So, obviously mage wars isnt actually disappearing any time soon. It seems that very recently in the past month or so a lot of old retired online mage warriors have come crawling out of the woodwork and returned to the game after a long period of inactivity. When I said that the forums had become a ghost town, a week later it was no longer a ghost town. That being said, we do seem to have difficulty growing our community, and Arcane Wonders isn't planning on selling the franchise anytime soon if ever.
The thing is, mage wars has SO MUCH potential for customization of strategies and variant formats and maps which is largely untapped right now. Domination is hardly played. Team play is hardly played. Academy perhaps is played a little more often than they are but probably not by much.
There are no publicly visible competitive metas for any variant maps or formats of mage wars, or at least not that I know of.
Let that sink in for a moment. The only format of mage wars with any serious competitive play after six years of the game's existence is just plain vanilla 1v1 3x4 zone no starting terrains Arena. And there is not enough interest to make any variant formats actually have competitive play any time soon.
This is a huge letdown for me. I love to play variant rulesets and design them for others to play, but it seems like my efforts on this front are largely wasted in the Mage Wars community. The long and short of the issue is, I suspect, that we simply dont have a large enough playerbase to support variant competitive play, and we never have.
My question is, is it possible to grow the playerbase to that point, if so how can it be accomplished, does Arcane Wonders have any plans to try to accomplish it, and if so what are those plans?
While mage wars is not dying, I do still feel like Arcane Wonders did kinda bungle their marketing for the game and impeded if not outright prevented much of the game's potential for future growth. Someone said recently in another thread that Pegasus Spiele, the german distributor for mage wars, is discontinuing their translation of the game. I think this is likely to indicate a big problem because a lot of our best players have come from germany. Over the years I've heard people online talk about mage wars like it was specifically a game for Americans and there is even less people playing it in europe or elsewhere.
Sometimes I feel really let down by this game which I love which I invested so much of my time and energy into. It is a great game, but it's greatness comes and goes, and it could have been amazing all the time instead of just sometimes great. It was so much better in 2013, when there were lots of people here, Arcane Wonders was still actually producing story material and in the process of making the first battlegrounds set, and a bunch of other mage wars things besides just pumping out new cards. The community wasnt just active, it was ALIVE.
And one of the worst things is that over time Arcane Wonders has mostly stopped communicating with its playerbase. We can talk about these problems all we want, but Arcane Wonders will not respond to tell us what they plan to do about it. They will just have their playtesters come on and say "trust me, next year will be amazing and there will be so much new awesome content etc etc etc."
We've heard this before. 2016 we were promised that 2017 would be an amazing year for mage wars. And yet for most of 2017 the online community was not very active, and the forums were a ghost town until sometime in december. Where was this amazing year for mage wars we were promised by the arcane wonders playtesters? Maybe it's in the same place as the other amazing years of mage wars we were promised before, which also didn't quite happen either?
Why isn't arcane wonders communicating with their playerbase more? I don't really see them on here at all anymore. In fact, I think responding to the "Mage wars is dead" thread was the only post they made on here for months and months if not the whole year. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about that.
Even if I somehow do manage to create an actual local player community for this game at this point in the game's history, how big is it realistically likely to grow, and what am I supposed to tell them about all this?
