Development roadmap update
Hello everyone,
In this blog post, I would like to discuss the different types of Magic: the Gathering players we have identified, the features that they require, and the order in which we have decided to implement these features.
Our team at Playgroup began building our life counter app and website based on our own playgroup's requirements. We believe in "eating our own dogfood," which means that we use our own product to ensure that it works perfectly for our own playgroup. Therefore, the first type of playgroup we identified is our own, which we call the "Statis" archetype playgroup.
The Statis Commander playgroup is a static playgroup where all games are played by the same players who have a high level of trust with each other. This group of players wants an easy way to start games with their playgroup members and desires playgroup-based leaderboards to rank themselves among other members. Signing up for an account is not a problem for this group as they plan to use it for all their future games. We have developed the life counter app's features with these requirements in mind, and we have completed 90% of the features we had in mind for this archetype with the upcoming 1.3.0 release.
Moving on to other archetypes, we become less certain of their needs and rely more on feedback from users. Therefore, we encourage users to reach out to us via email, Reddit, or Discord to help us better understand their needs.
The next archetype we have identified is the “Metamorph” archetype, which is similar to the Statis type but includes members who are not always fixed, and random people may join games without necessarily being familiar with the Playgroup life counter app. These groups have less trust between members and different requirements when it comes to changing games. They also require more security when logging into the Playgroup life counter app and prefer tracking Elo per deck or even per player. For people who use Playgroup with random players, it is crucial to allow these players to easily join their games without having to go through hoops to create a Playgroup account. After the release of version 1.3.0, we will begin developing more features for this specific archetype while also focusing on general features that both types can use.
As we explore other groups, we enter even more unfamiliar territory. For example, other Magic: The Gathering formats may want to track more details about their games. However, we do not have enough insights into what these formats need because we are not playing them ourselves. Therefore, we welcome any ideas or feedback from users about what would be needed to start tracking other formats.
Thank you for reading this blog post. We look forward to hearing from you and improving our MTG life counter app and website to better meet the needs of Magic: the Gathering players.