Mark's article today
I didn't really doubt it, but posting just because it's always slow here...
I didn't really doubt it, but posting just because it's always slow here...
Myth #3 – R&D Doesn’t Care About Casual Players
I think this myth comes when players look at how much Wizards does for competitive play. Why can’t casual play get that kind of support? The simple answer to this is – how? How exactly does Wizards support casual play?
R&D does its job. We go out of our way to design cards that cater to casual players. We make lots and lots of Timmy and Johnny cards. We make cards with an eye toward multiplayer play. We make coin-flipping cards and many other cards that actively upset our tournament players.
Back to the first question. What can we do to encourage casual play? For competitive Constructed play there’s an easy answer. We’ve created an entire organized play structure to make sure that there are tournaments and events constantly to allow competitive players to have a place to play. And we try to make casual-friendly tournaments. We run prereleases and release tournaments. We run Friday Night Magic. We’ve been encouraging events like Two-Headed Giant that take some of the pressure off of the individual player.
But here’s the Catch-22. The casual players are defined by their lack of desire to want to play in structured events. It’s hard to make events for the true casual player because the mere act of making a formal event makes it by its nature less casual. We'd love to find ways to support the games played around the kitchen table more, but other than making cards for that style of play, we are caught in a paradox. If you have any ideas how to break out of it, please let me know.
R&D cares a great deal about casual players. We know that they make up a significant portion of the audience and we want to make them happy. The hard part is that this group is very tricky to track. Because the true casual gamer is playing with friends around the kitchen table and isn’t necessarily all that involved with Magic Internet sites, they’re a hard group to involve in other programs. We do our best, though. And we do care. But, by their very nature, casual gamers interact with the game through the cards, not events or promotions. Like I said, that makes casual players a pretty tricky group to cater to, so any feedback on this topic is appreciated.