They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them (just a few pieces of paper, not enough dice, sub par instructions ). Or really expensive character toys.
D&D has undoubtedly gotten more popular, but I wish it were under the stewardship of someone more deserving, like a geekier board game shop than greed-enthralled Hasbro. They've become the Disney of board games, all quantity and profit and no real concern for a high quality gamer experience. I bet someone like Larian (Baldur's Gate 3) would've taken better care of the IP and rulesets (and they're working on a Divinity tabletop game!)
> They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them (just a few pieces of paper, not enough dice, sub par instructions ). Or really expensive character toys.
For me this is the most telling part that Hasbro doesn't quite get what you're actually selling if you have a tabletop company; it's not the ruleset, that will be leaked as soon as you sell a single copy and people actually play the game. It's instead ideas and world building visions from the people who were directly involved in creating the world and rules the company tries to sell to people. People are creative, but even the best story tellers wouldn't turn their nose up at some lore to help spark creativity, long as the lore isn't needlessly restrictive.
For me the naive part is focussing on player options.
I understand that groups generally have one DM and 4 players, do if you include player options you might sell 5 books instead of one. But that's the shallow, cash-in-now-fuck-next-decade mentality.
Meanwhile they haven't put out a decent adventure in a decade. The internet is awash with people trying to glue their ramblings back into coherent campaigns and running D&D (always a huge time sink) is becoming a worse experience every year as they keep flooding the market with crap.
I love running games but I've come to the point where I'm not really interested in starting a D&D group anymore because of all the bullshit.
> It's instead ideas and world building visions from the people who were directly involved in creating the world
Yes, but someone needs to impress their boss/shareholders this very Quarter, and then the next, and then the next. Planning for the long haul requires a vision and patience that is not on the table. Hasbro mentality is (probably) "release the game mid-December, let it sell tons for Xmas, rake it in, start planning for next Xmas release".
I don't know if 'slow burn' is in their scope. It would be interesting to hear from them on this.
This is where I always thought the vampire the masquerade games excelled. In fact, they seemed to have so much content that the game itself was less important. I spent way more time reading vtm books then DND books. But I played way more dnd. But maybe it's because it's a lot harder to convince people to play vampire.
If people are still going to pay money for D&D then they truly do not care about the hobby. I must admit before the OGL fiasco I didn't see much of the allure of other systems, but that really pushed me away and the world of TTRPGs is so much brighter and better than crappy D&D.
I still play in one D&D campaign, but it was started before the fiasco, but I have already decided that at least I won't be running another D&D game.
The biggest thing that I've seen D&D offer is support for campaign play. Systems like Blades in the Dark, Heart, and Mork Borg are great, but they are built around the assumption that characters are replaced (or in the case of Mork Borg, the world ends) regularly. A lot of other systems also tend to abstract away treasure in a way that I think is less satisfying for some players.
Personally, I'd love to see more systems that are less "wargaming" oriented than D&D but with a focus on long term play and, where possible, player growth.
Also their recent move to 3-book + DM screen sets is really annoying. They did it first with Spelljammer's rerelease into 5e and I think the oceanic thirst for Spelljammer content might have sent them the wrong signal about the popularity of the actual content which was pretty thin for the amount you paid for it with notable missing rules like long range travel... for the space setting.
The combat system is pretty piss-poor, too - to the point where many people have released their own, better, rulesets for combat to address these problems.
For those of you who are sick of Hasbro/WotC's shinanigans, give Pathfinder a shot. Its setting and rules should be very familiar for anyone used to DnD, but I've found the small changes they made to combat and progression really make the game much more interesting and rewarding.
I've found Paizo's pricing to be much more reasonable than WotC and they work well with open source projects. I've been using the open source system for Pathfinder on FoundryVTT with Paizo's official content packs and it's amazing. My experiences with DnD in Roll20 and AboveVTT don't even come close.
If you ever want another huge, ancient labyrinth of a language that also kinda sorta runs everywhere, the Javascript world welcomes you with open tentaces! Here we're controlled by an evil older than Oracle itself (Microsoft and Typescript), with upgrades and crossgrades and cross compilers that deliver astounding 15% improvements in performance in exchange for a mere few animal sacrifices and a lifetime of misery. In our delightful world, getting your app to run on other platforms is as simple as embedding your operating system into WASM and putting it in their browser. What could be simpler?
