MWS Shuffler really is rigged

[cmaflippi]

This was an April fool from magic-league

(original statement by judge director from m-l.com )

There were many complaints to staff about the MWS shuffler in the past.
Hundreds of players accused their opponents of manipulating the shuffler in some way or another.

We have always exhibited a behavior of ignoring such accusations.
The reason is because we believe in the principle "In doubt, on behalf of the culprit".
This basically means: Until we (judge staff) can prove someone is using an engine which derandomizes draws,
we will not make rulings against that person.

In the past, Apprentice was the number one playing application for magic-league.
It was well-known that there are ways to cheat on Apprentice which mainly arise from how Apprentice
communicates its data between 2 computers.
Having made research on Apprentice and its exploits, magic-league's technical staff Laplie has developped
the so called MlAnti Softwarein past. It detects Cheating software pretty well, so magic-league could
provide a cheat-free playing platform for Apprentice with MlAnti.

MWS transmits its vital information very similarly. The advantage of MWS is that players also have
the option to play via servers (mwsplay.net mwsgames.net pavouk.square.cz mws-magic.league.com ).
Unfortunately, someone recently discovered how to work around MWS's normal functionality even if you're playing on a server.
I had a long talk with various people but we're yet to find a solution for the MWS hack.

So magic-league staff got aware of an MWS hack. Our short-term resolution is to take down the magic-league MWS server
(mws-magic.league.com). Seeing we have no way to detect the abuse on MWS yet, we will switch our shedule
to Apprentice tournaments only.

You can still play on MWS if you wish, but you will at your own risk. Note that we
still have no way to determine whether someone uses additional software to play with MWS or not.

And now we've got some good news. Jorbes finds more time to work on his project OPT ( http://www.onlineplaytable.com ) again
so we can await this application getting ready for (constructed-)tournaments on magic-league in April.
You can find useful guides helping you to use OPT at
http://onlineplaytable.com/guide.html and/or http://www.magic-league.com/guide/go/go.php
The latest News post about OPT can be found at http://www.magic-league.com/news/323/up ... r_opt.html

OPT is ready to play Magic on already, so I suggest you try it out !
For this purpose, there exists a channel on solidirc specifically for OPT players on #opt