eight will still be undefeated.
Of course, adding a little randomness to pairings would alleviate the problems slightly, but this problem would only be removed by making pairings completely random, as they are now.
I appreciate all of the titans for stepping up and speaking out even when they didn’t have to. Afterall, you’re safe with your HOf status and could take down a PTQ whenever you liked it. I just want to say this systems killing me softly inside and I am in despair and pretty much resigned that I will never play on the Pro Tour again. I’ve attended seven PTs in the past and I qualified through a number of ways (PTQ, Rating, Nationals to speak). But the PTQs got slashed by half and the invites from GPs are no longer awarded. I love this game as much as about anyone else. We’re passionate about it and it just disheartens me that the demise of the Pro Tour is inevitable if no remedies are made.
I remember Maro saying in an article that Richard Garfield said he could make any game popular by adding a ladder system to it. What they are doing essentially is cutting the legs off a ladder with thousands of people holding onto it. It basically just seems like a ploy to get more people paying for tournaments.
The people saying that this article is written in self interest may not have noticed that it is mainly written by hall of famers, who are qualified anyway. The people that PWP is worst for are the ones who were penalised by the Elo system in the first place. It’s just stupid.
Nice article. I agree entirely.
Come on, guys! Do you really think it is even remotely possible to stay a bad player when grinding in the way described? Not to mention that to have 3 byes at a GP you must be good already. After only 1 season, Alice will be a much much better player than the average PTQ winner of the old days, and will have earned her place at the PT. And it remains to be seen that people such as Alice exist in the real world – I highly doubt it.
(That said, I also think that a top X finish at a PT or GP should award a PT qualification, and that a rating cut for byes etc. was a good thing, because it was a guarantee, unlike he top 100 position which depends on too many factors outside your control).
wow, must be one of the best magic articles ive ever read on one of the most important topics and very close to my heart.
just wow
WOTC used to care about what players thought about the game. This is just a business decision to make money masked as a change to the game. As a semi-competative player, my incentive and motivation to play at local area drafts and FNM’s and such has been taken away because I do not have the infinate money it takes to grind onto the PT. WOTC no longer cares about its players but only the money in players wallets.
Playing more doesn’t necessarily make you better at all.
I feel like, if nothing else, this article is ill-timed. The other thing it is is poorly thought out in parts. Your entire Alice example is faulty because Alice cannot and almost certainly will not be able to sustain her qualification if in fact she is so bad. Also, WotC WANTS Alice to qualify over Kibler if she is playing in as many events as the example says, even if she is just gaming the system. Now, as has been mentioned, the N squared points system is very flawed. I like the irony in an article about the bugs in an infant system recommending fixes that themselves are flawed.
Now, let’s not got something confused, LSV and people like him will be staying on the Pro Tour. They play in all of the domestic GPs (sometimes foreign ones) and all of the PTs which will almost assuredly give them enough points, with solid finishes, to be in the top 100 over people who cannot play high level events as much.
Sorry that this new system, as it stands, does not lend itself to people who play every once in a while, or who have a good rating stored up and want to be qualified for the Pro Tour so that when it’s convenient for them, they can play. In the meantime, the guy who finished “tied-for-just-shy-of-a-qualification” is on the outside looking in because X amount of people have had a better rating than them that hasn’t changed in 4 years. That is not a system that fosters the type of people on the Pro Tour that I, or apparently WotC, want to see.
I, for one, welcome our new PWP overlords.
I hope you’re right about the “WOTC doesn’t care about the pros” thing. They’re all scum. Remains to
One final comment to add: Let’s name drop your friend and mine, Paul Cheon. Now, Paul is a hell of a guy, I like him a lot…but he should not be qualified for the Pro Tour, which he is (based on being rated one of the best in the world), in my opinion. Working in Curacao means he can’t play much, but he showed in Denver that he still has what it takes. Want to come play on the Pro Tour? Prove you’ve still got it and we’ll let you. You shouldn’t just get to use past success as a reason to maintain an invitation.
Just to be clear, Paul is a just a name I used from the first page of top rated players in the world based on Elo, anyone in a similar situation could have been substituted.
The drama is strong in this one.
I would have liked to see a rough calculation of how much money Alice would have to spend to get to 3000+ PWPs. Then compare that to the Alice’s EV of attending a Pro Tour. Would this be sustainable? My gut tells me it’s not, so this would affect Alice’s choices and, in turn, lower the threshold for making the top 100.
To everyone who says they’d like to see the Pro Tour get more accessible to newcomers, consider this scenario. At the end of 2012, the Top 8s of 3 Pro Tours and Worlds contained 1 ‘name Pro’ each. The rest was filled with durdles who “bought” their way into the Tour. Would you watch the Top 8 broadcasts on Sunday? I know I wouldn’t. I don’t care for Alice, Bob, or any other Magic player I don’t know. I care for LSV, Kibler, PVDDR and all the other pro’s I know. Those pro’s are excluded due to this new system.
Good luck to WotC sustaining a PT that’s hella expensive for players to reach, but that no-one wants to watch. Typical short-term thinking on their parts, if you ask me.
Signed, btw.
“The benefits massively outweigh the drawbacks, and this is a vast improvement to the old system. It seems pretty sweet, and I’m excited to see how things go. If things don’t work as smoothly as intended, Wizards will make necessary changes, and it looks like there aren’t any major problems.” – http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/how-i-became-an-archmage-my-thoughts-on-planeswalker-points/
…
Just sayin’
And do you know what the funniest part is? In order to sustain Travels, Hotels, Entry Fees, magic card expenses and other stuff for an intensive 4 months of grinding through USA (if not the world), probably not even a 3rd place in the Pro Tour is enough to mantain your budget. And that’s saying a lot.
“Can I sign up for a side event while playing in Day 2 of a Grand Prix despite the fact that I have no intent in actually playing in that event?”
If I understand correctly, you only get participation points after the first round you’ve played.
South Africa:
GP’s = 0,
PTQ’s = 1 per PT,
FNM’s = 16 on average, once had a turnout of 40 people.
Point of playing for points = None whatsoever.
It is more benefical to me and everyone else playing here to just go to regionals and try qualify for nats, and to do the 1 PTQ per PT, as the points would get us no where regardless of anything.
To the people accusing the authors of writing this in self interest:
1: You’re wrong. They’re all in the HoF, more scrubs on the PT is good for them since they get invites anyway and it’ll be easier to do well with weaker competition.
2: It’s irrelevant whether you’re right or wrong about your accusation. It’s an ad hominem fallacy. What matters is whether they are correct or not in their analysis of the results of the change in the rating system. I think we can all agree that, for the health of the game, and our own enjoyment, it would be a better thing to see the best players be qualified rather than those who grind the most.
Also, for those saying Alice will get crushed on the PT anyway, you should keep in mind that the competition Alice faces is made up of more Alices, and hence will be weaker. In this light, Alice will be more likely to X-X rather than 0-2X.
A local FNM match win being worth three times as much as a States Championship match win says about all you need to say about how asinine Participation Weaksauce Points (PWP) are. The old system wasn’t perfect. I think a decay system would have solved the problem of people sitting on rankings. However, what we have now is a joke, and I cannot believe Wizards is selling it to us with a straight face. The argument in this letter is well said and written by people who’s opinions Wizard “should” value (and arguably should’ve consulted before hand).
Very nice.
People respond to incentive.
I wonder if wotc considered how much money they were losing by cutting GP PT invites? I play online and due to family/work have very little to no time at all to play live events. Even so, I could make time to travel to at least a few GP or a ptq to try to q for the PT, which is my goal. I also had a rating that gave me two byes. Now I have no incentive to travel to a GP at all. People are willing to spend money and make time to travel for an event if it will offer a PT slot with a solid finish. Now, if you’re a player ho can’t grind at a freakish level, you have to win a ptq, that’s it. Ridiculous. I’d be traveling to at least two gp coming up if they offered pt slots. Give at least one pt invite at the gp level and you give ALOT of players like me incentive to travel to them.
I agree with every last word.
Well said. Can’t see them doing anything though, they just don’t care.
i dont like the pwp system as it ruines good players in small communities chances of qualifying for nationals. now i have to play the qualify’ers … and with a limited number of qualifyers in a 200mile radius (1) it will mean i have to see how i can budget qualifyers in other regions instead of ptq’s…
SunByrne QFT
Hopefully Wizards will read this and do something, they have shown to be flexible in the past.
This could be the most important article in the last few years. And I agree with everything you said.
I agree with everything said, but if you guys do a followup, please address one other thing.
FNM multipliers are really off. Why is magic played on Friday so much better than all other magic? My local shop does drafts on Friday and Standard on Saturday, always. Now suddenly the people who like to draft get more points than the standard players? Now, I recognize that the store could start rotating or something to get standard on Friday night sometimes, but what about the weekly Legacy tournament on Wednesday night? It’s a pretty good turnout every week, sometimes upwards of 20 people, and it has a 1x multiplier. Why, exactly, is this tournament worth so much less than drafting two days later?
There’s nothing magical about Friday, except if they want to reward magic players for having no lives. My shop offers lots of great weekday tournaments so you can do other things on the weekends, and many people take them up on that, so why are they being penalized?
Agree totally. WotC does make use of instant bans, so in the dreamers world an instant reiteration of the DCI system would be good. I imagine they’ll take ALL of this into consideration (and be hurt by the people saying Wizards doesn’t care. I don’t agree, Wizards care a lot, HASBRO maybe not so much. Their public face is much smaller and far further from the heart), see how it goes after one season and if it turns out 100 “random never before seen, never to be seen again” players are the new top players, they’ll make changes.
I can personally envision a dual system, using both DCI and PWP. PWP is cute and for more casual events, while DCI still does the old jazz. Saying I’ve got a rating of 1800 and am an Archmage sounds fun.
Or even let players decide when they sign up for a DCI what system they want to play for. Though this causes a split for all the tournaments (“Dude, you going to that PWP Standard?”)
Don’t expect things to change immediately, don’t expect them to change back entirely.
I noticed that several comments were made from the viewpoint/desire of FNM’s being able to place someone at the pro tour, or at least the national FNM tournament.
1. This is mostly a pipe dream, as there are so many people playing FNM. Chances are that people who figure out how to do 2 FNM’s per week and/or routinely have a 6-8 round FNM will be the only ones who benefit. This is hardly a level playing field for good, but casual gamers.
2. Why the interest in big rewards for only playing FNM? It’s nice that there is something to be gained from those events, but people who only play FNM are really not trying to do anything more. As long as that’s the case, why should they get something more?
It’s to bad we can’t go back to the old system and tweak it. I would have favored ratings decline for those sitting out of the game – to maintain their rating. That way people still need to play, but the depth of your pocket doesn’t indicate how far you will go in Magic.
I also agree with SunByrne, for the most part.
Alice is not realistic. Who is going to do this? Let’s say as a *conservative* esimate that it costs $600 to play in a GP for Alice on average ($400 for a plane ticket, $100 over the weekend for a split hotel room, $100 for event/sides entry – leaving out food and incidentals). Let’s also say $50 for the average PTQ (gas + entry). That’s $5400 for the GPs, and assuming she grinds one PTQ every free weekend, another $600 for PTQs. She’s now spent $6000, at least, and has won nothing at these tournaments. She isn’t any good. She gets one invite, and now has to top 8 the PT to break even. Players do respond to incentives, and assuming Alice is not an idiot, she *might* do this *once* before she decides that the glamorous life of a PT grinder is not for her.
I’m kind of surprised no one here suggested a system like this:
Only your 3 best performances in 8x multiplier events count towards Competitive PWP
Only your 8 best performances in 5x multiplier events blablablabla
Only you 15 ” ” blablablabla
adjust number accordingly.
This allows the average Joe to grind all year and try to lucksack some good results in high multiplier events, also allowing the “pro wannabes” to be rewarded even if they don’t have money/time to grind everywhere. It also keeps the dream alive for the old players who sat on ratings and somehow feel entitled for a lifelong of invites to nats and such.
This system takes best of both worlds, as it rewards success much more than grind (like the old system), while providing 0 disincentive to play (like the new system, and the “main reason” WOTC changed it).
Now spread my word and make me famous!
Here’s how I fix the system:
1) Remove PT qualification from PWP. The systemic problem here is that a “behavior altering system” is being used to qualify for a tournament that is supposed to be about the best players facing off.
Implement 1 and 7 from the article
“1) Keep the Pro Players Club and Pro Point system. This is more important then everything else. The last thing we want are the Luis Scott Vargas’s of the world needing to grind into every Pro Tour. We need our top players at the biggest events, and they need the security that consistent strong finishes will keep them qualified. Also, unlike PWP, the PPC looks back over a full year, allowing for a hiccup or two without immediately falling off the tour, like Jon’s 251st at PT LA2000 en route to winning Nationals and Worlds that year.
7) At a bare minimum, top 32 of the PT and the finalists of each GP get slots. The GP slots should pass down to avoid collusion in the top 8.”
and also
4) Base GP byes off competitive PWP, but with a reasonable set threshold. This gives players an incentive to grind, but not to destroy themselves utterly doing so.
5) Bring back Player Rewards, rewarding promo cards with level ups or similar.
Playing is still good, the pro tour is still pro. As a semi-competitive player I would actually grind this system, where the current system just has me ignoring it in disgust.
My thanks to the authors for speaking up for the players about the new system.
While I agree with the authors on most points, one problem I have with the article is the assumption that Wizards made a mistake in “failing to do the game theory”. There is no way that the brain-trust at Wizards didn’t anticipate the gaming of the system that the article describes.
Mike Turian mentioned the Market Research that was conducted, and obviously months of debate and thought within WOTC went into revamping the system. If you look at any of the forums that responded to this announcement – within the first 5 posts there is one replying “Wait, doesn’t this mean that whoever spends the most money will get invites?” Most had similar analysis to the one in this article that showed similar conclusions – a person who wins few or half of their games but plays in every tournament ever held will garner more points that a great player that has a 75% win percentage but plays half as often, or that someone that plays in 8 FNM’s in a month will make more points that someone who wins a GP.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that this is the outcome that Wizards wanted. It is entirely another question whether they looked at the next level of depth in terms of the results of such a system. Alice’s results are clearly not sustainable over the long term, so the question is not whether there are 100 people that are willing to keep paying that much money to make a PT, it’s how much money people are willing or able to spend to qualify. There may be some that can afford infinite funds and infinite time for an indefinite period of time, but that will be a short list. There will likely be a period at first where there will be ridiculous grinding, but after a few hundred people look around after a 157th place finish at a PT and say, “Wow, I spent $3,000 to qualify for the PT!!” most will be smart enough not to repeat it, or will not be able to repeat the financial outlay. After that, since there are more players with infinite time than infinite money, the best gaming theory will probably be “How can I maximize points and minimize costs?”
My difficulty with the system from Wizards perspective is that it is a disincentive for 90% of players. Most will realize fairly quickly that they can not keep up with those willing to spend the time and money required to achieve qualification. It remains to be seen if those players will keep showing up by the thousands for GP’s or the FNM’s.
This system was not designed for me. I am a casual player with an 1800ish rating. I have played in local PTQ’s in the hope of getting a random Q or pushing the rating up to the point of getting a Nationals invite. Most of my play is online, kitchen table and pre-releases. Qualifying for me went from almost nil to slightly smaller than that, so it doesn’t affect me much at all. From the perspective of keeping the game healthy, it doesn’t seem like a great change, however.
The only thing I would add is the 3x multiplier for FNM why? I live in England and want to play magic during the Week I don’t on Fridays because I have fun with other friends. So now I get punished for playing Monday to Thursday. I really would like FNM to be supported in a better way it’s casual and I want to attend with a casual deck instead of with Caw-Blade/Solar Flare or what ever because of PWP. There does have to be changes and I think it has to take into cultural differences as well as purely gaming ones.
-An easy and possible fix to the PWP system would be to add a multiplier of your win% percentage. For example:
You play at an FNM of 7 rounds total with 80 players:
Case 1)Your final result is 5-1-1 and your points are 5*3+1*1=16. The maximum number of points you could get is by finishing 7-0 which is 21 points. So you got 16 out of 21 maximum points. The PWP you get is (16+4)*3 = 60 points with the current system. Multiply that with your winning points% which is 16/21=0,762 and you get your final earing points which is 60*0,762=45,72 !
