12 ms·

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

225 points by apitman 4y ago

Imnimo 4y ago
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.deckmaster https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.trading-cards.magic.misc 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 worth many thousands of dollars) for a few bucks.
- SeanAnderson 4y ago
  Another piece of MTG history which, surprisingly, is still up and running (albeit very poorly): http://forums.magictraders.com/Ultimate.cgi http://forums.magictraders.com/Ultimate.cgi Magic Online Trading League, or MOTL, is incredibly special to me. It was the premier place to discuss and trade MTG cards on the web in the year 2000. This is the first website I created an account on using the Internet. I was 11. I chose the name "Meowmix2.0" which slowly evolved into my permanent, online username of Meo / MeoMix. Heck, my profile still exists - unmodified since it was written 22 years ago, http://forums.magictraders.com/ubbmisc.cgi?action=getbio&UserName=meowmix2.0 http://forums.magictraders.com/ubbmisc.cgi?action=getbio&Use... I remember getting banned from the forum when people realized I was under 13 and then begging my mother to fax in permission for me to hang out with the cool adults. Such good times. Bought my first MTG singles through their trading forums. Stuffed cash money in an envelope, mailed it to a random stranger, and rushed after the postal worker every day until I found my precious cardboard in the mail. :) So many memories. Thank you MTG for continuing to exist over so many years. I stopped playing for ~8 years and it's difficult to put into words how much of a warm hug it was to come back and find my beloved game still chugging along - seemingly uncorrupted by the slow pull of capitalism. All that seems to slowly be changing with Hasbro's acquisition, but I'm holding out hope. Magic has evolved a lot over the years. It'll continue to do so and I believe in it's ability to stay... magical. :)
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    TBF Hasbro bought WotC in 1999. They just didn't start milking it until a few years ago when they realized most of their money came from cardboard...
- gorgoiler 4y ago
  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.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    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.
- jedberg 4y ago
  > 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...
  - courgette 4y ago
    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.
    - asciimov 4y ago
      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".
      - courgette 4y ago
        Oh that definitely what happened and I’m not even mad. That’s on me. Keep your own shit if you care enough. To come back to the discussion at hand…maybe someone who care should have back to article up? A webscrapper and a zip, then torrenting it.
  - GolfPopper 4y ago
    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...
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    The cryto of the 80s and 90s. Cards.
    - badpun 4y ago
- prepend 4y ago
  I used to sell magic via Usenet auctions and made enough to pay my tuition and rent. It’s funny because when eBay was released I thought “why needs that? Anyone can just do their own with excel and Usenet.”
Our_Benefactors 4y ago
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.
- jachee 4y ago
  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.
  - chongli 4y ago
    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.
    - prettyStandard 4y ago
      Agree. Not a Magic player, but this is your business, what do you think you should be doing?
    - gverrilla 4y ago
      Well this is the first time I hear about magic in a few years. So maybe it's a PR stunt?
    - jachee 4y ago
      “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.
totetsu 4y ago
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 more years earlier, before facebook. it was so strange to think all these people had the same conversations and questions and experiences, but there was no connection between that community at that moment and the one when I was part of it. I suppose the history in the facebook pages will be even more easily lost, and then the discord groups or whatever they're using these days will be lost even after a single year..
- throwanem 4y ago
  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.
  - courgette 4y ago
    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.
- onetrickwolf 4y ago
  I'd like to see something like torrenting for websites. Just a way that if a certain site is important to you, you could seed it yourself and 1. Help with the hosting costs and 2. Preserve it if the original hosts decides to take it down or change it.
monero-xmr 4y ago
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 severance package. If you actually are emotionally invested in this, you don’t want to hate WotC. You want vengeance and to feel you are heard. So a veneer of listening will be embraced and show the little guy makes a difference, everything better, let’s add this to the Wikipedia History section.
- beebmam 4y ago
  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.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Somehow, Games Workshop still thrives with a lot longer of a history of fan and customer abuse.
    - iamacyborg 4y ago
      They’ve very much turned things around in that respect over the last few years though
  - wmanley 4y ago
    Or make plans to anger them in ways that are useful to the gaming company. As you say: hating invigorates a community
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    > 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.
