Why does WotC have the shittiest software ever?

[Fonzy]

They need to hire a third party company to handle the web design, software engineering, and forum management and stop trying to do do everything computer-related in-house. The end result always winds up sucking.

Case in point: forums are broken *again*.

[Jenius]

modo v3 sucks pretty badly too. It crashes a lot, boots people off it's servers a lot, and has lag issues quite often. They had this one week where like no one could play games, and as a result they had some free events that were first come first serve. So many people tried to join the events that we had a lot of clients crashing and people ended up more infuriated that they lost out on their reimbursement for the shitty lag infested week. It was pretty funny to be honest.

I didn't get in, but I only tried for one out of the four events (I was at school/work the rest of the time) it was no big loss really. Just some free product.

[Van]

Seriously, what keeps happening over there to cause it to fuck up so badly? I've been randomly logging in and out for the past week, and the new version of Gatherer (which is awful and looks like it's trying to rip off magiccards.info) works maybe 5% of the time.

[Fonzy]

The modo problems, the crappinness that has always been Gatherer and the repeated forums problems are exactly what I'm complaining about. It seems to me that if they outsourced their tech work to a company that does exclusively tech stuff instead of trying to hire in-house teams to do all the work, they would probably have more success. Not saying that the people working on this stuff aren't competant or don't have the skills, it just seems like when they do things like put Randy Buehler in charge of their website that there's probably a bunch of cases of "gamer first, programmer second" going around. It's just dumb. They need to put me in charge of their company. I'll whip the whole thing into shape in 5 years.

[Van]

5 years?

Trying to milk all the money possible or something? :V

[LegendShark]

Seriously, what keeps happening over there to cause it to fuck up so badly? I've been randomly logging in and out for the past week

That shits been happening to me too.

And when I click "Click Here to Login," which is retarded in the first place because they should have a place to log in on every page, it just redirects me back to the page I was on.

[Fonzy]

5 years?

Trying to milk all the money possible or something? :V

Bureaucratic "this-is-the-way-we've-always-done-things" thinking can be pervasive and take a good long while to change.

[Jenius]

Modo is what surprises me the most honestly, I have a feeling that the reason more people don't use it is that it's problems are quite well known. Why would you want to spend money on drafts and tournaments when the clients can crash on you at any time, or disconnect you without telling you.

When you discon, did you know that everything stays the same and it just looks like your opponent is running their time down (their clock changes) but what's actually happening is you're the one running your time down? There's been a couple times where I waited 5 minutes only to check to see if I was disconned and I was. That shit is dangerous. So rather than my opponent wasting 5 of their minutes, I had wasted 5 of mine :V.

And modo is basically free money for wizards, they have to maintain their servers and such, but other than that, people are buying digital product from them. It's like the most brilliant scheme ever. Why are they handling it so shittily?

[Fonzy]

And modo is basically free money for wizards, they have to maintain their servers and such, but other than that, people are buying digital product from them. It's like the most brilliant scheme ever. Why are they handling it so shittily?

This is what I'm saying. Printing Magic cards is like printing money and printing cards that don't even exist...well...

Let's just say they're doing a really piss poor job at being successful. It often seems like they're successful in spite of themselves.

[Shadow]

Something you need to take into account: They don't give two shits about their customers.

[Fonzy]

They have to in some respect or else they would go out of business. There's a difference between a sort of malevolent indifference and being completely inept.

[Clem]

Rosewater=Jewish

Duh. :V

[Purser The Guy]

Management likes to scrap projects at the last minute to do something else and then try to take old shit and put it in to half-baked projects. They also laid off entire departments among the programing staff a few months ago and contracted most of the remaining work.

And that's the facts, gentlemen.

[Hallways of Always]

3rd Edition D&D also had a useless computer character generator that was supposed to have tons of great features but never delivered.

They're giving it another shot with 4th Edition but I don't know anyone who gives a shit.

[Van]

3rd Edition D&D also had a useless computer character generator that was supposed to have tons of great features but never delivered.Haha, I remember that shit. I thought it was pretty good actually. Really streamlined the process of making basic characters.