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Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

mtgrocks.com

21–30 of 155 posts

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#21

[flagged]

Sure, learning a complex competitive game in their youth shapes your logical thinking, handling pressure, and learning how to handle people in a competitive 1v1 situation (think sales or salary negotiations).

I know a lot of people which were playing, and than moved on and changed their career to either poker player or studying computer science, or both.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#23

What is it about this older content that makes it impossible to migrate them to their new back end? I'm imagining it's mostly text and images. Is it more than that? I stopped playing Magic 25 years ago, but I think its history is definitely worth archiving for posterity. I hope somebody is going through and saving articles while they can, it would be a shame to lose that.

"I'm imagining it's mostly text and images."

You are almost certainly correct and, further, it is likely the text represents almost 100% of the value.

There is no excuse for this buffoonish behavior. Just absurd.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#25

Major franchises that have a lot of nerd crossover (marvel, Star Wars, etc.) keep a lot of influencers on the payroll as “advisors” or various types or consultants for events like this. Expect some mea culpas and some Twitter threads from respected people saying, “WotC made a terrible mistake but with the latest changes it’s better now.” Someone at corporate will take a public decapitation as the fall guy with a nice…

I have plenty of friends who are emotionally and physically invested in MtG and they certainly want to hate WotC. People love to hate things, especially gaming communities, in my experience. Hating something invigorates a community. Game companies need to make serious plans to not anger their players.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#27

Major franchises that have a lot of nerd crossover (marvel, Star Wars, etc.) keep a lot of influencers on the payroll as “advisors” or various types or consultants for events like this. Expect some mea culpas and some Twitter threads from respected people saying, “WotC made a terrible mistake but with the latest changes it’s better now.” Someone at corporate will take a public decapitation as the fall guy with a nice…

Between this and the recent attempt at looting the D&D community for all it's worth that horribly backfired (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/dd-maker-retreats-fro...) what is there not to hate?

As far as I'm concerned I'm done being charitable to them. They've never been fantastic, and Hasbro has clearly been demanding their dues forcing this.

My biggest hope is the Magic community has a great open alternative similar to what the d&d community is likely to do in response to this.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#28

I don't understand why they pulled everything off the wayback machine. Even if I disagree, I can understand the argument that it's not worth maintaining the old content themselves. But why stop third party archives?

>I don't understand why they pulled everything off the wayback machine.

Someone cannot--as in their request will be rejected--do that unless it's for pages that host personal information.

Archives still there if you have the original URL*. The problem is, like in many other sites, every few years they move everything around. So you cannot just copy-paste the new URL and expect to find the copies available in the older one.

*E.g. the one article that they're unable to find in the submitted one: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://magic.wizards.com/en/a.... Had to use Google myself to find this older archived URL.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#29
This article reinforces something that has been irking me more and more. The word content. I think the thing that annoys me about it is that it erases the uniqueness of the... content. This is even reflected in it being an uncountable noun. And, as a believer in the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, I think this changes how we think about it. Sunsetting some content in favor of newer more engaging content sounds almost reasonable, until you realize it amounts to erasing unique and irreplaceable works, and along with it the historic record.

Re: Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history

#30

WOTC doesn’t care about hardcore fans who have history with the franchise, they just care about creating limited run products to juice the fans. It’s been impossible to take the game seriously from a competitive standpoint for about the past decade where they’ve continued to move further and further from the block-core annual release cycle.

My theory is that they also killed competitive magic due to the MeToo movement and the various other social causes that sprang up in the last 6 years. Wotc and its corporate parent cannot control who the winningest players are, and their old tournament structures more or less simply rewarded, and therefore promoted, those that did the best in tournament play. One individual, who frequently won or was in the running at the largest tournaments, was banned from competitive play for inappropriate texts and/or behavior. They subsequently moved to a system where selected partners, mostly Twitch streamers, were selected for qualification. Competitive qualification was still possible, but the change gave Wotc more control over the individuals that would play on their broadcasts.
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