29athrowaway 4y ago
[flagged]
- prettyStandard 4y ago
  Good question, what's your contribution to humanity?
- random78965 4y ago
  [dead]
- SeanAnderson 4y ago
  Well, it contributes greatly to the arts? Sooooo much artwork on soooo many cards fueling soooo many payments to soooo many artists. The fact that WOTC has been able to continually innovate on the game and maintain interest has resulted in artists being given continuous opportunities to get their work seen and handled by hundreds of thousands of people.
- tibbon 4y ago
  I made a lot of connections when I was younger with people a few years older than me that really helped lift me up. I gained a lot of logical skills from needing to read about how cards interacted and apply that to judging small tournaments. I'm guessing a lot of people used it as a tool to be social when they didn't otherwise know how. That all by itself seems worthwhile to me.
- htag 4y ago
  Sometimes brining joy to people is enough.
- moehm 4y ago
  Sure, learning a complex competitive game in their youth shapes your logical thinking, handling pressure, and learning how to handle people in a competitive 1v1 situation (think sales or salary negotiations). I know a lot of people which were playing, and than moved on and changed their career to either poker player or studying computer science, or both.
hovden 4y ago
Tangentially related: An MTG art project the explores “owning culture and people’s participation in culture through copyright” Writeup by Cory Doctorow: https://doctorow.medium.com/provocateur-copyrights-a-magic-the-gathering-deck-d55e67f59e13 https://doctorow.medium.com/provocateur-copyrights-a-magic-t...
curtis3389 4y ago
Like GW, gamers can't and shouldn't entrust their joy or dollars to WOTC. These companies only exist to exploit; they have no respect for or understanding of their customers (except maybe that they will probably keep buying no matter how poorly they're treated).
- bdw5204 4y ago
  I don't see much difference between the business model of trading card games and the business model of the EA Sports Ultimate Team mode other than the existence of physical items. This business model is really good from the company's perspective because it increases revenue and involves less effort and less risk than releasing complete games at a single price. But it means that the way to win is to be willing to spend more money than everybody else. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that companies that base their business model on pay to win would have about as much respect for their customers as a typical OnlyFans personality has for her customers. I think people who enjoy card games would be better off making alternatives where the focus is on skill rather than how much you're willing to pay. Even if you aren't a competitive Magic or Pokemon card player, playing those games casually supports a company that exists to extract money from "whales" just like EA Sports or the companies making those awful freemium phone games. And it is at least an order of magnitude easier to make a good card game without pay to win than it is to make a good football simulation game without pay to win.
karaterobot 4y ago
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.
- rsync 4y ago
  "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.
  - Yhippa 4y ago
    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.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      What is also ridiculous is how links and search for merely half a year old articles were broken too.
    - karaterobot 4y ago
      > 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. There's so much history that gets lost for that reason: it's ephemeral, and nobody misses it at the time. It's hard to get people to think about what historians 500 years from now will be frustrated by not knowing. There's no immediate profit in it, we don't view it as all that important right now, and it's slightly inconvenient, so it'll probably just be lost to history.
  - courgette 4y ago
boomboomsubban 4y ago
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?
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >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 older one. *E.g. the one article that they're unable to find in the submitted one: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/three-year-mirage-2003-04-18 https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://magic.wizards.com/en/a.... Had to use Google myself to find this older archived URL.
  - boomboomsubban 4y ago
    >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 the magic wiki and as it had only attempted archives that showed "page not available," I assumed they had been wiped.
    - jl6 4y ago
      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.
  - sp332 4y ago
    It's really not that hard to get info taken down from IA if you are the site owner. Official blog from 2017 https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea... and more recent third-party blog with a survey of several ways to remove content (that you control) from Wayback https://blog.reputationx.com/block-wayback-machine https://blog.reputationx.com/block-wayback-machine
83457 4y ago
Does archive.org scrape data for historic preservation even if they are not allowed to make the content available publicly?
wyldfire 4y ago
Oh phew I thought they'd changed the card backs. That would be a big change - a strong partition between new and old. I really like that they've kept it as-is.
im3w1l 4y ago