Case 2) Your final result is 1-2 drop which means 3 out of 21 maximum points. Final earning points are (3+4)*3*(3/21)= 3 !
Seems fair to me.
What A_New_Hope said!!!!!!
tl;dr
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Also I noticed ptqs on mtgo give only 1 invite. Says each seat max is like 762 thats a redic number and should be scaled to the number of players.
also its interesting to note that this is made by Hall of Famers, mostly, who already is qualified for every PT.
Why do they care? Because of their love for the game. I’d feel a bit ashamed if I were a pro player right now who hasnt participated in this.
Also, if anyone cares, signed.
Im from Ireland and the new system has made it impossible for me to ever make it at magic.
This is leading to the opposite of what wizards are trying to do. I no longer care too much about going to events because I know it isnt possible to ever be on the gravey train for me
The part that continues to blow my mind about the mythical “Alice the Magic Grinder” theory, is how cost prohibitive it is, and how unreasonable this extreme is.
In the “Alice” scenario: Assuming she only participates in the ~3 PTQs in a players sensible range, given price ranges are based on rates I have seen for the events (Yes, I’ve seen $20 constructed sides.) This is how it falls out.
** Transport, food, etc. costs are not factored due to variance, numbers are for entry fees only.
9 GPs x $30-$40 = $270-$360
3 PTQs (In Range) x $30 = $90
81 GP Sides x $7 ($5/$15) – $20 ($20 All) = $567-$1620
18 FNMs x $0-$15 = $0-$270
$927-$2340
3168 PWP
Kibler
1 PT x $0 = $0 + $250 Appearance Fee = -$250
5 GPs x $30-$40 = $150 – $200
Ahead $50-$100
2576 PWP
In this fantastic scenario, Alice has either a sponsor who is an idiot, or she has too much disposable income and no common sense. Note this scene implies 3 byes on Alice’s part, which means she spent about the same amount, but came up short and ended in the Top 300 LAST season.
That’s right, if you aren’t really good at Magic, but you have between $4,000 and $10,000 and six months of your life to blow, you too can qualify for the Pro Tour.
Note : I do think there are flaws to the PWP system. Multipliers need to be adjusted, and I do think there needs to be place based invites where there used to be. I just think that using these absurd scenarios to point out how “bad” the system is, is poor positioning.
Attack how a person 4-0ing FNM made more points than a person 9-X’ing States this weekend did. Point out how Gamedays mean next to nothing because their multiplier is only 2x. How is a regular sanctioned event worth the same value as a “casual friendly” prerelease? Attack these problems, not how “People with little skill and infinite time and dollars can qualify for the PT”
Hopefully WotC will listen to this, but my fear is that they won’t do any major changes until they see a negative trend in their economy =/
This article made me rethink the tax structure.
B.t.w You guys should really post this on SCG aswell, just spread the word.
THANK YOU!
Thank you for this open letter.
Hasbro have played with us enough.
The online PTQ yesterday brought way over 20.000$ to Wizards(Hasbro) and what did we get in return? 1 slot, 1000$ and some boosters.
no one can give an argument that stands against the only logical conclusion about this whole mess:
“Wizards made PWP so they can sell more product by encouraging quantity over quality”
The state of affairs is such that I will stop playing paper magic and become a MTGO only player. No travel expenses, players and tournaments available 24/7, and more importantly, no PWP…
Thank you for writing this article!
While there has been an initial surge in tournament attendance after the announcement of PWP, I am convinced that a reverse effect will soon be noticed. Most players are now realising they will never qualify for anything on PWP, so chasing them is stupid. But at the same time the incentives for GPs (top 16 qualifications and Pro Points) have been removed and the number of PTQs has been halved (at least in Europe). And the way to chain one PT after another (top 50 finish) is also gone. The end result is it’s impossible to reliably get on the PT except if you’re an American grinder.
Personally I have played in nine PTs and twenty-something GPs. I still love the game and enjoy high level competition. But if nothing changes, I foresee quitting the game halfway next year. At that point I will no longer have any way to qualify for PTs, except a few PTQs, which can’t be relied on to get to every PT. Without top level competition, I will lose interest and quit the game. This is not a kneejerk reaction; it is merely the result of me thorougly thinking about the new system since it has been released. I expect I will occasionally still play, but without a real incentive I will be investing about 5-10% the amount of time on Magic compared to now. And that’s unfortunate, because it’s nothing about the actual game I don’t like – it’s just the fact that I will no longer be able to access top level competition.
Wizards makes mistakes after mistakes after mistake…some heads should roll.
PWP is not a good solution, everybody can agree on that. ELO would have been easy to fix, this article is testament to that. Fact is mtg is run by hasbro’s marketing and they care not about anything other that profit.
I’m looking at modern now. I had big hopes for the format, but the way they manage organzied play is making me fear the worse. It’s alreay off to a bad start.
I believe the new changes are very good for the Magic community, in the respect it doesnt allow for business to die down, The increase of play will increase the revenue this game makes and thus helps players play a game they love. I am a big fan of this move in the respect of business. It just makes sense.
Well overall its “possible” to create a simpel Standard Tournament and everyone just intentional draws each game , so nobody plays but gets the Points.
Maybe someone “wants” to play, but anybody else just draws ; speeds everything up a lot.
Just draft and play a Standard tournament in between at the same time ; if you finish earlier in draft, play Standard against your opponent, if you have no time left, just draw against that opponent.
Theirs tons of ways to abuse the System , the only thing that prevents it are the Tournament Organizers that carry responsibility that nothing is going wrong.
Making 1000 Standard Tournaments and everyone just draws obvisious doesnt work as its way to obvisious.
@ Fenaris: It’s only going to be 100 people in the world, that will have to do this. It’s not really that many. I, for one, know quite a few people who can actually do this financially. They might not be the average magic player, but in the world there are quite a few, who have the money to compete.
Getting invites for PTs should only be for the very best players, not for grinders, who have too much money.
As to the players that compete and travel and have monies tied up in these pts and rating systems, Wizards really needs to come up with a happy medium. I dont think a guy who puts all his time and money into a game he loves should be penalized for someone who can play every week at a FNM or some small store run event. So there has to be a better way, Good for business, not good for competition players.
ELO + decay every week is good solution.
To Wizards of the Coast, if you read this:
I’m a 19 year old student from Norway and have been a devoted Magic player for a couple of years now, and it have always been a dream to get qualified for a Pro Tour. I’ve traveled to GPs, played PTQs and worked hard every day, drafting on MODO, reading strategy articles etc. to improve my game and my chances for qualifying. Being from a relatively rich country like Norway, I’ve been able to put some amount of cash into the game, and I have probably been a most good customer of yours.
After exploring the new system, I’ve given up my dream. Being from a European country that is far away from the center of the continent as well, means that I have no chance competing for the “grinder” slots that PWP represent. Taking away the invites from doing good at a GP is the singlemost biggest change for me, rating invites coming in at a second, as those were two of three realistically possible ways for me to qualify. Winning a PTQ is my last option, and when my whole country on average gets one PTQ for each PT, and that PTQ is in a city a plane trip away, I’m at a loss on how it can be done. Please provide details of how a devoted, money spending and frankly pretty good player even has a chance under this system. Until that question have been answered, I will play Commander with my friends back home and do a draft now and then. You have lost a good customer and a devoted player.
Hope things will change for the better.
/sign for what it’s worth.
Well-written and with weighty signators, but nothing that hasn’t been said since the day this was announced. I’m not holding my breath on them finally starting to listen now.
/signed
Completely agree with every point made in the letter. The proposed system is insane and it should have been obvious what the result will be. Unfortunately I reckon it’ll be allowed to run for at least a couple of years before it’s even significantly tweaked.
in all reality, there are NOT going to be anyone (outside of trustfund kids) that can afford to “grind” into the PT by attending all of these GP’s… so that who entire part of the article is kind of null and void.
what we have here is a series of pros that are afraid for the free ride they’ve had for ages to change (for better or worse) and people who actually play a lot of magic and do well will actually make it to the pro tour now (instead of people who haven’t played for two years but sat on their 2050 rating).
we want the best players on the pro tour, not just the biggest names.
All I see from this article is a lot of complaining from pros about losing their gravy train privileges under the guise of a plea for a better system. Alice would have to have a 6-figure income working 3 days a week (read: really high-class whore), to produce those kinds of numbers consistently. The only sentiment that I really agree with is that they need to reinstate the top 50-pt/top 16-gp qualification rule. This will provide invites to the consistent pros, they can then drop the pwp qualifications to the top 100 who aren’t already qualified, making the grind for top 100 actually completely doable, and keep the rest the same as it is. if some wealthy nerd wants to buy his way on to the pro tour, then good for wotc on making lots of money off some poor shmuck who’s going to get his ass handed to him until he cries. even if they reduce the qualification numbers to like, top 30 pt, top 8/4 at GP, this will allow for rewarding of consistent performance while still opening up slots for the good grinders. I think all this panic is really over the fact that wotc has not announced at all what’s happening to pro points or the pro player’s club. I would bet that once they announce the system that’s taking that over, the silence about pwps from pro players will be deafening.
For everyone wondering whether or not I can afford this kind of lifestyle, let’s keep a few things in mind.
1. I only need to travel to GPs in the US. If I don’t want to spend the money to leave the country, I’ll just go to the StarCity Opens on those weekends. Those are decent PWPs compared to other options.
2. The example of me might be a bit extreme, but is my story any different from the StarCity grinders? How can anyone who attends FNM regularly and goes to a Grand Prix when it’s convenient ever hope to compete with any of the StarCity grinders for a top 100 spot? Should I start listing names like AJ Sacher, Drew Levin, Alex Bertoncini, and Edgar Flores? Yes, these people exist, even if you think I don’t. YOU CAN’T COMPETE WITH THESE PEOPLE UNLESS YOU WANT TO TRAVEL AS MUCH AS THEM. (I don’t know the Pro Tour status of them, but I know Edgar Flores isn’t qualified for the Pro Tour, so I’ll use him as an example). Does Edgar deserve to be on the Pro Tour? Maybe. But that’s not relevant. Now he’s on the Pro Tour, and unless you want to start going everywhere, you’re NEVER getting that spot from him. The idea of “anyone can get it by playing and doing well” is a joke. If I want to buy my spot by doing decently well, I can go everywhere. Maybe I’ll sell some cards here or there. Maybe my wealthy dad is going to sponsor me. Maybe I’m rich and retired at age 30 and just want to get on the Pro Tour because I enjoy playing competitive Magic. We may be few and far between, but we exist, and I’m willing to guess there are enough of us that your dreams of winning your FNM every week and qualifying for the Pro Tour have already been crushed, you just don’t know it.
Very interesting article, but it really comes off as a bunch of Pro Tour long timers grasping for a way to save what the Pro Tour has meant to them. The honest truth is that PWP has been nothing but GREAT for our area, average FNM went from 8 – 16 to a 6 – 7 round monster. A GP trial had a 30 person showing the same day as States. Single sales, player trading, and the number of events are all up, and this is directly related to PWP.
Looking back at the Pro Tour, just getting an invite was a major accomplishment for players. I think all the grinding talk is temporary, because all those players who lost in the finals of a PTQ or just missed the rating cutoff see a way to make it. The truth is, the Pro Tour will not be the elite venue it once was. After a few seasons people will realize, that those who are dedicated ($$) the most to the game, are on the Pro Tour. Basically allowing it to become a way for WoTC to reward their most dedicated/precious player base.
A look at large TO’s shows that they are lobbying for larger multipliers on their events. This lobbying sure doesn’t strike me as a concern of people grinding their events, but rather a positive. Let them Grind!
You don’t need the Pro Tour to prove you’re the best player. If you can only play in 4 events a year, play in those events and post top finishes. At the end of the day people aren’t going to remember the Alice that went 6-3 and grinded 10 side events to maximize her pts. They’re going to remember the person who won it, regardless of how many pts they have for the season.
So in summary GP finishes are the new Pro Tour.
@adam t: For the umpteenth time, those pro’s “free ride” is NOT in jeopardy, seeing how four out of five are in the freaking Hall of Fame, and the fifth is a lock for the future.
i really dont like maher being on here. he was only on the pro tour from rating fraud and who knows how much cheating he did on the tour. he should be perma banned from magic
There should also be something to help players in places with few grind options…
Also… maybe some way to lose points by dropping…
I live in a city in Brazil and by the new system, my schedule and my budget I have no way to play on some pro event… something I wanted to do at least once for the next couple of years.
This whole PWP thingy reminds me of WoW, really.
Once you needed to be skilled to get to end game, win nice rewards, epic stuff and such. Then Blizzard realized that if they could reward playing time instead of skill, that would make people play more wich in turn becomes more…. $$$$$$$$$. Then everything turned into a grind.
And guess what. Hasbro is a private company that is out there to make money. People playing more (grinding) = more money. You really think they oversaw the flaws in the new system???
As a casual player im not really upset about the changes. Ill keep to my Commander games and such… But the Pro Tour is losing my interest really fast. Id rather watch good players than grinders.
Just my 2 cents.
@Erik – You are an imbecile sir. Please refrain from reproducing for the good of all humanity.
Too bad this article includes Brad Nelson and PV as an example and their signatures would’ve proved less powerful given the conflict of interest involved.
As a mildly serious player that has to become more casual due to work issues, I was always inspired by PV and Brad Nelson as those who got where they were on skill and aspired to get on the train so to speak and see at least one PT a year. That dream is gone now but that’s not the issue.
PV and Brad Nelson are exemplary players that keep normal players interested in the game. They serve as role models and mentors (indirectly through their articles) for the normal player. They inspire many people to spend money on the game and casual players to go to that one big event during the year to get to see their favorite stars.
Having skillfull players to aspire to is much more motivating to buy product and participate events than the guileless crass planeswalker system that puts people who spend a lot of time into going to events.
From a business perspective, this entire system is foolish and closely resembles how WOW use to treat stuff like PVP. Before the time invested generated a huge amount of points and nobody could keep up except day-long grinders. What happened? Few people participated in PvP and growth was capped to only those grinders. Nobody also cared about the top pvp’ers as they were just grinders and not necessarily skillful.
Then Blizzard changed the system and allowed for weekly quests and daily caps on points. The appeal broadened greatly and you had more people participating and keeping their subscriptions.
The math has been done and pretty soon the casuals will realize there is no chance in hell they could ever keep up with grinders. This will mean the growth of this game being severely limited only to those who fly out every weekend to events. How much profit do these people generate for wizards? The profit margin from entry fees into tournaments is paltry if it is extant at all. It is likely wizards loses money at these events no matter how many people show up.
Each grinder only needs one playset of each card which you can get more or less from a case. Each mildly casual player who is inspired by the PV’s and Nelson’s of this world buys just as much product as a grinder if they need playsets. The profitability of this game comes from appealing to as wide an audience of people as possible and having them each purchase the minimal level of product to be competitive.
As such the current planeswalker point system is a disaster as it incentivizes actions that limit broad appeal.
The PWP system is blatantly flawed to the point of near self-imposed collapse before it even gets going.
The only thing it positively affects is a potential increase in revenue, that is, until it collapses in on itself and wizards has to apologize profusely for taking their eye so far off the ball that they forgot what they were even doing on the field in the first place.
For those saying Alice doesn’t exist, I could well have been her this season.
A GPT win and subsequent day 2 in GP Montreal put me in the top 300 in PWP off the bat. I work a programming job with plenty of expendable income, free friday nights and weekends, a FLGS with 2x FNM every week, and am within driving distance of 11 PTQs this season (US East Coast).
As much as I hate the system, I was strongly incented to grind – I’ve wanted to get on the Pro Tour (the normal way) for a couple of years now.
My concern is that letting people grind on to the Tour means that the Tour itself loses its prestige. The driving force to be on the Tour is not the prize money – there’s really not enough upside to make it even close to EV positive for the vast majority of players. It’s the prestige and the competition itself.
These two things are what the PWP grind system ruins (prestige and level of competition), and in the long term, losing those two things will undercut the whole point of the Tour.
