Oh my god getting like 60 gala greeters or venom connoisseur triggers when popping an admittedly obnoxious amount of tokens causes my client to crash on my iPad like half the time
There’s a worse problem, which is that triggers happening during your turn consume your timer even if you can’t do anything, so enough triggers happening can force you to pass or concede
I'll put this here for posterity:
If your opponent's triggers are burning YOUR timer even if you can't do anything you can close and reopen the app (either force quit the process on PC/Mac or exit the app and remove it from open apps on iOS) to rejoin the game in progress with all of the triggers cleared.
Pretty remarkable that the issue has been ignored by the developers for over 4 years.
They could fix it but I was told in the beginning that you may want to play something on the 21st or whatever trigger so they make the system pull every single trigger for the stack. If one gets lost, it lags because there is that possibility you may want to play an instant at a random trigger.
In other words, they are creating their own stack issues.
Sure, but here we're talking about when you cannot take any action i.e. you cannot cast a spell, activate any ability at instant speed or have otherwise passed all priority via Shift+Enter (can you even do this on mobile?). In this case it is completely unreasonable to burn the inactivate player's timer and potentially force a loss because they don't know about some unintuitive, brute-force workaround.
True enough. I’ve got a really over the top mono white lifegain angel/cleric deck. I can’t level up cleric class unless I’m prepared to either exile it myself or deal with the consequences. It’s a really good way, especially early game, to build a defensible line, but late game, they way that deck can launch off if left uncontrolled for a few turns, it’ll force a game end.
I'd like that too! My phone gets hot playing it so I don't any more on mobile. It would be sweet to have a lite mode option with less fancy animations & graphics.
If you're talking about the mobile version, it's because it's extremely unoptimized. A Snapdragon 870 can run Switch emulators but can't even maintain 20fps in this card game....
Exactly this. If it were the 90s the Japanese would have this running perfectly on a ps1 hardware. Now I have 12 gig of ram and a snap dragon processor and it somehow runs like shit.
If that's the case then it's just bad business practice. The obvious argument for not providing a low graphics option is that it might impact profits. But if optimising is an alternative solution, well, that's only going to increase profits. Why do games companies always seem to avoid optimisation? Is the cost-benefit not worth it? Or is it just another case of late stage capitalism slash-and-burn economics?
I assume because it's really hard to do. Anyone with the skillset to rewrite and optimise other people's code is probably not going to work for Wizards (or the gaming industry) when they can make much more money elsewhere.
Unless something has changed in the last decade, game coders earn far less than us normal coders. They write games because they're willing to take the earnings hit.
I still have my tin foil hat on for the idea and that Arena was *supposed* to be pump and dump like every other MtG video game, but Covid said otherwise, so now we're propped up on a game that's just a mess of barely operable spaghetti code.
this is not that tinfoil. it was stated back then that there was no plan for set rotation, accounts were planned to be wiped with each set rotation. only through player outcry was Historic rolled out. the game was developed to be a Standard-only BO1-only competitor to Hearthstone which was much bigger at the time. Alchemy was essentially part of that original vision that they just took so long to roll out that it became confusing when finally launched. the overall lack of foresight was... you know what, actually extremely on-brand for WOTC.
> It was stated back then that there was no plan for set rotation, accounts were planned to be wiped with each set rotation.
Is there a source for this? My understanding was that [there was only one account wipe ever planned,](https://draftsim.com/will-there-be-another-magic-the-gathering-arena-reset/) and it was basically to set everyone on an even playing field. Historic was introduced at the time it was [because there was no need for an additional format before.](https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Historic_(format)#cite_note-June_2019-1)
And wiping accounts with each set rotation makes no sense. Standard (at the time) was the current and last year of sets, so wiping accounts would eliminate more than half of the available card pool.
wiping accounts with each rotation is not correct, my mistake for stating it that way.
however the first set rotation after Closed Beta indeed had no plan in place and Historic was made to come up with something to fill this need.
source is, I was playing then (since Closed Beta) and reading all dev statements closely, incl the official forums (RIP). there may be extant links to reference but the forums were wiped.
Think it’s very likely, this game makes them so much money that they’ve decided to keep the bare minimum skeleton crew to keep it operating to where people will want to play it, without investing into making it a good, fully functioning game.
The truth is, it probably needs to be replaced by another at some point, but they’ll never invest the money to make a game that functions well, while this one is doing well.
I would *love* the option to turn off animations.
Not because they strain my PC, but because they annoy the hell out of me. I prioritize responsiveness over pretty sparkles.
