I had a discussion with another MTGO player and it turned out both of us found leagues prohibitively expensive to enter.
If I go to the LGS, local game store, and play a 4 round Legacy tournament, that usually costs the equivalent of about 3-5 tickets. I'm not sure why MTGO needs to be more expensive. A digital solution that doesn't need to pay for a large store area in a central location in a heavily populated area, and paying for a judge, should be able to compete in price, I'd like to think. And by keeping the cost relatively high, you are unfortunately preventing players from joining.
Personally, I use MTGO mostly for brewing purposes and haven't actually played a league yet, after spending about 800-900 tickets on cards, and I just find it unattractive to pay to play when I expect to lose a lot. I think if you could find a way to enable cheaper playing experiences that could help enable more play on this platform, by a lot. One of the people I discussed with lives in a country where salaries are much lower, and that makes the issue much worse for them than for me.
There are many ways this could be implemented. One way is to lower the cost of playing in leagues and lowering the wins proportionally. Another way is to have for example 1 ticket games and keeping a record of win/loss percentages per player and season or a total number of wins.
So, I just wanted to put this thought forward to you. I understand that it's a complicated issue to start lowering prices, since you will self-cannibalize on the main leagues. But I think by avoiding this alternative you are limiting the platform's potential growth. By reducing financial barriers to entry you will grow the player base and it will benefit the platform in the end, if well implemented. This will need a lot of tweaking, probably.
To further discuss potential tweaking, I think the lower cost alternative could have slightly worse payoff. Then you can compensate by increasing the payoff for the more competitive leagues. That way, the lower cost tournament or playing alternative is supporting the higher cost tournaments, making them relatively attractive for competitive players. Also, you could tone down the competitive aspects of the lower cost tournaments, by for example not publishing leader boards and not sharing decklists etc. I think a ranking system could still be used to give the players some feedback on their playing. Attention for their results is a main value for MtG players, and by limiting it for the low-level competitive tournaments you are also making sure the high-level competitive tournaments stay relevant. I think this way, the low-cost leagues or single games would be a good alternative to the free playing which is of very varied quality (I enjoy it, but there is a lot of variation in quality of decks, my own included).
Thank you for reading!
If I go to the LGS, local game store, and play a 4 round Legacy tournament, that usually costs the equivalent of about 3-5 tickets. I'm not sure why MTGO needs to be more expensive. A digital solution that doesn't need to pay for a large store area in a central location in a heavily populated area, and paying for a judge, should be able to compete in price, I'd like to think. And by keeping the cost relatively high, you are unfortunately preventing players from joining.
Personally, I use MTGO mostly for brewing purposes and haven't actually played a league yet, after spending about 800-900 tickets on cards, and I just find it unattractive to pay to play when I expect to lose a lot. I think if you could find a way to enable cheaper playing experiences that could help enable more play on this platform, by a lot. One of the people I discussed with lives in a country where salaries are much lower, and that makes the issue much worse for them than for me.
There are many ways this could be implemented. One way is to lower the cost of playing in leagues and lowering the wins proportionally. Another way is to have for example 1 ticket games and keeping a record of win/loss percentages per player and season or a total number of wins.
So, I just wanted to put this thought forward to you. I understand that it's a complicated issue to start lowering prices, since you will self-cannibalize on the main leagues. But I think by avoiding this alternative you are limiting the platform's potential growth. By reducing financial barriers to entry you will grow the player base and it will benefit the platform in the end, if well implemented. This will need a lot of tweaking, probably.
To further discuss potential tweaking, I think the lower cost alternative could have slightly worse payoff. Then you can compensate by increasing the payoff for the more competitive leagues. That way, the lower cost tournament or playing alternative is supporting the higher cost tournaments, making them relatively attractive for competitive players. Also, you could tone down the competitive aspects of the lower cost tournaments, by for example not publishing leader boards and not sharing decklists etc. I think a ranking system could still be used to give the players some feedback on their playing. Attention for their results is a main value for MtG players, and by limiting it for the low-level competitive tournaments you are also making sure the high-level competitive tournaments stay relevant. I think this way, the low-cost leagues or single games would be a good alternative to the free playing which is of very varied quality (I enjoy it, but there is a lot of variation in quality of decks, my own included).
Thank you for reading!
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