Hello folks,
I appreciate the friendly responses your constructive criticism here.
A reason of the website revamp is that the existing platform is written in a legacy technology (Vaadin) which is not suitable for scaling upwards of 100-200 active users for a fast paced P2P game (can’t keep up with latency or memory requirements). A couple of years ago we continuously hit that ceiling when we were up to date with latest expansions. It was tough to have to turn back users and gate access to keep latencies under control (I remember it was extremely laggy). This was also around the time where the top features requested (by hundreds of players, with hard data) were mobile support, improve latency, better deck editor, animations, player/social level customizations, etc.
We’ve been losing those users silently due to lacking platform UX, e.g. non-responsive old style deck builder, high latencies for UI actions, old school design, no mobile support, no customizations, etc.
In the past years we’ve invested thousands of hours into fixing a ton of bugs, and this shows by the fact that many tournaments are being hosted on TCG ONE successfully.
Current user base are mostly the people who are the real fans of the Pokemon TCG and are fine with legacy UX as long as they can play efficiently without bugs or interruptions. And I thank you for your attention. However, this is only a fraction of global players.
Since I stopped casually playing TCG ONE 5+ years ago, I always ask this question to myself: what features I’d like to see in order for me to get back to playing this game as a casual player? The answers are varied but it’s almost always about the UX, accessibility and uniformity issues. But some answers are actually about changing the core rules of the game, because after playing many card games, I realize Pokemon TCG doesn’t really have the most balanced game rules (3 things I dislike: playing unlimited number of items and big basics in a single turn, hand disruptions and the sheer long duration of an average game). We’ll get to these points too, in time.
In the last few years I began splitting some functionality into new modules, which are also not providing a unified experience currently. My goal is to have a finer and more connected user experience across all features of the TCG ONE platform in a single application and also have it scale beyond 1000 concurrent players. This new site is the first step in that direction.
I must remind you the objectives and North Star metric: Monthly active returning players and number of active supporters.
In order to achieve these objectives and increase those metrics, we have to get out of the local maxima of the project’s position right now and move towards a global maxima, even though I hate to disappoint players, sometimes I have to break things, only to fix them shortly after in a better way. As the creator of the project, if I can’t move in the direction that I want to, I might as well just quit the whole thing.
In the last few years I began splitting some functionality into new modules, which are also not providing a unified experience currently. My goal is to have a finer and more connected user experience across all features of the TCG ONE platform in a single application. Which means more features will be ported soon.
This new http://tcg.one site is a new Next.js application (built almost entirely by Claude) which takes care of cards, expansions, formats, decks, and career mode. However the website is far from a perfect user experience state as of now. I need an experienced frontend/fullstack engineer to take care of styling, theming, character, fine tuning elements and components to improve UX, gather user feedback, setup and track metrics and some other finer details.
fixed
The link is working but only for ones with developer access. I shall see it removed for non-devs once we have global roles support across the platform.
I’ve updated the search to work with wildcards now, so you’ll get partial results while typing without necessarily typing entire word. If you want to search for the card “N”, use quotes, it works nicely.
Cheers