byobgyb#68150
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100% agree but I come at it from a different perspective. Incentivizing daily wins is a structural problem with Arena that is leading to a lot of negative player experiences. This deserves way more upvotes. I've played paper magic in casual & competitive formats going back 25 years, and the older Magic Online client (Modo I think was what people called it?), and now Arena. There's a big difference in the proportion of certain play styles I've observed in paper/Modo vs. Arena and I found paper/Modo to be a much more positive experience. In Arena, you can just annoy your opponents into conceding, and then get rewarded for it. The incentive is for winning.
That means roping which we probably all agree is underhanded/unsportsmanlike is a rewarded strategy. Also there are decks that I just have zero entertainment value in playing against. I know everyone's mileage may vary on the types of decks they have zero interest in spending their time playing against, for me it's the 100+ card deck that is every removal spell in the format. Sure it's not a great deck and very beatable, but I'd rather spend my time in a matchup that's not so boring & annoying. The "kill X creatures" daily reward is probably contributing to this type of deck. I've heard the argument of this daily goal is to teach people the importance of interaction, but it seems players are learning that every creature that hits the board must be killed - not learning the finer points of what you can play around, what's a real threat, what to hold removal for, etc.
In paper magic/Modo, I've never seen those decks.
In those formats, if you're playing competitive, you'll lose over the long run and that will discourage you. In casual paper/Modo, if people just say "I don't want to play this" and scoop, you don't get rewarded. Instead you get the message "I don't get to have fun playing because people don't want to play me" and most people will eventually pick up on this and play something else. There's an incentive against playing things that your opponents find consistently annoying.
Unfortunately, Arena is incentivizing just winning. Even in the play queue. So that leads to people, likely with all the best intentions, creating a deck from some idea. Maybe the idea is "I want to figure out which removal spells are best, I'll play them all for a few games and see which work and which don't." Then when opponents just scoop rather than play, they don't rethink whether what they are doing is actually fun, they think "hey this is great I'm getting wins." So regardless of whether their intentions were to troll/grief other players, that's what they end up doing & that's what gets reinforced. I'm not trying to shame anybody I've made decks myself that were super annoying, but in those other formats I fairly quickly learned that I wasn't going to have fun playing them because nobody wanted to play me.
Daily win rewards also incentivize taking a top-ranked meta deck and running it in the play queue. How many times do we all see Red Deck Wins, or before that Grixis mid-range, before that mono-black Control, etc - in the play queue? EDIT I literally just played a play queue game with a very not-serious deck and was matched against the blue/white soldier deck that is T1 right now. I myself have taken a deck for a spin in play queue before running it in ranked, and I don't think there's any bad intention - it's just there are limited options for people to find the types of games they are looking for.
This isn't about "banning" any particular deck or play style that I happen to be annoyed by. It's about having a place in Arena that you can play casually and have a good time. I play competitive Standard Ranked and also Limited, but a lot of time I want a casual game with a weird deck I created. It can be such a slog to wade through the standard ranked decks, the all removal deck, etc.
Last point, we've probably all read about the Johnny/Timmy/Spike profiles. Spike has a clear lane in Arena (Ranked queues). For Johnny & Timmy, it gets a lot more muddled. The Play queue is so broad and I doubt there's any player consensus on what it's for or what the etiquette is.
All of this is fixable.
Some options:
- Don't count play queue wins in the daily wins
- Get rid of the daily win rewards
- Get rid of the "kill x creatures" daily win rewards
- Allow for the creation of player-created rooms/queues where we can advertise & find casual play, beginners rooms, ranked deck test-drives, etc.
- Or create these dedicated queues - "Play" is just too broad.
- Have a "play x games" daily reward that only counts if the game goes to at least 4 turns