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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

#51

Post by wmanley »

beebmam wrote: post #25
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…

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.

Or make plans to anger them in ways that are useful to the gaming company.

As you say: hating invigorates a community

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

#52

Post by bcrosby95 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #33
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.

I got my first programming job because of MUDs. I also met my wife at my first programming job.

I guess I owe MUDs a lot.

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

#53

Post by courgette »

jedberg wrote: post #47
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…

> You can find people selling Black Lotuses (now worth many thousands of dollars) for a few bucks. Yup, that was my friends. I was smart enough to preserve my cards. Sadly I don't know where I put the box with the preserved cards...

I have a box with some third and fourth edition decent card somewhere.

Some first edition lands, because that’s all my 15 yo ass could pay for.

Same as you m, unclear where it is.

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

#54

Post by courgette »

TOMDM wrote: post #38
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 a…

Hi, I’ve been playing DND since 20 years or so. I never bought more than a few books. Other friends were buying other and we were lending them to each other. Of course we might also have used PDF from dubious sources …

But my question is : what are people paying from to WOTC ? Subscription? To what ?

Sorry, I’m sure that the WOTC website would happily tell me more but I don’t have the energy to go though a ton of marketing.

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

#55

Post by Semaphor »

beebmam wrote: post #25
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…

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.

> People love to hate things, especially gaming communities

Video gaming communities seem to only hate in the lightest sense of the word. I think it was quite a shock for WotCBro to see that TTRPGs players actually put their money where their mouth is, instead of just talking.

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

#56

Post by courgette »

throwanem wrote: post #9
totetsu wrote: post #6

Its something to reflect on, that those small nonmainstream groups, communities, cultures that you might be a part of everyday are mostly completely empherial. Records of what people did and said are bound to be lost, noone is going to curate or summerise the history. I faced this when yahoo groups was deleted. I found many messgae boards of a the transient 'teaching abroad in japan' local communities from ten or mor…

Most things that have ever happened were likewise ephemeral; mostly, what we have is what those who came before considered worth significant effort of preservation. It may also be worth reflecting on the hubris, evident in retrospect, which underlay the idea that in the age of the Internet this would magically cease to be the case.

Excellent point, I seen in the article some regret about the non availability on the way back machine.

At some point information worth preserving must be preserved by people who care about it and understand it.

We can’t trust random corporations to do that on the “real” long run. Hasbro will be bought by something else, and that might be a company that don’t give a damn about MTG.

I’ve played a lot of MTG and I know the community sonehow. I’m surprised that nobody has a dump of those articles.

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

#57

Post by courgette »

sp332 wrote: post #35
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

Oh. So it’s not lost then. If it’s that important, someone should dump them and store them somewhere else.

I don’t think we can expect corporations to maintain stuff for free for us forever.

They are gonna fuck it up at some point, if not now. In 50 years when hasbro and all its asset is buy by a agricultural tractor manufacturing company with no website and who don’t know what MTG is.

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

#58

Post by courgette »

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.

I agree, but also : apparently that content is still accessible on IA, under the older link scheme.

If it’s that important, someone should scrap that, zip it and put it on a tracker.

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

#59

Post by EamonnMR »

shostack wrote: post #27
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…

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 alternati…

It's very hard to do an open alternative to MTG. MTG's ecosystem is very closely tied to the economics of the physical cards driving the development and community (ie card shops.) Tools for playing magic without cards of course exist, but the vitality of the community depends on the constant refreshing of the environment tied to carefully balanced development.
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