I completely agree. I’ve already started looking for a new FNM venue to attend because the current FNM I go to has 70+ playres but can only run 3 rounds!
@James: It was the store owner where Bob played that committed the fraud to get another player into the PT, and Bob was the one that brought it to the attention of Wizards. He was suspended because he acknowledged that he knew about it for a few weeks before mentioning it, but stated that it was because he didn’t know who to say something to until they gave the info publicly because they had reason to believe that fraud was being committed. He was suspended as a technicality.
Good Grief, maybe I should have Brian David Martial’s job… I have way too good a memory for Magic related trivia, having played for the past 14 years.
Hey u semipro whining.
U semipro aint buying products as much as ppl playing casually and liking the game for what it is not for the ev it could give them like u do. Casual ppl also spend more money in sites like this. If u “semipro” stop playing then even casual ppl have change to win on gp:s etc. It makes them more eager to spend even more money.
Also the few realistic semipros and the ones that aint stubid realise this all and stay playing those ptq:s as u my dear idiotic readers have stopped playing mtg and now they have even more easy time to get that pt. Oh did i forgot to mention that it gives them even more EV on GP.s even when they dont get to pt.s anymore. A
In the end no one really miss u. Not the ppl that play this game because love for it. Not other grinders that see your quiting as opportunity (that it is). Not wotc as u are worst customer overall of them all. nor even pros really.
To end this all.. if u guys really stop playing this game when u cant get EV from it.. i have to ask why have u played this game? And do u really think wotc needs ppl that wants hobby to be EV = Income!
I myself have been on gp:s ptq:s even pt and even if this casual guy never again could not play on any of those i would not stop playing mtg as its best game there is and limited is best thing there is. Oh yeah and i will go to gp:s and enjoy the fact that if u all doomsayers are gone it will be even more easy to me to gain some money out of them. SO good ridance all of u!
I think the system is good the way it is with a few minor exceptions. I like the idea of toning down the multipliers in some areas (5x for gp side events?), and I don’t like the fact that the PWP system crowds out non-Americans, but the N-squared solution sounds terrible to me. From a business perspective with the goal of maximizing incentive to play more magic, the best thing in the world is for all the Alices to qualify for the pro tour through grinding.
Something this article overlooked is the motivation people will get to “become a grinder” when they see players living the grinder life and qualifying for the pro tour despite being comparatively terrible at magic. The thought will be “I’ve never even seen Alice top 8 a PTQ before, so if she can grind her way onto the PT, I certainly can!” This is what I take to be a (huge) hidden upside of the present PWP system, and one that should really be brought into the spotlight. Making “grinding your way onto the pro tour stage” more a question of logistics (traveling to tournaments) than skill (improving as a player) is in my mind a fantastic way of incentivizing a target audience that primarily consists of yound adults in a transition period of their lives who could realistically spend a couple years grinding (since starting a family, embarking on a career, etc can rather easily be ‘put off for a while’ in order to live the dream).
My only realistic option for getting to a PT before the system change: Win a PTQ.
My only realistic option for getting to a PT after the system change: Win a PTQ.
But this article isn’t about me, or about most people. I would love to see a breakdown by % of how PT attendees qualified, that would tell us something about the magnitude of the problem.
There is not a SINGLE PROFESSIONAL SPORT where you get to use last season’s records for this season’s playoffs. None. No where.
You don’t qualify for the playoffs once and then get entitled to it every year, you don’t win the ring and get an automatic chance to defend it. You have to earn that spot each and every year.
I’m just not as much into the hero worship thing. There’s a bunch of people who got to the top,
stopped playing, starting talking about being the best, and stopped having to prove it. Every set is different, every new ability changes the game.
You have to keep playing to claim to be the best.
Wizards of the coast is controlled by hasbro. This seems to be the best way to get more and more people to play and in return more and more people buying.
I don’t think hasbro cares how good anyone is at this game or will abide enough to keep their pros (who from what I hear barley pay a thing). MTG generally is the thing that keeps Hasbro from going in the red year after year. Hasbro’s stock as of july began crapping out (like most) and this change is probably one among several other changes to increase profit. entering the holiday season with a 10% increase under their belt seems like someone made a good decision.
“Xander Crews: Then we pump those profits back into the, uh, profit cycle to generate even more profits. And I know what you’re gonna say. Profits? Yes, Stan you’re soaking in them. Thoughts? “
sad stuff when you can’t qualify to a PT by doing good in a GP 🙁
Also, why has nobody mentioned the fact that wotc has raised the maximum # of allowed players to join a PTQ online from 512 to 768 WITHOUT raising the prize pool accordingly? pretty sure thats the lowest EV you can find anywhere online :p
thats 256*30=7680$ more without even a single more pack given out if you reach the TOP64+…
100% agree. Signed. GG WOTC…
There´s something missing in this letter: the money that WotC gains with system X or Y
@RobotPirateNinja – That’s a totally apple and oranges comparison, and here’s how the comparison should look. The Chicago Bears have a team in the NFL and they will have a team in the NFL next year too based off there fan base of the previous year. Matt Forte there running back is starting RB for there team, and he’ll start next year too again based off his previous years stats if they’re good enough. So basically all single professional sports do work exactly like they’re asking…the good players get to play in the PROfessional football league the next year based on there previous year stats.
The pro’s aren’t asking for a top 8 at the Pro Tour based off there last seasons results. Which is what your awful example was really trying to compare too. There asking simply to be there based off last years stats and qualify not to top 8…
Nonetheless, I disagree with the article for the mere reason that this is NOT NOT NOT NOT a professional sport which is what people seem to think. The NFL generates LARGE amounts of revenue off of the players. Wizards generates NO money off of the players themselves. There’s no sponsorship, no endorsements, 100’s of people don’t buy there jerseys or pay entry to see them play. And even though they’re better then most of us they simply are customers! They are not professional magic players. Magic can not be a profession…it’s a game…it’s not a sport. It’s apples and oranges and I hate when it’s compared to a sport. Your DCI Card is much like your kroger card, food lion card, dicks sporting good card or American Airlines frequent flyer card. The more you spend the more your rewarded as a customer. Wizards is a business pure and simple. You dont make a living playing a game…
Wonder if this will get more comments, than Jace banning…
As fun as a gatherer draft and a silly letter may be, they are not what I was expecting from LSV this Monday morning. Quit passing off other people’s work as your own and get on with the content!
To the people complaining about the proposed N squared for N wins: Yes, getting more wins in a bigger tournament gets you more points. That’s how it should be. Winning the 12th round of a 14 round swiss tournament is harder then winning the 5th round of a 6 round swiss tournament. The best decks/players have had more rounds to rise to the top, and those matches are (generally) going to be harder. Someone going 9-1 and 3-3 versus 4-4 and 4-4 SHOULD get more points overall. The 9-1 performance is much harder to pull off then two 4-4 records. If you are sitting at 2-2 in an 8 round tournament, you are playing other 2-2 people, who will generally be weaker players/decks barring some occasional random variance. The fact that it was only a 10-15% difference in most of the examples used almost seems too little of a difference to me.
Yes, the casual players who grinds out the tournaments will spend money on the game. But, without personalities for the casual/wannabe spikes (people who want to play competitively but don’t have the time, such as myself) the game loses a lot of popularity overall. The net loss of interest has a bigger effect on the bottom line then the handful of people playing so many tournaments.
addendum. When I said “winning the 12th round of a 14 round tournament is harder” I meant if you had a winning record by that point. i.e. You are 11-0 and playing another player with a bunch of wins.
Props to the HOF’ers for speaking up on this matter. The new system likely increases their Pro Tour EV if the field weakens. They could easily have kept quiet since their own seats are safe.
This reads like a straw man argument to me. Are there really 100 Magic players with the money, time, and desire to be “Alice”? Is there even one such person? That’s a crazy commitment for what…you get to say you made the Pro Tour, where you’ll get destroyed by the Hall of Famers and PTQ winners? THAT’s worth thousands of dollars and all of your free time???
The structure of the article is all about people responding to incentives, yet for some reason it treats “Making the Pro Tour” as the far and away most valuable incentive of all. Why?
Players game a system when the rewards outweigh the sacrifices. You skip FNM because you don’t want to screw up your GP byes. FNM is a minor sacrifice, you’re just ensuring that a future, much more important event you’re already planning to attend goes better for you. You’re investing in a better GP finish.
I don’t see the value of such a radical investment just to get slaughtered on the Tour. In other words, Alice doesn’t exist until someone can point her out to me.
o btw /signed
@Phyrre56 – Are you completely ignorant? There are a hundred people that fly out just for SCG premium events. For GP’s you get attendance of 600-700 at least and a large number are ringers.
At least google before you post something so woefully ignorant.
Pro tour will/should be replaced / phased out.
It’s open events that should be the norm. Make more grand prix, they are already immensely popular. Why would you make events and refuse people makes no sense.
The GP should be happening 3-4 more times in a year at eache place. The real pros will win repeatedly at these, so they dont need their own invite only tour to live on.
1. The people that co-signed this article are not self-interested in the way that many of the responders are indicating. These people are qualified for life and their interest is in the health of the game long term.
2. I am a competitive player that would love to qualify for the tour. After several weeks under the new system it has become clear that my only road is winning a PTQ. I’m curious about the devil’s advocates to this letter as to whether or not they track their ratings and compare locally. I feel like I have given it a hardy try by upping my participation to several tourneys a week and sometimes even squeezing in two FNMs. I am still far off the pace of qualifying and that is not for a lack of winning. I regularly win my local FNM and tourneys that I enter in general.
3. This is clearly a strategic business move by Hasboro and we should stop evening saying the name WOTC. Hasboro has always pimped its products for short term gain and really has no interest in anything else.
4. Signed!
Oh yeah, forgot to point one thing out. Alice is the extreme example that proves the point. She doesn’t even need to exist for the system to be broken. You can just look at the FNM championships and know that there will be an Alice in someway even if it’s not quite on the grand scale described in the letter.
@Diogenes5 — I’m not an idiot, I know people travel for events. But do they travel specifically because they want to qualify for the Tour even though they’re not very good?
That’s the kicker in the Alice example…she’s a very mediocre player potentially knocking a world class player out of the running. If Alice were actually good, no one would argue she doesn’t deserve her place at the PT for being both talented and skilled.
Also remember that for the Alice plan to work, you have to attend EVERY event, not just a few you feel like traveling for. People fly for GPs, but it’s not the same 600-700 people at every event. It’s mostly locals with a few true road warriors. How many people attended every GP last year that weren’t getting paid to be there?
And to take it one step further…if someone were to put in such a crazy commitment, should they not be deemed a Pro?
The system needs work. Obvious flaws. I just think focusing on this construct of Alice who may or may not actually exist is a poor way to go about the argument. As others have suggested, it might have been more powerful to wait a season and use real examples — this guy got in, this guy didn’t, how screwed up is that?! — instead of relying on hypotheticals. It just feels like a “sky is falling” response.
I think the relevant game here is how does Wizards make money, not how does a person qualify for a particular type of tournament. Your letter doesn’t do much to suggest ways in which Wizards is losing out with this idea. In fact, it presents the idea that people might pay money to enter tournaments which they aren’t even playing as if it is a bad thing.
Something that was brought up a lot in the article, and needs to be fixed:
Some sort of PWP equivalent for MODO, or MODO integration with real life PWP.
This could help all those folks in North Dakota and such, where real life events are scarce.
its not the commitment of joining the tourneys
its the commitment to understand the fundamentals of the game entirely, and play at the highest level is the one that make people be eligible for pro tour
if what alice does is joining tourneys and does not get better, she aint goin nowhere at the PT itself.
Who would you rather watch at the PT, Alice or PV? If you said PV you should agree with this article in its entirety.
@Rich
Alice, by far. PV is a sexist, yuck.
@ Robotpirateninja You are looking at it wrong. The PT is not “the playoffs” Top 8 is the playoffs. The PT is the regular season. The old PT system works a lot like the systems of sports that allow new players/ teams to qualify and play in the league events or seasons. Take the PGA Tour for example once players qualify and do well in events they stay qualified for next year based on last year performance. This is pretty much the norm for all individual sports. This is how the old system works. This is not how PWP Q’s work.
Also, at the whole the new system punishes you for not playing argument. Does it really? or does it punish you for not having time or money to play in 3+ events a week?
First off, we didn’t lose top 16 PT invites from GPs because of planeswalker points. We lost top 16 invites because there’s going to be a gp every week next year, and Wizards doesn’t want a giant PT. Heck, I remember a lot of sturm and drang from PV and others when they announced weekly GPs because he didn’t want giant GPs. Zac Hill and others have indicated changes were in the works on twitter when this was rolled out, mostly focused on PWP bonuses for top X at a GP. I suspect we’ll see something when this season ends and the season of weekly GPs begins.
Secondly, I don’t think Wizards has said anything about getting rid of the pro player club. It will probably be recalibrated with the weekly GPs, but there’s no reason to think it is going away
So, effectively, PWP only replaces rating invites and byes. Who is hurt by the change? Paul Cheon types, and the mythical slowly grinding up to 2100 at FNM and 1 localish GP a year. As far as Paul goes, I am fine giving his spot to a more active, dedicated player, even if that player isn’t quite as good. As to the person out in New Zealand who plays in FNM and whatever GPs and PTQs are local, I have to apologize, but I don’t think you were making it to the PT unless you won the PTQ anyway.
Totally agree. I didn’t even realize even good PT-performances wouldn’t grant auto-invites. The whole PWP thing really turns getting onto the gravy-train (and staying there) into “how many GPs can I fly to?” If you can’t play a GP at least every second weekend (and pay for the travel-expenses), you might as well stop playing competitively right there because you aren’t beating the hardcore grinders (100 players worldwide is actually quite low compared to the number of people likely to try).
Note: I’m not a pro player and unlikely to ever profit from something being done. I still feel this new system essentially kills both the integrity of competition (by rewarding quantity of play over quality by a mile) and any likelihood of a player making it to the PT more than once. No change means we’ll never see another Budde, Finkel, Nassif, PV, LSV, Maher, Kibler or any other great player whose exploits we’d enjoy following. It will all be random grinders whose plays will make you want to facepalm when you watch the coverage.
This is a fantastic, well thought-out letter/article with excellent, concrete solutions within the current system. Well done gentlemen, and thanks for all your continued hard work.
Now that GPs do not offer slots to PTs and amount of PTQs is halved (in Europe anyway), I do not see any realistical path for me to qualify for PT. I probably fade from competitive player to more casual one.
Hmmm let me see, so Mr Nelson can play mtgo everyday and qualify before the new system was created. Yet you are complaining about someone doing the same thing irl even though the cost is not reasonable to do so?
I agree with Brennen Lesser
Folks the whole point of Wizards is to make Wizards money. The new system is designed to encourage more playing. This means more money for Wizards. Anything designed that makes less money then this will not go through. Only something that makes more/equal to the new system will go through.
Why not just aggregate the top 5 tournament results in a season and then qualify people based upon those performances?
It would allow people from small states and countries to qualify, yet would reward grinders because they have the highest chance to amass those 5 good performances. But it would also reward play skill for obvious reasons, those tournaments would necessarily have to be large.
Look the solution is simple. PT Invites should not be awarded with points or ratings of any sort. Qualify by winning a PTQ is fine. Qualify with a top finish in a GP is fine. Qualify with a top finish at another PT is also fine. This rewards players who travel to a bunch of PTQ’s and GP’s by giving them more chances to qualify which is what we want. It also obviously rewards players good enough to do well in those events.
So how do we reward grinders. Players who play a lot of events, do well, but never qualify via a win. My system would propose that a player who top 4’s a FNM or other low level event earns 1 point. Top 8’ing(or top 16’ing depending on attendance) a PTQ or other high level event like an SCG Open would earn 5 points. Top 8’ing(or whatever, again based on attendence) a GP or PT or some other pro level event would earn 10 points. Top X players not otherwise qualified would get invites. The maximum amount of points you could earn from low level events would be capped at a certain number per week to prevent people from gaming the system by setting up and playing in a bunch of meaningless tourneys.
