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Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

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Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#151

Post by kweingar »

sublinear wrote: post #148
solardev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever want another huge, ancient labyrinth of a language that also kinda sorta runs everywhere, the Javascript world welcomes you with open tentaces! Here we're controlled by an evil older than Oracle itself (Microsoft and Typescript), with upgrades and crossgrades and cross compilers that deliver astounding 15% improvements in performance in exchange for a mere few animal sacrifices and a lifetime of misery. I…

> controlled by an evil older than Oracle itself (Microsoft and Typescript) Who still uses typescript? It's not the mid-2010s anymore. Plain javascript is everywhere and I'd argue using a framework implies an immature project or team.

According to StackOverflow’s 2023 Developer Survey, TypeScript is the fifth most popular language, beating C, C++, Java, C#, Rust, Go, etc.

Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#152

Post by phpisthebest »

rndmwlk wrote: post #113
dmix wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a unionized job as a teenager at an industrial plant and I asked how to get hired for real instead of temping and he explained how unions worked there and other plants in town. He said it's extremely neoptistic, they'd usually hire a kid of one of the workers or a friend and the odds of an outsider getting in was thin. They dealt out jobs like a mafia family.

I have a few friends in the trades, all part of a union, and none of them would echo this sentiment. It's also funny because this is the exact same sentiment people complain about with the corporate world, where it's more about who you know than what you know.

Trade unions and Employment unions are very different.

That said, i suspect the parent story was from years ago, most likely late 90's or early 00's when that type of thing was common

Today most unions are very very very hard up to find anyone willing to work everyone that wants a job, and can actually follow instructions, and show up on time (harder than it sounds it seems) gets a job right now...

Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#153

Post by phpisthebest »

criddell wrote: post #134
bsdpufferfish wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unions tends to reward credentials and years of experience over performance or capability. For most people it lowers downside risk and lowers upside opportunity.

Unions prioritize whatever it is the members want prioritized.

Unions like government prioritize what ever the vocal, loudest, and most organized minority of the group wants prioritized, this will not align with all members, and rarely even aligns with what the majority of members desire

Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#154

Post by teg4n_ »

sublinear wrote: post #148
solardev wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever want another huge, ancient labyrinth of a language that also kinda sorta runs everywhere, the Javascript world welcomes you with open tentaces! Here we're controlled by an evil older than Oracle itself (Microsoft and Typescript), with upgrades and crossgrades and cross compilers that deliver astounding 15% improvements in performance in exchange for a mere few animal sacrifices and a lifetime of misery. I…

> controlled by an evil older than Oracle itself (Microsoft and Typescript) Who still uses typescript? It's not the mid-2010s anymore. Plain javascript is everywhere and I'd argue using a framework implies an immature project or team.

This is an absolutely baffling take to me. Like, I don’t know if you are even being serious or not.

Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#155

Post by prakhar897 »

morelisp wrote: post #146
prakhar897 wrote: post #120

thinly related but i could really use some advice. There's a board game called "quoridor" that I've been playing a lot lately. I found 2 platforms where u can play this online, major one being BGA (boardgamearena). It was kinda sad to see a game on par with chess in terms of simplicity and strategy, being lumped into the same group as kids games. So, I started building a platform for it myself in my free time. Still…

BGA is... not for kids games. I mean, there are kids games there, but there's also RftG, TtA, T&E... Quoridor is nice but I would not even put it in the top 10 modern abstracts, let alone on par with chess. Legality aside, it is a bit of a dick move to reimplement a modern abstract that people can play for free, or even make themselves for a low cost, just because you don't like the (free) site it's on.

The problem isn't free site, it's extensibility. Chess/chess.com has 100s of variants, ability to study games, and lots of other chess specific features.

Bga has fixed set of features for all its games. And their focus is divided.

This game atleast deserves its own home.

Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#157

Post by TacticalCoder »

bart_spoon wrote: post #149
THENATHE wrote: post #48

I really miss 2016 MtG. I remember when full art lands and full art promos were RARE and with money for no reason other than their collectability. I really liked when cards were rare because of the fact that they were good and uncommon and maybe because they were the same as the regular card but foil, not because they were arbitrarily a different type of shiny, or like when that one card from Kamigawa had a different…

There’s only two camps, investors and gamers. I think that anyone who wants to “have cards that have relative value” are investors, whether they realize it or not. Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves (I recall a recent Reddit post where the user was trying to collect every single Magic card that depicted an owl in any way). But if your concern is about the monetary…

> There’s only two camps, investors and gamers.

It's not that black and white. I used to play the game in the mid nineties. The most expensive card I bought back then I paid the equivalent of 5 EUR (the Euro didn't even exist yet) because I needed it for a deck but that card came out before I started playing.

I'm not an investor in MtG cards. But my collection went up in value. Nothing crazy (I don't have any of the "power nines") but with 28 dual lands, the most valuable card from Legends (The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale) and the most valuable card from Arabian Night (Bazaar of Baghdad) and a few others, I'm sitting easily on 20 K EUR atm.

I didn't do it on purpose: I simply never got rid of my cards, not paying attention to the price. I just like my old cards and they bring me back memories when I look at them.

I'm take it I'm in a third category: nostalgic people who simply like their very own (and very old) cards.

Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#158

Post by morelisp »

prakhar897 wrote: post #155
morelisp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BGA is... not for kids games. I mean, there are kids games there, but there's also RftG, TtA, T&E... Quoridor is nice but I would not even put it in the top 10 modern abstracts, let alone on par with chess. Legality aside, it is a bit of a dick move to reimplement a modern abstract that people can play for free, or even make themselves for a low cost, just because you don't like the (free) site it's on.

The problem isn't free site, it's extensibility. Chess/chess.com has 100s of variants, ability to study games, and lots of other chess specific features. Bga has fixed set of features for all its games. And their focus is divided. This game atleast deserves its own home.

Look, for all I know Gigamic is just waiting for someone to come along and make chess.com for Quoridor, and you're the guy to do it.

But I think your ignorance of the hobbyist game market is revealed a bit here already (not having full context for BGA, not knowing if Gigamic still owns it - they certainly do and had a booth at Essen this year like they do every year) - and you're vastly overestimating not just Quoridor's popularity but the size of the entire market for non-chess/go/tables/poker games. And I don't just mean financially - dozens of variants are no good if there are barely enough players to match dozens of games to begin with.

Did you try contacting BGA to see if you could get the Studio files for Quoridor?

Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#159

Post by grogenaut »

busterarm wrote: post #61
speeder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw someone pointing out they are doing exact same things comic companies did leading to their crash. The comic companies started to sell a ton of variants, foils, collector editions. They also started to do attention grabbing but bad quality storylines. And also they started to try to cut middlemen and sell more directly to the consumer. The end result was that readers eventually noticed quality was crap, with com…

It may not have worked in the comic book industry but the same tactic has proved an enormous boon to the sports card industry in the last decade and that's absolutely booming.

Is it still booming or is it coming down like many other things post pandemic free cash flow and ability to do things with people again?

Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling

#160

Post by keep_reading »

boringuser2 wrote: post #156

Layoffs during periods of strong performance really raise an eyebrow to me. You should have to prove some economic need to make those kind of layoffs similarly how you have to prove economic need for work visas.

Why do so many people think the economy is in a healthy position? Strong performance now means nothing. e.g., Department Store Sales 3-month average was $17B in 2008 and is now down to under $11B. It's a bloodbath. It has been steadily trending down since 2008.

"Bill Ackman warns economy will fall off a cliff if the Fed doesn't hurry and cut rates"

The Fed isn't going to cut rates for years. They're refusing to blink. These are Volcker-sized balls on JPow.

Any rallying now is squeezing blood from the stone. Any massive layoffs, sales, mergers, bankruptcies, or consolidations is hedging for the unavoidable cliff.

These are just smart, safe moves by corporations -- getting their affairs in order, per se.

And now the workers are going to suffer because they didn't organize labor when the economy was booming and they weren't feeling the pinch. Hopefully they learn this time and don't let the unions weaken if they want to avoid being battered and left for a cheaper workforce or replaced with automation.

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