This article reinforces something that has been irking me more and more. The word content. I think the thing that annoys me about it is that it erases the uniqueness of the... content. This is even reflected in it being an uncountable noun. And, as a believer in the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, I think this changes how we think about it. Sunsetting some content in favor of newer more engaging content sounds almost reasonable, until you realize it amounts to erasing unique and irreplaceable works, and along with it the historic record.
- sp332 4y ago
  You're right, although maybe late to the conversation. The idea is to set up frames first, like boxes around tweets, or a five-paragraph blog post with a placeholder hero image and lorem ipsum. Then pour in your content to fill the frame.
pyuser583 4y ago
Back in May/June of 2020, they scrubbed cars deemed racist. One card “Invoke Prejudice” corresponded to a URL that contained an obscure neo-Nazi symbol. Geek culture has a nasty side to it. Maybe they found more where that came from, or maybe they just didn’t want the press.
- riskycodes 4y ago
  Your story is true, but I think this is far too broad a loss to be something like that, even providing a smokescreen. An article I wrote has been lost, and there's nothing controversial in there!
- gpderetta 4y ago
  I don't know about URL, but the card had very blatant symbology and WOTC were rightfully ashamed of it.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    I don’t know if it was just the imagery - the card itself “Invoke Prejudice” removed all opponents players of a different color. I could see some very inappropriate banter happening if a player used it - regardless of the imagery. The imagery was the obvious outcome of the card’s functionality.
UberFly 4y ago
Hopefully the end result is that the community decides they don't need WoTC and moves on without them. I mean the links to the past have been scrubbed. What's left to hang on to?
steve_taylor 4y ago
> or it no longer meets our current editorial standards. i.e. their lawyers advised them to remove some articles that don’t comply with the latest “sensibilities”.
johnea 4y ago
What is it going to take for the new millennium generations to learn that a corporate product is not your "community"?
neilv 4y ago
A lot of the outcries lately could be seen as the result of letting a company own your community.
lisper 4y ago
I have never played MTG, never even read the rules (are there rules?) But I watched the video [1] linked from this text: > Whether it’s a crazy top-decked Lightning Helix... and listening to the play-by-play I swear to God I felt like I was watching a Simpsons parody of a geek convention. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, on idea what half the words meant, and no idea why everyone freaked out at the end. Can someone explain what happened without having to explain the whole game? [UPDATE] OMG, yes, there are rules. Pages and pages and pages of them [2]. --- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t0pzLnSWw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t0pzLnSWw0 [2] https://media.wizards.com/2022/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020221118.txt https://media.wizards.com/2022/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020...
- klodolph 4y ago
  I took a quick look at the video. Quick info—you can deal damage to creatures and players. Creatures die if they take enough damage in a turn, and the damage resets each turn. Players die if they take 20 damage total over the course of the game. Craig is “chump blocking”—he’s getting attacked by strong creatures, and uses weak creatures to block them. The weak creatures (the “chumps”) die, and the strong creatures remain. This leaves him extremely vulnerable, but alive. The strong creatures can attack again next turn, and he will be even less able to block them because the creatures he used to block are now dead. He has a spell called “Char” which deals 4 damage to a target creature or player and 2 damage to himself. This could be used to destroy the attacking creature, but destroying the creature won’t win him the game. At that moment, he is at 3 life, his opponent is at 7. After chump blocking, the opponent will be able to attack and win the game next turn. Craig decides to Char the player, rather than targeting any creature. This brings his life total to 1 and the opponent to 3. It's then Craig’s turn (because he played Char at the end of his opponent’s turn). At the beginning of his turn he gets to draw a card. He draws a card that can deal 3 points of damage. (That card is Lightning Helix.) It was exciting because it was a gamble. He could only win if the right card was on top of his deck, and therefore, it was the right move to play assuming that he had the right card. There’s a maximum of 4 copies of any card (except basic lands) in your deck, which must be at least 60 cards. By that math, you get 1:15 odds of drawing the right card here (undoubtedly the odds were not exactly 1:15 but some other number, based on however many cards were left in the deck and however many Lightning Helix were left). The commentary on the game was that this was the “only correct play”. Edit: And he won $31,000. Second place was $16,000.
snickmy 4y ago
Back in 1998, when I was a 12y old, I started a website about Magic. I was an italian kid that didn't know any english, with a pentium 2 and a cracked version of front page. fast forward 3 years from there, I was running the the biggest italian magic community with ~15k concurrent active users daily, with one of the biggest deployed use cased of a asp/access database (because hosts were charing a lot more for php+sql). Foreigners were running their own subforums on it, with the brazilian and french community being the biggest one. I did suck at the game, but every time I was attending an event, every single person knew the website and had only nice things to say about it. It was magical, I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't realised what I achieve until very very long after. Me wanting to connect with people online on such a niche topic, and having to create a platform for it, started a personal learning chain reaction, that down the line allowed me to enter the tech world with ease.