What we want to matter is not how many tourneys you play, or how often you lose, but rather how many tourneys you do well in. Tourneys you don’t do well in won’t hurt you but they also don’t help you. Isn’t that what we want?
100 worldwide is miniscule. And its even worse outside of the US where we have reduced ptq numbers, a smaller ranking quota and smaller FNMs…. Plus with half of the GPs next year revealed so far taking place in the US (with nothing to suggest that pattern will change), makes it hard for us to attend the big point events.
Support the letter guys.
@Nolan – Yes, going 12-0 in the first matches of a big tournament is more impressive than going 6-0 in a small one. So? That’s not the point of people who are complaining about the N-squared idea.
Magic itself is a game of high variance (LSV might be a far better player than I am, but if he has to mulligan to five while I keep a respectable seven, I’m probably a huge favorite to win that particular game, and moderately favored to win the match). As a result, a system that rewards extra wins disproportionately is problematic.
Let’s say I’m an average player, expected to go 8-8 in a particular tournament, and that the mana gods are equally likely to smite me or my opponents. If they strike twice in my favor, I go 10-6. If they strike twice against me, I go 6-10. However, I earn nearly three times the points for getting lucky as I do for getting unlucky. Under a linear rewards system, as existed previously, I earn only 67% more points by getting lucky. Under the N-squared system, I’d earn 178% more points by getting lucky vs. getting unlucky.
Many people view a 67% swing due to chance as preferable to a 178% one, and THAT’S what so many people are objecting to.
you know this article brings up some very good points and problems with the system, but I think it pushes it’s own lenses a little too far, the stories of brad nelson and pvddr hit home hard because they really put in alot of work to get where they got, proving immense dedication and it’s true their stories probably would not exist were these changes in effect. the problem is you look far too high on the top end pro perspective, personally the idea of and basis for pairings beyond current record and such is complete blasphemy, anyone with the same record can play eachother, that is the beauty of it, pairing weak against strong or strong against strong produced more stratification which hurts the integrity of it all. the problem is the dream is killed for small communities, I feel it and I live in the states, 40 gps sounded great I thought maybe if I save up I can hit 3-4 gps a year instead of 1-2, but that’s still only 1 a season and getting top 8 at a gp will only net 400 or so points, I love gps but they no longer give me a way onto the tour because the tournaments within my reasonable range will not compete with others with my dedication, but a better geographic area or more money, if I lived out of the united states it would be even worse. a gp gives someone way to attainably reach the pro tour without winning an event and gives great experiences, you guys have it hard, but as it stands half theways to get on the tour is by being already on the tour, you have appearance fees for a year, that qualifies you atleast one more year which gives them time to change it, I don’t have that luxury, I lose half my ways to qualify, gps become merely money and play to me, I like both of those things, but they both make up a part of the dream that is making it onto the tour and establishing yourself, a longshot but one that is attainable if I work hard enough, but doesn’t make my whole life the grind. a person top8/top4s/top2s a grand prix they deserve a spot on the pro tour 100% these events are 700-2000 people these days, so why is a ptq win all the sudden a way to get an invite but a grand prix win isn’t. furthert hey give more bonuses for pt top8s never mind that gps top8s get no such benefits, the payout is already 10x for a half or less the players. this is hurting gp players, and gp players have it hard already. so in short spread out your argument because this hurts would be grinders too, I can’t globe trot but I still grind every chance I have.
What about FNM’s that cap rounds ? All of the local game stores here in hawaii Cap Fnm’s at 4 regardless of attendence to reduce labor costs etc etc. I am not sure if they are now “required” from the new system, but if it still is capped then it sure does throw a chink somewhat.
#occupyWOTC
Thank you for acknowledging that the current system doesn’t reward skill as much as signing up. If Alice can’t even get above 50% in a GP, she shouldn’t be at a Pro Tour. For the “Gravy Train” haters, the reason the CF team is on the Gravy Train is because they win against winners in PTs and GPs. The player who plays the most isn’t who’s best.
The whole ratings thing is dumb in general. Why isn’t it like Poker? Why is the Pro Tour even exclusive at all. Open it up to everyone…the difference is you pay $1,000 entry fee to get in. You can earn free entry’s by top 16’n a GP or winning a PTQ, but if you think your the best put your money where your mouth is…show up, pay and play. The best will come to the top…and you don’t even have to keep track of ratings ever again!
Just one more person adding a voice, but a story that is somewhere in the middle.
I’m not a grinder, and I’m not a pro, but I do well enough for myself playing. At the SCG Invitational in Indy, I could have dropped on Day 2 and been qualified for the PT on rating, but I kept playing and ultimately lost that invite.
I maintained for 6-9 months a rating around 2000 while playing in FNM. I was aware of the possibility os losing my byes and hated Elo for it, but I wanted to keep playing the game rather than sit on rating.
Now I work on Friday nights. The new system destroys me. I can’t grind FNMs, so I’m just SOL when it comes to even attempting to grind in. I can’t constantly grind GPs, though I’ll make it to a few, and know that even if I win it I likely won’t make the PT. Unlike the old system, where my play had earned me tangible rewards, all I get from the new one is a shiny Planeswalker level that doesn’t do a thing for me.
There are many good things about the new system, but there are a ton of players in a position similar to mine (good players who can’t play often), who just lost nearly all incentive to show up and play, since the dream of the PT is unreachable unless you happen to spike a PTQ.
“The pro’s aren’t asking for a top 8 at the Pro Tour based off there last seasons results. Which is what your awful example was really trying to compare too. There asking simply to be there based off last years stats and qualify not to top 8…”
Well, again, there’s a lot more teams trying to get into the league. If the team doesn’t put in the leg work, why should they get a spot that someone else is working their ass off for?
This article reads a lot like rants about “welfare queens”. This mythical person that abuses the system with unlimited time and funds in some theoretically possible way that is “unfair” to people already at the top of the pyramid.
I totaly agree. I just had a PTQ this weekend, played hard for more than 12 hours. But someone who payed the 30$ and dropped would get 30 pwp. Do that a bunch, yuo get an invite to the protour. You lose day one. You never get to the pro tour again. You just wasted a year and a bunch of monney. And what if lsv had a horible season, or a bad finnish, and missed on one or two pro tours? No way should a douche bag who enters and drops a bunch of x5 or x8 tournament should get in the pro tour over lsv.
Also, i am 13 years old. I am very good at magic, much better than a lot of the people much older than me.
With this system, i will never make it to the PT short of winning a PTQ. And if i do get on, i get one shot at wining. Then i have to win another PTQ.
I very much understand about killing the next generation of pros.
i’ve been trying to grind into the tour on and off for a few years now, and i’ve always felt it was BS that the “top players in the world” don’t have to grind in like everyone else. it seems to me that wizards just wants to even the playing field. pro players should have to prove that they deserve to be on the tour, and that means they should have to grind in like all of us. i applaud wizards for trying to create a more equitable, player-focused system. if the pros don’t like it, they should get out of the way. essentially this article was written by pro players arguing for the preservation of a system that was unbalanced and gave too much to the pros. they should have to grind in just like all of us.
From the start, UI’ve been uncomfortable with how the PWP system seemed to reward grind-numbed zombies, and punish hobbyists with concerns like school and family and work. The hobby should be able to complement a real-world lifestyle, not be inimicable.
At the start of the PWP system, I nursed dreams of making the FNM Championship. That delusion lasted 2 weeks, before I saw how immense an entrenched advantage a few players had based on geography creating an insurmountable points advantage. 200 points earned in 2 weeks? Even with a perfect record, it would take someone such as myself with a reasonably-sized, sensibly time restricted (for those who have work commitments) FNM 2 *months* to achieve similar points, even attending each one over the period, and assuming the store doesn’t misenter or set up a tournament incorrectly (which does and has happened).
Without even PT invites for doing well at a GP or in a PT if I were to win a PTQ, having any ambition to attend a PT or GP or even invest in doing well at an FNM has already evaporated, and we’re only that 2 months into the system! I like that playing Magic is broadly rewarded, but it is similtaneously punishing those with other commitments whilst not even remotely benefitting the very people it appears to be aimed at, because as this letter noted, they don’t particularly care about either system anyway.
For those that don’t follow twitter:
mtgaaron Aaron Forsythe
Many good points were raised in PWP manifesto. Most were already on our radar. We’ll be addressing much of it soon-ish. Patience, please.
Great article. Wizards hopefully read and take to heart.
Alice, Alice… who the F**K is Alice?
My only realistic hope of playing the pro tour using Elo ratings was by winning a PTQ.
My only realistic hope of playing the pro tour using PWP is by winning a PTQ.
So… what the F**K is this self-serving letter about?
Right. Forgive me because Paul Cheon is being penalised. Who the F**K is Paul Cheon? Some dude sitting on his Elo rating to play the pro tour does not deserve to be on the pro tour! Yes, Edgar Flores deserves to be on the pro tour more than Paul Cheon does.
@Robot – Huh?
You said, ““The pro’s aren’t asking for a top 8 at the Pro Tour based off there last seasons results. Which is what your awful example was really trying to compare too. There asking simply to be there based off last years stats and qualify not to top 8…”
Well, again, there’s a lot more teams trying to get into the league. If the team doesn’t put in the leg work, why should they get a spot that someone else is working their ass off for?”
PLAYERS man…not teams. Think about players i.e. Running Backs. There’s probably a MILLION high schoolers that are working harder then some of the best Running Backs in the game. Who cares? The bottom line is if Walter Payton simply just practiced once a day vs. the high schooler who practiced 6 times a day Walter Payton was going to get his starting spot every year based on previous years performance. Exactly like how LSV is saying Kibler should get the spot on the tour because he was amazing last year. Not that he automatically gets the win but the spot on the Pro Tour team…
Your welfare example is even more bonkers…but I feel like I may just be wasting my time now…
TIL if you want to be awesome at Magic a Firstname with 3 Letters certainly helps, seeing Jon, Bob, Kai and Zvi.
To further strenghten my Argument im quite shure thats also the Reason why Luis wants to be called LSV
😀
@Alice…? – I couldn’t agree more. I agree that Alex Bertoncinni and Edgar Flores deserve to be on the current Pro Tour more than the Paul Cheon’s and even Jon Finkel. I don’t care if Jon Finkel is an amazing player…he’s not playing Magic Professionally anymore…he invests his time into other stuff to make money. People seem to associate the word professional with accomplishment when all it really describes is a way people are being funded.
Pretty safe to say they design the system to incentivize people to spend as much money as possible on their products.
Business is business after all but kinda sucks for everyone aged 20+.
People forget tha wotc is a BUSINESS first and foremost. It all boils down to money, the more people play the more wotc makes.
By offering players like alice a chance to play on the pro tour regardless of skill, both parties are winning.
I would enjoy seeing an article like this with the cost of events and travel fees included. Maybe some sort of effort vs costs graph or something.
The easiest solution I can think of is just kick the k value for FNM down to almost 0…. keep the Elo though
@Jon
This may be the easiest solution but…
8)
…would it be the final one?
YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAH
I agree.
The creation of PWP almost made me want to quit competitive magic.
The ridiculous catering towards FNM (of which I am an avid player) over for example playing on a Thursday (heaven forbid) is a mockery.
The catering towards grinders over good players is an atrocity. I work and am a full-time student. I have commitments and expenses that don’t allow me to go all over hell’s half-acre just to play in the tournaments that are only taking away from my local store. Because of this, I went from a total DCI rating of 1830, just under the cusp of winning byes and finally getting into the real spirit of competitive magic, to lifetime PWP of 1230 with my current competitive score being 92 where it should have climbed past 1850 in DCI rating by now.
I can’t play all the time, but I win with good consistency, and having my competitive magic hopes funneled into PTQs alone is depressing and limiting.
They are the “ONE PERCENT” never forget!!
ELO really does need to die. It is not suitable for a game with a significant component of randomness (aka variance). It also is missaligned with WOTC’s goal of motivating people to play more Magic. So, how to fix the PWP system…
Aside, I’m currently in the running for Top 300. I’m pretty sure that not attending Worlds or any foreign GPs will make that tough, but I’m close now and will grind what I can for a shot at the byes next season (I’m not holding much hope at all of Top 100 unless I perform way beyond expectation in San Diego).
That said, I’ve also done some serious math to figure my chances, likely points needed, and overall affect of the changed system on both my behavior and that of my play group. I’ve also had some interesting conversations with several of the SCG Open Grinders (at both Indy and Nashville) as well as some of the PPC members that attended those same events and have taken their input along with my own analysis. With that in mind here is what I suggest.
My proposed adjustment to multipliers:
GP Day 1 – 5x
GP Day 2 – 8x
GP Top 8 – 12x
PT – 15x
GP Top 8 – 20x
FNM – 2x
Side Events – No relation to the main event multiplier. If they are “WPN premium” or equivalent then 3x multiplier. Casual then 1x multiplier.
Participation – The multiplier for participation should be be N-1 where N is the event multiplier (but keep participation points themselves the same per existing attendance thresholds).
Additionally GP Top 8 get PT Invite (I could maybe go down to Top 4 if PT size will grow too much with this change) and PT Top 32 ALWAYS get a PT Invite.
Lastly, keep the PPC in some form or fashion not too different from how it operates today. Likely based on the number of Professional PWP accumulated over the entire year. Top X are Level 8, Top Y are Level 7, etc.
@ Everyone who says ‘Alice doesn’t exist’
Alice doesn’t need to exist, she’s the tip of the iceberg.
A lot of people are pointing out the obvious: ‘It makes business sense.’ Yes, in the short term. In the long term, you have a system that rewards time/money spent and feels embarrassing to be a part of. It doesn’t matter if no one ever takes advantage of the flawed system to the point where a terrible player gets on the pro tour. The fact that the door is open to that kind of flaw makes everything feel worthless.
If they are going to try to make a game for adults (these are the real big spenders) then they better make it feel like a legitimate game that rewards skill. I refuse to spend money on a money spending contest. Fuck that. It better change soon.
Why isn’t every player given a raffle ticket for every 100 or so dollars he spends playing in sanctioned tournaments and at the end of each season there is a drawing for some number of PT slots?
First, I would like to thank the authors for an excellent article.
Second, I would like to introduce myself so that anybody reading this knows where I am coming from. My name is Tom Brownscombe. I am a chess master and a 4 time state chess champion. I am a US Chess Federation certified senior tournament director (roughly the equivalent of a level 3 judge in Magic). I am one of the contributors to The Official Rules of Chess, 5th edition (that is the most recent edition). I also used to work for the United States Chess Federation. My job responsibilities there included supervising the ratings manager and the national events manager. In other words, I like to think that I know a little something about writing rules, managing an Elo rating system, and organizing and directing large chess tournaments.
I am fairly new to Magic, so I don’t claim to understand all of the issues as well as I should. But I do want to say that as far as I can tell, Wizards has never used a properly managed Elo system. Based on what I can see (based on my perspective as somebody who has managed an Elo system for a national chess federation) Wizards has only misused the Elo system. JonS has already posted an excellent comment on how Wizards might improve its use of Elo. He hits most (but not all) of the major ways in which Wizards could have improved its use of Elo. I would just like to add that I think that Wizards should have at least tried to use Elo properly before completely scrapping its use of the Elo system. It is not too late for Wizards to admit that scrapping Elo was a mistake. They admit their mistakes all the time (by banning Jace TMS and Stoneforge mystic in standard, for example). So wizards could admit that Planewalker points are a mistake and return to Elo (hopefully using it properly this time).
Tom Brownscombe
It looks like the message was heard. Aaron Forsythe just tweeted and I quote “Many good points were raised in PWP manifesto. Most were already on our radar. We’ll be addressing much of it soon-ish. Patience, please.”
C’mon guys you really think WOTC is that ignorant? The message was heard. lets let them do thier job and wait for the changes to come.
There have seen so many comments that just make me wonder if the article was read before someone just played devil’s advocate. The main one is the bias, it obviously exists, any article will have bias, but this article is more an essay with a thesis of there isn’t the right balance between playing and winning, I am not saying you have to agree with that thesis but blindly saying this is a self-serving article is a mistake. Also, soon enough all 5 of those players will have HOF status so they really don’t have as much bias as some commentors make it appear.