You sir go wherever you want but please leave Java to professionals that make companies just work (TM). Yes its not ultra fashionate with all new features in some other languages (but improving constantly), but TBH I don't care, at all, I can work till retirement with Java 8 and be very happy, at the end its just a tool to solve problems and darn good one.
Proper quality engineering is delivering good robust solutions to companies, and Java is great for that in many many aspects, moreso than most other platforms. And who steers it, that's a question I couldn't care less about, just keep it working as expected, completely cross-compatible across all platforms and all previous version (looking at ya Microsoft, that clusterfuck with 'MS Visual C++ redistributable' requiring 20+ sometimes conflicting installations, often ending up in games not working at all even if required version is present - that's just bad engineering, they don't even have solid internal registry to prevent these FUBARs requiring full clean reinstall of Windows).
I'm no fan of Oracle but Oracle's steward ship of Java has been pretty good. They have invested in long term (open source) improvements such as Loom and Graal and open sourced additional technologies such as Flight recorder.
Yeah, WotC should never have sold themselves to Hasbro. Buying TSR was great, but selling to Hasbro was not. It may have seemed like a good idea at first because they got a lot of freedom in those first 10 years, but Habro has been tightening the screws lately and none of that has been good.
This happens in every industry once that business is opened to the stock market. Larian is great because its private. Steam is great because it's private. Facebook used to be great then it went public and went downhill fast. Same with basically any company that doesnt have 2 vectors of VERY solid competition (AMD v Intel v ARM, nvidia v AMD v Intel, Micro v Samsung v hynix, Ford v GM v Dodge, etc). Companies that exist only to drive profits will do shit to ruin their brand in the name of profits, because stock profits make more money than being a good company.
We just need to move on from DnD to other IPs at this point, it is absurdly clear that everyone putting all their eggs in the basket with wizards of the coast and it is just a bad idea.
There are plenty of fantastic alternatives, we really don’t need the DnD universe. I mean, as highly acclaimed as BG3 is, people in general seem to feel that the dev’s previous game Divinity Original Sin 2 has better combat mechanics… so idk I just think it’s time to move past wizards of the coast and embrace better systems.
I think Forgotten Realms has a special place in many people's hearts (especially the millennials and around them), being a formative part of our childhoods: Minsc and Boo, Drizzt, beholders, mimics, etc. It's like Star Wars or LOTR, people get attached and emotionally invested and it's not so easy to let go overnight.
I enjoyed the Original Sin series and played them for many hours,but never finished either one. The characters and stories weren't their strong suit IMO (they were kinda cheesy, honestly), but yeah, tactically they played better than BG3. That's the downside of trying to accurately transfer tabletop mechanics, I guess, and combining it with the poor UI of the BG3 series (too many different types of actions and reactions to squeeze in the toolbars). Anyway that's beside the point.
I agree new IPs would be great, but those are rare! It would be cool to see an open source fantasy world where high quality fanfic could be curated into canon.
The alternative systems flourished with DnD 4.0 back in 2008, since that system just wasn't as good as 3.5 or the new 5th edition.
Wizards of the Coast did a great job with the balance of customization vs simplicity of 5e and that's why DnD did so well recently. But the alternatives always were there.
Its a big community of literal house-rule makers (everyone plays DnD with their own houserules). Its a community used to making rules for themselves, buying 3rd party rules packages or discussing balance things online. The community will figure something out one way or the other.
> Divinity Original Sin 2 has better combat mechanics
While I think the combat in 5E combat in BG3 is fairly simple by comparison, DOS2 combat was definitely not better. All combat devolved into status effect versions of “the floor is lava” and a lot of builds become unviable late game.
Side note: I had tremendous fun doing a BG3 combat-only playthrough (meaning paying no attention to the story or characters, just min-maxing combat).
One of my most memorable encounters happened entirely by accident: I had just learned how to make my characters fly, and was exploring a new city by gliding from rooftop to rooftop. I ended up on top of some big castle thing by chance, and pissed off all the guards in what looked like a throne room. They chased me out onto a small patio, where I set up a perfect ambush: https://share.cleanshot.com/tPHhWk6p
A cloud of darkness blocked vision out of the only exit, with only my fighter visible at the end of the ledge. Each enemy would come stumbling out of the darkness, only to be ambushed by arrows fired from a dust cloud. Enraged, they'd run towards the ledge, engage my fighter, only to be blown into the chasm below by my warlock hiding on a tower above. Over the next couple hours, I ended up killing like 40-60 of these huge guards, a pile of bodies at the river bottom. (Apparently this was some sort of boss fight, which I had no idea lol). It was just such a perfect tactical setup to blow them off the ledge, one by one, unaware and so angry :D
One of the best moments I ever had in any video game.
