I have held out from using the beta for two reasons: 1) I become irate when I get screwed in a draft because of instability (read: crash) and 2) the horizontal layout of the turn phases is AWFUL. I know I will get “used” to 2) in the future, but I find it much less intuitive and when I’m thinking about game phases, triggers, and stops, it means I am not focusing on decisions as much as I should.

However, I decided to give the beta a shot again in the past week because everyone keeps claiming 1) has been remedied greatly. So I hop in a Cube draft, despite the horrid payouts because I’m looking for relatively easy QP. First draft I pop into at 7 players in the queue, the Beta crashes. I restart the game. I expect the Beta to be a much faster load. Instead, it sits on “loading your decks” for far too long. By the time I’m back in the game, it’s pick 5. I have four cards of different colors…I try to make the best of it. The kicker comes in pack two when I see a second copy of one of the first four cards autopicked for me. I pause, think, “this is singleton, but there is copy #2.” As fate would have it, that card fit into the deck I salvaged, so I snapped up copy #2. When I get to dekcbuilding, I go through my pile, submit with two copies of the card. I get an error that tells me that my deck cannot be submitted, restart and try again. Three minutes left with deckbuilding, I quickly get everything back in there, only to find I only have 1 copy of the card now. And no extra card in its slot. I am simply a card short, including this playable card.

Then I won the draft anyway.

Psyche. Lost quickly and submitted a reimbursement request.

Yes, I submitted feedback, so don’t tell me about how this is the wrong spot. I am into helping them out. I have noticed a lot of positives from the beta players on this site and I wanted to add my experience. All I seem to see is “V3 looks like it was coded in 1991″ and “Beta looks great.” Well, sure, the cards in the beta look nice, but I cannot play it at the moment thanks to incidents like this one. I mean, I like pretty as much as the next guy, but I’d prefer to have simple, uninterrupted gameplay. I still vehemently stick to the horizontal turn phase tracker as garbage, as well. Plus, the life total, hand count, library count area is abysmally small. That is simply bad design.

So to all the anti-anti-beta people around, it’s not all roses.

Your argument is bad and you should feel bad.

It would be like me going to the local supermarket and protesting the fruit display section. Who really cares?

I think most people are disgruntled at you because they do not even give the client some seconds of thought and here we have one guy posting every week about it. You could be protesting how your government treats prisoners, or something. Instead we have a weekly discussion on a video game client. No one cares. It’s just not that important. Let it go.

The only difference between a “sellout” and any other person is opportunity. Getting paid to do something you enjoy should be everyone’s goal in life. Why begrudge anyone for it?