- WirelessGigabit 4y ago
  I'm actually surprised that ASP & Access were cheaper than PHP & (assuming) mySQL. In Belgium it was the other way around. PHP and MySQL was cheap, anything Microsoft related was more expensive.
  - adql 4y ago
    ...probably running on pirated windows lmao
    - firstcommentyo 4y ago
      Must have been a hell of a fight? Pirates from the British or the Spanish crown?
- smagut 4y ago
  What was the website name? I started playing Magic in Italy around 2002/3, maybe I've stumbled upon your site
- sfmike 4y ago
  mtgox?
charcircuit 4y ago
Nothing on the internet is permanent. If you want to preserve something it back it up.
j1elo 4y ago
> Wizards of the Coast announced these changes in an article dating back to November 2022. "The Internet" collective was disappointing here. I am used to read the story of how, after an announcement like this, a lot of the users and archivist types would hurry to make a backup of the whole website when the parent company makes such claims. Surprising that it didn't happen.
smurda 4y ago
Who is going to tell them about the Wayback Machine (archive.org)
pluc 4y ago
WOtC is on a real charm run eh?
anthk 4y ago
I feel your pain.. Not on MtG, but the loss of fora. Back in the day the Spanish speakers in Spain had a literal Slashdot clone in Spanish, Barrapunto. The server shut down a few years ago and just a very little of it has been preserved under archive.org. A great loss.
thom 4y ago
Sad if nobody manages to archive this all properly. Obviously a huge part of Magic culture is the tournament report, which became something of an art-form at its peak: https://amzn.eu/d/3TcYK4o https://amzn.eu/d/3TcYK4o I used to be an avid follower of tournaments online, moreso than playing once I was a bit older. A lot of old pros got into gambling and hedge funds, and there’s even an overlap with the sports analytics industry I work in now - my cofounder used to travel the world running Pro Tour coverage. I’m hoping some of the old magic returns with this year’s big tournaments. Still, Magic memory is pretty good. You can still find archives of stuff like The Dojo out there: https://www.classicdojo.org/ https://www.classicdojo.org/
neals 4y ago
Ten years ago I made a bunch of money trading o the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange. Great Times.
pdimitar 4y ago
Yet another proof that having `wget` to download websites, `git` to control for versions (what changed since last pull) (or restic/borg to do more of less the same) and/or host them somewhere is (a) extremely easy and (b) somehow mind-blowing to a lot of people who call themselves "technical" or even "programmers". Weird. I get what not having time and energy is, I truly do, but if you cared so much about this community and its history, surely SOMEBODY will find the time AT LEAST ONCE and archive these precious bits of history? I have a very and I really mean VERY benevolent spider bot -- we're talking from 2s all the way to 10s waiting between each link visit -- that crawls sites I care about weekly and does exactly that. The only thing I am worried about is if I can rely on my GIT hosting but I'll get to that at one point. I already have a NAS and everything goes in it, and everything on it gets deduplicated / compressed / encrypted and sent to several cloud storage services, but still, you never know.
- blincoln 4y ago
  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 URL every day, but that page used JavaScript to download the actual daily stats from a separate JSON or XML file and used that data to render the page. The Internet Archive bot was only downloading that data file maybe every 2-3 weeks, so even though they had archives of the page for almost every day, nearly all of the per-day data was missing. I don't write bots often anymore, but for the last ten years or so I've defaulted to using an automated instance of an actual browser, because it's the only way you'll get all of the page content to load accurately, especially on sites that use the "lazy loading" anti-pattern.[2] Even if you do that, it's still another step (probably several steps) to archive the content, because the browser just loads the page and resources, it doesn't save them, and in a lot of cases images in articles are downscaled and you want to archive the full-res version as well. TLDR: make sure you're really backing up what you think you're backing up. [1] At the time, the CDC was only showing the current figures, not the historical data, so if you wanted a graph based for sure on their real data, not some third party, you needed to collect it yourself. [2] I know a lot of devs think lazy loading is great, because it reduces load on their servers, but it's an anti-pattern for UX IMO because it causes the page to take longer to load than if the browser were allowed to continue loading resources before the user even started scrolling.
smsm42 4y ago
I feel we as a society are not yet adapted well to culture being in ephemeral electronic form, and we will keep losing huge chunks of cultural history because some corp doesn't care about stuff not reflected in the yearly plan. There are laudable preservation efforts like archive.org but they can't get everywhere and are hindered by copyright regime. We need to develop a model which would allow us to preserve our collective cultural memory.

