Recently, things have been going rather well for MTG Arena players. While there have been the usual hiccups around set launches, as to be expected, Wizards of the Coast has been doing a lot of good. The introduction of Gold Packs, for instance, finally allows Draft averse players to complete their collections relatively easily. Alongside this, Wizards has been doubling down their commitment to Pioneer. With Explorer Anthology 2 and Shadows Over Innistrad Remastered on the horizon, MTG Arena is going from success to success. Unfortunately, MTG Arena was recently hit by a major outage, but that might not actually be the worst thing.
Disruption Protocol
Earlier this week, on Wednesday, the 7th of December, MTG Arena players suddenly found themselves unable to play the game. This was despite the absence of an update that causes the usual slew of login issues. Remarkably, MTG Arena’s matchmaking appeared to have broken on its own. After experiencing these issues, many players, such as u/implode311, took to Reddit to gauge the scope of the problem. “Did Arena break in the last 6-7 mins? Can’t get Standard queue to create a match. Even with resetting [the] client.” Responding to this question, players such as u/mmCion would quickly confirm this wasn’t an isolated issue. “Yeah, matchmaking is dead. Deck building is not apparently.”
Thankfully, since this issue was seemingly affecting all of MTG Arena’s matchmaking, Wizards of the Coast expediently took notice. Shortly after the first reports came in, Wizards announced on Twitter that they were “investigating an issue currently affecting [MTG Arena]. Players may not be able to access matchmaking or other game features at this time.” Unfortunately for eager players, this problem appeared not to be an easy fix as Wizards had to take drastic action. “Matchmaking and Drafting has been disabled as we continue to investigate this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience,” Wizards stated.
Mercifully, players wouldn’t be left with only the deck builder as company for long. After an additional two hours of waiting, Wizards announced that “a fix has been implemented on [MTG Arena] and we are monitoring the results.” Hearing the good news, players eagerly flocked back to the game. However, despite this fix, all was not well.
The Saga Continues
As Reddit users were quick to point out, the fix that Wizards implanted appeared to cause more harm than good. “Annnddddd… arena is broken again,” u/deathofcake announced on Reddit. “Forced me to log out for an update but it’s not updating and I am reading an authentication error when trying to log back in.” While login issues aren’t out of the ordinary for Arena, other players once again confirmed this wasn’t an isolated issue. “I am also having the same thing happen to me, unfortunately,” u/The_Remy stated. “Seems like their update has broken it once again. Pretty embarrassing.”
Alongside the litany of disgruntled complaints, other Reddit users, such as u/GuestCartographer made light of the situation. “They solved the matchmaking problems by eliminating the part of the game that requires matchmaking. Now you can enjoy the store without any of the previous distractions.” Thankfully, unlike the matchmaking issue, this login issue did have a solution, albeit one that might not work for everyone. As suggested by MTG personality Fireshoes on Twitter, “logging out, terminating the client, then logging in under a different account works,” to restore access. While this is handy information, you obviously need two accounts in order to make facilitate this trick.
For those who couldn’t utilize this login trick, thankfully, Wizards was on the case once again. Following an additional three hours of waiting, Wizards took to Twitter once again to state they “will be deploying an additional fix momentarily.” Mercifully, this fix appeared to solve the problem for locked-out players, as after some monitoring, Wizards declared that “this incident has been resolved.”
Repair and Recharge
To apologize after all the disruption that was caused, Wizards is thankfully giving all MTG Arena players reparations. “After the issues players experienced in #MTGArena yesterday, our servers have been repaired and recharged. Now we want to do the same for you! From now until December 20, enter code RepairAndRecharge to receive 3,000 XP and 1,000 gold!”
As a code available for all MTG Arena players to claim, this compensation is surprisingly generous from Wizards. Not only does it benefit players such as u/Meret123, who “didn’t experience a single bug,” but it’s also more compensation than is usually expected. “To be fair they raised the rate,” Reddit user u/Superb-Draft points out. “It’s usually 1k exp and no gold. We’re making progress here guys.” Similarly commending Wizards’ actions, u/Viktar33 stated “we all love to hate on WotC and their greed, myself included, but it’s undeniable that we are in a positive trend lately. Let’s hope this continues.”
