Gary

Ah, great thank you for the explanation! I will keep the add card button thing in mind when I get there on the redesign. :)

Exactly what I'm thinking @ClockworkCopper. Push formats first and let the user filter/sort how they please after that, be it new, active, hot, unloved (help needed), etc.

This one caught my eye. When you say "there just isn't any incentive for someone like me to participate in this community", what do you mean? What sort of "incentive" do you normally look for to participate in a community? I would absolutely love to fix this, I just don't know how yet.

Until now this has been a hobby project that takes week nights and weekend days to run, that makes it REALLY hard to do big changes like redesigns and new features, BUT... BIG NEWS, as of October 1, I will have dedicated days during the week to work on the site and I intend to do just that. First, I am going to finish (yes, I started) working on a new mobile-friendly redesign and then we can start thinking about the big new features.

I don't like new & active, I don't like hot decks and I don't like unloved decks, I think they are in fact quite negative for anybody trying and failing to get there and I don't like that. I'm thinking of switching to a format-based split for the main pages. Thoughts?

I really like the idea of letting people ask for help with decks, this is what we *tried* to do with "unloved decks" but the problem is that too many people mark their decks as unloved. So you end up with this MASSIVE list of decks and still not enough people willing (or with the time) to help, so we end up with a second version of the homepage, with just as many decks not getting any love, which is a negative experience to the people trying to get, and ultimately not managing to get the help they're looking for.

Maybe we should only allow decks to be made public if they have proper descriptions. This could help the public listed content be better, but still allow people to just store their decks privately without descriptions if they want to.

100% agree. People want attention and they don't want to give it back. This has ALWAYS been the problem and I simply don't know how to fix it. So instead I'm going to focus on the tooling wer offer for deck builders and collectors. Keep the social stuff in there, but try and reduce its importance/value.

Welcome aboard! :)

Thank you. We're not going anywhere! :)

Absolutely. We've seen it over and over again. People want feedback/attention of their decks but are unwilling to provide that feedback/attention to others. This is ultimately the fault of the tool we've built here and I will be looking to fix that over the coming months.

We tried to make the site work like Reddit, requiring a combination upvotes and comments to get to the magical homepage. I feel like this has given everybody a false sense of "Oh, I'll post my deck, get to the homepage and get feedback", but unfortunately, for most people, that simply doesn't happen because, well... we're not Reddit!

I absolutely built the site originally to do just that, keep track of my decks and allow me to share lists with people. The idea of getting other people to help build was well intentioned, but ultimately failed because there are so many more decks being made every day than there are people willing to comment/help on them. I don't like the negative impact this has on people.

I totally understand that it can be disheartening when you post a get and get no feedback, but I don't believe there is an easy fix for that, instead we need to make the tools better and not have people wanting/needing this magical feedback that will, more than likely, never come.

Thanks very much for posting this. I'm Gary, I built and own mtgvault and when I see decks like this, it gives me a small glimmer of hope and inspiration going forwards. I loved reading through this thread, learning thoughts on what is good, what is bad and what it totally broken and NEEDS to be fixed.

I know that I have neglected this place in the last few years and I'm sorry for that, life (and lack of spare time) has a way of... getting in the way of hobby projects like this and ultimately the site suffers as a result, BUT... I have good news!

I have renegotiated my work contract, and starting October 1, I I will have dedicated days every week to work on this site and our Vault X gaming supplies & accesories business. Changes are coming, a redesign is coming, mobile-friendly is coming. I want to get rid of that negative feeling of posting a deck and not having anybody reply, honestly I'm not entirely sure how to do that yet, but I think that focusing on the tools available to deck builders and collectors alike and not making people feel like they need to get to the homepage would be a good place to start.

Hey, this is a great write-up, thanks a lot for taking the time to write it! :)

Haha, check out Ian bigging himself up. :D

Hi, I don't get as much spare time as I would like to work on the site, but I am still here and I am listening!

Ok, thanks for the feedback. Seems like a quick fix might be to up the limit and see what happens...

First of all, thanks for the feedback.

I hate the hot page. We built it with good intentions, but it just hasn't worked. I want to change the main homepage tabs to be the major formats, then underneath each of these we could filter by hot/new/unloved as well as filter by user tags. Do you think that could work?

A big issue we had in the past with letting users select the format of a deck is that you end up with decks marked "Standard" that have rotated out. We are trying something in the background at the moment to auto-tag decks with a format. It could be as simple as untagging "Standard" decks when cards rotate.

I like the idea of giving users recognition, we tried to do this with comment upvoting and user reputation, but I don't think this really worked. maybe the addition of aschievements/badges would help that would be displayed against your username in all comments to make to show how much of a badass you are?

I love the idea of forcing decks to be tagged with certain key information such as casual/competative/1v1/multiplayer etc. I will look into this.

Cheers!

You're awesome, I like you. Keep up the good work man! :)