I had an idea just now.

Instead of people continuously posting in the MTGO Daily thread, maybe there could be some kind of alert when a Daily is approaching. Maybe like a little countdown timer that starts an hour before the Daily? Not sure. What do other people think?

I'm all for an alert system. Although personally I'm aware of when they're occurring for the most part.

A bit off-topic, and just thinking aloud, but can someone check my math here?:

A 12-player Vintage Daily normatively yields the following records:

After round 1: 6 1-0s, 6 0-1s
After round 2: 3 2-0s, 6 1-1s, 3 0-2 drops
After round 3: 2 3-0s (ideally), 3 2-1s, 6 drops
After round 4: 1 4-0, 3 3-1s, 8 no-prize

They pay a 4-0 record 6 packs and a 3-1 record 3 packs, or 15 packs in total. Packs have MRSP value of $4 each so $60, although resale value of $10 a set or 5 sets for $50 is perhaps more realistic.

They pay $36 in play points to a 4-0 and $18 in play points to the 3-1s for a total of $90. Combined with MSRP for packs this is $150 total if we ignore the 6 Season Qualifying Points for the moment. Divided equally by the 12 players joining, it makes $12.50 in prizes per person. Not bad for a $12 entry. The actual loss in the difference between MSRP and resale value might be offset by the value of the Season QPs earned.

This analysis is overly superficial but it seems like these are not as bad an investment as I once thought - at least they don't seem to be huge WotC moneymakers.

Back on topic - I like the idea of an alert system on this site: either by way of surreptitious countdown timer that we can toggle on/off or by 30-minute and 10-minute toggleable warnings.

The value of 360 play points is entry into 360 PP worth of events, which is (on average) worth much less than $36

Unpublished article I wrote on that topic here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jIX0ojE9g5sZUXzl9Ls1mkwGCAYPdIJZ-uBScAvp5Ic/edit?usp=drive_web

@ajfirecracker can you share that article in the Facebook group so hopefully someone from mtgo staff reads it?
It's awful that you can't buy a few play points if you need ten more for an event or whatever.
Also they need to make a way to buy prizes with pp.

I think the real losers under the new system are the players who lose a lot, that must be expensive.

@BazaarOfBaghdad It assumes perfect collusion between the players. It will sometimes go:

6 1-0, 6 0-1
3 2-0, 6 1-1
1 3-0, 5 2-1 Assuming 0-2 drops and one player gets a bye.
1 4-0, 2 3-1 or 0 4-0, 4 3-1

For $10 in prizes per person. It could be even less if there is players not scooping at X-2. If we assume the downpaired 2-0 wins half the time, the expected prizes are only $11.25 per person. Only with an 80% win percentage or a 60% collusion rate would you break even.

Consider that it does not cost WotC $4 to provide MSRP $4 worth of prizes. It costs them sub-penny amounts. If 12 players colluded to "cheat" the system and split prizes, WotC would still be making what rounds to 100% profit on the event. If this got people to fire dailies that were not already firing, it would be in WotC's best interest to encourage this behavior.

If a 13th player wanted to join the event without colluding, nothing about this system would change their chances of winning a prize, either. This is sort of a win-win for everyone involved ...

... Except the colluder, who just spent 4 hours to make 50 cents worth of virtual currency with a real-world value of, idk, 5 cents / hour? If you can read well enough to be posting on TMD, you can probably find a more efficient way to turn time into MTGO cards Amazon Mechanical Turk?

@Brass-Man bbd wrote an article about a bot that could play mtgo and turn out a profit of like 2$ an hour or something like that. It was satire of course, but it made me laugh.
Once upon a time a highly skilled magic player from a country with low wages could earn enough on mtgo to do it as a job, play points have ruined that though .

said:

Once upon a time a highly skilled magic player from a country with low wages could earn enough on mtgo to do it as a job, play points have ruined that though .

You can absolutely still make money on magic online, even post play-points ... you just need to be good enough to consistently profit on events (i.e. not colluding and splitting the profits across losing matches). Still, for MOST people, even if you're living in a county with a favorable exchange rate ... if you're good enough at MTG to consistently win enough to profit, chances are pretty good that leverage that skill into money in a more efficient way.

@Brass-Man Turning surplus play points into value via rare-drafting is far less lucrative than if the prizes were all packs to be sold for tickets. You could try to play out the drafts to win cards and more packs, but that takes even more time.

Still, there are usually better ways to earn money than playing Magic. There's also poker and lottery tickets.