That leads into the second point, this article (essay) doesn’t seem to be against grinders, just adding more of a winning aspect to grinding. Many comments make it seem like they just want the best players in the PT, I don’t think that is the case from reading the article. And I really I don’t think the system with those tweaks above would keep super grinders out completely, where the Elo did.
Other points/ Predictions:
This sytem will not keep the same grinders year in year out, I would think it is very hard to be an “Alice” year in year out, as you would rarely (never) ‘Money’ at the PT, but I do think there would be at least 100 “Alice’s”, every year. Hey it is like taking a year off to travel the world, I am sure in any given season you will have a crop of people who just decide to take a MTG vacation. Because really they will get to do something they love (play MTG) and travel the world, so even though it would be a financially un-sustainable there would be those that jump at the chance.
Also anyone that says there will not be people that Buy their way into the PT are wrong, they may not do it every year, but there will be 100 ppl every year that buy their way in, whether this is a bad thing I am un-decided.
No name players in the top 8’s of the PT are going to be much more rare. The average “Alice” just isn’t going to be as good as the people they are replacing. And a Pro will beat an average “Alice” much more consistently then a player that is being replaced by the “Alice” player.
It is not in the best interest of Wizards to promote ONLY participation, as the number of overall players and people in the community would go down. The reason being that anyone that can not play a lot would just not play other then casually or at PTQs. Yes they will make more money then the Elo system, but it wouldnt’ maximize profits. Your best bet to maximize is a strong balance. I will not comment on whether this is the right balance or not, but I am just saying if players quit playing because they are a) not pro’s and b) don’t have the ability to play enough your profit won’t be maximized, you need to keep a number for the middle ground, not sure how, but just saying this does NOT maximize Wizard profits, it Does increase Wizard profits, but it won’t maximize them.
Conclusion:
After all that, I agree with all the comments that say no changes should be made until after the system is actually in motion. I personally do not agree with this article, I think there are very good points, and I think the article was well-thought out and overall very enlightening, but I think there are flaws, but they make points and they explain them, so teh “devil advocates” that just bash them as un-biased and hating on Rich Grinders are off base.
But anyone who says there won’t be those that buy their way in to a PTQ
ahmen
Who cares about rating? I did when I was 22 years old and didn’t have a family.
Now I play Commander mostly, when I get a chance to get out and play.
Know what I like about the new rating system? Im a sorcerer bitches! YEAH!
I am the 99%.
This is fact, quoted from the article
“In other news, players at FNM will get more points for playing in larger groups, so every travel area will experience a shift of players away from its small stores towards its large ones. In some cases this will kill FNM at the small stores, since the moment they can’t reliably get 8 people it’s all over. Note that being large doesn’t on average make matches any harder or easier.”
already seeing it happen here…My new store, with old ELO ratings, averaged 12-16 players for FNM…My old store 60 miles south of my new store I play at, ELO had 24-32 players. Now that PWP has been put in place, my new store PWP…lucky to get 8, my old store, over 60 sometimes…they even have sign ups now and you have to be signed up by Wednesday or you cannot even get in their FNM. They are limiting it to 48 players now I think.
Another thing I find out is that there are stores here in the area who are taking advantage of the system as well…Ah need lots of points, ok, we will run a round robin event, one match only, no best two out of three…you play all the players who came for that FNM that afternoon/evening…get lucky and go undefeated…109 points awarded for the FNM.
There has to be a better formula for evaluating the FNM points, some kind of system that balances out the amount of players at a store vs the amount at other stores. 8-12 players has a multiplier of 6 while a store with 48 plus has a multiplier of 2…something like that.
I like the PWP over ELO myself, but it for sure needs a hard tweak…
The Tin Indian
Wizard is creating it’s own financial bubble.
DID NO ONE READ MY ABOVE POST??? IT WILL BE FIXED!!!
This article was well written and well presented. The names who signed the article are pro’s and most importantly HOF’s. As it may seem that this article was written in self interest, as many of you do from the comments above. There are things to think about outside of “pro” status.
Some of the reasons why the old system didn’t work for me was that it had ZERO incentive for players, pro or not pro, to play MTG anymore once you reached a certain rating. Players who would go to a GP and make day two, could no longer play for the next 3 months or so to preserve byes for an upcoming GP that they wanted to attend.Why?
Because a player, pro or not pro, would lose too many points if they lost, and gain almost nothing if they beat a player. My highest rating ever was almost 1900. I would go to an FNM to play because I enjoy the game and I wanted to become a better player. But if i went 3-0, the most i would get is about 1 point per match. On the other hand, if I 0-2 drop, I would lose about 16 – 30 points. The system was flawed. It didn’t account for the randomness of not drawing mana, or drawing too much. It didn’t distribute the points of my rating equally if i won or lost. Therefore, players with high ratings would no longer play the game(Notice i didn’t say good players because not all good players had high ratings, some got lucky)
Now what does this new system bring to the table. It’s money. The more money you spend, the more rewards you receive. This system is not based on skill any longer. Not to mention that it doesn’t take into acount the demographics. In the east coast, players can easily go to 16 gps if they wanted to within an 8 hour drive of where they live. How about the west coast? South America? Worldwide? This new system has eliminated skill, sometimes luck, out of the equation and replaced it with money. We all can make time for magic if we wanted to but now your incentives for being a good player have gone out the window. View the new system from a perspective of all players, not just pro’s, or semi pro, or grinder. Take a good look at what this new system is encouraging
If the pro player’s club changes in such a way that people who can’t grind won’t be able to stay qualified, there’s no way that it will be good for the game. How many PWPs do Paul Reitzl and Josh Utter-Leyton- who have each gotten 2nd at a PT this year- have so far this season? Is a system that doesn’t keep these players qualified a good one? Do the grinders deserve byes more than these people? I don’t think so. If the PPC DOESN’T change substantially, and the people formerly qualifying on rating are replaced with some people who ground their way in via losing money flying to every GP, I can’t see this being an enormous shakeup.
This is all to say- PWPs are not the issue. The unknown future of the PPC is the issue.
They should do a q-school format like in professional golf. Once a year have a tournament where the top x players get a “tour card” and are fully exempt from qualifying for the next year’s tournaments. The tournament would be multi-staged with far more games than regular tournaments to reduce the luck factor (somewhat). Anyone could enter but good performances in PTQ’s, FNM, MODO, etc would give players byes to the later stages providing an incentive to participate. There could be partial exempt status for those who just missed out, like they could play a few tournaments in their home country or some low-demand events, etc.
At the end of the year players would keep their exempt status by finishing in the top xx in points (only from PTs and GPs), lower finishers would get byes into the later rounds of q-school. There could also be ways to qualify during the year such as multiple high finishes or a win.
You would still have PTQ’s, winner’s exemptions, maybe special invitations, country-specific exemptions, etc. But recent performance combined with the qualifying tournament would provide the bulk of the exemptions.
When I first saw the tour system I wondered why they didn’t do it this way; magic has a lot of similarities to golf (high travel costs usually paid by players, high luck factor, not all players can play all tournaments).
@Kaleb and Rich – thanks for the substantive update.
@Paul Cheon/anti-alice railers – the whole point is that the system is not reflective of MTG ability/skill, it’s reflective of who spends the most money on airfare and tournament entry fees. You can easily get Bertoncini, Flores, etc. into the pro tour through tweaking the old ELO or by implementing the author’s proposed modifications, because not only do they play a lot, but – and here’s the whole point – they CONSISTENTLY MAKE DEEP RUNS IN TOP-LEVEL TOURNAMENTS. News flash – being able to reliably top 32 major events is a damn good indicator of your skill at Magic. Driving all over the country so you can scrub out of GP day 1 – not so much.
WoTC is clearly pandering to the grinders who are going to spend a lot of money, and while it may seem like the right “business” decision, I actually don’t think it is the optimal economic choice for them. The decision seems quite short-sighted to me because they simply need to understand the role that the Pro Tour has to the various types of players out there, and provide the right incentive to maximize value from EACH segment, not just one of them.
Pros on the Gravy Train: While they may not spend a lot of money on the game, there’s a lot of value the “Pros” who are on the gravy train provide to the Magic community. They spend the time to write articles, engage with people in events, provide a “goal” for aspiring players to live up to, etc. While they may not provide economic benefits to WoTC directly, they add enough value for WoTC in these ancillary things that it makes sense for them to continue to invest money back in these guys through the form of the PPC.
Competitive / grinders: Already discussed in great detail – this is what WoTC is getting through PWP. They get a handful of grinders to make Magic a lifestyle. PWP does maximize value from this segment to WoTC for all the reasons laid out above – that they will buy into a side event at a GP just to get the PWP entry points.
Competitive / non-grinders (part time players / hobby players): These are players who are good, but don’t play every weekend. For them, Magic is a hobby, not a lifestyle. They may do a couple PTQs, show up occasionally for FNM, do a Grand Prix if it’s in the area, and play in the Prerelease and Release events. They may have made the Pro Tour a couple time before, but never done well enough to make the gravy train. For this segment, the allure of making the Pro Tour via the Grand Prix is strong, and is the real reason they would drive 4-8 hours to do so. Additionally, being able to get an invite to the next Pro Tour by having a strong finish in the *one* they do qualify for allows this segment to at least have the “dream” of making it onto the Pro Tour, doing well, and continuing to stay on it. The PWP system is terrible for this group and WoTC risks alienating this segment completely. Now there really isn’t an incentive for them to “care” about Magic from a competitive standpoint at all, since there is no longer any realistic “dream” scenario. While they may not individually provide a lot of value for WoTC, as a WHOLE this is probably one of the larger segments of players.
Casual gamers: They may or may not care about being super competitive, although any dream they may have about fame and fortune through Magic is changed. The “do well at a GP, get on Pro Tour” dream has been killed, but they have a somewhat new outlet to be recognized – the FNM championships. As many pointed out though, many people are gaming the system and while FNM championships is a great tool to shine the spotlight on this segment, if they feel like people are just cheating (7 round tourneys, 1 game matches, 25 minutes per round, twice a night, 2 times a week), then they may feel frustrated and angry. In a strange way, this may actually *disincentivize* the group from playing. According to consumer psychology, putting a reward out there that people aren’t able to attain (say, Free Shipping on all orders over $200!) is actually a negative and will actually result in fewer orders, not more. It’s bizarre because it’s strictly better than not having it (even if I don’t get free shipping, I am no worse off than before), BUT the psychology of not getting something good is actually quite frustrating. I think we’ll actually see this with the FNM championships – that most people will feel like it’s unfairly tiled towards shops that are trying to game the system, therefore I cannot win, therefore I am more frustrated and annoyed, therefore I will actually play less.
Overall, it seems like WoTC is maximizing value from just the Grinders segment, and risking alienating these other segments. All-in-all, it’s disappointing that WoTC is willing to potentially harm the community (if PROS drop off, it makes it much less interesting to follow the PT, and the vibrant knowledge sharing from articles may also decline…and don’t care about these other segments) and long term viability of the game in exchange for extracting dollar values from one segment of the population in the short term. Personally, I think they should try to maximize incentives for all these groups – which would mean having the “pro tour dream” alive and kicking for all segments.
– having some form of PPC to allow for the “I qualified once and can keep at it by performing well”
– Continuing to allow PT invites from GP and PT performances
– balancing the FNM championships to reward and measure playing and performance evenly (maybe points are evened out weekly between stores?)
the people that are saying it will cost $100k or more a year to grind in this fashion are very very bad at booking trips.
This is a very strong article. Thanks for your point of view on the new system.
Yeah, it’s a good thing I don’t care about qualifying because if it came down to a grind fest I’d rather just play WoW (or insert new MMO here).
@Booma: Interesting post. I think you nailed it on a lot of aspects here. Cheers
This ratings system caters to the players that don’t care about the rating system.
@Attus
No, that is not the correct story at all, though you would do admirably as BDM given that he and others have happily whitewashed what Maher was involved in while playing action the actions of others (non-Americans mostly). He knew about it for many months and didn’t report it for quite some time, knowingly benefiting from fake tournaments (that were set up against real people!), qualifying for PT Chicago on illusory points. His defense on that issue (which, by the way, gives the lie to the “he didn’t know claim”) was that he would have qualified anyway, because if it weren’t for the ratings fraud he wouldn’t have played a rogue deck at Regionals and lost rating there. He received a reduced punishment because he was a whistleblower, not because his involvement was trivial, despite the lies that his friends have tried to spread ever since.
The issue is not Elo vs. PWP, that is missing the point. Even if the article stated that a return to Elo and a subsequent tweak would be ideal, everyone at this point has realized that that ship has sailed. What the discussion should really be about is how to improve the new system in a way that adequately reflects performance, but also keeps incentivizing people to play.
The main fix in my opinion would be some form of progressive system, in which the Nth time you win in any given tournament is worth more than the previous win. Why? Because currently winning just doesn’t matter enough relative to participating. And because there is no other competitive endeavor in the world that rewards consistent mediocrity. What should be rewarded is being consistently very good and/or occasionally excellent.
If the system worked out in a way such that people with PT Top50 or GP Top16 finishes would have a de facto qualification or at the very least a very strong fighting chance, the loss of the outright qualifications wouldn’t be so bad.
Now the N squared proposal is one possible solution, but there are others. One that I like would be to award N points for the Nth win of the tournament, i.e. 1 point for the 1st win, 2 for the 2nd, 3 for the 3rd, etc.
What matters in the end, however, is not which specific system is used as long as it is some sort of progressive system, as opposed to the linear system we have now.
In fact, I think the best way to approach this is to poll a large number of competitive players about what the relative values of certain achievements should be. Let’s say using a base value of 100 for winning a PT, what should the value be for a PT Top8/Top32/average result, GP win/Top8/Top32, PTQ win/Top8, FNM win, etc.? (Note that a value over 100 is also possible, i.e. LSV’s domination of the Swiss in San Diego)
Just choose a number of benchmarks that are representative and that let you extrapolate the rest, poll a bunch of people about it, establish a baseline and here’s the important part: find out which of the many proposed solutions lines up best with player expectation. That’s the one that should be used.
Of course the other problem with PWP is geography. PWPs reflect availability of tournaments in your area just as much as, if not more than, your willingness and ability to play in them, and your performance.
I encourage you to use the tournament finder for the current PTQ season, type in wherever you live, but then zoom out the map to the entire world. If you do, it will be impossible not to see the problem.
Someone who plays every tournament that can be reached with reasonable investment of time and money should be called a grinder, regardless of the absolute number of tournaments. Under that premise, how can a system be called fair if a very good European grinder (it doesn’t even need to be some far-flung corner) doesn’t stand a chance against a mediocre American grinder with half his win rate? I know that there are regional slots that are supposed to act as an insurance policy against this, but that doesn’t do nearly enough. Currently, we have 10 slots each for Europe and North America, 5 each for Latin America, Japan and APAC, and 65 “lucky loser” slots. In reality, it might as well be 75 slots North America, 10 Europe, 5 Latin America, Japan, APAC. The practical difference would be miniscule. (Besides, the majority of the regional slots will go to players already otherwise qualified, rendering them even more irrelevant)
Luckily, a progressive system fixes this to a degree. The pendulum just needs to be pushed far enough in the direction of quality that the good European, Asian, Australian and Latin American players no longer lose to the mediocre North American players. However, just to be safe, I would also suggest doubling the regional slots across the board and leaving only 30 “lucky loser” slots.
Seems like the thesis for this article is “this system does not properly reward magics best players”
Could someone please point me to the article that convinces me that magics best players should be rewarded so well.
“Magic is one of the rare sports where its top players almost always have more lucrative options elsewhere.”
I personally dont think that magic is a sport. I also dont thinbk it should be. If these top players have more lucritive options then maybe they should take those opportunities.
Please let me know if I am wrong but The Protour is essentally subsidised by every person out there cracking booster packs. Maybe that HUGE base isn’t as interested in subsidising the gravy train as the people who are on it are.
Maybe magic does not need it’s “top players” as much as it’s top players think.
Brilliant in every aspect, thank you all for putting the effort into writing this letter.
I would also like to point out the effect PWP has on Nationals.
For a few countries (US, japanese, part of euro), nationals is a cool tournament amongst other cool tournaments like all those GPs and those PTs. Fair enough.
