With all the critical server failures this week leaving matchmaking in disarray, Wizards of the Coast has decided to halt all Draft queues in Magic: The Gathering Arena. Intermittent connectivity issues have now spiraled into a platform-wide crisis specifically targeting the Limited formats of the game. Upon joining the Draft, players are met with errors; those who are already in events report that they are unable to save deck builds or progress in matches.
This outage could not have come at a worse time for the developer. The collapse came just as the “Arena Direct” series was ramping up; a competition where well-performing players earn physical Play Booster boxes of the new Avatar: The Last Airbender set. Since those events charge exorbitantly for entry fees, Gems, or Gold, community frustration has been rising. Deprived of any real compensation, competitive players with great investments at stake find themselves being hoisted by the petard of the WotC’s technical failure and are saturating the forums with calls for an extension of the event or remedial compensation.
Probably the Draft environment, but the festering could run far deeper. Trouble must have run deep in matchmaking stability in Standard and Brawl queues too, hinting at a scant possibility of a deeper worm in how the client communicates to the regional servers. The enormity of these failures notwithstanding, WotC has continued to remain tightlipped about any restoring timeline. The status page does mention an ongoing investigation into matchmaking, but nothing as concrete has ever been said about reopening the Draft gates or a possibly required holistic maintenance period to clean up these bugs.
This technical gremlin looms above what has otherwise been the year of the expansion for the client. The new arrivals by Final Fantasy and Marvel crossovers have made for some great player proliferation and likely imposed a hitherto unseen burden on the aging backend architecture. Advice to the community for now: steer clear of the queues. Until the all-clear signal is given, any attempt to spend currency on Draft is a gamble against a server that is not currently winning.
