The Future of MPDC

This past Monday, I was sitting online once again, watching as the same dozen or so players slowly filtered into the #MPDC channel and registered for our weekly event. I hate to sound an old timer, but it's hard for me not to reflect on the days when this event was drawing 40+ players every week. In fact, we just barely had enough players to make the 8 person minimum for the event, and only because someone who was planning on playing was willing to jump in to make sure it happened.

After reflecting on this trend, I sent out the following Email to everyone who participated in the Standard Pauper Double League - over 60 players in all:

You are receiving this E-mail because you participated in the Standard Pauper Double League. As I mentioned at pdcmagic earlier this week, I am seriously considering changing our weekly Standard Pauper tournament to a recurring league-style event, where pairings are played out at each person's convenience rather than everyone having to show up at a particular time and place.

With our weekly attendance averaging only around a dozen players, it's clear that most of you don't participate in this event. Back when I did my survey, it did seem like the most common reason for a lack of participation was simply how hard it was to make any particular time and day of the week work for a majority of players.

If we were to make this change to MPDC, would you be interested in participating in such an event long term? And if so, would you be willing to play out multiple matches in a week? How often would you like the league to end, award prizes, and then start up again?

As I consider this change, your feedback is very important to me. I would love to facilitate as many people as possible playing Standard Pauper on a weekly basis, and maybe this is the best way for that to happen. I'd love to hear back from each and every one of you, even if it's just to say that you wouldn't really be interested.

Thanks for reading.

I've already heard back from over a dozen players, and for the most part the response has been fairly positive. It does appear that running a league-style event is much better for many people who remain interested in Standard Pauper. 

That said, there are still several details that would need to be worked out:

1. What is a reasonable number of matches to expect people to play in a week?
2. How often would the league reset - only once Standard rotated, or once a new set was released, once every four weeks, or something else?
3. How would the event be organized - using a spreadsheet like the recent Zendikar Unified Sealed League, using the built-in tournament software on Gatherling, or something else entirely?
4. Would the league feed into some sort of in-person event, like a Top 8 or something similar?

Now I certainly don't want to give the impression that my mind is made up yet. However, I certainly see the advantages of moving from a weekly event to a league-style approach. Sure, it has its disadvantages. But on the whole, they might just outweigh the disadvantages.

If you've got an opinion on the matter, I'd love to hear it. Drop me an email at gwyned at gmail dot com, or reply in the comments below.

It's Getting Bigger

Last time, I wrote about the new bug with the Standard Pauper filter on Magic Online that now allows any Uncommon currently in Standard that was once printed at Common into matches. Obviously this would have a big impact on the metagame going forward.

As it turns out, it wasn't just the Standard Pauper filter that was bugged...

While the community has gotten reassurances that the Magic Online team is aware of these issues, thus far there is no word on what the problem is or when it will be fixed...

As far as MPDC is concerned, until the problem is resolved, there seems to be three options:

1. Simply go with the filter as is. The "Uncommon-Commons" would now be allowed into the format. 
2. Continue with the rules as they are. This means that despite the fact that players will technically be able to enter a match with illegal cards, once they are discovered, that player will receive a match-loss.
3. Change the way registration works such that Gatherling enforces the rarity restrictions rather than Magic Online.

This is a big issue, and I appreciate all those who have commented thus far. Here are some of my initial thoughts:

•  Looking at the list of Commons that would be added to the format, only Arc Lightning, Gravedigger and Stab Wound would see widespread play with the potential to disrupt the format in an unhealthy way. The rest of the cards might find a home in particular archetypes, but aren't really broken or overpowered. But Gravedigger in particular is a strong card with no real answers in the format. Of course, the same might be said for Font of Return.
• Having new players enter what they believe is a legal deck, only to be disqualified due to a bug with Magic Online, seems like a good way not to keep new players. While MPDC worked this way for a long time, I have no doubt it hurt the growth of our player base. And having a filter that doesn't work properly only makes the problem worse, since the new players would have every right to believe that their deck was in fact legal.
• The third solution seems like a good idea, but in fact Gatherling doesn't actually work that way, at least not the version we use on pdcmagic.com. Even if you force players to enter a decklist to register, they can still just enter nonsense characters into the decklist and bypass that restriction. And it certainly doesn't tell a player that a card entered isn't legal for a particular format. So if we wanted to go down this road, we would have to switch over to the software at Gatherling.com, essentially leaving pdcmagic altogether.

Hopefully this will all be a moot point. The Magic Online team is aware of the issue, and one can hope the problem will be resolved before the next season of MPDC starts. We shall see.