For the rest of the world (like South America, western europe, Australia), Nationals is THE coolest tournament. Without PT`s in less than 1000 miles distances and only a GP every two or three years, a competitive Nationals is what holds a local scene together as far as showing who “the best” are and providing a goal throughout the year. Huge bragging rights, loads of fun, something to strive upon.
The new PWP system will absolutely crush this spirit.
Whereas in the PTs you at least had the HoF and Pro Players (hopefully) to maybe give legitimacy to the results, in local Nationals there isn`t even that as local legends in most countries do not have the opportunity to earn PPC.
Also, I cannot emphasize how much more incentive the PWP system gives to tournament fraud, which is a gigantic problem in Brazil.
One more thing I’d like to add:
For those of you demanding real life examples, consider GP Madrid, as in, you know, just the freaking largest Magic tournament of all time. Even though I don’t have the necessary facts to say this for sure, I am reasonably certain that the winner of that tournament, Andreas Mueller, would not have been qualified under the current system.
“Yeah, grats for winning the biggest tournament ever against tough opposition, but we really can’t have you on the Pro Tour, it just isn’t good enough. Good luck winning that PTQ!”
WTF??
Alice in Wonderland?
: (
My name is Alice. Now everyone at FNM is going to make “your killing the protour jokes forever”
A system should reward Edgar Flores for his CURRENT achievements, rather than reward Paul Cheon for his HISTORICAL achievements.
I don’t even like Edgar Flores that much but he deserves to be on the current ProTour circuit more than Paul Cheon does.
Seems to me like Pros crying about spilt gravy.
Magic would be fine if there were no ratings at all.
So rather than try and “fix” PWP I think people should focus on getting back the multiple ways to qualify (I.e. at least top 8 at a GP should qualify for the PT).
No matter waht ratings system you use Magic players will wrk out the math and game it. A system where you earn your reward in a qualifying tournament seems more robust.
Stop giving GP byes and National invites based on rating and instead have more GP trials (afterall more Magic is the plan right?) and more slots given at regionals.
If you want to play on the PT or at Nationals you should win some games of magic.
This is a fantastic and IMPORTANT article it objectively reviews the good and bad of the changes while highlighting some huge future problems from the new system. I like that you guys despite most of you being from the US have taken the time to point out how this system kills everyone who isn’t from making the non region protected places in the top 100 which is refreshing since this subject has barely been brought up in the months since the PWP announcements and kinda turns MTG into a very much American only sport which I feel would be sad since it has always been a global phenomenon. I hope Wizards give this the attention it is due.
The grinding nature of the PWP system is compounded by the complete seasonal competitive turnover. If you can’t spend and entire 4 months grinding at a time, then you really get hurt for the next set of season’s qualifications. To be realistic, most people who would even consider trying to ‘grind’ out a PT qualification would never have made it under the ELO system as it was without winning a PTQ. The biggest fault of this grind in my opinion for the ‘average’ player are the smaller incentives such as Grand Prix Byes. Anyone who only has a limited amount of time (or money) to play and used to slowly, but surely, get their rating up used to have a reasonable chance to end up with 1 or 2 byes. That goes out the window with PWP.
Myself as an example: I’m currently capable of playing most major events in the area on a monthly basis and occasionally, but rarely, play in FNMs. Without the ability to reliably play in a Grand Prix or SC Open every season or being able to grind multiple times a week puts me at a severe disadvantage for getting to a realistic goal of a bye or two. Anyone with limited access to large tournaments, with difficult access to FNMs, or to be realistic, with bad stores and worse tournament organizers to deal with, is at a severe disadvantage. Anyone who is active in playing competitively but can’t make a consistent weekly commitment is thrown under the bus in the current system. Evidently if I can’t make a FNM EVERY week (even if I MTGO in place of it from week to week), I’m expected to simply quit trying. That won’t happen completely, but I am much less likely to get to more events simply because I can’t get to all of them. Playing consistently to get to a few byes with limited time is no longer remotely possible.
The system also seems confused by what it pushes and the branding of the Pro level that Wizards has tried to do. They like having well known players doing well. I’m much more likely to sit down and read or watch coverage of good players that I know of than I am to sit down and watch a ceaseless grinder. I don’t know about everyone here, but I’m nowhere near as likely to pay attention to the Pro-level or follow it if Alice is being qualified over the Brian K’s of the world.
Who the fuck is Jon finkel
Someone who plays magic a whole lotta better than you
Reading some of these comments makes me realize that sometimes, public forums are contradictory to what they try to encourage. Honestly, before you go on tangents about how “I think its alot of pros just complaining about problem X” please consider the magnitude of the players who proposed this idea. Also, please consider their reputations that are now at stake for saying something such as “The system is wrong.”
Some times, I don’t think people understand the gravity of actions across a digital medium. Just because you cannot hear these words spoken by their author, doesn’t mean they carry any less conviction.
And for anyone saying that this game does not need it’s pro players (especially the ones signing this article) just think, we’d have no shadow mage infiltrator, no cross-country rivals, and better yet, no channel-fireball.
Please think your comments through before posting them, and respect these authors, as I doubt this is something they posted lightly, but after a long period of discussion.
Zvi Mowshowitz
Jon Finkel
Kai Budde
Bob Maher
Luis Scott-Vargas
Thank you guys.
We are the 99%
“James says: October 16, 2011 @ 9:43 pm
Wasn’t Bob Maher DCI suspended for Ratings fraud?”
HAHAHAHA
Great article, while PWP has some good features that ELO lacked it still creates problems. Its far too exclusive in regards to qualification. The grinding required is downright impossible for most other than the people already in the high levels and rankings anyway. Even If I went to every PTQ, GP, Open,etc.. within my range (Which isnt great) it wouldn’t mean a thing unless I alone won a PTQ out of another 150 people who are now out in the cold for not being that one person, its ridiculous. Wizards never tries to do anything all the way right which continues to seem suspicious to me.
Once again great letter
Just a few thoughts from someone who’s in the class of players who don’t care about their points/rating.
1. Outside of US, you see slightly different behaviour, though it’s driven by the same factor (rating). In my area, there aren’t many people on the Pro Tour, but players will skip FNM all year so they can make Nationals on rating. I always thought that seemed very strange, because it means that, regionally, your best players don’t play very much.
2. The pro tour should, for the most part, represent the best players in the game. If the correct method for this is rating, or pro points, or whatever, then I’m happy with that. The PT should definitely not be just the players who committed the most time. That being said any adjustment to the system can create a situation where certain players who would otherwise have been stars fall through the cracks, and new opportunities are created for other players who step into the spotlight under the new system. The PTQ grinder who places well everytime but never gets the blue envelope falls through the cracks in the current system. Overall, you just need to make sure that the pro tour is primarily composed of the best players.
3. I’m actually not keen on pro players showing up at FNM. It may sound selfish, but FNM, to me, is the minor leagues. I want to play against players within a skill band that, yes, is better than I am, but where I still have a chance to win. That’s how it is today for me: I’m not odds-on to win an FNM, but nevertheless I’ve taken down a few drafts. If pro players start showing up, I’m pretty much out of the running. For that matter, if FNM is flooded with all of the PTQ grinders, it would probably be the same situation. So to some extent, I’m not entirely upset about disincentives for these players to play. Huh.
Really great article. I have three comments and a sort of meta-proposal.
First – the “N-squared” suggestion. Disregarding draws and modeling tournament performance as a binomial random variable B(n,p), you can quantify your suggestion’s impact on the variance of point accumulation per tournament. Your suggestion seems to increase the coefficient of variation for points accumulated per tournament by a factor of 1.5x to 2.0x for all reasonable values of n (number of rounds) and p (expected win percentage). So, point accumulation would fluctuate quite a bit more than it currently does. I have other concerns about your proposal but my thoughts aren’t quite fully formed (and without reading the comments, my guess is that other commentators probably touched on them) so I won’t won’t try to critique beyond this point.
Second – There are an enormous number of possible approaches to structuring organized play systems to meet whatever goal you might have. Off the top of my head, if you wanted to give PTQ-level players a better shot at getting a taste of the Pro Tour, you could incorporate elements of Vs. System’s OP (where making top 8 of a PTQ awarded fractional invites, for example). If you wanted to discourage professionals from “sitting on rating”, you could segment ratings into amateur and professional components. If you simply wanted to do a better job of identifying the best players, you could use a Bayesian approach instead of ELO. Again, these are off of the top of my head. There are a million things you could do, and designing a system that meets everyone’s needs in an optimal way is a Very Hard Problem.
Third – PWP is pretty clearly not optimal. Your suggestion is probably a strict upgrade but also probably not optimal (reflexive responses to utter disasters tend to have unintended consequences of their own). It also almost certainly doesn’t do everything that Wizards wants their OP system to do. But hey, good news. Magic has an a lot of players with heavily quantitative backgrounds, and lot of players with backgrounds in game development and game theory. Wizards has a database of every sanctioned match ever played. That’s an awful lot of intelligent people and an awful lot of data and no particular hurry, because PWP probably can’t be walked back for another year or so anyway.
So, here’s a suggestion. Wizards clearly articulates what it wants to get out of an organized play system. Bullet points and metrics. Players do the same, through the same channels that they articulate other opinions (polls on the mothership, community representatives, pro feedback, etc). Wizards releases their match history database. Community input and heavy backtesting yield, something like six months from now, some solid alternative systems to consider. Crowdsourcing usually isn’t the way to go for business decisions, but when you are trying to build an ungameable system and the people at the head of the crowd make their living finding value in one spot or another . . . seems like a no-brainer.
I really appreciate this letter and agree with it wholeheartedly, and I think it’s pretty silly that some readers are interpreting this as self-serving. If you actually read the whole thing, the authors are quite clearly concerned about the future of the PT, not themselves. 4/5 of the authors are already members of the Hall of Fame, and the last will be elected as soon as he is eligible. Each also has a “real” job that gives them plenty of income, so it’s not like their livelihood is going to be destroyed by the introduction of Planeswalker Points.
However, I can’t help but feel that this really is futile. In the end, Wizards and Hasbro are businesses, and businesses are designed to make money. The new system allows them to make significantly more money off of those players who have large disposable incomes and the desire to play on the Pro Tour, regardless of skill level. As much faith as I want to put in humanity, human beings truly are greedy creatures and I don’t see this letter changing Wizards’ decision. It is incorrect to view Planeswalker Points as a competitive decision, as it was clearly a business decision made for business incentives. In the words of the authors, “people respond to incentives”, and this new system is the product of Wizards and Hasbro responding to incentives.
I am 100% in support of this letter, I feel it addresses the issue perfectly. I am located outside of the US and if this system doesn’t change, myself and others will just quit the game.
I find it fascinating that so many non-pro players are supporting 5 pro players for supporting them when in actuality the article’s purpose is self-preservation for pro players.
If Alice wants to spend 15,000 a year on Magic travel, power to her. It isn’t any different than what Juza and Nakamura do all the time. A combination of dedication and talent is what it’s always taken and the new system doesn’t change that. And yeah, it’s awesome to think about the Brad and PV stories, but how many others got missed out on? How many more will be made under this new system?
I understand that HoF guys are in anyway and that takes away a little of the bias, but how many dozens of co-workers, teammates and friends are these guys thinking about as they write this?
Disagree.
This letter is a good example of not wanting it enough. My good friend Kyle had written an article on this matter, you should read this.
First of all, my props to many and many of you that posted significant and Relevant comments,enriching the discussion.
It’s really interesting to see this all play out. Right when the changes were announced, I declared that PTQs had gone to the toughest way to get into the PT(GPs were probably the easiest, followed by ratings, then PTQs) to the easiest. It didn’t get any easier to win a PTQ, but GP invites have been eliminated completely, and ratings invites are now, as anyone with half a brain could figure out immediately, pure grind. I remember Evan talking about how suddenly FNM players had a chance to grind in to the PT, but I just kept thinking to myself, “no, they really don’t. There’s only 100 slots. The only people getting in through ratings are going to go to every possible event and grind, grind, grind. The FNM guy goes to one event a week, wins some, then goes home and doesn’t think about Magic for another week.” It didn’t take much math to figure out any of it, really.
There was an article, I believe, on SCG, about how Magic was kind of a racist game. It’s not. It’s more classist. I’ve heard arguments that Magic, at the highest levels, is about how much you spend. I’ve defended against those arguments, but now, with this new PWP system, it really is about how much you spend. Traveling to GPs, playing every possible event and side event, that’s how you’re grinding into the PT. But that’s Magic. If the sky isn’t falling every other week, it isn’t Magic.
In short:
– The new system needs urgent fixing. A system that gives 16 points in a tournment with >120 players (states 2011’s), less than a 8 people FMN that happened on that same weekend, can’t be real
– I do believe that the Pro Tour Slots next season will be handled by 100 Wealthy grinders. I do not need to wait until the end of this season to conclude that, you just need to check the current leaderboard on the PWP. You will be amazed. I know at least two american guys that traveled to play the last weekend GP in Australia.
– I also do agree that this carries some whinning on the pros side about their evident loss of “rights”due to that. Altough the cause is noble, they should first be more worried on the system overall in a top-down perspective, to later on stalk on the PPC or PT invites, etc.
– I strongly believe that wizards won’t come back to ELO, as per the results under the new system increased their sales dramatically this quarter. (TO BE ANNOUCED)
– These grinders (aka Alice) disgust me deeply as they want to buy their slot into a pro tour.
It’s very shortsighted to criticize this article as biased, especially when the pros in question are not affected by the changes. The reason why getting rid of invites for top 50/16/ppc is bad is because it does not incentivize good play.
I’m glad you guys talked about how people are affected by the change outside of the US. I am from Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand. Up until this year there were 3 PTQs per PT in NZ, two in the north island and one in the south. WOTC has cut this back to one PTQ per PT, in Auckland, on the other side of the country. This doesn’t only affect NZ, in Australia there have been massive cutbacks as well and I’m sure there have been cutbacks in other small countries too. So if I want to qualify for the PT I either need to hope to win the one PTQ per PT in New Zealand, or….oh wait, thats it.
Before this, it wasn’t prohibitively expensive to travel to the Australian/Asia Pacific GPs each year for a chance to qualify. Although still incentivized, it makes it very hard to justify dropping $1100 on tickets to SIngapore when it is going to be an enormous struggle to make that money back.
Jerome, consider that without the possibility of achieving longevity in the pro tour, many players would simply stop attempting to be competitive altogether. The protour is the single largest driving force for magic players wanting to be competitive. Many would rather play their edh decks without alteration for years without the incentive of becoming a pro. I realize this may be a stretch, but this could result in people spending so much less money on magic that the game ceases to be a lucrative game for hasbro, causing them to abandon it altogether. That’s worst case scenario, but is within the realm of possibility, and worth considering. I feel it’s wise for people to be concerned about it.
If nothing else, wouldn’t you agree that the game is better off judging players on their worth in skill rather than their net worth?
Ok, maybe I do not understand correctly, but would it be wrong to assume that many of the problems with the old system could be solved with a sort of “opt out” option at smaller events? Basically, people with barely enough points for a three-round bye or whatever could play in events such as FNM, but choose to not have it impact their rating. This way, they are still playing magic, which most of us want to do, they can still have fun, and their rating remains intact.
Another option could be leaving the planeswalker points system for non-PTQ/GP/PT events (the leveling up thing is cute) and retaining the old system, but only for these higher level events. That way, one’s rating increases based on competing with people who, presumably, are on their level, meaning rating would not radically drop from a single game loss. Under this system, people could not really sit on ratings, as they would miss a large event, instead of simply losing the opportunity to play a wacky deck for FNM.
Thoughts?
Short story then my thoughts:
A few years ago, when I got back into magic with a rating of 1630, I was taking the game seriously and wanted to improve my rating. Always been a competitive guy etc… I’m like 5-0 in a 6 round event, cutting t top 8 and I ask my 6th round opponent to draw. He asked me what my rating was and I said like 1690-ish? He said, nope, I’m 1800+ and I’ll lose points on a draw, let’s play. So I beat him.