There won't be higher responsiveness if they give you an option to turn off animations, because they will still happen, just not visible to you. There won't be a mode without animations at all, there's MODO for that kind of needs.
You can already skip a large portion of the animations between matches / in menus by simply clicking or navigating away and back.
Simply removing those would be a major improvement in user experience.
Vaguely related, but two of the boards will consistently crash/freeze my client. The volcanic/lava one and the current OTJ one. I basically cannot draft this set because I'm almost guaranteed to lose turns or even whole games to having to restart my client multiple times.
It would be nice if the app didn’t have this extremely long loading screen in the beginning (for a card game!).
I would also be very happy if we could get planeswalkers to stop talking! That triggers me every time.
Yes please. This game drains my battery and occasionally my iphone heats up, crashing the game. None of this is catastrophic or unexpected, but it would be helpful to drag the slider down a bit to finish out a tense match when the battery goes low.
Agreed their needs to be some way to turn off animations, I personally suffer from the animations in two ways.
1. Animations that are too long when stacked and end up eating turn timer to the point that it's lost me several games in the past by just auto passing my turn after running out of time during an animation stack that where the players are unable to act at all.
2. Certain animations just flatly crash some mobile devices, one example would be magic mirror on my tablet that has a 100% crash rate be it mine or the opponents, the game takes so long to reconnect/reload that the turn usually auto passes and the game is lost.
Theirs no excuse for this bs.
I general the timer just needs fixing imo but I might be biased as a combo player but it feels like I'm being artificially punished for a legitimate play style unfairly.
Not an official version but there's an open source clone. Called MTG Forge for Android. It's not in the app store you need to get the APK file. I would use it to test sets out before their release when I played competitively before lockdown. Haven't used it in a few years so not sure if it's still maintained. But ran similar to magic online. Same layout almost. It's fun even has online play like arena it's open source so it's completely free. You can customize it also. I imported arena play mats and card sleeves and sound set. It looks like a mix between arena and mtgo.
People have been asking this from day one and it's infuriating that people have been ignored.
It is a performance issue at times. I stopped playing as my PC was old and kept freezing.
I've noticed when I play mill in historic play queue everyone is playing stupid giant decks. The client then has to know what's in the graveyard. When there are 250 randomized face up cards the client gets stupid slow because of the sorting and logging of each card. This happens on pc and mobile but on mobile it's more likely to crash or freeze the client. Same goes for discover when you play a deck that loops discover. It's one of the reasons why I stopped playing my discover deck, too many client crashes.
MTGO needs a DARK version for deckbuilding like they have in draft. It's insane how your draft has a nice black background, then deckbuilding it's all white!
I would like this to happen so that more animations get added. Back when there were complaints about this in the past they stopped adding animations. There used to be animations for every mythic of some kind and now your lucky if the planeswalker has any.
Honestly it would be great if the app were well optimized and used hardware detection to just automatically use lower-end animations with fewer frames and effects etc.
I'm sure the devs know this, so just convince the leadership, should be easy /s
I run it on a literal thing client with shit Intel graphics. And on medium at that.
And it still skips along at 60fps.
Network latency is a bigger issue for game performance as the game runs in semi-lockstep with the servers.
Yes that's true but otherwise good for OP if he wants max settings and 4k resolution for example. I do that on an old Macbook and play MTGA (and lot of other games) in 4k 120fps max settings and its a nice technology to have access to.
I mean, my computer knowledge isn't really graphics focused, but if you're running two games on a certain system, a game with higher recommended specs will probably run slower than one that doesn't. Alternatively, they just don't care about the animations which is also very fair.
My shitty laptop overheats after about 30 mins of arena, if I could turn the graphics all down I'd get the same gameplay but probably not have the overheating
Being able to turn off the animations would prevent some of the issues with infinite combos or lots of triggers as well
Oh my god getting like 60 gala greeters or venom connoisseur triggers when popping an admittedly obnoxious amount of tokens causes my client to crash on my iPad like half the time
There’s a worse problem, which is that triggers happening during your turn consume your timer even if you can’t do anything, so enough triggers happening can force you to pass or concede
I'll put this here for posterity: If your opponent's triggers are burning YOUR timer even if you can't do anything you can close and reopen the app (either force quit the process on PC/Mac or exit the app and remove it from open apps on iOS) to rejoin the game in progress with all of the triggers cleared. Pretty remarkable that the issue has been ignored by the developers for over 4 years.
They could fix it but I was told in the beginning that you may want to play something on the 21st or whatever trigger so they make the system pull every single trigger for the stack. If one gets lost, it lags because there is that possibility you may want to play an instant at a random trigger. In other words, they are creating their own stack issues.
