Magic: Legends - State of the Open Beta, Week 3
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Following a couple weeks of open beta testing, Magic: Legends’ executive producer Steve Ricossa brings us this state of the game update where he addresses some player feedback, outlines his team’s plans for the nearest future, and announces a couple of in-game events. Check it out:
Hello Planeswalkers, your Executive Producer Steve Ricossa here! I’m back for another State of the Game update, letting you know about some of our upcoming changes (and other ideas floating amongst the team) as a result of all your fantastic feedback. We’ve already made some near-term adjustments that we’re very happy with, and there’s more to come! We’re another week into our journey to full launch and I have more updates, responses to feedback, information about our mid-April build, and a tease of our new event that starts this weekend - which will run for the next three weeks.
PERFORMANCE
Last week I spoke about our team discovering some performance wins for Tazeem, and that we discovered even more opportunities to crank up performance in the game. I’m pleased to report that the team has already spun up work on addressing these key issues throughout all of our environments, and will continue to do so for several weeks. While these fixes will not make it live immediately, the team is hard at work on them and I’ll keep you posted in future blogs regarding our internal progress.
TUTORIALIZATION WORK
We’ve heard everyone’s desire to get into the ‘meat’ of Magic: Legends more quickly, and we have a multi-tiered approach. In the very near term, we’ll be reducing the breadth of the overworld progression missions in Tazeem while also removing the requirement to fast travel back up to Briarthorne Glade to turn in your missions. These fixes will help newer players get into the game more quickly, filling loadouts with Equipment and Artifact drops, and building up spell libraries with the recently-doubled spell drop rate.
BATTLEPASS PROGRESSION
There’s been some concern with battle pass missions either not being available or not completing, and while we’re rapidly moving to fix these specific missions, it does mean that some Planeswalkers are missing the opportunity to earn XP. In addition to the huge grant of XP we delivered last week, we will also be running battle pass double XP weekends from time to time while constantly evaluating the overall duration to hit the max level of the pass. We want to make sure the battle pass experience is as clear, fun, and rewarding as possible.
CURRENCY CAPS
We’ve heard a lot of feedback about the presence of various currency caps, with some understanding as to why they exist, but many ultimately having concerns about the cap level. Currency caps allow us to make sure the economy doesn’t get too out of whack if we end up over-rewarding somewhere, while we still get to provide solid numerical rewards without needing to worry about them being too over the top. That being said, we are hearing your feedback and are evaluating some ways to reduce the pinch and provide some options for players that want to engage more deeply than the current currency caps allow.
MID-APRIL UPDATE
I’ve been talking about the Mid-April update for some time, and we’re getting close to when it’ll go live! You should expect to see a pretty large set of patch notes as over 450 bugs have been resolved so far, along with the popular request of removing player to player collision in the game. On top of that we have some of our very initial performance work going live, which won’t make the biggest impact but should provide some help on those early maps. As I said above, the team is actively hard at work hitting the maps in the game and we’re fully engaged on providing a more solid overall play experience. Beyond performance fixes in this update, we also want to help make building out your spell library more efficient - by now including the full 12 spell starter deck for every launch class you unlock. This means if you unlock a class through the realm or the store, that full starter deck will be added to your library. Of course many people have already unlocked classes, and we’ll also be retroactively adding those spells to your library at the same time. We want to make sure everyone can really get into the thick of deck building and explore their own play style with the game.
LATE BREAKING FEEDBACK
We’ve seen feedback coming in recently on the following items, and I wanted to at least briefly touch on them this week.Once again, your feedback has been absolutely invaluable to refining Magic: Legends, and I look forward to getting even more of it as we work our way towards full launch together. It’s been incredible seeing all of you exploring the multiverse every day, and I look forward to seeing you this weekend with the release of two new events! The first event is a Double Red Planar Mana Weekend, meaning any source that gives you red planar mana will be doubled from this Thursday through Monday morning. The second event is called Mana Rig Mayhem and focuses on the Mana Rig going haywire and requiring a group of planeswalkers to shut it down. The event will start this Thursday then run for 21 days, and if you participate in the event for 14 of those 21 days you’ll earn the brand-new Mythic Sorcery spell “Unstable Beam” along with some spell infusers for that spell and other currency rewards. It’s a fun event with an awesome reward, and I’m hyped for the community to quell the mayhem.
- Multiplayer Missions ending and losing out on drop loot if the reward chest is opened hastily.
We will be taking a look at potential solutions for this, because we definitely want everyone to grab their hard-earned loot before being pulled out of the mission/ordeal instances- AFK Players Farming Rewards
Our engine has built in AFK penalty tech, and since this issue is coming up we’ll start spinning it up. It will take a little time for us to get the values correct for each mission, but getting this online is something we’ll work on.- Mission Queue Notifications
We’ve heard that the “Public match taking too long notice” is obtrusive in the UI, and people would like the option to simply keep waiting while they do other content. We’ll evaluate the ability to make these changes. There are also reports that when a queue pops users are stuck in place until everyone accepts or declines. This isn’t ideal behavior, and we’ll look into it as well.- Overworld Reliquary Audio Ping
There is some sentiment within the community that they’d like to turn off the reliquary ping in the overworld and simply use the radar on the minimap. We’ll evaluate this for a future update.
I thank you again for reading, and I’ll see you in the multiverse!
Steve Ricossa
Executive Producer
Magic: Legends
