As it turns out the new PvE mode of MtG Arena is a huge disappointment. Most importantly the AI is playing very badly, much worse than the AI in Magic Duels or other previous incarnations of Magic the Gathering on a computer. Something as easy as selecting the obvious creatures to block an attack isn't mastered by the MtG Arena AI.

Now for a new player the game gives you five mono-colored decks. Then you get xp for every practice mode win, so you level up to a cap of 30. And for each level gained you gain mastery orbs, which you can place on a board to get additional cards for your favorite mono-colored deck. Later you can even get five two-colored decks. Now this is not a bad system, especially not for real new players: You get to play against easy decks repeatedly until you learn how to play, and what the main characteristics of the five colors are. As a "new player experience" that is much,  much better than having to play against the sharks right away.

However for anybody who already knows Magic a little, the system falls flat. The AI only ever plays the same five mono-colored decks that you got at the start. While your cards get better, the AI doesn't get better decks. And it doesn't get any *more interesting* decks either. So long before you reach level 30 and get all the additional cards and decks out of the practice mode system, you are already extremely bored by playing against the same simplistic decks over and over with no challenge whatsoever. That also means that "practice mode" fails to do what is said on the label, help you to practice real decks.

What I found really mean was that the main screen of MtG Arena very prominently shoves quests and quest rewards in your face. Oh look, I can get gold for winning a game, or for playing 20 white spells! So I get my white deck and win a game in practice mode, and nothing. What the quests simply don't say is that their conditions aren't triggered in practice matches. That also means that after you reach level 30, practice mode simply doesn't have any rewards at all any more. Now I could understand PvP mode giving better rewards than PvE mode, but PvE mode giving nothing beyond enabling you to get a set of starter decks is a killer.

In summary, MtG Arena now has a better new player experience, but which still fails to give the player the cards and skills he would need to even start playing competitively. And MtG Arena still hasn't got a usable PvE mode.

While I had a look at MTG Arena during the beta, I at that point considered the game unplayable, because it didn't have a PvE option. Magic the Gathering basically invented the Pay2Win principle a quarter of a century ago, long before anybody even thought of the use of that principle in computer and mobile games. Any online version of Magic that only offers competitive play against other humans is just a gigantic trap, which will lead to you either spending lots of money, or giving up in disgust after being continually trounced by people who spent more on the game than you did. And of course in any online PvP game you will have to deal with other people who are more likely than in the real world to be willing to show you the bad side of their characters, feeling protected by distance and anonymity.

Since then, MTG Arena was officially released. I have no information how successful the game is, but I remained skeptical, especially when they tried to lure players with a $1 million prize pool for competitive online play. So I never installed the release client. But I still remained on their mailing list. And now MTG Arena is announcing, among other stuff in their March update, "expanded early player progression" and "Practice Matches" against an AI. With my two biggest concerns about the game thus being addressed in some way, it is time for me to install the game and see what they did.

I haven't gotten far yet. As I haven't played the release version previously, the game really considered me as a new player, and I was put directly in a tutorial game that explained me how mana and creatures worked. As the new player experience is something I consider important, I will play through the rest of the tutorial, and see in how far it is now possible to play MTG Arena without playing against other human beings.

My Zortrax M200 Plus has been repaired, and after a bit of further fiddling with it is now producing satisfying prints. I'll show some examples below. Now obviously these are still not the quality of store-bought miniatures. For example you can clearly see the print layers. The models in brown I treated with acetone vapor, which improves the surface aspect. The others I haven't treated yet, and I'm not sure I will bother.

In the end these figurines will mostly be looked at from arm's length away, on the middle of a table on a battle map. The main requirement is that the players can tell which figurine is the beholder, and which one is the basilisk, and I think this is clearly the case here. And they are cheap: The human-sized figurines are below 5 grams of material, including losses from printed rafts and supports. The large sized ones are below 20 grams. And the material is regular ABS, costing just 2.5 cents per gram. So even a large figurine costs me less than 50 cents, while a store-bought Reaper Bones human-sized figure costs $3.

I was watching a video on YouTube by LemmingRush in which he was playing a tier V tank in order to advance in a new tech tree; he said that as a very good player who is usually playing tier X tanks, playing at this low tier was basically cheating. Well, that "cheating" argument might be more valid for people who play thousands of games at even lower tiers, because they not just have better skills, but also better crews and gear than their opponents. But overall the comment reminded me that in general in World of Tanks, as you progress in the tech tree to higher tiers, you meet more and more skilled opponents.

