Dear Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast,
As angry as everyone is getting about the changes to OP, I understand where you are coming from. I tried to write this as a grand stand against the changes, but just couldn’t finish it, as I knew every point I made was driven by my personal stance in the matter and not the company one.
When the Junior Super Series was axed, it hurt me, but I understood. The events were sparsely attended and attracted a poor atmosphere for younger players. The events were more or less bullies beating up on smaller kids for their lunch/college money and showcased the kind of assholes and cheats you don’t want to see as the face of the game. There were a few good ones in the group, but the program as a whole was a failure. It’s possible it even lost customers, as people would snap quit once they hit the cutoff because they lost the gains they were used to.
When you announced Planeswalker Points and the first round of Organized Play changes, it hurt me, but I understood. Elo was a complicated mess, the play evaluation equivalent of Balduvian Shaman, and its death was a great step forward. Planeswalker Points weren’t perfect, but it was the start, and I trusted you to tweak it as you learned. The loss of Grand Prix and Pro Tour finish invites was the real one, but being conservative there seemed like the correct play to start off with. Pro Tours were definitely getting a bit too large, and while it seemed like the best option was some Grand Prix and Pro Tour finish invites, how many was necessary was something that could be easily evaluated after a couple seasons.
It just happens that this last change hurts me more than any of these. To summarize, you are moving from a high incentive system that rewards consistent, strong play with long-term benefits to one that rewards extreme grinding and extreme finishes with short-term benefits. And you know what, maybe this is good. It definitely makes the Pro Tour dream easier to get a taste of, if less reasonable and less sustainable.
Even if you cut the Pro Tour and just leave Grand Prix, people will still show up in droves. You only need look at other games and notice almost none of them have a Pro Tour model, but they still work. In fact, the only one I can think of with a PT model died a terrible death because it was designed specifically for the pros. In the Grand Prix–only games, you still see people traveling for events and a large local force showing up to play. The lower attendance they may have has more to do with this lack of brand power than any inherent flaw in that system.
So, rather than just rant about how this affects me, here are the legitimate flaws myself and others have come up with for the current system that you are going to want to address moving forward.
You need to keep proper incentives extended to all markets.
Matej Zatlkaj has pointed out all Pro Tour qualifying opportunities in Slovakia have been cut. No Grand Prix or Pro Tour finishes, not close to enough events for Planeswalker Points, no Nationals to qualify for Worlds, and now no PTQs outside of Magic Online. I don’t know if this is a TO-based issue or not, but you are basically cutting an entire country out of your market there. Issues like this need to be resolved. I understand you may think the market is too small to matter, but without some kind of latching point to start, it never will grow big enough. It is also possible you are underestimating some US markets along the same lines. If the market is large enough, the value of incentives spreads too far and essentially rounds to zero per person. You are probably already watching this, but I think erring on the side of safety here is probably better lest one region completely collapse in sales and you have to start basically from square one.
You may have more burnout and lower retention among competitive players.
First of all, Planeswalker Points as a system is prone to burnout. If you invest your time and miss, you are going to have spent a ton of time and money for nothing and be very disinclined to do so again in the future. Grand Prix byes are a bit of a safety net here, but it doesn’t feel like enough. The system wants some kind of equivalent to Pro Level 3 here, just enough to not be the full reward but enough to keep people around for the next season. The reason this doesn’t really happen with PTQs is the cost there is in essentially microtransactions. When you try to qualify that way, it only costs you one more Saturday to run the next one. To run the next PWP qualification, it costs months of hard work.
The shorter seasons also add more exits. In the current system, it takes a whole year of bad events for someone to fall out. In the future, it takes a third of that time. Expect to see people bricking for a single season then disappearing.
Finally, the loss of an end game to PTQing is a huge issue. Before, when you won a PTQ, you then had a shot to no longer have to grind them. Now, odds are you are going to have to win another one soon. I have never experienced the drop off the Tour back to PTQs, but from what I know from other people, it is miserable, and your main selling point is people having fun. There’s also the issue that the Pro Player Club helped get some of the real sharks out of circulation so more people could win. It was much cooler for a newer player to get to the Tour only to lose to someone like Luis than it will be for them to get smashed in a local PTQ top eight by him for the Nth time this year. Talk to Sam Black about his experiences PTQing since he could again. From what I understand, he probably could have won two by now. You may start harvesting talent at the local level from this, but there’s a chance this scares off a lot of people before that happens.
Even if a high-level PPC exists, the ranks are going to be hard to refill.
There are very few people who are just suddenly masters. There’s a reason Brad Nelson has a book out about him, and even that took a lot of work on his part. We all know the superstars are good for the game, but you don’t become one overnight. Part of what the old Pro Tour was about involved cultivating and growing these personalities. High-level success is a lot about building a network. When everyone keeps popping on and off the Tour, it’s hard to consistently work with good people and get significantly better to the point of being a Brian Kibler or Martin Juza.
The secondary market is going to take a hit, and that may affect booster sales much more than you think.
The hype created by superstar writers drastically increases the value of cards. Whether it’s a single article or a winning decklist, their name adds brand backing to the card’s stock. Demand spikes much harder than it would otherwise when a well-known name endorses it.
High-pack value sells packs.
That’s all there is to it. In a system where being absolutely better is less rewarded and therefore less publicized, it is going to be harder to generate the name recognition and associated trust that generates this effect.
The potential for customer backlash is larger than expected.
On November 2, Wizards of the Coast gave a set of PR employees a pay cut and reason to believe they are being fired soon.
If this was the case, things would be easy and internal.
The problem is all these PR people are those who have risen to the top in both intelligence and charisma through direct competition.
None of them have any official obligations to Wizards. They are free to speak their minds about the situation with no real fear of their actions resulting in immediate termination. They all have active platforms to do so.
This is also framed up against a division that is recording record sales. Turns out this is also happening at a time where there is already popular movement against perceived profit-maximization at the cost of worker benefit.
Be aware these are not your normal customers that will simply quit and move on if disenfranchised. If this becomes a fight, expect there to be significant damage even if you “win.”
So, that’s the big picture. I had a whole section about how this affects me personally, but it straight up doesn’t matter. I can quit, fight the changes, or just accept them, in the big picture. It doesn’t matter. Keep optimizing; just keep in mind the dynamics here aren’t quite that simple.
Best of luck,
Ari Lax
P.S. One semi-personal level rant.
You have stated you are honoring PPC benefits through next year. This announcement was made a long time ago.
Direct quote from the PPC website for all level 4+’s, bolding my own
“Member is invited to all Pro Tours and the World Championship.”
This direct contradiction to recent announcements is very frustrating for obvious reasons. It just feels like a blatant lie. If the event was canceled, sure, no invites if it doesn’t exist. But it does, and you aren’t inviting people who were told they would be not only by pre-existing policy but by constant reassurances that their benefits would hold. I could make more absurd arguments drawing anti-parallels between this and other recent document-based policy decisions, but that would likely dilute my point.
Also: “Member receives expenses-paid air travel ticket and hotel accommodations at all Pro Tours and the World Championship during the current season.” Are you paying for Luis to burdle at Gen Con?
My question is: are you actually going to be honoring these benefits or not?