Sunday, October 16th at a PTQ in round 8. I’m 4-3, playing for fun and 15 PWP. Maybe I’ll top 2,000 PWP for 2 byes at GPs. Opponent sits down and says “Would you consider conceding, I’m 20th in PWP in the world?”. I said no.
Thinking of the 2 scenarios makes me laugh.
My thoughts on the PWP system:
There isn’t really anything wrong with it. Let’s say Alice spends $700 per event, including airfare, hotel, food, entries and attends 9 GPs. She spent $6,300. Couple that with the price for her FNMs, drafts, 4 JTMS and so on, we could say she spent $10k? Isn’t FIRST PLACE at a pro tour like $10k? So a mediocre player was dedicated and devoted enough to waste her money to scrub out at a pro tour. Who cares. She probably won’t do it again. David Sharfman, Paulo, LSV or Shuhei will win the PT anyway. Most of them are semi-sponsored. Most of them make money outside of WotC event, writing articles or running a card shop. The top will stay on top. They might have to go to a few extra events to ensure entry to the PT but it won’t be outside of the scope of what they were doing before.
Your Reitzls and Sperlings might suffer since they have a real job and life but that shouldn’t be an alarm to change the system. If they are good enough, they can win a local PTQ. They aren’t making a living off of magic, it is a hobby. Playing FNM and weekend events and occasionally going on vacation to play magic can still be their hobby. The $2k they might win at a pro tour that they won’t get now won’t put them at the doorstep of a food pantry.
Your Alex Bertoncinis, Edgar Floreseseses and Chris VanMeters now get to keep doing what they are doing AND get to go to the pro tour. They can grind their SCGs and GPs, try and stay in the black and hit up every pro tour. If they stop playing, they stop going to pro tours unless they battle down a PTQ. Seems fair to me.
Also, ANYONE who is attracted by the allure of the pro tour, who is decent enough to win 51% of their matches, can grind out for 4 months and taste it. Then they can decide whether or not to do it again.
The only flaws to PWP, that I see, is that some number of people from the top tables at every Pro Tour and Grand Prix should get an invite. The last GP I went to there were something like 1,300 people. At $30 a pop, that was $39,000. First place was $2,000. That is terrible EV. But, you went to the Pro Tour as well. They have to up the prizes to compensate for the lack of plane tickets and invites (which they very well may be doing).
Magic has horrendous EV in general. You spend 14 hours and $30 on entry, $10 on food and maybe $5-10 on gas to top 8 a PTQ and win a $75 box of cards. Whether we admit it or not, we play for more than prizes.
By all that is true and just, this article should have ten thousand comments by ten thousand different players, all of which should read:
I agree. Wizards, please listen to these guys!
Guys, thank you!
Yeah, this is very well said. Thanks to all the authors for raising these points.
A couple things to those who disagree:
Counterargument 1. “No one is going to behave like Alice – the costs are prohibitive.”
What this means is YOU are not going to behave like Alice and don’t understand how anyone else could. Learn economics. People respond to incentives and some people have both time and money. At GP Brisbane, there were two folks from America us down under had never seen before. Turns out they’d flown all the way down from the States. Their plan is to play in every single GP, since they heard the planeswalker points system was announced. I don’t know where they finished, but it certainly wasn’t in the top 16.
Yes it’s costing Alice a lot of money, and she may or may not decide that it’s worth it after the PT, at which she may or may not do well enough to justify continuing. However, how does she know she won’t do better next season? And if she does quit the grind, or at least scale it back, what about next season’s grinders? There are always more people ready to take up the flag.
Also, learn to read. “The good news is that there almost certainly will not be 100 grinders with Alice’s dedication and ability to travel. The bad news is that what matters will not be how much players are like Brian. It will be how much they are like Alice.”
Alice and Brian were extreme examples. Most people are not going to grind as much as Alice. Also, most pros do not do as well in any given season as Brian. The point is that Alice-ness, or grinding, is rewarded more highly than Brian-ness, or succeeding. That is the crux of the problem.
Counterargument 2. “You just want the Pro Tour to remain an elite club for those who’ve had success in the past, regardless of how well you’re doing now.”
Are you serious? You’re aware that LSV has a PT top 8 and a GP win in the past 6 months? And that Kai top 8ed PT Amsterdam and GP Paris, despite those being two of the only events he’s played over the past two years? And that Jon top 16ed PT Philadelphia which was the MOST RECENT Pro Tour? This hardly even deserves responding to, but I’ll do it anyway.
This new system does not reward recent success. It rewards recent grinding. The multipliers aren’t scaled appropriately and the participation points are terrible – how does signing up to play in a dozen events reflect anything about how good you are? Do you really think the person who plays in 6 GPs and 15 FNMs (and does poorly at all of them) is more deserving of a PT invite than the person who plays one Pro Tour (and top 8s)? Why should the very best players in the game have to play event after event after event to constantly prove how good they are? You really need LSV to show he’s the best every single week?
Look, as the article says, the best players in Magic have more lucrative options elsewhere. Look at how many pros go on to become poker millionaires. They stay in Magic because if you’re on the train (level 6+) the time commitment is not too onerous and the rewards are good. If you take that away, goodbye best players in the game. I don’t think they’ll mind too much. They’ll be upset for awhile but once they start making 10 times as much money doing something else, they won’t look back. “Oh, Magic – yeah, used to be fun, it’s a shame it ended up selling out.”
I didn’t think elo was a bad system, but only that ratings should ‘decay’ after a while when people don’t play after a while.
I’m a competitve person, and I like ratings to reflect that, PWP I feel does not IMO. So while I won’t quit playing Magic, it isn’t my first love now in terms of games, playing the likes of Street Fighter Four online or Halo is because if I play and beat better opponents I feel that I am improving and am rewarded so.
Andrew Jagger
@Syvanis and others: Fuck this elitist capitalist shit.
It isn’t WotCs job to make money. It’s their job to make an intresting, challenging game that keeps people hooked for decades. It’s their job to create a competetive scene. It’s their job to balance the game. It’s their job to set up a stage for really good players, watchable by the cheering crowd. It’s their job to be creative game designers. They do a good job. Mostly.
It’s Hasbros job to make money. Theirs alone. And they fail miserably. The only thing that lets them survive is a freaking good game. Not capitalistic, money-hungry schemes and ideas. But they continue to destroy this very game and its playerbase, and let WotC suck their greedy, money-hungry dick. And WotC likes it.
already close to 500 players registered for the upcoming modo PTQ. this is insane…
I don’t see the point of this letter. They are heavily invested in the new system, they won’t be inclined to change it any time soon, if for no other reason than to not upset the player base that is already attempting to grind in.
I agree that this system is flawed and ultimately it will be my main reason to stop playing magic, but in reality it is helping their bottom line for now and that is all they really care about, not the players.
…the first thing to do is to adjust GP prizes in a poker-like way.
Let’s just compare the last 2 GP’s:
Brisbane – entry fee = $30 (30,5 USD), # players = 385, prizes 30K USD
Wiz collected $11742,5 and paid $30000, losing $18257,5
Milan – entry fee = €35 (48 USD), # players = 1785, prizes 30K USD
Wiz collected $85680 and paid $30000, gaining $55680
So basically people in Milan played a much harder tournament AND they paid the prizes for people playing in Brisbane, and this is just plain wrong. Let’s have entry fees in form of $X+Y, where X is ENTIRELY put into prizes (maybe with a minimum guaranteed) and Y is Wiz’s margin.
I agree. Wizards, please listen to these guys!
Here here.
Wotc should also implement a nice suedo rake back system. A nice one not some brokeas rewards program they have ESP FOR MTGO…
Aaron has spoken,
there IS hope.
“1) Keep the Pro Players Club and Pro Point system. This is more important then everything else. The last thing we want are the Luis Scott Vargas’s of the world needing to grind into every Pro Tour. We need our top players at the biggest events, and they need the security that consistent strong finishes will keep them qualified. Also, unlike PWP, the PPC looks back over a full year, allowing for a hiccup or two without immediately falling off the tour, like Jon’s 251st at PT LA2000 en route to winning Nationals and Worlds that year. ”
I disagree with this heavily. WHY should you be rewarded simply because you were good. I have nothing against the “Pros” of the game, but if you want MTG to be a sport you need to be constantly demanding of your “atheletes”. You don’t let MVP quarterbacks of the 80’s play on today’s teams just because they were really good back then, or else you get the Brett Favre effect…I would LOVE to play against Jon Finkel in ANY MTG event, but I don’t feel it’s right to give him a free pass due to his previous accomplishments (same goes for every pro).
First off, how can anyone claim there is a problem with the new system when it is just rolling out?
Secondly, Other then his clique of Pro buddies, does any player out there really give a rats ass if LSV is there or not. Boo Hoo he is going to have to play like the rest of us that feed the gravy train. Listen people it’s your money that supports these guys. All this article is about is someone trying to do the least amount of work for the largest paycheck.
to somecanadianguy, by application of basic logic and mathematical estimation. I care that players like the mentioned regionally disadvantaged superstars would have such limited options to make their ascension into the ranks nearly impossible.
Personally I always thought competitive magic was a bit of a joke with the whole 3 free wins if you won some last season. Huh? Why? I mean, what other sport can you show up to a tournament and get *3* free wins before you even sit down? I could understand 1 bye, that isn’t ridiculous. But every time I read a tournament report I have to factor in how well they *really* did. Oh you were 6-3? Well really, you went 3-3. But the other people that went 3-3, they didn’t get any recognition or write a report, because 3-3 isn’t that great!
I’m not sure the current system is any better than the old because it still awards byes. And for those saying pros will leave to do other things…what else is new? Pros always leave to do other things. If you’re good enough to win multiple magic tournaments you’re definitely intelligent enough (or lucky enough) to end up with a decent-paying job.
I’d like to see an even playing field. Let the pros show up with their control vs control sideboards and duke it out like the rest of us instead of bypassing 3 rounds for free.
Walker has hit the nail on the head!
@PotterNB Have you looked at the current standings? The “Pros” are mostly already there. And since when was LSV geographically challenged?
To crack the 100 mark you need to play big events and win. period. The big name players will/do show up for the big events regardless of their geographical location because they always do. If they can’t, well guess what? Someone willing to travel and play is going to take that spot and rightly so. All the new system really does is cut off the free rides based previous totals.
Signed. this is terrible 🙁
Here’s a good rule of thumb: The more prestigious the assembly of people are that are promoting something the more likely it is to be full of crap.
Take the American bank bailouts for example, or the wars, these are some of the few instances where top figures from both republican and democrat sides come together to endorse how necessary these things are in their given iteration.
These pro players are basically the weapons manufacturers and hedge fund managers of MTG. Be very skeptical when they talk about how the rules should be set up that will determine what they need to do to stay on top of the tournament scene. This matters a lot to them, and hey maybe whether they know it or not MAYBE they just come to their conclusions and assertions out of self interest.
@David
The problem is that if the pro just wants to be good and not have to grind(or win a PTQ, which makes things more difficult for him but also for anyone else aspiring to win a PTQ) it’s nearly impossible without the PPC to stay on the tour. Look at the Kibler/Alice example. Kibler went to a bunch of events and was overtaken in points by a grinder. Without the PPC and without invites for doing well at the PT or GP, he has to compete with the grinders as well as the PTQ players for spots. And with the PWP system, it’s just too tough to beat the grinders.
@SomeCanadianGuy
No, actually, it does exactly the opposite. The folks who were getting ratings invites under the old system had to play big events and win as well. They weren’t getting any kind of free ride, except in that when they reached their intended point totals, they stopped playing. Under the new system, you can’t just play big events and win if you want to crack the top 100. You have to play every big event you can. And small events. There’s no way for you to stop with a guaranteed slot, because every week, you’re liable to fall behind someone more willing to go to more events. Say you played a bunch of big events and won a ton in them. There are a few weeks left before the end of the season, but you’re well within the point leaderboard for the season. Can you stop? The answer is, very likely, probably not.
Also, the point about the “geographically challenged” bit is about guys like PV, who are severely handicapped because they don’t have an event a week they can go to and grind, like players in the US have.
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In case anyone missed the best post in the thread, here it is again:
A_New_Hope says: October 18, 2011 @ 9:00 pm
Here’s a good rule of thumb: The more prestigious the assembly of people are that are promoting something the more likely it is to be full of crap.
Take the American bank bailouts for example, or the wars, these are some of the few instances where top figures from both republican and democrat sides come together to endorse how necessary these things are in their given iteration.
These pro players are basically the weapons manufacturers and hedge fund managers of MTG. Be very skeptical when they talk about how the rules should be set up that will determine what they need to do to stay on top of the tournament scene. This matters a lot to them, and hey maybe whether they know it or not MAYBE they just come to their conclusions and assertions out of self interest.
@A_New_Hope
Well said. It “seems” to be a very self serving point of view the “Pros” put forward.
@Team Sp00ky
Hey thems the breaks. If you want to be a “Pro” you are going to have to dedicate time & money. If you look at almost any other competitive hobby out there you need to spend a lot of money to stay on top. These hobbies could include horse shows (owning a horse and going to shows racks up thousands upon thousands of dollars), Hockey (to be noticed and have a shot at the pros many families spend tens of thousands of dollars for their child to even get close), the list goes on. The point is if you want to be top dog you need to put in a lot of time and money.
As for the Free Ride comment: Sitting on your points rating for an entire year and not playing and expecting an invite/byes is pretty much a free ride into the tournament.
I’m pretty sure that David Price would be just fine in this world.
I don’t think you guys really understand the deal with tournaments. The sole purpose for these are publicity and to get this publicity they need pro’s. Don’t ever fool yourself that wizards will make a fair system that benefit the player, this would go against their interest since it would introduce variance in the performance of the pros. Few understand what a huge edge 3 byes is on anyone who doesn’t have these byes, if a pro has 3 byes going into any tournament s/he will have 9 points before they shuffle their deck and what is more important; the pro will have 3 matches less to get mana screwed/flooded or simply get bad draws. Wizards know this and make sure to protect their big names from suffering from this. Imagine if a handful of new names appeared in the top 8 for every +200 player tournament. It would be a bit hard to keep up with who-is-who in magic.
The only fair system would be a league formate where you simply have a system where you earn point for wins that qualify you for different tournaments. No byes or anything like that, a simple system where everyone would be able to see their status and what tournaments they could enter. Some tournaments would be closed events where you need to qualify by points or feeder tournaments and other would be open, pretty much like today, with the exception that a pro wouldn’t get 9 points before he sit down at a table.
What goes for this system it is clear that Wizards want to create a group of top tier players that will be able to coast around promoting the game. This system is in practice not any different from the old system; unless you are a pro, you get screwed by the system. If the system was made fair I estimate that half of the “pros” we have would be gone within a year. Only the strongest, well rounded and consistent players would have the skills to survive and we would have a new influx of ‘Journeymen’ each year where a few make it to become pro and replace the guys who aren’t good enough to survive.
We already have a system that has 3 or 4 unknown players in many top 8’s, be it at the Grand Prix or the Pro Tour level. When you have a 1500+ player Grand Prix, or an increasingly large Pro Tour, it is a testament to just how good top Pros are that they still crack as many top 8s as they do, byes or no.
The fact that PWPs are effectively a replacement of the Player Rewards scheme, only with very high level payouts, seems to be a dangerous move, as creating an incentive for tournament fraud and increased frustration at socio-economic differences between players (along with geographical ones) isn’t a positive move as far as I’m concerned.
The Pro Tour itself will likely survive under this system, though it saddens me that it seems possible we might have less names (or at least different ones) to follow going forward, depending on how qualification ends up working.
A lot of this feels like water-treading as we wait for info on what is going to happen to the Pro Players Club. That will be the real acid test for the Pro Tour to my mind.
Assuming that we kept with the PWP system, I’d hope for more low level rewards for playing a lot, achievable by everyone with a bit of hard work, rather than a system that rewards an unrealistically small number of people for being behavioural outliers that few can mimic. I guess there is still time for this sort of thing.
the greatest thread on CF? almost 300 replies so far
Sorry to say this guys but if there actually is some number of Alice like players spending that much and going to every single PTQ and GP in the continental US or further then WOTC/Hasbro/Satan has done what it inteded to.