225 points by apitman 4y ago

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.deckmaster https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.trading-cards.magic.misc 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 worth many thousands of dollars) for a few bucks.

SeanAnderson 4y ago
Another piece of MTG history which, surprisingly, is still up and running (albeit very poorly): http://forums.magictraders.com/Ultimate.cgi http://forums.magictraders.com/Ultimate.cgi Magic Online Trading League, or MOTL, is incredibly special to me. It was the premier place to discuss and trade MTG cards on the web in the year 2000. This is the first website I created an account on using the Internet. I was 11. I chose the name "Meowmix2.0" which slowly evolved into my permanent, online username of Meo / MeoMix. Heck, my profile still exists - unmodified since it was written 22 years ago, http://forums.magictraders.com/ubbmisc.cgi?action=getbio&UserName=meowmix2.0 http://forums.magictraders.com/ubbmisc.cgi?action=getbio&Use... I remember getting banned from the forum when people realized I was under 13 and then begging my mother to fax in permission for me to hang out with the cool adults. Such good times. Bought my first MTG singles through their trading forums. Stuffed cash money in an envelope, mailed it to a random stranger, and rushed after the postal worker every day until I found my precious cardboard in the mail. :) So many memories. Thank you MTG for continuing to exist over so many years. I stopped playing for ~8 years and it's difficult to put into words how much of a warm hug it was to come back and find my beloved game still chugging along - seemingly uncorrupted by the slow pull of capitalism. All that seems to slowly be changing with Hasbro's acquisition, but I'm holding out hope. Magic has evolved a lot over the years. It'll continue to do so and I believe in it's ability to stay... magical. :)
- goosedragons 4y ago
  TBF Hasbro bought WotC in 1999. They just didn't start milking it until a few years ago when they realized most of their money came from cardboard...
gorgoiler 4y ago
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.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  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.
jedberg 4y ago
> 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...
- courgette 4y ago
  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.
  - asciimov 4y ago
    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".
    - courgette 4y ago
      Oh that definitely what happened and I’m not even mad. That’s on me. Keep your own shit if you care enough. To come back to the discussion at hand…maybe someone who care should have back to article up? A webscrapper and a zip, then torrenting it.
- GolfPopper 4y ago
  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...
- ipaddr 4y ago
  The cryto of the 80s and 90s. Cards.
  - badpun 4y ago
prepend 4y ago
I used to sell magic via Usenet auctions and made enough to pay my tuition and rent. It’s funny because when eBay was released I thought “why needs that? Anyone can just do their own with excel and Usenet.”

Our_Benefactors 4y ago

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.

jachee 4y ago
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.
- chongli 4y ago
  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.
  - prettyStandard 4y ago
    Agree. Not a Magic player, but this is your business, what do you think you should be doing?
  - gverrilla 4y ago
    Well this is the first time I hear about magic in a few years. So maybe it's a PR stunt?
  - jachee 4y ago
    “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.

totetsu 4y ago

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 more years earlier, before facebook. it was so strange to think all these people had the same conversations and questions and experiences, but there was no connection between that community at that moment and the one when I was part of it. I suppose the history in the facebook pages will be even more easily lost, and then the discord groups or whatever they're using these days will be lost even after a single year..

throwanem 4y ago
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.
- courgette 4y ago
  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.
onetrickwolf 4y ago
I'd like to see something like torrenting for websites. Just a way that if a certain site is important to you, you could seed it yourself and 1. Help with the hosting costs and 2. Preserve it if the original hosts decides to take it down or change it.

monero-xmr 4y ago

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 severance package. If you actually are emotionally invested in this, you don’t want to hate WotC. You want vengeance and to feel you are heard. So a veneer of listening will be embraced and show the little guy makes a difference, everything better, let’s add this to the Wikipedia History section.

beebmam 4y ago
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.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Somehow, Games Workshop still thrives with a lot longer of a history of fan and customer abuse.
  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    They’ve very much turned things around in that respect over the last few years though
- wmanley 4y ago
  Or make plans to anger them in ways that are useful to the gaming company. As you say: hating invigorates a community
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > 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.

