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

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

#31

Post by JeremyBanks »

blockwriter wrote: post #30
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #3

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 a…

[dead]

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

#32

Post by Our_Benefactors »

gsk22 wrote: post #16
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #3

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.

> 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. What does the set release cycle have to do with the health of competitive Magic? I mean, sure, there's no yearly core set anymore, but so what? - Reprints (actual or functional) of staple cards still get made in every se…

> Reprints (actual or functional) of staple cards still get made in every set.

Taking away new design space and diluting the game overall. Instead of creating limited environments that are totally fresh (save a very small # of reprints historically) with an annually-reserved slot for revisions, everything gets sloshed together.

> There is still a diverse metagame in standard.

There better be, in standard the meta game is basically designed in a lab and prescribed to the player base. Other formats have done worse, we’ll see how many years they can keep modern interesting before it falls to the same power creep issues the old extended format did.

> New formats like commander have created new competitive environments.

Commander is a casual format, it’s not competitive nor meant to be. Arena has no on-ramp to serious competitive MODO play, the interfaces and economies are entirely different.

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

#33

Post by gorgoiler »

Imnimo wrote: post #2

One piece of Magic history that is still well-preserved is the ancient usenet groups: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.deckmaster https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.trading-cards.magic.mi... The most recent posts are spam, but if you use the advanced search to go back to 1994/1995, it's fun to read about the way people looked at the game nearly 30 years ago. You can find people selling Black Lotuses (now wort…

Alongside newsgroups I also have fond memories of telnetting to MUDs in the 90s. Sprinkling real time social interaction with people online truly felt like magic.

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

#34

Post by pyuser583 »

Back in May/June of 2020, they scrubbed cars deemed racist. One card “Invoke Prejudice” corresponded to a URL that contained an obscure neo-Nazi symbol.

Geek culture has a nasty side to it. Maybe they found more where that came from, or maybe they just didn’t want the press.

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

#35

Post by sp332 »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #22

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?

Conversation below the linked tweet says those links have been broken on the actual site since November. You can find them in Wayback by changing /news/ to /articles/archive/ . https://twitter.com/EpiphanyG/status/1617652985919852546

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

#36

Post by boomboomsubban »

forgotpwd16 wrote: post #28
boomboomsubban wrote: post #22

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 olde…

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

The Internet Archive abides by the DMCA meaning it has to take down any material the copyright holder requests. WotC presumably owns the copyright for all the posted content, so very well could demand their archives taken down.

From your example I seem to be wrong. I tested one article link I found on the magic wiki and as it had only attempted archives that showed "page not available," I assumed they had been wiped.

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

#37

Post by sp332 »

im3w1l wrote: post #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 reason…

You're right, although maybe late to the conversation. The idea is to set up frames first, like boxes around tweets, or a five-paragraph blog post with a placeholder hero image and lorem ipsum. Then pour in your content to fill the frame.

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

#38

Post by TOMDM »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #3

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.

The only way to get companies like this to cooperate with what the fans really want is to vote with your wallet.

The DND community recently won a large battle against WOTC over the proposed open gaming license changes. Fans saw wizards taking away some of the freedom that made DND great and decided they wouldn't put up with it.

Huge numbers of people cancelled their subscriptions and paizo, DND's biggest competitor announced that they sold 6 months volume in 2 weeks after they announced their own open license as a replacement to the OGL.

All of this culminated in wizards backing off the updated license, and actually publishing the DND 5.1 SRD under creative commons 4.0.

I reckon wizards will try again with the next edition and their virtual table top, but for now the DND fans have proven they can get wizards to bend under enough pressure.

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

#39

Post by vlunkr »

monero-xmr wrote: post #8

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…

Do they really pay influencers? I’m skeptical. There seem to be a limitless supply of megafans who will defend the bad decisions of corporations because they’ve invested their personality in it, not because they’re getting paid.

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

#40

Post by Yhippa »

rsync wrote: post #23
karaterobot wrote: post #20

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.

My guess is that they saw a long tail of content that got infrequent page views and thought that the effort wasn't worth it to do a migration of all that content. People will feel an immediate theoretical loss but that they never did really access old articles so it wasn't a big loss and they'll move on.
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