Measuring skill is pretty much impossible. The best tool we have is the WN8 rating, which basically measures how much damage you dealt on average in all your past battles, compared to an "expected" value for a given tank. My WN8 rating is just below 800, which isn't good, but isn't terrible either. Now in World of Tanks you get double xp for your first win of the day per tank. Thus playing a lot of different tanks gets you more overall xp than playing the same tank over and over. Normally that xp on the other tanks isn't so useful, especially if those tanks are already fully researched. But due to my specific history of having received in the past free gold, and now being easily able to afford to buy gold when I need more, converting this xp from the wrong tanks to free xp which can be used for the tanks I really want to play is no problem for me. I usually wait until there is an event which gives a better exchange rate (35 xp per gold instead of 25 xp), and when I did this last week I had half a million of free xp. (Of which I spent some in the subsequent "get crew xp for half the free xp cost" event.) Anyway, because of this I tend to play tanks of different tiers. And I have a mod that shows me the sum of all WN8 rating of all players of each team. Thus I know that if I drive a mid-tier tank (V to VII), my own WN8 rating times 15 is 12,000, about equal to the WN8 rating of my 15-man team. At lower tiers my WN8 rating is higher than the team average, and at higher tiers my WN8 rating is lower than the team average.

Which brings me to the question of whether I am playing in the wrong league / tier. While I play different tiers, I mostly concentrate on the tanks I am trying to "level up", and as I said yesterday those are tier VIII and IX. I thus frequently find myself in tier X games as bottom or low tier tank, being outclassed both skill-wise and gear-wise. If you were a mediocre soccer player, would your best strategy be to play a match with Manchester United, or would you be better off playing in the league that corresponds to your skill?

Thus I am considering abandoning or postponing my "fill the Russian tech tree" project, and starting to play tanks of a different nation instead. That would get me playing lower and mid-tier tanks much more, which is probably more appropriate for my skill level. Do you have a recommendation which nation's tech tree has good tanks for mediocre players? I'd be most interested in tanks that have guns with comparatively good penetration, because I am really bad at knowing about all weak spots of all enemies and being able to reliable aim for them.

My gaming life happens on several independent parallel levels: On the most long-term level, I have been playing tabletop role-playing games, mostly Dungeons & Dragons, for nearly 40 years now. That is currently at a frequency of about one D&D session per week, either as DM or player. On the most short-term level I play a bunch of mobile games, usually just for a few days or weeks before I move on to the next game. In between there are two other levels, my console games and my PC games. I only have a Nintendo Switch console right now, and I mostly use it during my summer holidays, so not much activity there. On the PC I have been playing World of Tanks almost exclusively since Christmas. Of course I also use the PC for D&D preparation, and 3D printing.

In World of Tanks I am currently concentrating on heavy tanks, with the goal of researching all tanks of the Russian tech tree. Right now I have one tank line already at tier X, two at tier IX, and two at tier VIII. The general idea is to also get better at playing heavy tanks in World of Tanks, but it isn't so easy to just even measure performance. Various mods that do that only show me that my performance is very inconsistent. This weekend I managed a campaign mission which I frankly thought was beyond me, as it required dealing 20% of all damage of your team, which is three times the average. But those good results are usually achieved when I am top tier.

As a bottom tier heavy tank, I am not doing so well. It happens frequently that I either advance too much and get shot to pieces in no time, or I don't advance fast enough, and my team wins without me getting a shot in. I have a bunch of games at bottom tier where I landed either no or just one or two hits. One problem is meeting enemy tanks of higher tier head on, and not being able to penetrate their armor at all. So a typical result might be me having fired 9 shots, hit 7 of them, and then having only zero or one penetrations. Yesterday I played that a bit differently, by using HE ammo in situations like this, which increases the number of times I actually deal damage, but then each shot only deals little damage, and the overall WN8 score still isn't good.

I've been looking on YouTube for advice on playing bottom tier, but I have a strong suspicion that the replays shown are not representative at all. People only post "bottom tier" videos if they miraculously managed an excellent result as bottom tier, they don't show their average games. That does happen to me too, but I haven't managed to find a strategy that would guarantee me some sort of minimum result in terms of damage / WN8. The fundamental problem is that the outcome of a battle in World of Tanks is very much determined by how many and which tanks of each team decide to go left or right, and human behavior in a group can be extremely random and unpredictable. If you want to learn the phrase "I am bottom tier again, and my team is full of idiots" in multiple European languages, World of Tanks EU battle chat is the place to go.

I have a few other PC games installed, for example Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, which I picked up for cheap as part of a Humble Bundle monthly. But I haven't even started playing. It is not just that the current "main game" is holding all of my interest. There is also a definitive "barrier to entry" preventing me from switching games too often: When I come home after a long day at work, I don't have the energy to learn a new complicated game. It is much more comfortable to stick to the game you know well for some time.