29athrowaway 4y ago

[flagged]

prettyStandard 4y ago
Good question, what's your contribution to humanity?
random78965 4y ago
[dead]
SeanAnderson 4y ago
Well, it contributes greatly to the arts? Sooooo much artwork on soooo many cards fueling soooo many payments to soooo many artists. The fact that WOTC has been able to continually innovate on the game and maintain interest has resulted in artists being given continuous opportunities to get their work seen and handled by hundreds of thousands of people.
tibbon 4y ago
I made a lot of connections when I was younger with people a few years older than me that really helped lift me up. I gained a lot of logical skills from needing to read about how cards interacted and apply that to judging small tournaments. I'm guessing a lot of people used it as a tool to be social when they didn't otherwise know how. That all by itself seems worthwhile to me.
htag 4y ago
Sometimes brining joy to people is enough.
moehm 4y ago
Sure, learning a complex competitive game in their youth shapes your logical thinking, handling pressure, and learning how to handle people in a competitive 1v1 situation (think sales or salary negotiations). I know a lot of people which were playing, and than moved on and changed their career to either poker player or studying computer science, or both.

hovden 4y ago

Tangentially related: An MTG art project the explores “owning culture and people’s participation in culture through copyright” Writeup by Cory Doctorow: https://doctorow.medium.com/provocateur-copyrights-a-magic-the-gathering-deck-d55e67f59e13 https://doctorow.medium.com/provocateur-copyrights-a-magic-t...

curtis3389 4y ago

Like GW, gamers can't and shouldn't entrust their joy or dollars to WOTC. These companies only exist to exploit; they have no respect for or understanding of their customers (except maybe that they will probably keep buying no matter how poorly they're treated).

bdw5204 4y ago
I don't see much difference between the business model of trading card games and the business model of the EA Sports Ultimate Team mode other than the existence of physical items. This business model is really good from the company's perspective because it increases revenue and involves less effort and less risk than releasing complete games at a single price. But it means that the way to win is to be willing to spend more money than everybody else. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that companies that base their business model on pay to win would have about as much respect for their customers as a typical OnlyFans personality has for her customers. I think people who enjoy card games would be better off making alternatives where the focus is on skill rather than how much you're willing to pay. Even if you aren't a competitive Magic or Pokemon card player, playing those games casually supports a company that exists to extract money from "whales" just like EA Sports or the companies making those awful freemium phone games. And it is at least an order of magnitude easier to make a good card game without pay to win than it is to make a good football simulation game without pay to win.

karaterobot 4y ago

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.

rsync 4y ago
"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.
- Yhippa 4y ago
  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.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    What is also ridiculous is how links and search for merely half a year old articles were broken too.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    > 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. There's so much history that gets lost for that reason: it's ephemeral, and nobody misses it at the time. It's hard to get people to think about what historians 500 years from now will be frustrated by not knowing. There's no immediate profit in it, we don't view it as all that important right now, and it's slightly inconvenient, so it'll probably just be lost to history.
- courgette 4y ago

boomboomsubban 4y ago

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?

forgotpwd16 4y ago
>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 older one. *E.g. the one article that they're unable to find in the submitted one: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/three-year-mirage-2003-04-18 https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://magic.wizards.com/en/a.... Had to use Google myself to find this older archived URL.
- boomboomsubban 4y ago
  >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 the magic wiki and as it had only attempted archives that showed "page not available," I assumed they had been wiped.
  - jl6 4y ago
    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.
- sp332 4y ago
  It's really not that hard to get info taken down from IA if you are the site owner. Official blog from 2017 https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-search-engines-dont-work-well-for-web-archives/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea... and more recent third-party blog with a survey of several ways to remove content (that you control) from Wayback https://blog.reputationx.com/block-wayback-machine https://blog.reputationx.com/block-wayback-machine

83457 4y ago

Does archive.org scrape data for historic preservation even if they are not allowed to make the content available publicly?

wyldfire 4y ago

Oh phew I thought they'd changed the card backs. That would be a big change - a strong partition between new and old. I really like that they've kept it as-is.

im3w1l 4y ago

This article reinforces something that has been irking me more and more. The word content. I think the thing that annoys me about it is that it erases the uniqueness of the... content. This is even reflected in it being an uncountable noun. And, as a believer in the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, I think this changes how we think about it. Sunsetting some content in favor of newer more engaging content sounds almost reasonable, until you realize it amounts to erasing unique and irreplaceable works, and along with it the historic record.

sp332 4y ago
You're right, although maybe late to the conversation. The idea is to set up frames first, like boxes around tweets, or a five-paragraph blog post with a placeholder hero image and lorem ipsum. Then pour in your content to fill the frame.

