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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

#141

Post by charcircuit »

kappuchino wrote: post #99
charcircuit wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

robots.txt only prohibits people from using the wayback machine to view the archive. The IA still has it archived. If someone later changes the robots.txt to something more permissive it will put back everything on the wayback machine.

Wrong. (If you know better than I please cite a credible source). I requested to purge the archive from a domain I have since the former owner put semi legal crap there. Apart from robots text, I was asked to set up one specific page with a hash-like url to signal that I am really, really sure about the purge. Thats all that is needed. The process is described here: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-r…

I only have anecdotal evidence from a domain becoming parked with a restricted robots.txt and then it getting unparked and the archive still existing.

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

#142

Post by courgette »

kilburn wrote: post #67
courgette wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/subscr…

Well, I take papers note, like our forefather had plan for us. And then I spend the session scribbling on it. It’s actually nice little artifact of long evening with friends

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

#143

Post by gsk22 »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #32
gsk22 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gam…

> There better be, in standard the meta game is basically designed in a lab and prescribed to the player base.

The sheer number of bans in standard the past few years proves this isn't the case. That might be the image Wizards' designers like to project, but it is clear they are not able to predict how players will use the cards they print.

> Commander is a casual format, it’s not competitive nor meant to be.

There is literally a competitive commander format (cEDH), and the "hell queue" in historic brawl on Arena shows that there are other very competitive commander-based formats.

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

#144

Post by courgette »

rsync wrote: post #137
courgette wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Free rsync.net space to anyone undertaking this or any efforts like this. Just email.

I have no connection with the MTG article. But I do keep in mind the “any effort like this” bit. Your account name is memorable enough.

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

#145

Post by jachee »

chongli wrote: post #7
jachee wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasbro and their injected pointy-hairs don’t care about hardcore fans. Or fans. Or players. Or even the odious non-playing collectors. Or the game. Or it’s history. Or their workers. All they care about is how much more money they can wrong out of their cash cow.

While all of that may be true, it's hard to see how the deletion of a website fits into that grand plan. We're talking about saving a few bucks to maintain this old information at a cost of huge waves of bad will? Seems incredibly short-sighted.

“Incredibly short-sighted” concisely describes all the Hasbro execs in two words.

The Magic site has been running more or less for 25 years, and due to WotC being a game company rather than a web content company likely has a shit ton of tech debt. Rather than “pay down” that “debt” the right way, they’re going to “write it off” and only modernize a small fraction of their content.

Because they have zero actual intellectual investment in their business, haven’t ever played, or been involved, and thus have zero idea of how much value they’re destroying.

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

#146

Post by EamonnMR »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #117
EamonnMR wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's that hard. I gave that a bit of thought when I finished my degree. At the time, I had written an M:tG expert system, for my end-of-year project, that included a rules engine and an ability text parser [1]. The parser was written in Prolog with Definite Clause Grammars so it could generate new ability text as easy as it could recognise it [2]. I realised that all it would take to make a community ve…

All very cool stuff (awesome to see serious work done in Prolog!) but...

Actually cloning the rules isn't the issue. Convincing the community to use your off-brand version is the issue, and trying to keep the community together in the absence of the trusted central authority of the company producing the game. That can't be easily replicated.

Consider Wargaming: Every tabletop wargamer I know eventually designs their own rule system. Yet none of them can displace Warhammer 40k, despite 40k's rules not even being very good in the first place and GW frequently alienating fans.

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

#147

Post by tiagod »

pdimitar wrote: post #133
blincoln wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your description (wget + git), I think your bot is going to miss a lot of content on modern websites. Have you tried viewing the content you've archived recently? A lot of modern websites don't even download the actual page/article content until some JavaScript runs. I noticed this in particular when I was collecting daily Monkeypox stats from the CDC website.[1] The Internet Archive had indexed the public U…

Good points, yep. I'm too indifferent to try and fight to have an automated browser download stuff for me I admit, plus the websites I archive are server-side rendered, but if I ever get to the point you speak of then I'm much more likely to find how are they downloading the data that they're rendering, download their CSS and turn the page to a static one after downloading the data myself. They're interesting problem…

Check out the SingleFile browser extension. It's open-source and automates Firefox/chrome to turn any content page into a static HTML file with everything bundled in (js is stripped out). In my experience it handles anything you throw at it remarkably well.

It can be automated from the command line too.

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

#148

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

EamonnMR wrote: post #146
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's that hard. I gave that a bit of thought when I finished my degree. At the time, I had written an M:tG expert system, for my end-of-year project, that included a rules engine and an ability text parser [1]. The parser was written in Prolog with Definite Clause Grammars so it could generate new ability text as easy as it could recognise it [2]. I realised that all it would take to make a community ve…

All very cool stuff (awesome to see serious work done in Prolog!) but... Actually cloning the rules isn't the issue. Convincing the community to use your off-brand version is the issue, and trying to keep the community together in the absence of the trusted central authority of the company producing the game. That can't be easily replicated. Consider Wargaming: Every tabletop wargamer I know eventually designs their…

Yep, that's exactly right. The big problem with a project like that would be to get enough players on board to have an actual community.

But, I know how to write code, not how to make people follow me in my hare-brained schemes :)

>> All very cool stuff (awesome to see serious work done in Prolog!) but...

There's plenty of serious work done in Prolog. My new job is maintaining a 30-year old behemoth of a Prolog project used to manage company car rentals. I'd never heard of it before starting to work with it and I'm betting there's plenty more where it came from.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by pdimitar »

tiagod wrote: post #147
pdimitar wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points, yep. I'm too indifferent to try and fight to have an automated browser download stuff for me I admit, plus the websites I archive are server-side rendered, but if I ever get to the point you speak of then I'm much more likely to find how are they downloading the data that they're rendering, download their CSS and turn the page to a static one after downloading the data myself. They're interesting problem…

Check out the SingleFile browser extension. It's open-source and automates Firefox/chrome to turn any content page into a static HTML file with everything bundled in (js is stripped out). In my experience it handles anything you throw at it remarkably well. It can be automated from the command line too.

Oh right, I completely forgot about that one even though I have it bookmarked. Thanks.
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