Do you actually think that WOTC cares if the skill level drops by quite a bit if attendance to events with heavy multipliers is increased by a couple of dozens Alice or, Urza forbid, 100 or so more grinders?
That people will actually be buying lots of product, arguably they will have the hottest deck atm. I mean, if you are spending over 6k on travelling alone you are going to have a few tier 1 decks to compete with.
Wizards owes you nothing. This system encourages playing a lot more than the old ELO system. If there are any significant numbers of Alice like players, then it’s for the better of the game. Sure, there are a couple of numbers that can be tweaked, but as a bussiness model this seems to encourage both event attendance and buying product. This article sounds a lot self-entitled and tries to scare people with something that, overall, will be good for the game. More sales and more attendance means WOTC is making a profit and Hasbro will continue to support the game that we love. Who cares if someone falls off the gravy train?
In the end all the whining came down to this: Poker is more profitable and its hard to make a living of magic. From that point onwards you try and lure some people into buying that keeping your famous friends in the competitive scene is good. Not even for a second you took into account how finnancially good for the game would be if people responded like Alice.
So you guys don’t like PWPs because it’s essentially weakening the pro tour but Owen is going to what is usually an amatuer event and taking it away from the amatuer players (Wisconsin States). I’d like to remind you that he’s playing for Player of the Year. So it kind of works both ways.
@JaceTheMetaSculptor
I think you are missing the fact that if there are 100+ supergrinders attending every event that doesn’t necessarily mean things will work out well for Wizards. On the old system every man and his dog had some kind of outside shot at qualifying for the PT and getting byes on ranking. For every person that qualifies on rating there are probably a thousand or more guy who are ‘almost there’ and keep playing with the dream of getting that one extra good result that will put them in t100. With the new system a huge chunk of those people are going to know from the start of the season that they don’t enough time/money to stand a chance of qualifying for anything and as a result have 0 incentive to play for the next 4 months. When you combine this with the reduction in ptqs as well I think you will see a lot of once healthy magic scenes outside the USA quickly die out as entire communities suddenly lose all incentive to play competitively.
Any system which gets the ‘pros’ play more Magic is surely a good system. Heavens forbid they may actually play an FNM or two per year.
Having said that, living in Australia it matters little to me which system is actually used. Professional magic for people living in North America, Europe and Japan. The rest of the world matters very little.
@Tim –
I’m sure there are some where we find 3 or 4 “unknowns” in the top 8, this does not in any way address the fact that the system with byes benefits the players that have these buys a lot. If you are playing a 10 round sealed/draft tournament and enter it with 3 byes you start way ahead of the pack. Having the extra byes does not only give you more points, it also affects the Tie breakers which make it so the pros almost always get ahead when tiebreakers are used. I think you misunderstand how much it help with 3 byes, I once played a sealed tournament a few years back on MODO (during the Onslaught year) with fantastic deck, the only games I lost came from mana flood. The risk of suffering from this is reduced dramatically if you have 3 byes. I went 8-1 and the cut-off for the top 8 was 7-2. If I would have had some more “bad luck” in another match I could have missed the top 8 even both my deck and game play were solid.
You cannot escape from the fact that most pros who make it to the top 8 in a tournament have 3 byes and that they are happy having these. The problem with this system is that it produces a feedback for the players who already have 3 byes making it easy for them to keep these and though for any new player who don’t have these byes. A ‘Journeyman’ in magic will need to get really lucky if s/he want to get into the pack with this new system, as a pro with 3 byes should have no problem with this system since it is self feeding. They enter tournaments with 3 byes and can use the results from these to keep their byes for the future, it is a self feeding loop that only benefit the pros at the top and work against anyone who is trying to climb up the ladder to be one of them.
@Ovlov –
Having 1 bye doesn’t matter, the risk of getting screwed by a bad shuffle is roughly the same when you play close to 10 rounds. When you have 3 you are removing 3 matches where “bad stuff” can happen and get points for just having done good in the past. If you cannot understand how much this affect the results you don’t understand what the unfairness is. I believe that wizards should reward good players and give them an incentive to keep playing, but the current system with byes really make it a waste of time for anyone with a bye to play a tournament where byes are used, some will make it but unless you have the byes chances are high that you won’t make it at all. The variance itself will be your enemy and it doesn’t matter how good you are when you don’t (or only) draw lands the first few turns. This will happen about every 8 game you play no matter if you mulligan or not, and if you have 3 byes you have 6 to 9 less instances of this happening. If you play where the competition is though this could be translated into a match loss since the margins are so slim in Magic.
At all the people who say the pros are just trying to stay on top-
1) they are on top because they are better at magic that other people that are not on top
2) this system would not care about skill, just about how much u spend
3) there will be no more big new pros after this
4) if this does not change, every pro tour would be
day one: a bunch of bad people who spend too much money on magic
day two: everyone from the hall of fame, and a couple people who won ptqs
Day three: shuhei vs kibbler, nassif vs kai, bob maher vs raphael levi blah blah blah blah
That is not a very interesting pro tour if Know the top 32 people
@poor drafting skillz
– whilst I agree that 3 byes is possibly too great an advantage to give anyone, You are still missing the point. getting one or two byes is still SOMETHING (hell ive made a few gp t8s off 1 or 2 byes) for people to aspire to. not ev eryone is going to be able to get 3 byes for a gp but almost everyone had a chance of making 1 or 2 under the elo system. it was something small that casual players could aspire to and give them at least a small leg up when they attended GPs. Now it seems unlikely that ANYONE can even get 1 bye per season without playing at least a few times a week and attending some major events.
@whatever they do with rating
GP Milan did not pay for GP Brisbane. All GPs make a heavy loss. Don’t forget the tens of thousands of $$ for venue, airfare and lodging for a few dozen judges, expenses for many more volunteer judges, same for the rest of the wotc staff, hundreds of cases of product and all the other costs I forgot.
@ Anne elk
1) No one said they weren’t better, the arguement being put forth is there seems to be a sense of entitlement by them to have success but playing very little.
2) That is not how it works at all. Get it through your head people that it is financially almost impossible to make the cut just based on participation, the points for winning make a big difference.
3) There will still be big news Pros after this, the cream will always rise to the top, and hey maybe there is a kid out there that is just better than the current clique of Pros.
4) So you concede that the Pro Tour will not change a bit on day 3? So then what’s the big deal? Why is everyone crying about the sky falling when in the very end you end up with the same results.
Anne elk –
1) This may be true for many players, but having 3 byes will make a mediocre player do pretty good in most tournaments. The edge you get from 3 byes is too much and it is beyond what is fair, 3 byes is 9 points before you even have shuffled your deck.
2) If the byes were removed, how much money you spend would not matter. You would also need to spend some serious money to buy yourself through this system as I see it. Winning will still matter. This system is better then the old system but it still has it’s flaws.
3) What does this have to do with a “fair” system? If you play golf with Tiger Woods would you let him tee of twice just because he is better then you or would you use the handicap system? Naturally everyone who has 3 byes will want to keep this system since they understand the huge edge they get from starting every tournament with 9 points as opposed to “the rest” of the field. But having a few that is benefiting from this system does not in any way validate it as fair.
4) I don’t understand this…
Ovlov –
It is not possible that this is to much of an edge, it is. If you are playing 10 rounds and get 3 byes you only need to win 5 of your matches to reach day 2 as opposed to someone else who will need to win 8 matches AND have fantastic tie breakers. Few understand how much the byes affect the tie breakers which often will be deciding for a few to reach day 2. If you have two players where one has 3 byes and the other doesn’t, the player with the byes will have better tie breakers ~90% of the times they are needed putting even another hurdle for the new players to overcome.
The problem with the bye system is that the pros benefit from having an easier path to get to day two and wizards get their “names” to use in publicity. Having pros are an important part of the marketing strategy by wizards and we should recognize this. The only losers in this system are the guys who are good enough to compete at the pro level, they will be to far behind without 3 bye to have a realistic shoot at wining. A few of these guys will get lucky and manage to reach the 3 byes to put themselves in the position the pros are in and we enter a loop where there is no real incentive for anyone to change the system.
Have the last few responses been by Hasboro employees in disguise?
If you think the new system works take a look at the players in your local area and how they are fairing on the leaderboards. Are the best players at the top of the standings or is it just a bunch of guys with too much time on their hands and shady tournament directors? I can tell you for sure that the latter is true in my local area.
just wanted to point out is still ages before anything near full information is known
from the PEIP :
“A comprehensive list of the selection criteria will be identified in this Invitation Policy prior to December 31, 2011.”
presumably some hints will be dropped at Worlds, also
Since there’s tons of feedback here, hopefully Wotc listens, so here’s my two cents. The Elo system was not broken, it just needed some editing. I’ll never be able to play on a pro-tour, I will never win a ptq, but my rating gives me a sense of accomplishment, and it matters to me. Planeswalker points say I’m a nobody, Elo say I’m actually pretty good. Overall, I just want to be recognized, if to nobody else than myself, that my frequent tournament play has accomplished something, even if it is just a number. PWP is fine, if you can somehow incorporate skill, and the fact that i’ve only played for a couple years. I’m no LSV, I get that, I just don’t want to feel like a total scrub.
While it may be ridiculously expensive to grind in the manner that is required for a qualification without winning any events and the vast majority of players cannot afford to do this, you have to remember that there are millions of players worldwide, and that only ~.01% of players would need to be able to afford to do so in order to shut EVERYONE ELSE OUT. It’s not that it will be a common road, with hundreds of people grinding every American GP (though that is certainly a possibility), it’s just as they said in the article, that only a small amount of people need to do so to make it prohibitively difficult for anyone else to break the ceiling. I would additionally posit that if Wizards allowed outrageous buy-ins for PT events for players not qualified, say $3000, there would be a certain number of players that would take them up on this just for the experience of playing one. Signed.
I respect the need to help maintain a pro tier of quality players, however I find the arguments made here are mainly beneficial to the top 1%. It would in fact make it more difficult for the bottom 99% to break into the pro tour while keeping more pro’s on.
it parallels the standard tax code arguments made by the wealthy. You don’t want to tax the rich because one day you may in fact become rich.
They should probably just take the entire match records database, sanitize the DCI numbers from it, and release it to the public. I’m sure given the raw data the magic playerbase could come up with an appropriate system.
Mike –
This is what keep the system going, ask any new player trying to make it how he feel about the system when he has no byes, then ask him how he feel once he have one. When he has two his view on byes will have changed and when he reach 3 he will come up with some strange reason that basically is that he is so god he should have these byes. I once had a talk with a pro that said he didn’t need the byes to make it, he wouldn’t give them up when I asked him to contact wizards and ask for this though.
Without the bye system and sponsored pros there would be far less pro names in magic. Magic is hard and it is though to keep up with the new players and constantly changing mechanics. Of course pros should have some incentive to play since we don’t have external sponsors in magic, but this should only be focused on what happen outside the tournaments. Putting anyone in a self feeding system where they can use their advantage at one time to retain it is just unfair and will probably be abused or corrupted by someone in the near future.
Thomas Cleberg –
As I understand you more or less need to play every event there is traveling around the world on your own expense to “cheat” the system. If you have a few unknown wining a GP or other big tournament the traveling grinders will lose out . I may be wrong here but I understand that the volume needed to get ahead on participation alone is huge and not doable for anyone who isn’t a pro today.
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Advantages to byes:
1. They help players who have played well in the past to be “consistent” (the gravy train does this as well), increasing the number of “faces” Wizards has for the Pro Tour, and particularly increasing the visibility of those faces.
2. They make it more financially viable for pro players to travel a long way to GPs, increasing the number of “faces” Wizards has for the Pro Tour, and particularly increasing the visibility of those faces.
Disadvantages to byes:
1. They make it less likely that the player with the best deck, the best play, and the best luck will win a particular GP.
2. They discourage players without byes from trying to compete, since the odds are stacked against them (you have to win three times just for the privilege of playing against the full pool of pros).
3. They increase the number of rounds needed in a tournament, since the first few rounds “don’t count” for a significant fraction of the players.
Overall, if Wizards thinks they need a bye system to support the Pro Tour, then I respect their decision. However, I do find it personally frustrating (and the GP at which I had two byes was the only one where I made Day Two). Now that byes are based on PWP rather than rating, I don’t know if I expect to ever have a bye again (and certainly not two).
Why doesnt wizards just eliminate the byes system?
How did this go from a critique of PWPs to a Bye Bashing?
anyhow. I can give you two good reasons for Wizards to want to keep the bye system.
1- revenue. Grand Prix will always be a losing investment but I’m pretty sure grand prix trial go a long way toward recouping some of the losses. First you have the thousands of dollars of entry fees they get from the Friday trials, then there’s all the indirect benefits they get from promoting the GP through store run grand prix trials.
2- incentives. we have had enough pwp bashing here to know all the arguments about why that doesn’t work very well anymore but under the old system the bye system worked ell as a scaled series of rewards. Everyone could aspire to get more more by than they already had. didn’t matter if you were a 1700 or 1950, you always had a goal that was close enough to feel attainable, and the byes were a sufficient reward to make you feel like you had achieved something worthwhile.
I agree that 3 byes does feel like too much of an advantage. Maybe we should be limited to just 1 or 2 byes. but regardless this isn’t really the correct forum for such a debate. This is about PWP and how much they suck ;). Once we uscceed in eliminating PWP then maybe we can move on to stuff like this
It’s an incredibly genius system because:
A) It rewards those who spend the most and not those who play the best, which for wizard’s bottom line is the best thing possible.
B) As soon as people slack off and protest by not spending less dedicated people will climb into the ranks of the PT causing an immediate collapse of the protest, pride kicks in and we’re back at square one. Kicking and screaming at wizards “Shut up and take my money!” desperately trying to buy a seat at a PT.
The reason why wizards implemented this system is pure greed, if everyone as described is dead set on grinding to get their PT slots then they will essentially “buy out” the PT by registering in as many events as possible which translates directly to more product sold and higher profits for WOTC, from a business sense it makes complete and perfect sense they are simply acting to maximize their profits.
Clearly, the PWP system will give some people incentive to pour more money into the system in an effort to gain entry to the pro-tour. However, if a greater number of people are discouraged by the fact that they KNOW they cannot compete with the volume of play others will exhibit and either reduce or stop play, the overall health of magic as a gaming community and a product is still diminished. Wizards said up front that they were making this change to influence player behavior, but it is very possible to negatively influence behavior. I, for one, fear that the new system rewards collusion and fraud more, as well as making it more difficult to detect.
It remains to be seen what the short and long-term effects of this change will be, but i will say that gaming communities have been using ELO ratings for a long time and nothing has collapsed as a result of it. However, if in the end we have a major scandal break where some abuse the new system for personal or group gain, it will be very unfortunate for the future of magic.
Clearly it needs to be changed, I am just starting to play premier events, states being my first.
apparently I can take the alice path to PTQ stardom…. interesting
I enjoyed the article, thanks
Well, clearly Wizards took no notice of this well crafted letter.
Hollywood –
and neither should you, as long as byes are in the system it will be an unfair system for anyone who doesn’t have byes. Both the pro players and Wizards need the bye system to have a large pool of pros they can write about and use in marketing.
Unless you are a guy at an ELO +1900 these changes doesn’t affect to you. Nothing will have changed for you with this system since you don’t have byes. The amateurs still get screwed in this system and they really don’t have a way to fight this since Wizards control all official tournaments. IMO this system is better then the old ELO system but still have the problem with byes.
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If we would be duped by the system, why not boycot Wizards? Just don’t play for a year or so, enjoy your life, give your girlfriend/boyfriend the time of their lives by taking them to Paris or whatever. spend time with your kids, familly and play kitchen table magic. maybe than they actually listen?
Pro players are overrated, Just like FORMER champions. If you can’t keep up, go away and free the place for DA NEWCOMERS! No point in gravy trains. You are a good player only if you keep playing and winning, not when you earned some title 50 years ago and now resting on laurels. So yeah, if you drop down from pedestal back into dirt, bad luck.
Also, participating is more important than winning. Fun is what games should be about.
And who cares about pro players anyway? There a few of them. Bringing HUGE masses to the game makes PROFIT. Tasty, sparkly and crunchy $$$!
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