I really miss 2016 MtG. I remember when full art lands and full art promos were RARE and with money for no reason other than their collectability. I really liked when cards were rare because of the fact that they were good and uncommon and maybe because they were the same as the regular card but foil, not because they were arbitrarily a different type of shiny, or like when that one card from Kamigawa had a different color neon border that made it spike to 3k for a while, let alone the new serialized cards.
I wish we could go back to that, because I was so excited about collecting cards back then. Nowadays I feel like unless I open a pack with a crazy reprint or a REALLY lucky list card, there are essentially no cards worth anything. I remember pulling some shock lands and even when they were only 8 bucks it felt really great, like it was gambling. Now, I only ever get packs of remastered sets, and standard sets are wholly uninteresting. I do a $40 draft and get $3 worth of cards, and it is to be seen if these EVER go up in value.
I still love the game, and I play it more than ever. But there are three groups of people: investors, people that realize it is a TCG, and people that think all cards should be worthless. The first is greedy, the middle is realistic, and the latter is idealistic. But I am solidly in the middle, and there is so much pushing on both sides that the middle group is demonized for wanting to play a game and have cards have relative value too.
I prefer having cheap cards. You are paying for the experience not the cards when you draft.
What I don’t like is wotc printing new powerful cards in non-standard sets. Modern horizons, commander sets, etc print absolutely must play busted cards but the sets are limited print quantity and artificially scarce.
If it was up to me all new cards would be printed in standard sets and supplemental sets are reprints only.
2016 magic was nice because you could play reserved list cards without having to sell a kidney…
Part of the point is that a lot of these cards would be busted in standard though, so printing straight to modern is a way to still get these kinds of cards out without powercreeping the standard of the day.
There’s only two camps, investors and gamers. I think that anyone who wants to “have cards that have relative value” are investors, whether they realize it or not. Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves (I recall a recent Reddit post where the user was trying to collect every single Magic card that depicted an owl in any way). But if your concern is about the monetary value of the cards in your collection, you are an investor, of some kind.
I personally think cards should be for playing, and am pretty opposed to cards being valuable if that means that playing the actual game becomes prohibitively expensive. Standard decks costing hundreds of dollars is not a good thing.
It's not that black and white. I used to play the game in the mid nineties. The most expensive card I bought back then I paid the equivalent of 5 EUR (the Euro didn't even exist yet) because I needed it for a deck but that card came out before I started playing.
I'm not an investor in MtG cards. But my collection went up in value. Nothing crazy (I don't have any of the "power nines") but with 28 dual lands, the most valuable card from Legends (The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale) and the most valuable card from Arabian Night (Bazaar of Baghdad) and a few others, I'm sitting easily on 20 K EUR atm.
I didn't do it on purpose: I simply never got rid of my cards, not paying attention to the price. I just like my old cards and they bring me back memories when I look at them.
I'm take it I'm in a third category: nostalgic people who simply like their very own (and very old) cards.
This sounds good but doesn't actually make sense, like most corporate money-grabs. If cards accumulate in value, everyone is essentially playing for free(or indeed being paid to collect cards since generally the market rose faster than inflation). Everyone can sell their collection and if the secondary market is healthy they can get back what they spent on it and more.
This is the fundamental scam of the game-piece idea: it kills the secondary market and basically means instead of having the option to recycle your old decks into new ones you have to always pay $50/deck or whatever Hasbro is selling decks for.
I enjoy having high-value cards in my collection, but the best way to show them off is in a deck that uses them well. I'm not throwing my Surge Foil copy of The One Ring in a random Commander deck.
>Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves
I mean, isn't that a collector? I doubt there are more "investors" than "people who thought the card looked cool". A collector might turn into an investor, but people who aren't looking to flip their cards in months time are more likely to be a "collector". So for there card and art quality is key.
If you want my anecdote: I never seriously played YGO but there was a point where I tried to get every single Blue Eyes I could grab. I didn't care about mint condition or even the dozen of rarities. I just wanted to see the different ways Blue eyes was portrayed, even if it was the same exact card with different art.