pyuser583 4y ago

Back in May/June of 2020, they scrubbed cars deemed racist. One card “Invoke Prejudice” corresponded to a URL that contained an obscure neo-Nazi symbol. Geek culture has a nasty side to it. Maybe they found more where that came from, or maybe they just didn’t want the press.

riskycodes 4y ago
Your story is true, but I think this is far too broad a loss to be something like that, even providing a smokescreen. An article I wrote has been lost, and there's nothing controversial in there!
gpderetta 4y ago
I don't know about URL, but the card had very blatant symbology and WOTC were rightfully ashamed of it.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  I don’t know if it was just the imagery - the card itself “Invoke Prejudice” removed all opponents players of a different color. I could see some very inappropriate banter happening if a player used it - regardless of the imagery. The imagery was the obvious outcome of the card’s functionality.

UberFly 4y ago

Hopefully the end result is that the community decides they don't need WoTC and moves on without them. I mean the links to the past have been scrubbed. What's left to hang on to?

steve_taylor 4y ago

> or it no longer meets our current editorial standards. i.e. their lawyers advised them to remove some articles that don’t comply with the latest “sensibilities”.

johnea 4y ago

What is it going to take for the new millennium generations to learn that a corporate product is not your "community"?

neilv 4y ago

A lot of the outcries lately could be seen as the result of letting a company own your community.

lisper 4y ago

I have never played MTG, never even read the rules (are there rules?) But I watched the video [1] linked from this text: > Whether it’s a crazy top-decked Lightning Helix... and listening to the play-by-play I swear to God I felt like I was watching a Simpsons parody of a geek convention. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, on idea what half the words meant, and no idea why everyone freaked out at the end. Can someone explain what happened without having to explain the whole game? [UPDATE] OMG, yes, there are rules. Pages and pages and pages of them [2]. --- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t0pzLnSWw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t0pzLnSWw0 [2] https://media.wizards.com/2022/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020221118.txt https://media.wizards.com/2022/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020...

klodolph 4y ago
I took a quick look at the video. Quick info—you can deal damage to creatures and players. Creatures die if they take enough damage in a turn, and the damage resets each turn. Players die if they take 20 damage total over the course of the game. Craig is “chump blocking”—he’s getting attacked by strong creatures, and uses weak creatures to block them. The weak creatures (the “chumps”) die, and the strong creatures remain. This leaves him extremely vulnerable, but alive. The strong creatures can attack again next turn, and he will be even less able to block them because the creatures he used to block are now dead. He has a spell called “Char” which deals 4 damage to a target creature or player and 2 damage to himself. This could be used to destroy the attacking creature, but destroying the creature won’t win him the game. At that moment, he is at 3 life, his opponent is at 7. After chump blocking, the opponent will be able to attack and win the game next turn. Craig decides to Char the player, rather than targeting any creature. This brings his life total to 1 and the opponent to 3. It's then Craig’s turn (because he played Char at the end of his opponent’s turn). At the beginning of his turn he gets to draw a card. He draws a card that can deal 3 points of damage. (That card is Lightning Helix.) It was exciting because it was a gamble. He could only win if the right card was on top of his deck, and therefore, it was the right move to play assuming that he had the right card. There’s a maximum of 4 copies of any card (except basic lands) in your deck, which must be at least 60 cards. By that math, you get 1:15 odds of drawing the right card here (undoubtedly the odds were not exactly 1:15 but some other number, based on however many cards were left in the deck and however many Lightning Helix were left). The commentary on the game was that this was the “only correct play”. Edit: And he won $31,000. Second place was $16,000.

snickmy 4y ago

Back in 1998, when I was a 12y old, I started a website about Magic. I was an italian kid that didn't know any english, with a pentium 2 and a cracked version of front page. fast forward 3 years from there, I was running the the biggest italian magic community with ~15k concurrent active users daily, with one of the biggest deployed use cased of a asp/access database (because hosts were charing a lot more for php+sql). Foreigners were running their own subforums on it, with the brazilian and french community being the biggest one. I did suck at the game, but every time I was attending an event, every single person knew the website and had only nice things to say about it. It was magical, I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't realised what I achieve until very very long after. Me wanting to connect with people online on such a niche topic, and having to create a platform for it, started a personal learning chain reaction, that down the line allowed me to enter the tech world with ease.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago
I'm actually surprised that ASP & Access were cheaper than PHP & (assuming) mySQL. In Belgium it was the other way around. PHP and MySQL was cheap, anything Microsoft related was more expensive.
- adql 4y ago
  ...probably running on pirated windows lmao
  - firstcommentyo 4y ago
    Must have been a hell of a fight? Pirates from the British or the Spanish crown?
smagut 4y ago
What was the website name? I started playing Magic in Italy around 2002/3, maybe I've stumbled upon your site
sfmike 4y ago
mtgox?

