Welcome MTGsalvation readers. I’ve been added to your radar, yay! I must say I thought this site wasn’t good enough to be added yet. Still a lot of work to be done on this ship to perfect everything. Still, happy to have you guys here.
Unfortunately this next post I’ve been writing is both kind and critical of the very site that has shown this blog so much kindness.
Now I’m sure most of you have seen that the holy Gatherer has been updated to include Google Adsense ads. What further intrigues me is that the ad placement has changed which usually means somebody is experimenting with placement to maximize revenue. I hope this means we’ll see some significant improvements to Gatherer because of the new income stream.
Heh, maybe they added it to pay Mike Lesault.
Gatherer is a pretty low tech piece of the Magisphere. It basically regurgitates a card database with very limited search capabilities. Lets say I want to find all of the Zombie cards with the Swampwalk ability. No results. “Zombie Swampwalk” returns nothing. Over at Magiccards.info the same search term nets me some results. Magiccards.info’s flaw is that it does not search creature type. Goodies such as Anurid Murkdiver or Bog Raiders don’t show up in the basic search results.
This is probably of little concern to competitive players and there are certainly ways of finding the cards you need. My problem is that the sophistication of these tools, specifically Gatherer, is pathetically weak. The fact that Gatherer can’t help me make a tribal deck based on Cyclopean Giant makes my inner Johnny disappointed.
The Gatherer F.A.Q. states:
“Gatherer was designed to provide a maximum of flexibility while preserving a simple search interface. It’s true that the search lacks some of the advanced features of Magic Online’s card search or some other web databases. But we think you’ll find Gatherer is the most intuitive and easy-to-use web-based Magic card database out there. ”
You have to wonder why WoTC doesn’t provide the most advanced card database. Flexibility? Dude, I can’t search for Zombie’s with Swampwalk! Is this another example of Wizards complete lack of technological expertise?
The recent MTGO 3 client, the fact their own forums don’t have search capabilities, and the complete lack of any social networking features on their site makes me thing WoTC is really behind the curve here. Its great that I can add a couple of forum posters to my buddy list but that doesn’t allow me to do anything useful with it. Ooooo, I can PM them faster. :/
Just to be nitpicky: Why can’t I click on the gatherer logo to reset the form? Clicking a logo to return home has been a usability staple for years now.
Another related topic that I wish to address is that of the four or five major magic sites I visit only one has changed their default forum skin. Londes.com stands out from the crowd here for changing a single background color. Impressive…
MTGsalvation wins the award for best designed site by far but they too have only a lightly modified forum skin. Those great orange and greens on the main page just get replaced by the default vbulletin-phpBB blue-purple look that I see way too often. MTGSal’s main theme is beautiful, why not translate that over to the forum?
Editing vbulletin themes can be a bit of a chore, I’ve worked with them in the past. I understand if a strictly not for profit site like MTGsal doesn’t have the time and or energy to do some modifications. TCGplayer, a “blast you with so many ads you can’t read the content” for profit site should invest some energy into giving their forum some extra visual “zing”. When I see a default skin on a commercial site I know that their heart and energy isn’t really behind it.
Funny that as I wrote this entry TCGplayer’s forum seems to have lost all posts. I hope they backed up their database!
Why you gotta hate on everybody?
MTG.com may be technologically behind when compared to the web in general… but if you compare it to other adventure-gaming industry websites, they’re amazingly far out in the lead. Kind of sad, really. I guess most of the industry hasn’t truly caught onto the web’s potential. (And I can’t believe I’m saying this in 2007, this should’ve been obvious in 1997.)
On a side note, I think you’ll find that no one can get a vBulletin search engine to run properly. All of the largest vBulletin forums I can think of quire you to have a paid premium for search or use a external search provider. vBulletin search just doesn’t scale. That said, I am a bit suprised they haven’t gone with one of the above two solutions yet.