I mean, I wouldnt care if all of the cards were worthless as long as all of the packs are free. Winning tournaments (esp local ones) currently feels bad and unrewarding because a pack of cards is $5 to buy but contains $0 value. Investing implies buying and selling for the sake of profitmaking, whereas I really like the idea of cards fluctuating in value due to organic changes in the game so that you can trade a doubling season for 2 tutors, and then if for some reason one of those tutors goes for a long time without a reprint, you may be able to trade that tutor for a doubling season and another tutor! Like, Im not gonna go on to TCG player and buy cards for the sake of speculatively investing and holding value, but it doesnt feel good when packs are $5 a piece and contain $0.50 of cards. It feels even worse to draft for $40 and walk away with $3. ON AVERAGE a pack of magic cards should hold its value, and over time eventually go up.
Meaning if I spend $500 on packs of cards, I should get $500 worth of cards on the secondary market immediately (or even slightly less, like $300 would be reasonable), and then if I hold that for 5 years, it should be like $700. This is how it has been for all of magic's history pre-Throne of Eldraine (nothing particular about that set, but that is the last set that I really see this happening on)
My theory is that all cards will eventually be under $10, because cards like Mana Crypt are opportunities for WoTC to make money via reprints. I’ve only been playing/buying since March, but I’ve seen so many cards dropping dramatically in price, much more often than seeing a card shoot up in price. Reprints help drive sales and justify the higher prices for booster packs.
Cutting staff implies that, perhaps, they anticipate more Universes Beyond and reprints, and fewer original sets with original mechanics. Universes Beyond is great for Wizards because they don’t have to really invent cards, and fans will pay whatever they ask for cards from their favorite shows and movies and games.
This month people are losing their minds over the Princess Bride and Dr. Malcolm Secret Lair sets.
They're in a tough spot because they have to keep several audiences happy: collectors and players. Players generally want the cheapest set pieces while collectors want the value of their collection to grow. I think WotC has done a decent job trying to satisfy both groups and are at least trying different things. As an investor, you should be happy about that. Whether or not this sea change of releases over the pandemic helps or hurts the long-term health of the game is a worry of mine.
The monopoly profit maximizing price for a card is going to depend on the precise shape of the demand curve for each individual card; It may be $10 it may be $50; the fact that they could crash the price whenever they want does not mean it is in their interests to do so.
I dropped $200 on Dr Malcolm and some others for the Locust God promo. I'm very happy with it all, and now get to build an Egglord deck with Jeff Goldblum's face on it.
And, if you've only experienced a few set releases, price swings will seem weird. Keep in mind that more boxes will be opened for a while, thus making more copies of coveted things available. It's a different story when a set goes out of print.
(Not trying to be snarky. Just started playing a few months ago and that seems to be the best way to make decks without gambling. What's the point of buying packs?)
A lot of MtG turns into pay-to-win, since the best cards of the meta inevitably cost more. Drafting on the other hand, ensures that everyone has zero-cards upon the start of the draft and have to make due with the booster-cards that come in the draft.
In many ways, drafting is cheaper. You don't have to worry about making the best deck ever... instead you just have to make the best deck given the cards you draft. Then you can sell the expensive singles after the draft.
I do almost exclusively by singles. That doesnt mean that a) winning packs from tournaments and LGS FNM doesnt feel satisfying or fun or valueable, and b) it wasnt fun to gamble on getting good value out of all pre-Throne of Eldraine sets, or c) that draft doesnt feel like a complete waste of money considering it is usually $30-50 buy in and winning gets you like 3 packs ($50 for 6 packs of cards each worth under a dollar feels bad). There used to be a lot of fun to be had in paying $10 for an FNM entry, getting a pack from entering, paying an extra $10 to get 2 more packs and rolling the dice. Sometimes you got trash, other times you got $50 worth of cards, but it was at least fun because there was a chance of good cards. Now, even if the card is very playable it still has no value.
If you are exclusively buying singles that screams to me you are just powergaming and netdecking your decks instead of actually figuring out the game and playing it.
Sure you can get a better deal that way - meaning a higher win rate deck while spending less money, but a lot of the fun of MtG is (or at least was when I played) the discovery of new cards in the set, trading cards with your gaming group(s), and trying to build the best deck(s) you collectively had access to. When people started to just look what wins tournaments and just order whole decks as singles from web stores it ruined the hobby.
A) There was less cards to go around for the rest of us
B) they were just playing something someone else designed and play tested and tuned for GP or PT
Prices of swaggy stuff is always irrational until the smallest attention spans have moved on.
I assume you know about Collector Packs, those are my favorites for splashing a chunk of money on a set. If I can afford to preorder a box, or pick one up on some random sale, they have the highest swag tier.
