The wild cards were fun for a little bit, but they were here for too long. If they did it for a certain week, I could accept that more than the entire month (or two in the previous case).
I have no reason to believe Second Dinner and Secret Door are working on anything together.
How long from founding to market or at least announcement? It depends. So far they have made no announcements other than they are working with Marvel and they've secured a bunch of funding.
The odds of us seeing an announcement from Second Dinner long before they actually release something is slim. If they announce a project too early, it lets competitors potentially beat them to market. There isn't really a good benchmark to know when we should expect an announcement. They are still expanding core positions on their team which leads me to believe its still early on in the development cycle. We also don't know the scope of their game (is it a smaller card game like Hearthstone or is it something more crazy like an RTS which tons of moving parts) so comparing them to other studios is tough.
Hell, even Hearthstone being as small of a game as it is took 5 years to get to the announcement stage from the initial creation of Team 5 in 2008. Some of that might be inexperience, I know Starcraft II moved a bunch of early team members off of Hearthstone to work on that, which isn't a hurdle Second Dinner should have.
I'm hoping we see an announcement later next year from Second Dinner. I'm so hungry!
Sorry, this took a little bit longer than expected to get up this morning, this is fantastic news. I knew Mike wasn't about that retirement life, especially not with how things turned out at Blizzard.
I cannot wait to see what these awesome people create. With Bonfire Studios from Rob Pardo, Second Dinner from Ben Brode and gang, and now Dreamhaven with Mike Morhaime, we've now got 4 teams (since Dreamhaven has 2 studios) that are going to be working on assumingly great products. I love how Mike has said "fuck that" to chasing short-term financial pressure.
I'm also excited that we'll be able to cover stuff in the future :eyes:
I'm expecting a Year of the <zodiac> announcement as a bare minimum. Going heavy into details on it would be great use of their time. I would also love to see them announce the April expansion, but I'm also afraid they may not only because that would be 6-7 weeks before its actual launch, which isn't a timeline Hearthstone has used in a while since it "kills hype".
I hope we do see an expansion announcement though, and I hope the start of next year is so full of content that they can string us along for those many weeks with more announcements.
I'm really looking forward to how they end up structuring this. I'm curious if virtual ticket is still going to be a requirement if said virtual ticket might be discounted if it is still a thing, and if there is going to be any Esports component at all.
I could see there being no esports for 1 less thing going on that weekend (for each game doing esports) and it would shift focus entirely to the content each game is highlighting potentially boosting virtual ticket sales.
I'm also curious if this does well, will it mean we'll see more BlizzConline events on years where they don't have a ton of major announcements so they don't need to rent the con? Or perhaps smaller BlizzConline events during the year (halfway between BlizzCons maybe?) as a way to get a bunch of Blizzard announcements into the wild for an upcoming HS expansion, a WoW patch, and so on. Would be a lot of fun to have another Blizzard-filled weekend in the year.
I definitely bought it for completion's sake. I can't chance the hero portrait never being available again.
I hope this whole thing was a word of warning though for Blizzard and I hope the sales reflected it. People want new voice lines if you're paying. This portrait honestly should have been a reward for playing the adventure in a Heroic setting.
I also agree on the Iceblast thing. Its so lame we aren't getting special effect hero powers =(
About decks, I wonder how well positioned are OoC's decks in Google.
It's really tough to compete on that end when you have sites dominating the listing due to being around for at least 6 years, unfortunately. Hearthstone is an oversaturated market with a declining playerbase =(
Site traffic is higher now than it was when we launched, though forum activity takes a bit of a dip between set launches for Hearthstone.
Admittedly, decks have been a bit more of a struggle though. I believe us not featuring them in a widget on the homepage until recently may have hurt that part of growth. It's definitely something I want to see more of but it isn't very easy to incentivize people to write guides, plus, if the meta stops changing, why write or add a new deck to the site?
The fragmentation definitely sucked when the split happened, but I agree, its better here than it is elsewhere. We have a more positive thing going on overall!
I had a couple of black screens last night but since then in my 7 launches of the game I haven't had any new issues.
I saw that some people are able to launch the game a second time with the game still being open and it fixes the problem. You end up getting a "reconnect" button which lets you in.
Okay, technically it is 2:30 AM on the 17th for me, and most people its the 17th, but since the Pacific coast counts, we're going to pretend it is the 16th.
Split card frames now rotate 90 degrees so they can be properly read.
Added extra navigation when on non-Magic pages for faster browsing.
Mythgard
Added to navigation.
Added a site header for the game.
Runeterra
Imported fresh data for Patch 1.10
Bug Fixes
General
Fixed an issue with the portal deck widget showing the wrong game if you switched portals.
Magic the Gathering
Fixed incorrect default width of cards. Was 240, is now 265.
Corrected images for Modal DFC cards. Previously the same image was used for both sides of the cards.
Card BBCode will now prefer a collectible card over a non-collectible.
MTG doesn't really have non-collectible cards, save for tokens. However, with the way our data works, Modal DFC (and some other dual-faced cards) have a back and front that is a separate "card" in our database. When requesting these cards in bbcode, we're assuming you will want the front face of the card by default.
Mythgard
Fixed an issue when browsing Mythgard content that would result in a homepage error afterwards.
This was live for a few minutes this past afternoon. Sorry to the couple hundred people who ended up seeing the error.
Flux Notes
Yo! Couple things here.
MTG Deckbuilder should be out before the end of the month. We've got some big tech choices to get through to make this work well.
Mythgard support. You've noticed some Mythgard articles today. Thanks to Nirast for helping us cover the game! I'm not going to consider us fully committed to it just yet, which is why it doesn't have a large portal link on all pages, though the game has a great community and we'd love to give players a great home.
