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United Wizards of the Coast

unitedwizardsofthecoast.com

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Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#81

Post by nicolas-siplis »

Imnimo wrote: post #57

Back when Arena was first announced, there was an interesting line in their write-up: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-nee... >We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new me…

I'm actually working on this right now! https://chiplis.com/ironsmith

It's a parser + (de)compiler and rules engine which I'm trying to get to 100% coverage over all Standard/Modern/Vintage/Commander legal cards. About 23000 of them are partially supported, while 15k currently work in full (~3k more than what MTGA currently supports, IIRC). It also allows for P2P 4-way multiplayer which Arena unfortunately does not :/

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#82

Post by ryandrake »

looneysquash wrote: post #67
perrohunter wrote: post #44

I think there are some professions where Unions make sense, like for Pilots and Teachers, as a 30 years of experience teacher can be replaced with a 2 years of experience teacher, so we need unions to protect the experienced Teacher or Pilot, but when it comes to what MTG Arena does, I dont see much value on the union existing, perhaps someone can provide some valuable insight

The company you work for almost always has more power in negotiations than you do. (For some hypothetical "you".) The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically. If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage. Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.…

A lot of HN repliers think that they, out of thousands of other employees, are that One Captain Of Industry that has sufficient bargaining and negotiating power to stand toe to toe with a huge employer. And therefore, a union could never help tech employees as a class.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#83

Post by bwestergard »

I'm glad to see this.

I don't work in games, but I am a software developer and a member of the Communications Workers of America. I've also taken leave to help workers in games organize.

I'm seeing a lot of ideological takes that are disconnected from the reality of unions with software developer members today. If anyone has questions about the CWA or game worker organizing campaigns, I'll do my best to answer.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#84

Post by mjr00 »

margalabargala wrote: post #52
DelaneyM wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all uncommon, and important. When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one cont…

No, it's really only companies that don't care about being shitty that do this. It's a callous lack of regard for employees that leads to the situation you describe, though you're right that it's not uncommon. Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write".…

> If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.

The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.

This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#85

Post by jaggederest »

stirfish wrote: post #60
tiagod wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several MTG video-games. In this case, it's "Magic: The Gathering Arena" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic%3A_The_Gathering_Arena

I had one that came on a cd. I played that for ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering_(1997_vid...

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#86

Post by 1attice »

nonethewiser wrote: post #62
haunter wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was 27 years ago. They were only founded 9 years before that. The game(s) are more popular than ever, especially D&D

D&D is famously not more popular than ever and is one of the reasons why so many OSR's have exploded in popularity over the past 5-10 years.

It is both true that there has been an OSR revival, and that D&D is more popular than ever -- just with a much broader and culturally normative audience.

Also: Yes, Hasbro did some shit, but they also had to relent and CC their SRD. This all happened years ago.

I say this as a committed Pathfinder player who hasn't seen a good reason to return to D&D (PF2e is good enough). D&D is doing numbers and no one cares that us nerds moved on because of weak tea from the previous decade.

It's their house now, and it's fine.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#87

Post by bluefirebrand »

nonethewiser wrote: post #72

I understand why workers in the video game industry want to unionize. They like the industry but the standards are shit. I do not see how unions will catch on in the video game industry. The ability to unionize has very little to do with the ideology of the workforce and everything to do with the structure of the industry. Unions tend to catch on when labor is irreplacable, workplace is large and centralized, if they…

I think on the contrary somewhat

If everyone at a game developer goes on strike, there is basically no amount of outsourcing or scab labour that can replace them. This is actually probably true of basically all software

Just refusing to share passwords into key systems would be enough to significantly halt any attempt to bring on an entirely new development team

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#89

Post by ryandrake »

satvikpendem wrote: post #61
dhosek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s because the capitalist class has successfully persuaded the proletariat that they shouldn’t join a union. The US has been very successful at concentrating created wealth into a small number of people.

> beyond the typical reasons of American anti union sentiment like corporatism, bootstrap mentality etc, despite which there are many unions in the US like UAW, police and teachers unions etc. As I said for tech workers it's a different set of reasons.

I think tech largely falls for the same anti-union propaganda as a great number of the rest of the USA. You'll see HN commenters in this article repeating much of this propaganda.

Re: United Wizards of the Coast

#90

Post by Lonestar1440 »

looneysquash wrote: post #67
perrohunter wrote: post #44

I think there are some professions where Unions make sense, like for Pilots and Teachers, as a 30 years of experience teacher can be replaced with a 2 years of experience teacher, so we need unions to protect the experienced Teacher or Pilot, but when it comes to what MTG Arena does, I dont see much value on the union existing, perhaps someone can provide some valuable insight

The company you work for almost always has more power in negotiations than you do. (For some hypothetical "you".) The bigger the company is, the more power they have typically. If you want to make more money or get better benefits or otherwise negotiate a better contract, you need more leverage. Unionizing is one way to gain more negotiation power by negotiating together with your co-workers instead of individually.…

The big assumption here is that the Union's interests are, in fact, aligned with You, the Worker.

If they're not, then you're just caught between two powerful, unaccountable entities. You have to join the Union, after all. I see a lot of folks in Education who feel that the Union simply Exists and does not really help them (their employers being rather sympathetic as well).

When they are, of course the Worker benefits. Healthcare and Airline employees seem to fall into this camp.

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