Stop Rewarding Trolls
MTGA rewards and encourages timer trolling in a number of ways I will detail here.
Lack of a chat means complete anonymity and a lack of social pressure against trolling. There is no way to socially punish trolls or discourage trolls through community action in chats. You may have removed chats to stop abuse, but the truth is you've stopped social pressure against abuse
Lack of a report feature within the app means that players also can't effectively get WOTC attention on the issue. Hiding the ability to report a player behind the bug reports, and putting that bug report feature somewhere other than in MTGA itself means that you're effectively hiding the report feature from players who need it, protecting the trolls. It doesn't help that the bug report itself is buggy, as I had no intention of posting this here, but it won't let me submit a traditional bug report so here I am
Players have no recourse against trolls that doesn't give them exactly what they want. Players are either stuck sitting there through the trolling having a terrible play experience, or forced to concede and allow the troll to win. Players are literally being turned into a captive audience for the trolls by WOTC. You are delivering them victims on a silver platter and then taking away any method the victim has to fight back.
In short, WOTC is actively on the side of the trolls. Your game is designed to reward trolls. Your game is designed to subject players to trolls without anything they can do about it. And your game is designed in such a way that we can't even easily and effectively report trolls. And thus your game is full of trolls and the play experience is excruciating.
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bonsai#70698
commented
I concur. You're right on every point. I'll also add the turn/time-out mechanic is not a good fit to how Magic is actually played and it further enables trolling. The reality of the Arena-exclusive time-wasting "control" deck without any win condition aside from opponent resignation or turn-time-out-activation decks is all too real.
I had over 5k hours in Arena, but uninstalled not due to any (of the numerous) bugs, but solely due to WotC's continued tolerance of toxic trolling and lack of ANY visible player moderation.
This is inexcusable behavior from any online game publisher regardless of the underlying technology, game genre, or interaction model.