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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

#61

Post by asciimov »

courgette wrote: post #53
jedberg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd like to imagine they, like other tcgs from that era, ended up in a landfill after a parent decided to toss those "baseball" cards telling you years later, "...but you don't like baseball anyway".

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

#63

Post by BlueTemplar »

Yhippa wrote: post #40
rsync wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

What is also ridiculous is how links and search for merely half a year old articles were broken too.

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

#64

Post by _cenw »

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…

They certainly tried to do this during the 30A ($1000 for 4 packs of 1993's Beta, not tournament legal) sale, and nobody wanted to be involved. So they went to some people in the Yu-Gi-Oh community who talked up the product for a day until they learned of the collective backlash and pricing for the product and apologized as well.

Overall the community seems to be somewhat forgiving of what Wizards R&D does, but definitely not anything that's a result of Hasbro exercising pressure to milk the franchise, and usually it's quite easy to tell which is which as soon as you hear quiet "sorry I didn't decide this" remarks from R&D people. People don't hate the game or the company as much as the obvious ways to segment the audience and generally increase the price of new cardboard rectangles (as for reprints, they're actually doing those, but investor-collectors aren't so happy).

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

#65

Post by GolfPopper »

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 kept my cards neatly boxed in my basement... which flooded while I was on vacation in 2013. I came back to an undifferentiated pile of soggy paper. (In retrospect, I really should have used sealed plastic for all those unlimited-era cards...

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

#66

Post by GolfPopper »

courgette wrote: post #54
TOMDM wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mar…

My understanding is that a lot of people stopped paying for WOTC's Virtual TableTop software. While it's not my personal cup of tea, VTT got quite big over the pandemic. I've seen speculation that cornering the VTT market (where WOTC's own offering was in third place) was a big driver for the OGL revision.

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

#67

Post by kilburn »

courgette wrote: post #54
TOMDM wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mar…

The mass-cancellations were to the D&D Beyond software [1]. It is the official tool to help with character creation and progress tracking, as a quick reference, etc.

I definitely see the utility, and the cost (6USD/month for the top tier) to "please keep this up" signaling ratio seems pretty good to me. I can see myself subscribing if I played even 10% of some people I know.

[1] https://www.dndbeyond.com/store/subscribe

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

#68

Post by jl6 »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #36
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

Note that takedown doesn’t mean delete - it just means inaccessible to the public. IA still hold a copy, and the public will be able to see it again in ~120 years when the copyright expires.

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

#69

Post by pessimizer »

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.

Somehow, Games Workshop still thrives with a lot longer of a history of fan and customer abuse.

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

#70

Post by _cenw »

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…

Paper standard mostly has a player count problem as people move to Arena or into eternal formats, especially commander. This is because people don't actually seem to like standard and the constant rotation (and likely never did). Why own paper, of which 99% you'll never play again. ONE seems to actually tackle one of the issues, with 5+ special versions of supposed chase cards the price of a typical standard decklist could finally be reasonable again.
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