Worth Wollpert leaves Wizards of the Coast #blameworth

After 16 years at Wizards and a long time in charge of Magic Online, Worth Wollpert has stepped down.

The reason stated is that Wizards is restructuring digialt. That is probably a good idea and it is natural that it includes some layoffs. You really can't blame Worth for wanting to do something else.

I am personally amazed at the amount of stuff he has handled. And all the negative feedback he has endured.

The announcement by Wizards in itself is very interesting. They claim to be reimagining digital versions of Magic and other Wizards games. They will bring the characters and worlds to other games and experiences. They will make Wizards experiences more efficient, connect and convenient.

All I can think when I read that is "What does this mean for the value of my investment in MTGO cards?". I guess it is just too early to tell.


Wizard's announcement about the restructuring: https://company.wizards.com/article/press/making-moves

Worth confirms in a tweet: https://twitter.com/mtgworth/status/819694515682299904

Wizards and hashtags

In order to communicate more clearly to new players of Magic the Gathering, Wizards have made a decision to use the hashtags #wotcstaff and #wizardsemployee in their tweets.

The whole decision is detailed here: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/wizards-and-transparency-social-media-2016-07-22

It might seem like a non-decision or something that just eats more of their 140 characters so the big question is if we should care? Will the tags be abused by random twitter users?

The matter gets even more confusing when Wizards says: "they will ensure Wizards is consistent with all laws and regulations applicable to our business media."  I am sure there is more to their new social media policy than just some tags.

My reaction is first and foremost that I am happy that Wizards is thinking about these matters and that the company constantly works on its communication which, at times, may have been wanting. 

More about the dynamics of a game company like Wizards of the Coast

Hi Everyone!

I'm happy to report that my previous article on Wizards management was very popular and I got a great response so today I'm writing a follow up article. You can read the original article here. 

I did get a couple questions about why that doesn't work for Wizards but other companies promote the best worker to be the supervisor. The short answer is that while they do it, it doesn't work well there either. It's a pretty well known fact that many American businesses are run pretty poorly and one of the major weaknesses is quality management. In fact, several years ago I started saying, Small businesses are small for a reason. I still think this holds true, and the reason is typically poor management.

During my tenure as a college student I worked for many small companies that were trying and trying to grow but the growth plans kept falling apart. I thought then that there's a reason things aren't working and I could pinpoint the cause of failure, but I couldn't identify what was the right action to achieve success. Later on I learned all about the right thing, I suppose I had an advantage going into graduate school because I already knew what not to do. The reason for failure was always, of course, poor leadership.

Enough background on my experiences. What in the world does this have to do with Wizards of the Coast? We know management is important, and we know that Wizards is bad at said management. There is one unique thing about Wizards. I mentioned it earlier this week in my weekly youtube show (that's the link for the entire series if you're interested, episode 8 is the one I am referencing). Wizards being a game company requires exceptionally talented people to design and develop their games. I have a name for this kind of industry. I call it a "superstar industry". I think of it like any professional sport. Think about it. The players (designers at Wizards) get all the fame and win the games (make the cool cards at Wizards) and you hardly ever hear about their coaches (management at Wizards). In truth the coaches of world class athletes are responsible for making them perform their best, that's the same function of a manager. The easiest way to identify a superstar industry is to look at the "worker" and the "managers" and ask, can the manager do this as well as the "worker"? If the answer is no way in hell, it's probably a superstar industry. The relevant part to wizards is that there lies a special talent that people either have or don't have that allows the "worker" to be a "superstar". 

As I said before, I'm really good at identifying what's getting done wrong. The short version of what's wrong is that Wizards is promoting their "superstars" to be in charge of other people, departments, projects, deadlines. They give them this responsibility because they assume that since they're a superstar designer that they will be a superstar manager.....WRONG! People get this crazy idea that if someone is good at one thing they are good at everything. Good management needs to know that their skill at the task does not always (most of the time doesn't) translate to motivating or teaching others to being the best.

The bottom line is that players sometimes make great coaches, but have every pro sports player try to coach anyone else, the majority would be average coaches. The same thing happens with wizards, they hire the Mike Trout of designers to become the coach of the designers and his talent lies in designing, not managing designers.



You can reach me at Facebook and Twitter by following below, also you can email me directly at mtgconfidant@gmail.com.

Mtg Confidant

Thoughts on Wizards Management

Hi Everyone!

Today, I want to look away from the MTGO economy and look at Wizards as a company. This article is in response to the very popular article from last weekend posted on this blog. I have a couple areas that I have a great deal of expertise in. One of those areas is management.

I have hinted at it before when I wrote about the flip-flopping regarding Vintage Masters on demand drafts. It appears to me that Wizards management is awful. Click here to read comments about Wizards from current and former employees.