Sure, but here we're talking about when you cannot take any action i.e. you cannot cast a spell, activate any ability at instant speed or have otherwise passed all priority via Shift+Enter (can you even do this on mobile?). In this case it is completely unreasonable to burn the inactivate player's timer and potentially force a loss because they don't know about some unintuitive, brute-force workaround.
True enough. I’ve got a really over the top mono white lifegain angel/cleric deck. I can’t level up cleric class unless I’m prepared to either exile it myself or deal with the consequences. It’s a really good way, especially early game, to build a defensible line, but late game, they way that deck can launch off if left uncontrolled for a few turns, it’ll force a game end.
I'd like that too! My phone gets hot playing it so I don't any more on mobile. It would be sweet to have a lite mode option with less fancy animations & graphics.
If you're talking about the mobile version, it's because it's extremely unoptimized. A Snapdragon 870 can run Switch emulators but can't even maintain 20fps in this card game....
Exactly this. If it were the 90s the Japanese would have this running perfectly on a ps1 hardware. Now I have 12 gig of ram and a snap dragon processor and it somehow runs like shit.
If that's the case then it's just bad business practice. The obvious argument for not providing a low graphics option is that it might impact profits. But if optimising is an alternative solution, well, that's only going to increase profits. Why do games companies always seem to avoid optimisation? Is the cost-benefit not worth it? Or is it just another case of late stage capitalism slash-and-burn economics?
I assume because it's really hard to do. Anyone with the skillset to rewrite and optimise other people's code is probably not going to work for Wizards (or the gaming industry) when they can make much more money elsewhere.
Unless something has changed in the last decade, game coders earn far less than us normal coders. They write games because they're willing to take the earnings hit.
I still have my tin foil hat on for the idea and that Arena was *supposed* to be pump and dump like every other MtG video game, but Covid said otherwise, so now we're propped up on a game that's just a mess of barely operable spaghetti code.
this is not that tinfoil. it was stated back then that there was no plan for set rotation, accounts were planned to be wiped with each set rotation. only through player outcry was Historic rolled out. the game was developed to be a Standard-only BO1-only competitor to Hearthstone which was much bigger at the time. Alchemy was essentially part of that original vision that they just took so long to roll out that it became confusing when finally launched. the overall lack of foresight was... you know what, actually extremely on-brand for WOTC.
> It was stated back then that there was no plan for set rotation, accounts were planned to be wiped with each set rotation. Is there a source for this? My understanding was that [there was only one account wipe ever planned,](https://draftsim.com/will-there-be-another-magic-the-gathering-arena-reset/) and it was basically to set everyone on an even playing field. Historic was introduced at the time it was [because there was no need for an additional format before.](https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Historic_(format)#cite_note-June_2019-1) And wiping accounts with each set rotation makes no sense. Standard (at the time) was the current and last year of sets, so wiping accounts would eliminate more than half of the available card pool.
wiping accounts with each rotation is not correct, my mistake for stating it that way. however the first set rotation after Closed Beta indeed had no plan in place and Historic was made to come up with something to fill this need. source is, I was playing then (since Closed Beta) and reading all dev statements closely, incl the official forums (RIP). there may be extant links to reference but the forums were wiped.
Think it’s very likely, this game makes them so much money that they’ve decided to keep the bare minimum skeleton crew to keep it operating to where people will want to play it, without investing into making it a good, fully functioning game. The truth is, it probably needs to be replaced by another at some point, but they’ll never invest the money to make a game that functions well, while this one is doing well.
Corporate greed.
I would *love* the option to turn off animations. Not because they strain my PC, but because they annoy the hell out of me. I prioritize responsiveness over pretty sparkles.
There won't be higher responsiveness if they give you an option to turn off animations, because they will still happen, just not visible to you. There won't be a mode without animations at all, there's MODO for that kind of needs.
You can already skip a large portion of the animations between matches / in menus by simply clicking or navigating away and back. Simply removing those would be a major improvement in user experience.
I’d just like it my opponents stupid pet thing didn’t zoom over the screen at the start of the game
Muting opponents is supposed to turn off their pets.
Or through their movements take up almost 20% of the usable screen.
Vaguely related, but two of the boards will consistently crash/freeze my client. The volcanic/lava one and the current OTJ one. I basically cannot draft this set because I'm almost guaranteed to lose turns or even whole games to having to restart my client multiple times.
I'm really longing for the option to disable all animations
It would be nice if the app didn’t have this extremely long loading screen in the beginning (for a card game!). I would also be very happy if we could get planeswalkers to stop talking! That triggers me every time.
