The Past, Present, and Possible Future of Magic Duel

As I stated in another article on the archives, the key is order by chaos.
A fluid system that will change in an unpredictable way that does not have to be stable, in fact its stability is based on its instability.

It’s far more complicated to plan such a living world than it looks like, I am actually not planning anything, I am just adjusting the sails on a very big ship that is constantly moving. Its more like navigating then planning.

[Issue: Suspense and Development]
Part of the game addiction is created by the constant evolution. When you decide that you’ve had enough and know how things are going, you will always be curious to see what’s next on the news log. That’s not a planned thing, it’s something that simply happened but I now start to analyse it deeper and try to learn from it.
At some point, again, instability is the stability of the entire system.

[Suggestions: Go Wild!]
I want to go wilder than this. But considering the entire MagicDuel realm as my personal playground is not something I should do. The very few of you that have tested some of the things I am working on know how bad things can turn, and not all of you are “experimentalists”.
What I will do is to move ahead at a much slower rate, and do the things I want to do slowly and integrate them with the current system. At some point this will cause ruptures in the fluidity of the game play, and also conflicts of logic. This is already happening but it’s the next best thing to stability, as long as I want a constantly evolving world.

Most games at this point would say “STOP! Lets move it to version 1 and stabilize, we will reset it twice a year and that’s it, it’s final”. I, on the other hand, like to think of it as a “perpetual alpha”. MagicDuel is an experiment, live with it, might be the best experiment you ever experienced, might be a total disappointment.

[Insight on “Go Wild!”]
One of the briefly described features is the player DNA. Currently it’s at a basic stage where players are grouped based on similar decision patterns. That’s not put too much use, but it’s the framework of later development. One of the most interesting uses of this data is the prediction of social relations. For that to happen I still have to learn more about the time factor, the realm is relatively new and it’s uncertain how time affects these subtle interactions.