A call to all Developers

On Wednesday, June 29,2011, Wizards of the Coast published the second part of their article series called “Great Online Gaming Experiences Start With You!” which was meant as a reminder to players to be wary of websites offering freebies or asking for your username and password. One particular sentence though peeked my interest;

“In some situations, malicious programs have been created and sold to unsuspecting users. These programs can compromise the safety of your account by communicating your password to the bot seller, or allowing them to access your account through “backdoors” in the bot.” -WOTC

I understand that Wizards would want to take a hard line against malicious Bot developers but this feels to me like a broad shot against the development community.

Developers like Albert, whose programming lead to the development of the ML Bot and MTGOLibrary.com. Speaking to Albert, he enlightened me on some statistics from his trading system:

• The ML Bot community performs a trade almost every minute
• Trading 20-30 cards on average (approximately one card every 2 seconds)
• The MTGOLibrary.com web site gets 50 http requests every second for things like price look ups on WikiPrice.
• He estimates 60% – 70% of the trade bots on MTGO are ML Bot but there is no way to know the total number of bots.
• Each of these trades started out as product from Wizards either as Tix, boosters won from tournaments or from the MTGO Store.

It’s easy to see that without these developers (Albert, and many others), MTGO would not be what it is today. What is perplexing to me is that Wizards knows that their digital products like Path of the Planeswalker on Xbox, Playstation and PC are a successful pathway to new players and that people who play Magic for the first time are using these digital products to transition to the paper card game and other revenue streams. I think that it is time for Wizards to expand their horizons and provide Developer API's like social media has.

Wizards has an unique opportunity here with the upcoming release of next MTGO client. They could support developer tools called Developer API's which could mean products like iPhone Apps, Facebook integration and a whole new level of Free Market Trading that would attract new and old players a like. Imagine getting a trade request on your iPhone from your buddy while away from your desk or making a few adjustments to your deck for that nights TNMO or even watching your buddies playing in a online tournament while on the bus.

The possibilities are endless and Wizards doesn't need to do it alone. I want to know your thoughts on this so please leave a comment in support of a Developer API and maybe we can start something.