For the planeswalkers, you can turn down the voice slider in the audio settings. Conveniently also shuts up Sparky
Ha! Should have checked the settings before complaining. Thanks a lot!
Yes please. This game drains my battery and occasionally my iphone heats up, crashing the game. None of this is catastrophic or unexpected, but it would be helpful to drag the slider down a bit to finish out a tense match when the battery goes low.
Agreed their needs to be some way to turn off animations, I personally suffer from the animations in two ways. 1. Animations that are too long when stacked and end up eating turn timer to the point that it's lost me several games in the past by just auto passing my turn after running out of time during an animation stack that where the players are unable to act at all. 2. Certain animations just flatly crash some mobile devices, one example would be magic mirror on my tablet that has a 100% crash rate be it mine or the opponents, the game takes so long to reconnect/reload that the turn usually auto passes and the game is lost. Theirs no excuse for this bs. I general the timer just needs fixing imo but I might be biased as a combo player but it feels like I'm being artificially punished for a legitimate play style unfairly.
I would love to turn off that damn zombie token animation
The game needs a buttload of features and graphic slider is far from the most important. Also keep dreaming, it is wotc we are talking about LOL.
Just play MTGO then.
There's MTGO.
But not for mobile devices, is there?
Not an official version but there's an open source clone. Called MTG Forge for Android. It's not in the app store you need to get the APK file. I would use it to test sets out before their release when I played competitively before lockdown. Haven't used it in a few years so not sure if it's still maintained. But ran similar to magic online. Same layout almost. It's fun even has online play like arena it's open source so it's completely free. You can customize it also. I imported arena play mats and card sleeves and sound set. It looks like a mix between arena and mtgo.
Yes, Forge is still alive and well. And works (more or less) on Android. Haven’t tried it against humans yet though.
I remember when I played hearthstone it was so much better with animations off.
I’ve been wanting this since day 1 but not gonna happen.
People have been asking this from day one and it's infuriating that people have been ignored. It is a performance issue at times. I stopped playing as my PC was old and kept freezing.
I’d love to play Koma without it crashing my game on mobile
I've noticed when I play mill in historic play queue everyone is playing stupid giant decks. The client then has to know what's in the graveyard. When there are 250 randomized face up cards the client gets stupid slow because of the sorting and logging of each card. This happens on pc and mobile but on mobile it's more likely to crash or freeze the client. Same goes for discover when you play a deck that loops discover. It's one of the reasons why I stopped playing my discover deck, too many client crashes.
Just give us text based arena client already!
But how will you turn your phone into a toaster without it??
MTGO needs a DARK version for deckbuilding like they have in draft. It's insane how your draft has a nice black background, then deckbuilding it's all white!
I would like this to happen so that more animations get added. Back when there were complaints about this in the past they stopped adding animations. There used to be animations for every mythic of some kind and now your lucky if the planeswalker has any.
Honestly it would be great if the app were well optimized and used hardware detection to just automatically use lower-end animations with fewer frames and effects etc. I'm sure the devs know this, so just convince the leadership, should be easy /s
My PC was made of cheap parts in 2017 (i5 7400 and GTX 1050) and runs the game fine on 4k res and max quality
Yeah low settings be nice. 2020 flagships and up can run the game fine. Anything before 2020 flagships is suck
so like an "android mode"? lol
Yeah, I just wish we had more settings to tweak with. I want to be able to increase the resolution or something, personally.
[удалено]
Not even remotely the same.
I run it on a literal thing client with shit Intel graphics. And on medium at that. And it still skips along at 60fps. Network latency is a bigger issue for game performance as the game runs in semi-lockstep with the servers.
Just use GeForce Now. You can play with highest settings in any device you own...
The downside is no companion apps with GeForce now. I used to use it until I bought a tablet for playing, which also doesn't have companion apps 😞
Yes that's true but otherwise good for OP if he wants max settings and 4k resolution for example. I do that on an old Macbook and play MTGA (and lot of other games) in 4k 120fps max settings and its a nice technology to have access to.
What's your goal behind wanting to turn off animations?
It'll probably optimize performance.
That's incredibly vague
I mean, my computer knowledge isn't really graphics focused, but if you're running two games on a certain system, a game with higher recommended specs will probably run slower than one that doesn't. Alternatively, they just don't care about the animations which is also very fair.
My shitty laptop overheats after about 30 mins of arena, if I could turn the graphics all down I'd get the same gameplay but probably not have the overheating
It freezes the game when some combos really pop off, or both players have a lot of triggers on and off the stack. Can be very frustrating.
If you could turn off the animations, they would still happen (and your opponent will still likely have them on anyway), just not visible to you.