Massive update to TappedOut
TappedOut forum
Posted on June 3, 2017, 8:25 a.m. by shaftdiggity
It would be awesome if paper magic recorded statistics and achievements that both individual players and the meta had access to for all games (casual and tournaments).This could be achieved through a massive upgrade to TappedOut, and specifically, the TappedOut app.
How I would envision it is this, we would be able to link a DCI number to a TappedOut profile. This would prevent creating bogus accounts to beef up your numbers.
TappedOut would have digital "game tables" setup that are maybe tied to real-world coordinates. Players could then check into a game table to play magic. Maybe there would be a setting to "want to play" and then you could find others more easily at conventions and the like. They would then select the deck that they are using from tapped out, would then open a life counter (and game status) page featuring their featured card from TappedOut. The life counter would record life, poison counters, commander damage, energy tokens, everything. The game could accommodate duels as well as multiplayer. The game proceeds until someone wins, then players submit and record the match. Players can only have one game open at a time. There might have to be, out of necessity, an option to withdraw from game if one of the players refuse to submit or finalize the game, and maybe an honor system would show the number of withdrawals over the total number of games.
LGSs could have more digital tables setup, and have the ability to record achievements. Maybe more appropriate for commander, achievements could be game-state based goals that show as a badge when looking at a person's profile on TappedOut. Things like win X games by poison counters would earn the assassin achievement, or have 50+ creatures in play would earn the breeder achievement. Also available would be loads of format-specific statistics for individual players that they could personally access.
I'm not a tech-savvy person, so I don't know the feasibility or difficulty of implementing this, but I think it would be amazing.
Obviously, something like this will cost a lot of time, effort, and thereby money to implement and develop. What could be done to reduce the cost would be for TappedOut to use Kickstarter (or something similar) to crowd-source the app, maybe charging $20-$40 with the person receiving the upgraded app at launch.
What are your thoughts and would you pay/use this?
shaftdiggity says... #3
I appreciate your feedback, Boza, and understand you're not a fan of the concept.
I'm a fan of data. Something like this would greatly assist in recording wins and losses and other metrics by format and by deck. This is currently done for the large tournaments (and, to a lesser extent on MTGO), but this could give data on a particular store meta as well as individual data. While some of this can currently be recorded manually, doing so digitally would make things easier and add a sense of "offcialness" to the data.
Unfortunately, walking around with a deckbox doesn't necessarily convey that you want to play modern, standard, commander, pauper, legacy, or what specific format you're looking to play, which the app could do.
I'm not looking to change your mind, Boza, I just wanted to elaborate on the concept a bit more.
June 3, 2017 9:53 a.m.
1/ However, I would argue that no-one really wants to see non-tournament data, non-top 8/16 data. Those are the best decks at the time for that week in that part of the world. Do you really need to know anything more beside it? All GPs and other big tourneys have top 64 data even. When is the last time you looked at the deck of the person placed 64th?
2/There are literally a hundered of magic games played daily in an LGS, even for a just simple FNM with 20-25 people. Even if you have the data, will you look at the performance of bottom of a FNM to see what their decks are? Most likely not.
3/ With so much info on MTG available, you need to filter. You cannot have stats on every single deck in a tournament, as it is useless.
4/ Deck stats are useless in any card game. Say for example, this week you ran in FNM with deck A. You liked deck A, but for next week you changed 2 cards in the main. Is it the same deck? No, and that would create hundreds of variations that create unnecessary "noise".
Tl;dr - More information does not mean better information. Also, Golden rule of statistics - garbage in, garbage out.
June 3, 2017 11:01 a.m. Edited.
shaftdiggity says... #6
I would argue that people would want to know about non-tournament data when it comes to non-supported formats like Legacy, Modern, pauper, commander, etc. I'm ignorant of any sites that currently record stats for top decks that aren't the standard format or are MTGO.
I think the biggest difference is if you're coming from a standard-format only netdecking perspective, yeah, this concept probably doesn't appeal to you, you only need to concern yourself with how the best person in the world performed. However, if you want to know what decks are playing well at your local game store, or want to know how your decks compare to that of your friend (or rival), or even just people that want extensive data on their own performance so they can better understand how to improve, this would be good.
June 3, 2017 11:25 a.m.
1/ Modern and Legacy - mtgtop8.com and mtggoldfish.com. These two are actual wizards sanctioned formats. There are weekly big tournaments for both, especially modern.
2/ Pauper really exists only online since there is no official paper ban list, thus it is not supported in paper as there is nothing to support. But there are plenty of sites that support the format (mtggoldfish aggregates MTGO Pauper data).
3/ Commander has literally dozens of popular sites that aggregate data, with edhrec and mtggoldfish being the most popular. There is no good tournament data, as there is no good multiplayer tournament format.
4/ I am not coming from a standard format net-decking perspective. What you are suggesting is to (arguably) improve the imformation available, so people can netdeck better. You are just switching the "world meta" with "meta in the my local store".
5/ If you want to know how your deck compares to that of your friends, there is no objective to determine that. There is no point system or anything of the sort that says one deck is better than another.
6/ For improvement on your own play, tracking any deck statistics is kind of meaningless too. There is so much going on in a game of Magic that it is impossible to know what is the fault of the pilot and what is the fault of the deck. A single match gives little to no discernible information. You double digits of matches to extract meaningful data and normalize mistakes due to play errors.
Example: I picked up Death & Taxes for Legacy and ran it in tournaments. The first time I ever made a change to the list I started with was after the third tournament - only then did I feel comfortable knowing that it was not my mistake in piloting it.
You cannot require such diligence from your average Joe with an app.
Tl;dr - There are plenty of resources already. The idea does not work for self-improvement. The things you are trying to quantify are not really quantifiable.
Boza says... #2
Really no idea what the end goal of this is.
Putting achievements in Magic? Magic does not need achievements and you can easily make up your own, if you need them. In my experience, people rarely play in the prerelease mini-games (dragons of tarkir 'throw the dice' was the worst), so why should people care for random achievements?
Tracking the performance of a deck on T/O? You can easily do that as an update to the decklist itself now. Just write "This week I lost badly to so-and-so, but won solidly over such-and-such". That is usually enough and automated tracking of every single deck in T/O is definitely nigh on impossible to implement. In additional, most decks and players are of kitchen table magic variety and no-one is going to those up for reference consistently.
Making games of Magic easier to find? In a congested place like a convention, tables with games of Magic are never difficult to find and you can just carry a deckbox in hand and everyone in a 20 meter radius will know that you want to play. For larger areas, wizards have created the so-called "local game stores", where you are almost guaranteed to find people playing Magic.
Tl;dr - Magic is not Pokemon Go, nor does it need to be.
June 3, 2017 8:58 a.m.