If there's some free time this month, we'll get a card database up for the title pending datamining and card generation.
If helping cover Mythgard is something you'd be interested in doing as a volunteer, hit me up.
MTG "stuff" as a whole is still a work in progress. Card pages are still quite bare!
I'm going to bed now so I can be up for the launch of Zendikar Rising!
Interestingly, the threaten line is from the adventure. It's the only adventure-specific one that is on the playable hero.
I've gotten pretty good at drawing correct lines over the years :)
Unless something changes, these are attached to the playable version of Rexxar.
The wild cards were fun for a little bit, but they were here for too long. If they did it for a certain week, I could accept that more than the entire month (or two in the previous case).
Welcome!
Every time without fail!
I have no reason to believe Second Dinner and Secret Door are working on anything together.
How long from founding to market or at least announcement? It depends. So far they have made no announcements other than they are working with Marvel and they've secured a bunch of funding.
The odds of us seeing an announcement from Second Dinner long before they actually release something is slim. If they announce a project too early, it lets competitors potentially beat them to market. There isn't really a good benchmark to know when we should expect an announcement. They are still expanding core positions on their team which leads me to believe its still early on in the development cycle. We also don't know the scope of their game (is it a smaller card game like Hearthstone or is it something more crazy like an RTS which tons of moving parts) so comparing them to other studios is tough.
Hell, even Hearthstone being as small of a game as it is took 5 years to get to the announcement stage from the initial creation of Team 5 in 2008. Some of that might be inexperience, I know Starcraft II moved a bunch of early team members off of Hearthstone to work on that, which isn't a hurdle Second Dinner should have.
I'm hoping we see an announcement later next year from Second Dinner. I'm so hungry!
Most people are from Hearthstone, Starcraft, and Heroes of the Storm. Those are the easy guesses!
Sorry, this took a little bit longer than expected to get up this morning, this is fantastic news. I knew Mike wasn't about that retirement life, especially not with how things turned out at Blizzard.
I cannot wait to see what these awesome people create. With Bonfire Studios from Rob Pardo, Second Dinner from Ben Brode and gang, and now Dreamhaven with Mike Morhaime, we've now got 4 teams (since Dreamhaven has 2 studios) that are going to be working on assumingly great products. I love how Mike has said "fuck that" to chasing short-term financial pressure.
I'm also excited that we'll be able to cover stuff in the future :eyes:
I'm 99% sure I have the exact order they'll release in, just need to make a news article for it :D
Only paid entries =(
I'm expecting a Year of the <zodiac> announcement as a bare minimum. Going heavy into details on it would be great use of their time. I would also love to see them announce the April expansion, but I'm also afraid they may not only because that would be 6-7 weeks before its actual launch, which isn't a timeline Hearthstone has used in a while since it "kills hype".
I hope we do see an expansion announcement though, and I hope the start of next year is so full of content that they can string us along for those many weeks with more announcements.
3 days after my Birthday. I'll take it, Blizzard!
I'm really looking forward to how they end up structuring this. I'm curious if virtual ticket is still going to be a requirement if said virtual ticket might be discounted if it is still a thing, and if there is going to be any Esports component at all.
I could see there being no esports for 1 less thing going on that weekend (for each game doing esports) and it would shift focus entirely to the content each game is highlighting potentially boosting virtual ticket sales.
I'm also curious if this does well, will it mean we'll see more BlizzConline events on years where they don't have a ton of major announcements so they don't need to rent the con? Or perhaps smaller BlizzConline events during the year (halfway between BlizzCons maybe?) as a way to get a bunch of Blizzard announcements into the wild for an upcoming HS expansion, a WoW patch, and so on. Would be a lot of fun to have another Blizzard-filled weekend in the year.
I definitely bought it for completion's sake. I can't chance the hero portrait never being available again.
I hope this whole thing was a word of warning though for Blizzard and I hope the sales reflected it. People want new voice lines if you're paying. This portrait honestly should have been a reward for playing the adventure in a Heroic setting.
I also agree on the Iceblast thing. Its so lame we aren't getting special effect hero powers =(
It's really tough to compete on that end when you have sites dominating the listing due to being around for at least 6 years, unfortunately. Hearthstone is an oversaturated market with a declining playerbase =(
Site traffic is higher now than it was when we launched, though forum activity takes a bit of a dip between set launches for Hearthstone.
Admittedly, decks have been a bit more of a struggle though. I believe us not featuring them in a widget on the homepage until recently may have hurt that part of growth. It's definitely something I want to see more of but it isn't very easy to incentivize people to write guides, plus, if the meta stops changing, why write or add a new deck to the site?
The fragmentation definitely sucked when the split happened, but I agree, its better here than it is elsewhere. We have a more positive thing going on overall!
Gotta love a good troll mon.
I had a couple of black screens last night but since then in my 7 launches of the game I haven't had any new issues.
I saw that some people are able to launch the game a second time with the game still being open and it fixes the problem. You end up getting a "reconnect" button which lets you in.
What in the...
Thanks! I'll make sure we get this fixed on the next deploy.
Okay, technically it is 2:30 AM on the 17th for me, and most people its the 17th, but since the Pacific coast counts, we're going to pretend it is the 16th.
New Features
Magic the Gathering
Changes
Magic the Gathering
Mythgard
Runeterra
Bug Fixes
General
Magic the Gathering
Mythgard
Flux Notes
Yo! Couple things here.
This week =)
Still a work in progress, but all the cards are here. Deckbuilder should arrive this month.