Based on everything I knew before last week about Wizards, I confidently said, they make a good product but could be run more effectively. I have been reading articles by Mark Rosewater for at least 10 years, every single one. When I read that much from a certain person, I tend to be able to pick up on what they were or are feeling when they write, even if they aren’t the next iconic writer. Mark Rosewater wrote several times about how Wizards had made a mistake or made a poor decision. Mostly it was about a single card design, and it’s reasonable to expect that a card would slip through the cracks and make it to print (the article on skullclamp comes to mind released right after the ban announcement was made).

 Sometimes it was about entire sets or blocks. In another article he talked about how Kamigawa block was a success (I didn’t believe he really felt that way but when I realized he did, but that was worse than thinking he was lying to the readers). He talked about how Kamigawa was rich with flavor but the power level was low (he didn’t mention it but the mechanics were terrible too), and how Homelands was weak with flavor and had a low power level.

I didn’t make any assumptions purely off that article, but that was the article was when all my ideas came together. I realized that Wizards didn’t completely get it. If I were in charge a bunch of people would have gotten fired over Kamigawa block. It was so bad, I actually quit playing magic for a number of years because of it. Let’s look at a Magic set like a car. Let’s say there are two main factors to each, Magic has a flavor element and an element I’m going to call playability and it includes quality of mechanics and power level. Now lets look at the two main things a car needs to do for us. It needs to go forward when we push the gas pedal, and slow down when we push the brake pedal. Wizards calling Kamigawa anything other than a complete 100% failure is like the car we’re testing accelerating to 100 MPH and crashing into a wall at the end of the test track, then reporting, that our car was awesome, it went really fast, it didn’t stop in time, but it went fast. I have to point out that there is quality control that comes between the design and prototype of the car. All this was supposed to have been done between the design and the production of the prototype car.

I don’t mean to ramble but if the product doesn’t work, regardless of one or some parts working well, the product didn’t work and as a result is a failure.That's not to say the parts can't be used in other applications, but the project as a whole was a failure.

I read the reviews on glassdoor.com about wizards. When everyone who leaves the company says it’s terrible and the only people who say it’s great are the people who still work there, there’s something seriously wrong. I have left jobs and don’t think it was a bad job, I just outgrew the position.

I think that the reviews online about Wizards as a company are interesting because it’s what I have always said about Wizards (confirmed by Mark Rosewater articles). Wizards is run by a bunch of math nerds with Ph.D.’s in math. That’s great for the designers to be nerds, but the nerds need to stay out of the business operations of the company. Most of the complaints are regarding the software development and that sales and marketing have more power than they should. It makes sense that marketing should say, “I want it to be like this so the final product will match our brand image”. But Sales and Marketing needs to stick to what they know and let the coders do the coding.

Go ahead and shoot me an email at mtgconfidant@gmail.com or friend me on facebook or follow me and let me know if you want to hear more about my thoughts on these kinds of issues!

Thanks for reading!

Mtg Confidant

ML Bot for Mtgo v4 switchover

Hello botters,

As you probably already know, mtgo v3 will be retired soon and mtgo v4 will be the only official mtgo client. The announcement from Chris Kiritz can be found here and gives July as a date, right before the release of M15.

Our plan is to release the ML Bot client for mtgo v4 two weeks before the switchover so everyone will have the time to update their bots. This will not be a "beta", testing is no more required - this will be the official "first version" of the bot for mtgo v4.

In order to make the transaction smooth, we will be online 24/7 on LiveChat and on Skype (our account is "mtgolibrary.support"). You will probably need to add more ram to your virtual machines because Mtgo v4 needs more ram than v3 (2gb per machine are recommended). We will provide some virtual machines in case you need a good starting point. Please make sure you can install and launch Mtgo v4 on your machines and that it runs without crashes - we are in fact aware of some users unable to load Mtgo v4 properly.

We will run some v4 bots next week (we'll give the names), feel free to trade with them and write us the feedback.

Wizards have given me two days off

During the wide beta spotlight, my bots don't work and I can't play on the client I don't really love, but can at least live with.

This is what happened last time I tried your Wide Beta client, Wizards:

You said I would be forced to switch in July 2013.
You said Leagues would be back in 2011.
You said an awful lot of things that did not come true.

Get your act together. You have the best game in the world with the worst client(s) in the world. Just get your act together. Don't let Blizzard steal your market.

You will have to drag me kicking and screaming from v3, even though I don't really like it and it looks like it is from 1993. At least it works.

This two day break will give me plenty of time to play some Hearthstone and do all the chores I have neglected. Thank you for that, Wizards.

What is the Wide Beta spotlight, you ask? Well, it is Wizards forcing us to endure yet another forced buggy beta test. I will not. Not again. I am out. See you after this travesty.

Read more here:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/other/04142014/betaupdate