Wargaming is experimenting with the matchmaker, leading to more battles in which everybody is the same tier or there are only two tiers instead of the normal three. Unfortunately that mostly reveals a design flaw of the game: When tanks meet each other front to front, with a bit of angling, side-scraping or hull-down tactics, most shots bounce of tanks of equal or higher tier. I am currently playing Russian heavy tanks, and I have several tanks that wouldn't be able to damage the same tank in the turret. You die to shots from the side when you leave cover, but you can't do much while in cover. Unless of course the enemy is of lower tier, or less well armored tanks.

This is what I also observed when watching the (not so frequent) videos of good players as bottom tier heavy tanks on YouTube. The trick is to stay well away from the areas where the other heavy tanks are, because you are just cannon fodder there. In spite of being slow and inaccurate, you are better off pretending to be a tank destroyer or medium tank and go play in a different corner. World of Tanks considers all damage to be equal, you don't get more points if you are in a "fair fight".

I'm handicapped in that respect by having grown up before there were online video games, and by still playing tabletop role-playing games. Sitting around a table with friends, there is a value to playing nice, playing fair, because the social penalty for being caught playing unfair or cheating weights more than the win. Online that consideration isn't true. If your status symbol is a WN8 rating, and the game doesn't count who you won against, you'd better be bottom-feeding and seal-clubbing. Heroically holding the side against stronger tanks counts for absolutely nothing, even when it is strategically the right move.

I think the design flaw is that a frontal confrontation between two tanks of different tier in World of Tanks is so all or nothing. The weaker tank just doesn't deal any damage at all. It is much worse than let's say two fighters in D&D of different level fighting each other, because the weaker one there would still do a good amount of damage.

You are playing an online team multiplayer game of some kind. After a match you receive a message from one of the players who was on your time. What was that message?

A) "Well played, mate!"
B) A friend or guild request
C) "Fukcing retard!!!"

What does it say about us as a cultural group that C) is by far the most likely answer?

A few years ago I spent a week in Las Vegas. As I am not really a gambler at heart, and know too much about statistics and economics to believe in getting rich in a casino, I decided upon a different approach: I put aside $1,000, determined to lose that money, and then stop gambling. The plan didn't work, I didn't lose the money. I actually won $700, although of course that was much less than we paid for the flight, hotel, and food. But the experience taught me one thing: While *statistically* everybody loses in a casino, practically the thing is designed to have both winners and losers, just that the losers lose more than the winners win. If *everybody* left the casino poorer, that would be bad advertising, you need some people coming home and saying "I won!" to keep up the illusion.

I recently realized that World of Tanks is using the exact same psychological scheme: The games are deliberately not balanced too well. Quite a lot of games end up with one side having lost all 15 tanks, while the other side still has 10 tanks alive. And the matchmaking over 3 tiers assures that the 3 players in the top tier of the winning side have an absolutely smashing success and feel like invincible gods. Meanwhile most players on the losing side get eliminated so quickly, that the loss barely registers. The psychological effect of the huge wins is bigger than that of the quick losses, and so overall people don't become too frustrated. That is reflected by the coverage of the game on YouTube mostly showing those games in which the player is top tier and roflstomps through the opposition. Nobody shows the videos where one of those new French wheeled vehicles manages to spot your bottom tier heavy tank in the first minute of the game, and a combination of tank destroyers and lucky shots from artillery kills you before you left the base.

I don't really mind losing games. I do mind playing in games where I never had a chance to do much. And the huge variability makes it very hard for me to judge how well I am playing, and what I would need to do to improve. I just finished a game with a Mastery Badge "Class I" and a deep purple WN8 of 3,868, which would suggest that I am doing okay. But the game before that I had a tomato red WN8 of 0. Not only can't I achieve much consistency, but I am increasingly convinced that consistency is actually not possible for the regular players, who haven't spent thousands of hours on practice.

Beadle & Grimm's is a company making additional material for Dungeons & Dragons, under a license from Wizards of the Coast. Their first product caused quite an echo, because of the hefty price tag: $500 for a limited platinum edition box with stuff to play Waterdeep Dragon Heist. I didn't buy one, that was a bit too rich for me. But they had hinted at making boxes with slightly less stuff for a more reasonable price, so I got on the mailing list of their "supreme marketing goblin" and waited.

To my surprise they now announced a silver edition for $175 not for Waterdeep Dragon Heist, but for the upcoming Ghosts of Saltmarsh. I might actually buy this, but first I looked whether the previous adventure wasn't also available in a silver edition. No luck, I just found comments on Facebook that they are only doing one edition at a time. I find that somewhat weird: As they sold all the copies of their Platinum edition of Waterdeep Dragon Heist, there is obviously still unmet demand, especially at a lower price tag. And it should be easy enough to produce a downgraded version without too much work for them. Strange!