Hello Magic fans,
If you have been following our website for a long time, you might have noticed that we have not published much content in the new year, and I would like to use this opportunity to let you know why and how MTGO Academy will move into the future. Some of the points I will mention we planned to keep under the radar, but ultimately I feel that our users deserve to know.
First of all – regular content will be back. This includes articles and videos. The main reason we are currently “going short” on content is the following- we have big projects running that consume much of our man power and until those are done we simply don’t have much time to take care of contributor schedules, editing, video rendering, etc. As all of you know, we aim to maintain pretty high standards for our content and without proper post-processing, we feel the quality could not be guaranteed. I would like to talk about those projects so you guys see what is going on and how you might benefit from the results:
a) MTGO Academy goes LLC – We are incorporating the business as LLC. This will not only allow us to run everything in a much more controlled way but also make it possible to handle advertisers, investors, and stakeholders in a much more formal way. The legal framework is time consuming but ultimately worth the effort.
b) MTGO Academy develops bot software – While there are possibilities to buy or rent bots, we simply feel that as serious business we need to rely on our software moving forward. Only this will allow us to customize the code as we need it and make sure it is clean, fast, and reliable. You can see our first beta version of the architecture when you open trade with “Academy_QuizBot” in game and grab a few free commons/uncommons/rares after answering a multiple choice trivia question. So far, we are certain that we can exceed the speed and reliability of the best competitors and stay within the legal framework of the Wizards CoC. We appreciate any comments or bug reports.
c) MTGO Academy is developing a “DeckTech” Tool – We are looking to create a good utility that will allow us (and users) an easy up/download of all kinds of decks in MTGO deck format along with a neat search tool for ease of navigation. I cannot talk about a lot of details at this point, but be assured that this tool will be very useful for beginners and tournament veterans alike!
d) MTGO Academy develops “MtGNotifier” Version 0.04 – If you haven’t heard of our popular tool by now, then today is your lucky day! MtGNotifier allows you to easily input all existing chat symbols with a simple click in Classifieds or chat, adds audio to trade requests or the start of a draft so you never miss an important message or event again, and updates you immediately if we publish a news on our news page. Check it out here
e) MTGO Academy is working on the best and biggest MTGO beginner guide out there – We will cover all aspects of the game in a way that will make it possible to use it as the ultimate reference for all questions that can come up for users of the program and the game in general. This costs a lot of energy and time, and I would like to encourage anyone that wants to be a part of it or has a certain area of expertise (e.g. MTGO on Macintosh – go, Apple, go!) to contact us! Help us out to finish faster and better.
As you can see we have a lot of stuff in the pipeline, and we are NOT going to abandon the content side – we just need a bit of air to get the important developments out of the way and then content will be back. We expect a return to a reduced regular schedule with 3 contributions (articles and videos) a week within the first week of March. This will be increased as we see it fit depending on our other commitments. If you think you can help with administrative tasks or content, feel free to contact us!
Let me finish by ensuring you that we are doing better then ever and have a lot of plans for the future. We have a simple plan and are not going to stop until we are there – becoming the ultimate website for MTGO fans around the globe.
I hope this helps to clarify some of the concerns a few loyal visitors expressed. Stay tuned for a lot and more!
Plejades and the MTGO Academy Staff
Good job, guys. Keep it up.
I approve. Thanks for the update =)
Awesome! I was worried this site was dying, so I’m very happy to see lots of stuff is going on behind the scenes =)
Can’t wait to see it come to fruition!
I can ensure you that we are everything but dying. In fact I wish we had more people to handle all the projects we are working on. Especially the beginners guide is huge and requires a lot of work.
Meanwhile feel free to browse past content and test our Academy_QuizBot
Tested the Quizbot, got some nice cards.
Win – win! =D
Thanks for the update and congrats on your success allowing you to continue to grow. I do look forward to the return of more content, but it is good to know that things were happening in the interim.
Glad to hear what your all up to. I knew you were doing something but, wasn’t sure what. Now that I know its a BOT I think I’ll try out the quiz bot.
Taking volunteers? If you need help editing the guide for grammar/syntax/spelling/content I believe I could be of service. Feel free to contact me if so. Thanks for the update.
Nice update of things to come, really interested to check out the QuizBot to see what kind of things your working on.
Good plan with your bot’s, having and knowing the right way to modify them as you want will really help.
I couldn’t trade with the Quizbot, but I like the idea and hope for smoother sailing in the future!
More content is always good — especially videos, I really think there’s a lot of room for video content. It’s popular on other sites and could be a real big draw for MTGO Academy. Also, hint hint — where’s the Limited Resources vids at?!?
Keep it up!
i used the quizbot its a very nice idea but when i tried trading with the quizbot as soon as i typed done it kicked me out
Hello,
be aware of the fact that the bot has a time limit. If you are spending to much time it will kick you out and you can try next week again. It announces the time left but I witnessed several instances where people where simply ignoring it or reacting to late. Thanks for the comments so far.
I approve.
Keep the good job!
Hello,
@fifthchild: The Bug that causes that you could not trade with the quizbot in the past should be fixed in the meantime (the bot had problems with some specific MTGO usernames – it was an OCR thing and we are happy that we could discover such issues while in BETA).
If you have further problems and discover any bugs, please report it to us! So we have the change to perform better :-).
And if you had any problems in the past, don’t hesitate to try it again later. We are constantly working on all known bugs.
Glad to see that the behind-the-scenes stuff is moving the site forward. Keep up the good work.
Just tried the quiz bot, got the answer right chose 4 cards and had more than a minute left in trade time, still told me that I ran out of time in second trade confirmation screen.
@Insane Pete: According to our log the timeout happend exactly after 5 minutes. During the confirmation process (after the “done”) the timer is stopped but it is possible that your clock run out exactly at the moment you typed “done” and the timeout process was initiated. Sorry for the issue.
Best way to prevent it – stay comfortably withing the time limit and try again next week
I am new to mtgo, I came to this site and watched most of your videos. They were very helpful and now that you are bolstering up the content for beginners I feel it would provide a very much needed building block to help them feel competent playing from the get go. Thanks again and I am looking forward to seeing new projects!
Keep up the good work!
Used the quiz bot, answered my question, and got some decent cards. Nothing fantastic, but I suppose people beat me to it. Can’t wait for the content to come back in full swing
@ Muthy: We are refilling the bot regularly with rares, uncommons, and commons. Obviously due to the high popularity the really good stuff goes fast.