Getting started should be easy…. should be

When you want to play Magic Online, you better have a credit card ready, because it costs $10 just to run the app. By that I mean accounts cost $10 just to create, but come with a $10 coupon for anything in their online store, neat eh? Well not if you wanted to pay with PayPal because you assumed the PayPal button on the account creation screen is anything but decoration. If you try to use PayPal you’re fucked, the account wont process no matter what you do, even if you switch back to credit card.

I call support and they guy makes the *click/sucking in air* noise when I tell him I tried to use PayPal, he informs me I can’t and the name I wanted was now “lost” and I would have to do everything again with a different name. Not only do they have a big “fuck you” button on there that’s a trap, they also say I’m SOL about getting my name back. Right foot, consider yourself started out on.

But at least the software is good, right?

Wrong. The software is clunky and resource intensive, which is surprising for a CARD GAME with no other effects than “shimmer” on foil cards. When you maximize the window you don’t get more real estate, no, all of the interface items just scale up. The way windows are managed inside of the app is acceptable at best, everything is done in “scenes” and in the sidebar, except the sidebar is too narrow because it’s just scaled and not expanded.

Maybe that’s a little strong, Magic Online has a tremendous burden placed on it, that burden being the rules. It has to keep track of every single possible card interaction, every single ruling and it has to add new sets every few months, and it does it pretty well. For that, things suffer. The way the cards zoom in on middle click is very awesome though.

An example of how they just get it wrong is when I first got my account to work the servers went down. All servers need downtime and maintenance, I know, that’s fine. But there is absolutely no indication on the app that the servers are down, instead I get a socket error. I’m a computer guy, so I know what a socket is, but the error is so obtuse that I end up uninstalling and redownloading the multi-GB app trying to get it to work. The solution to this would be to say in the error “Unable to connect to the Magic Online servers, please check your internet connection. If the problem persists, check the server status link below.” but no, socket error, fuck you fuck face.

What about the team behind it?

Incompetence is a harsh word, and I’m using it. The way everything is handled is abrupt, direct and unrefined. Even Dreamhost has better PR than the Wizards Magic 3.0 team. Everything gets labeled with “We’re on it, it gets done when it gets done.” including things like a new “Collections Server” that would resolve SHOW STOPPING issues like trades not working and 1 person losing “tickets” (de-facto in-game currency) and not gaining the cards the payed for. I briefly played in the beta for 3.0 and I got to see first hand how it feels more like 3 guys working in a basement and not a team that’s working under a division of Hasboro. But I’m sure they’re not to blame, I get the feeling that they’re understaffed and over worked with unreasonable deadlines. It just would have been nice for Wizards to splurge and actually have a real developer make their cash-cow of a game.

Cash-cow?

They print no cards, they ship nothing to nowhere, they use art of the paper cards. The online business is a nearly 100% profit venture for them, they pay for the software development and servers, that’s all. They sell boosters/tourny packs/theme decks all MSRP which is about a dollar higher than what they cost at a store and they keep all of the money. Don’t even get my started on the Theme Decks and what a disrespectful ripoff they are.

So why even bother?

At the end of the day it is the best way to play Magic. The rules engine works, so even noobs can pick it up without worrying about the “phases” or the stack, it prompts you and holds your hand along the way, automating every automatible process. You can play literally any time of the day and get in a game in < 2 minutes. That can't be beat and is a good experience... if you can afford it.

How much does it cost to play Magic Online?

$10, if you just want to sit there staring at the screen. $50 if you want to be competitive in casual constructed, >$100 if you want to be competitive in standard constructed tournaments. Most of this, of course, you have to rebuy every year or so when a block/core set rotates out. Drafts cost $15 (3 packs at $4 + 2 tickets at $1). People will try to tell you different, but your fun in this game does depend on how much you’re willing to spend, and that, for me, is Magic’s biggest downfall.

So what do you really think?

If you have the cash, Magic Online 3.0 is the best game in town. Everything works well enough to keep you sane and playing whenever you want is great.

On the upside I do like Smart Bookmarks which allow you to view your most visited websites as well as your most recently bookmarked, the star, for it’s uglyness is a very nice way to quickly bookmark sites and the new notification system, while a little hard to get used to, is much more functional than the show stopping popup. There are also a mirriad of other features and behind the scenes stuff I’m sure, but that’s what has jumped out at me thus far.

All in all Firefox 3 is a needed and feature rich update that takes what works and does it’s best to make it better. It would be nice to see a little more polish before it ships but I’m not complaining, it’s the best browser available and it’s free.

Download Firefox 3 Beta 4

The company claims one of the benefits of the idea is that people not familiar with ordering online will be familiar with the shelf setup, but perhaps in the real world teaching Grandma how to search with Amazon might be easier than teaching her to “walk” though a virtual store looking for what she wants, especially seeing as how there is only one Kinset and many stores like Amazon. Give a Grandma a fish and she shops for a day, teach a Grandma to use Amazon and she’ll shop until your inheritance is gone.

Symptom(s)

When you try to add, play (Video will play for about 6 seconds) or transfer .mov or .mp4 (mpeg-4) video files (even from the iTunes Music Store) one of three things will happen.

• iTunes gracefully crashes and Windows Vista continues to function
• Windows Vista completely hangs and ceases to function forcing a hard power-down.
• Windows Vista will crash resulting in a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) with the error KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR.

The same outcome can occur when trying to transfer a large amount of photos to an iPod using iTunes.

I am using an HP A1510N with the A8N-LA Nagami2 (nForce 430 (MCP51)) mother board. I also have an additional SATA and USB HardDrive, an additional 512MB RAM and a PCIe ATI Radeon x1950PRO, I believe this error may be hardware specific as this error doesn’t occur on my Dell notebook.

The Solution

I reformatted and reinstalled Windows Vista, without installing anything else, even Windows Updates, I installed iTunes, but the video problems (above) persisted. I then installed all of the Windows Updates (Including optional drivers except for a Realtek sound driver) and the latest driver for my graphics card, restarted my computer and iTunes could play, transfer and add video perfectly, except for a slight problem with audio sync. Reformatting may not be necessary, check to see if you have an update in Windows Update named NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller and install if it’s not already, restart and test your video files.

The key to the solution seems to be the NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller which seems to have been released yesterday. It would make sense if iTunes was trying to access a harddrive function that the driver/ couldn’t handle resulting in Windows Vista crashing because it suspected a damage Page File. Of course, I can be SURE that this was the fix. I will update this post if anything breaks later on because of a program incompatibility.