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.
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.
As far as I'm concerned I'm done being charitable to them. They've never been fantastic, and Hasbro has clearly been demanding their dues forcing this.
My biggest hope is the Magic community has a great open alternative similar to what the d&d community is likely to do in response to this.
It's very hard to do an open alternative to MTG. MTG's ecosystem is very closely tied to the economics of the physical cards driving the development and community (ie card shops.) Tools for playing magic without cards of course exist, but the vitality of the community depends on the constant refreshing of the environment tied to carefully balanced development.
I’ve been playing Magic since 1994 and I’m still an actively involved player and collector.
I could not give two shits about a marketing piece from a decade ago being removed from a website. Fight that hoarding instinct! You’ll survive without a closet of Duelist magazines from the 90s as well. We’re already hoarding 30 year old cardboard!
If anything I hate how much Magic players are constantly complaining.
They certainly tried to do this during the 30A ($1000 for 4 packs of 1993's Beta, not tournament legal) sale, and nobody wanted to be involved. So they went to some people in the Yu-Gi-Oh community who talked up the product for a day until they learned of the collective backlash and pricing for the product and apologized as well.
Overall the community seems to be somewhat forgiving of what Wizards R&D does, but definitely not anything that's a result of Hasbro exercising pressure to milk the franchise, and usually it's quite easy to tell which is which as soon as you hear quiet "sorry I didn't decide this" remarks from R&D people. People don't hate the game or the company as much as the obvious ways to segment the audience and generally increase the price of new cardboard rectangles (as for reprints, they're actually doing those, but investor-collectors aren't so happy).
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.
> 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.
Do they really pay influencers? I’m skeptical. There seem to be a limitless supply of megafans who will defend the bad decisions of corporations because they’ve invested their personality in it, not because they’re getting paid.
RedLetterMedia's fake "Nerd Crew" podcast [1] satirized the fanboy Youtube/podcast community perfectly.
You don't need to pay influencers heavily. You just need to make them feel important.
You get mid-tier execs to phone them to give them "inside" information. You give them early access to content so they can have opinions before anyone. You invite them to white-glove events (maybe even fly them there for free) and then have your attractive well-spoken marketing people treat them like royalty. You get your social teams to drum up fake viral headlines to generate talking-points for TV interviews/podcasts for hosts that wouldn't otherwise have content.
That goes a long way with megafans and most people who aren't business savvy.
$15-30K payouts per every single video boasting shitty game (Ryse: Son of Rome) and upcoming Xbox One with explicit condition payments are not to be disclosed.
Payment doesn't neccesarily need to be money. Send some pack here, give early access to some info there and it's really easy to cajole average youtuber to shill for you just because they want to keep the priviledges of getting the stuff early to review (as that keeps viewers on channel)
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.
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...
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&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. :)
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.
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.
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.
yeah i mean this is why i stopped buying magic cards, stopped drafting, stopped doing anything related to the game. It stopped being fun. It became obviously "pay to play". Same with dnd. i stopped playing new editions. Why do i need to learn new rules, buy new books, etc.? It is a complete waste of resources. Especially given that
exists. The real fun of both magic and dnd was creating a story with someone else. You don't need new content for this, you just need some friends. This is what WOTC is afraid people will realize. Their products already exist and can be had for essentially free. You don't need them to tell you what to do.
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.
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.
They killed competitive magic because they didn't see a direct return of investment . Turns out that competitive play had second order positive effects on magic so they are tying to rollback on that a bit.
They tried with online league because they wanted a piece of the esport pile during peak esport hype. They failed completely.
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.
Hasbro and their injected pointy-hairs don’t care about hardcore fans. Or fans. Or players. Or even the odious non-playing collectors. Or the game. Or it’s history. Or their workers.
All they care about is how much more money they can wrong out of their cash cow.
While all of that may be true, it's hard to see how the deletion of a website fits into that grand plan. We're talking about saving a few bucks to maintain this old information at a cost of huge waves of bad will? Seems incredibly short-sighted.
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?
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.
> 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.
Paper standard mostly has a player count problem as people move to Arena or into eternal formats, especially commander. This is because people don't actually seem to like standard and the constant rotation (and likely never did). Why own paper, of which 99% you'll never play again. ONE seems to actually tackle one of the issues, with 5+ special versions of supposed chase cards the price of a typical standard decklist could finally be reasonable again.
> 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.
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..
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.
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.