charcircuit 4y ago

Nothing on the internet is permanent. If you want to preserve something it back it up.

j1elo 4y ago

> Wizards of the Coast announced these changes in an article dating back to November 2022. "The Internet" collective was disappointing here. I am used to read the story of how, after an announcement like this, a lot of the users and archivist types would hurry to make a backup of the whole website when the parent company makes such claims. Surprising that it didn't happen.

smurda 4y ago

Who is going to tell them about the Wayback Machine (archive.org)

pluc 4y ago

WOtC is on a real charm run eh?

anthk 4y ago

I feel your pain.. Not on MtG, but the loss of fora. Back in the day the Spanish speakers in Spain had a literal Slashdot clone in Spanish, Barrapunto. The server shut down a few years ago and just a very little of it has been preserved under archive.org. A great loss.

thom 4y ago

Sad if nobody manages to archive this all properly. Obviously a huge part of Magic culture is the tournament report, which became something of an art-form at its peak: https://amzn.eu/d/3TcYK4o https://amzn.eu/d/3TcYK4o I used to be an avid follower of tournaments online, moreso than playing once I was a bit older. A lot of old pros got into gambling and hedge funds, and there’s even an overlap with the sports analytics industry I work in now - my cofounder used to travel the world running Pro Tour coverage. I’m hoping some of the old magic returns with this year’s big tournaments. Still, Magic memory is pretty good. You can still find archives of stuff like The Dojo out there: https://www.classicdojo.org/ https://www.classicdojo.org/

neals 4y ago

Ten years ago I made a bunch of money trading o the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange. Great Times.

pdimitar 4y ago

Yet another proof that having `wget` to download websites, `git` to control for versions (what changed since last pull) (or restic/borg to do more of less the same) and/or host them somewhere is (a) extremely easy and (b) somehow mind-blowing to a lot of people who call themselves "technical" or even "programmers". Weird. I get what not having time and energy is, I truly do, but if you cared so much about this community and its history, surely SOMEBODY will find the time AT LEAST ONCE and archive these precious bits of history? I have a very and I really mean VERY benevolent spider bot -- we're talking from 2s all the way to 10s waiting between each link visit -- that crawls sites I care about weekly and does exactly that. The only thing I am worried about is if I can rely on my GIT hosting but I'll get to that at one point. I already have a NAS and everything goes in it, and everything on it gets deduplicated / compressed / encrypted and sent to several cloud storage services, but still, you never know.

blincoln 4y ago
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 URL every day, but that page used JavaScript to download the actual daily stats from a separate JSON or XML file and used that data to render the page. The Internet Archive bot was only downloading that data file maybe every 2-3 weeks, so even though they had archives of the page for almost every day, nearly all of the per-day data was missing. I don't write bots often anymore, but for the last ten years or so I've defaulted to using an automated instance of an actual browser, because it's the only way you'll get all of the page content to load accurately, especially on sites that use the "lazy loading" anti-pattern.[2] Even if you do that, it's still another step (probably several steps) to archive the content, because the browser just loads the page and resources, it doesn't save them, and in a lot of cases images in articles are downscaled and you want to archive the full-res version as well. TLDR: make sure you're really backing up what you think you're backing up. [1] At the time, the CDC was only showing the current figures, not the historical data, so if you wanted a graph based for sure on their real data, not some third party, you needed to collect it yourself. [2] I know a lot of devs think lazy loading is great, because it reduces load on their servers, but it's an anti-pattern for UX IMO because it causes the page to take longer to load than if the browser were allowed to continue loading resources before the user even started scrolling.

smsm42 4y ago

I feel we as a society are not yet adapted well to culture being in ephemeral electronic form, and we will keep losing huge chunks of cultural history because some corp doesn't care about stuff not reflected in the yearly plan. There are laudable preservation efforts like archive.org but they can't get everywhere and are hindered by copyright regime. We need to develop a model which would allow us to preserve our collective cultural memory.