DCI Reporter vs Gatherling

With all the discussion of the new client, I have been taking another look at my system for running Player Run Events on Magic Online and trying to see if there is a better way.

For as long as I have been host of Monday Pauper Deck Challenge, I have been using DCI Reporter version 3, which is a now-defunct program designed by Wizards of the Coast for running large Magic the Gathering tournaments. It was recently replaced with Wizards Reporter, which I have also tested and found it pretty lackluster.

The other alternative is to using Gatherling, a program designed and coded by jamuraa, who maintains PDCMagic.com, which was once the premier site for all things Pauper online. Not too long ago, jamuraa updated the program to allow it to perform many of the functions of DCI Reporter while also taking advantage of its previous use as a database of events and decklists.

For yesterday's event, I decided to run both side-by-side and see what happened. Here are some of my observations, not only from yesterday but from my experience with both programs.

• Gatherling is much simpler. Assuming a player can login to his or her Gatherling account, the entire process is essentially automated. Players submit their decklist, submit their results, and view standings all from within one program. 
• However, Gatherling lacks a lot of the flexibility and advanced features of DCI Reporter. You can't change the spelling of a player's username once the event has started. There are no pretty tables you can export to a public forum for ease of reference. And if something goes wrong, there's no backup, no way to fix results from a previous round, and no way to create multiple byes in a round. While these features aren't something I use often, when I need them, I really need them.
• DCI Reporter has these extras built in. It does everything Gatherling does and more. But it's a lot more work to use. You end up having to enter the data into Gatherling eventually anyway, although that process is sped-up by a handy feature that allows Gatherling to read DCI Reporter's backup files.
• DCI Reporter also requires you to enter all the data manually. Players have to registered one at a time, results have to be entered table by table, and both pairings and standings have to exported to somewhere else in order for the players to see them.
• Perhaps strangest of all, the two programs don't calculate standings the same way. In every round, the standings from Gatherer were different than those reported by DCI Reporter, based on some sort of difference in the way tiebreakers are calculated. In the end, both programs reported the same final standings after Swiss, so I suppose it all worked out in the end, but it's still strange.

So now the question is - which way is better, and why? What do you think?

Running Player Run Events Using Gatherling

Yesterday was Memorial Day here in the United States. As a result of family obligations, I was unable to host Monday Pauper Deck Challenge. At one point I thought I might have a guest host lined up, but in the end he was unable to make it work. However, in the process, I prepared a quick primer for how to use the Gatherling app on pdcmagic.com to host events without needing any additional software. In the interest of expanding the pool of players who are able to host Player Run Events, I decided to take today's blog post to make this information available.

Once you've read this over, if you have any questions or feedback, let me know in the comments below, and I will do my best to incorporate them in the next revision. Thanks!

** Note that this does not cover actually creating the event itself, since that requires a higher level of access. If you're interested in actually starting a brand new PRE series and would like help doing just that, let me know and I'd be happy to show you how to set all that up. But what's included below is everything you would need to know to act as a guest host for an event. **

Running Player Run Events Using Gatherling
10 Simple Steps

1. Find the event under Host CP and click on the event in question. Note that the event will only show up here in you have been given host access to this event.

2. Here the host can add players at the bottom of the event page by entering the name where it says "Add:" and clicking "Update Registration." Most of the time this will not be necessary as players can actually register for the event by themselves (see below).

3. The players can also join by finding the event name under the listing "Preregister for Events" in their Player CP and clicking Register.

4. Once the time for registration has expired, click on the "Start Event" button on the event page.

5. When the event is running, the event page has several new options now:

• Drop player - Remove player from the event
• Add player - Add a new player (will not be paired until next round)
• Recalulate Standings - Display updated standings
• Reset Event - Delete all pairings and start the entire event over

 6. Once you have started an event, if you click on "Match Listing" from the event page, it will display the Pairings for the current Round as well as those of previous rounds. At the bottom of the page is a handy tool to copy/paste the pairings into MTGO chat. From this page, you can also award any unpaired player a bye for the current round.

7. Players will be able to enter their own match results from their Player CP as well as drop from the event by clicking the "Report Result" option under "Active Matches"; as the host, you may also manually enter results on the event page, although you should not need to do so in most cases.

8. Once all results have been entered for a round, Gatherling will automatically pair the next round.

9. When you click on "Standings" from the event page, you can see the current Standings based on the latest completed round.

10. Once the Swiss rounds are over, again Gatherling will automatically pair the Top # Playoffs and continue pairings until the event has completed.