5 ms·

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 impos

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.
gsk22 4y ago
> 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 set. - There is still a diverse metagame in standard. - I don't draft much, but I've heard positive things about several of the last sets' limited environments. - New formats like commander have created new competitive environments. - Arena and digital formats like alchemy bring new players to the game and competitive scene Feels to me like, despite Wizards doing everything possible to screw things up, competitive Magic is in a pretty good spot at the moment.
- Our_Benefactors 4y ago
  > 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 game is basically designed in a lab and prescribed to the player base. Other formats have done worse, we’ll see how many years they can keep modern interesting before it falls to the same power creep issues the old extended format did. > New formats like commander have created new competitive environments. Commander is a casual format, it’s not competitive nor meant to be. Arena has no on-ramp to serious competitive MODO play, the interfaces and economies are entirely different.
  - gsk22 4y ago
    > 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.
blockwriter 4y ago
My theory is that they also killed competitive magic due to the MeToo movement and the various other social causes that sprang up in the last 6 years. Wotc and its corporate parent cannot control who the winningest players are, and their old tournament structures more or less simply rewarded, and therefore promoted, those that did the best in tournament play. One individual, who frequently won or was in the running at the largest tournaments, was banned from competitive play for inappropriate texts and/or behavior. They subsequently moved to a system where selected partners, mostly Twitch streamers, were selected for qualification. Competitive qualification was still possible, but the change gave Wotc more control over the individuals that would play on their broadcasts.
- JeremyBanks 4y ago
  [dead]
- braingenious 4y ago
  I feel like that’s quite the stretch. What other competitive endeavors were killed due to MeToo in your estimation?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  I'm sure plenty of people at Wizards were concerned that the public faces of magic were not on their payroll, with all the risk that that entails. I think the bigger factor is that they were trying to push more of the franchise and business Online. That way they don't have to cover the cost of physical Goods and split any profits with local game stores and Merchants.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    On other hand I would find it kinda worrying if the top competitive players were on the payroll. As that opens up a lot of questions about integrity of the game and scene from those still outside and coming in. Same really goes for most media production too.
- gpderetta 4y ago
TOMDM 4y ago
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 announced that they sold 6 months volume in 2 weeks after they announced their own open license as a replacement to the OGL. All of this culminated in wizards backing off the updated license, and actually publishing the DND 5.1 SRD under creative commons 4.0. I reckon wizards will try again with the next edition and their virtual table top, but for now the DND fans have proven they can get wizards to bend under enough pressure.
- courgette 4y ago
  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 marketing.
  - GolfPopper 4y ago
    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.
  - kilburn 4y ago
    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 https://www.dndbeyond.com/store/subscribe
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> they just care about creating limited run products to juice the fans Fans need to start refusing to be juiced. Stop paying them money.
SamuelAdams 4y ago
I wonder if WotC is failing to stay relevant in an era of increased entertainment. Back in the 90’s, we didn’t have streaming services and smart phones with dozens of apps. Hell social media barely existed (maybe MySpace was out then). Most households in America did not have internet. Video game consoles were just starting to gain traction, but were not nearly as ubiquitous as you see today. So trading cards were a solution to that. It’s an offline, cheap hobby that kids and teenagers could pick up relatively quickly. I’m wondering what their influx numbers are now - are new players still joining the game at the same rate as in the 90’s? Do people still play Magic considering all the other entertainment sources we have today?
- Our_Benefactors 4y ago
  They love to claim “magic has more players today than ever before”, but given that this is measured across so many different domains of play, it feels like the paper community is basically dead by comparison.
  - Cardinal7167 4y ago
    The paper community is certainly not dead, not at my game shop. However if they’re not careful they’re going to print themselves into a corner and then they’ll be just like Yu Gi Oh.

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.

gsk22 4y ago

> 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 set. - There is still a diverse metagame in standard. - I don't draft much, but I've heard positive things about several of the last sets' limited environments. - New formats like commander have created new competitive environments. - Arena and digital formats like alchemy bring new players to the game and competitive scene Feels to me like, despite Wizards doing everything possible to screw things up, competitive Magic is in a pretty good spot at the moment.

Our_Benefactors 4y ago
> 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 game is basically designed in a lab and prescribed to the player base. Other formats have done worse, we’ll see how many years they can keep modern interesting before it falls to the same power creep issues the old extended format did. > New formats like commander have created new competitive environments. Commander is a casual format, it’s not competitive nor meant to be. Arena has no on-ramp to serious competitive MODO play, the interfaces and economies are entirely different.
- gsk22 4y ago
  > 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.

blockwriter 4y ago

My theory is that they also killed competitive magic due to the MeToo movement and the various other social causes that sprang up in the last 6 years. Wotc and its corporate parent cannot control who the winningest players are, and their old tournament structures more or less simply rewarded, and therefore promoted, those that did the best in tournament play. One individual, who frequently won or was in the running at the largest tournaments, was banned from competitive play for inappropriate texts and/or behavior. They subsequently moved to a system where selected partners, mostly Twitch streamers, were selected for qualification. Competitive qualification was still possible, but the change gave Wotc more control over the individuals that would play on their broadcasts.

JeremyBanks 4y ago
[dead]
braingenious 4y ago
I feel like that’s quite the stretch. What other competitive endeavors were killed due to MeToo in your estimation?
s1artibartfast 4y ago
I'm sure plenty of people at Wizards were concerned that the public faces of magic were not on their payroll, with all the risk that that entails. I think the bigger factor is that they were trying to push more of the franchise and business Online. That way they don't have to cover the cost of physical Goods and split any profits with local game stores and Merchants.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  On other hand I would find it kinda worrying if the top competitive players were on the payroll. As that opens up a lot of questions about integrity of the game and scene from those still outside and coming in. Same really goes for most media production too.
gpderetta 4y ago

TOMDM 4y ago

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 announced that they sold 6 months volume in 2 weeks after they announced their own open license as a replacement to the OGL. All of this culminated in wizards backing off the updated license, and actually publishing the DND 5.1 SRD under creative commons 4.0. I reckon wizards will try again with the next edition and their virtual table top, but for now the DND fans have proven they can get wizards to bend under enough pressure.

courgette 4y ago
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 marketing.
- GolfPopper 4y ago
  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.
- kilburn 4y ago
  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 https://www.dndbeyond.com/store/subscribe

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> they just care about creating limited run products to juice the fans Fans need to start refusing to be juiced. Stop paying them money.

SamuelAdams 4y ago

I wonder if WotC is failing to stay relevant in an era of increased entertainment. Back in the 90’s, we didn’t have streaming services and smart phones with dozens of apps. Hell social media barely existed (maybe MySpace was out then). Most households in America did not have internet. Video game consoles were just starting to gain traction, but were not nearly as ubiquitous as you see today. So trading cards were a solution to that. It’s an offline, cheap hobby that kids and teenagers could pick up relatively quickly. I’m wondering what their influx numbers are now - are new players still joining the game at the same rate as in the 90’s? Do people still play Magic considering all the other entertainment sources we have today?

Our_Benefactors 4y ago
They love to claim “magic has more players today than ever before”, but given that this is measured across so many different domains of play, it feels like the paper community is basically dead by comparison.
- Cardinal7167 4y ago
  The paper community is certainly not dead, not at my game shop. However if they’re not careful they’re going to print themselves into a corner and then they’ll be just like Yu Gi Oh.