I think that as technologists we tend to assume that people in the future will come and build on our work and make better things. However, we have by sad experience seen that, technology and information simply gets lost unless some effort was make to preserve it. We only build on the things that someone took time to preserve - everything else disappears.
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.
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?
>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.
>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.
Conversation below the linked tweet says those links have been broken on the actual site since November. You can find them in Wayback by changing /news/ to /articles/archive/ . https://twitter.com/EpiphanyG/status/1617652985919852546
Oh. So it’s not lost then. If it’s that important, someone should dump them and store them somewhere else.
I don’t think we can expect corporations to maintain stuff for free for us forever.
They are gonna fuck it up at some point, if not now. In 50 years when hasbro and all its asset is buy by a agricultural tractor manufacturing company with no website and who don’t know what MTG is.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
In Belgium it was the other way around. PHP and MySQL was cheap, anything Microsoft related was more expensive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020930072241/http://www.thebib...
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.
As far as I'm concerned I'm done being charitable to them. They've never been fantastic, and Hasbro has clearly been demanding their dues forcing this.
My biggest hope is the Magic community has a great open alternative similar to what the d&d community is likely to do in response to this.
Presumably what monero-xmr means is: If you're MTG fan, the thing not to hate is MTG, and MTG+WOTC are a package deal.
Much like Star Wars fans have learned to put up with Disney's attempts to wring every last dollar out of the franchise.
I’ve been playing Magic since 1994 and I’m still an actively involved player and collector.
I could not give two shits about a marketing piece from a decade ago being removed from a website. Fight that hoarding instinct! You’ll survive without a closet of Duelist magazines from the 90s as well. We’re already hoarding 30 year old cardboard!
If anything I hate how much Magic players are constantly complaining.
Overall the community seems to be somewhat forgiving of what Wizards R&D does, but definitely not anything that's a result of Hasbro exercising pressure to milk the franchise, and usually it's quite easy to tell which is which as soon as you hear quiet "sorry I didn't decide this" remarks from R&D people. People don't hate the game or the company as much as the obvious ways to segment the audience and generally increase the price of new cardboard rectangles (as for reprints, they're actually doing those, but investor-collectors aren't so happy).
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.
As you say: hating invigorates a community
You don't need to pay influencers heavily. You just need to make them feel important.
You get mid-tier execs to phone them to give them "inside" information. You give them early access to content so they can have opinions before anyone. You invite them to white-glove events (maybe even fly them there for free) and then have your attractive well-spoken marketing people treat them like royalty. You get your social teams to drum up fake viral headlines to generate talking-points for TV interviews/podcasts for hosts that wouldn't otherwise have content.
That goes a long way with megafans and most people who aren't business savvy.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCIYCaXNe88&list=PLJ_TJFLc25...
https://venturebeat.com/games/ftc-settles-with-machinima-for...
$15-30K payouts per every single video boasting shitty game (Ryse: Son of Rome) and upcoming Xbox One with explicit condition payments are not to be disclosed.
a/ Obviously penalty was saying "sorry we wont do it again" https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2015/09/...
Deleted Comment
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.deckmasterhttps://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.
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...
Some first edition lands, because that’s all my 15 yo ass could pay for.
Same as you m, unclear where it is.
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&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. :)
I guess I owe MUDs a lot.
It’s funny because when eBay was released I thought “why needs that? Anyone can just do their own with excel and Usenet.”
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.
https://www.d20srd.org/index.htm
exists. The real fun of both magic and dnd was creating a story with someone else. You don't need new content for this, you just need some friends. This is what WOTC is afraid people will realize. Their products already exist and can be had for essentially free. You don't need them to tell you what to do.
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.
They tried with online league because they wanted a piece of the esport pile during peak esport hype. They failed completely.
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.
Dead Comment
All they care about is how much more money they can wrong out of their cash cow.
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?
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.
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.
Fans need to start refusing to be juiced. Stop paying them money.
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.
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.
https://ipfs.tech/
Writeup by Cory Doctorow: https://doctorow.medium.com/provocateur-copyrights-a-magic-t...
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/a.... Had to use Google myself to find this older archived URL.
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.
I don’t think we can expect corporations to maintain stuff for free for us forever.
They are gonna fuck it up at some point, if not now. In 50 years when hasbro and all its asset is buy by a agricultural tractor manufacturing company with no website and who don’t know what MTG is.
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.
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.
If it’s that important, someone should scrap that, zip it and put it on a tracker.