The only card I've sold in the past several years has been a copy of Parallel Lives. It got me enough store credit to cop a Chatterfang, and some other goodies to build a first Commander deck after not touching my cards in years. I had 4 or 5 copies, so it was easy to part with. I also gave one copy away to a friend who had just bought some sort of 'Hobbits and food tokens' precon deck.
That seems like a ridiculous attitude. Surely players should want all cards to be as cheap as possible, so everyone can play whatever deck they’d like.
Yes, we would. That's why most of us are okay with proxies. But the fact of the matter is that when all of the good cards cost a lot of money, and you need to play good cards to win tournaments, and you cannot use proxies in tournaments, spending money to win nothing at all feels really bad.
If all the cards were free and we were competing for $500 instead of decks cost $2k and we're playing for a $600 card I wouldn't care. I probably would enjoy it. But we live in a society and as it is, I would rather modern cards have more value than none.
Hasbro is ruining the brand at alarming levels. They think they are doing it "smart" because MTGA and some other plays to try and split the audience of regular players and whales.
There is no "smart" way to destroy your business.
Also as a player right now is one of the worst lore breaking and general worst story related times to care in any way about these characters, assets, places or anything else.
This comes after this year selling the rights to the Transformers movie series, an arguably larger hit to their ability to have mainstream impact. It seems very unlikely they wouldn't be looking for a buyer for WotC as well, and trimming down to just the IP may be making it a better sale.
The company is struggling and likely pulling out all the stops the avoid bankruptcy, when you need liquidity this could very much include cuts to otherwise profitable segments.
Well, why wouldn't they sell (license) the rights to make Transformers films (which as far as I know is just extending their existing contract with Paramount)?
They still own the underlying IP[^1], so as long as the contract is a decent one, Paramount has to deal with the actual making/distributing the film, and Hasbro just gets the money, and a toy line off the back of the film. Feels like an easier set up than taking the risk on movie-making yourself (which they did attempt with eOne for other properties, but seemingly have decided that it's probably not a good deal with them)
[1] yes, yes, it's a bit more complicated with Takara in the mix too, but you can essentially view it as a Hasbro-owned property
I'm not so sure. Whether this article is good or not is a moot point. Hasbro is publicly traded so there is verifiable information about the company available. As others have pointed out, we can see them rapidly selling off assets and IP and cutting staff. I'm not a professional analyst, but surely one could substantiate an argument for or against this decision.
Edit: Also, this decision isn't a single data point. We can look at the track record and business trajectory to make an informed decision. I am not particularly well informed about Hasbro, but based on historical stock price, industry trends and comments here, it really seems like they are fucking up
MTG and D&D both grew by like 20% last year. If they’re fucking up with managing them it’s not showing in the numbers yet.
Also it would be hard to know from numbers anyway. Maybe if they managed it better it would be up 30% Neither product has significant competition so you couldn’t even really guess by comparing to an overall market.
Broader Hasbro numbers might be a little more comparable (there is an overall toy and games industry) but still tough.
It’s often hard to tell from the numbers that a company is being ruined until it is too late.
Yeah, MTG twitter is really mad about it, but people at WoTC often have fairly narrow skillsets, so I would not be surprised that at some point they want to rebalance the set of skills that they have access to to do something different.
I found out they fired a community manager... and I had no idea who that person was without a bunch of googling, which tells you a bit about how effective that spending was for wotc.
Not to say that I think wotc corporate is at all infallible, they are clearly not very good at doing anything besides designing the cards themselves, and even then, they have largely inherited a very good game rather than really doing anything amazing.
Wotc could really use a shake up that raises the standards of what they produce to the level of eg riot games, but that's unlikely to happen any time soon.
Simple. Did the management meet the various internal targets outlined by the board.. Those could be anything from profitability, to total cost structure, to anything really
Good and bad itself depends on the perspective. Good for Hasbro? Can be argued I guess, depends also on its current economic situation and a lot of things other people may indeed not have the best knowledge about. Good for the players and fans of DnD? Good for those who actually work in the company and got laid off, or the remaining staff there? Almost surely not. This decision is not taken on their behalf and does not serve them in any way. And considering the popularity of DnD there is no surprise that the issue is going to be approached from an employee or player perspective rather than an investor or manager one.
Well, for example, when I worked at the Baltimore Sun, the owners at Tribune Media sold the already owned outright headquarters of the Sun, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, etc. and has us all lease office space from somewhere else instead. This is an insane business decision. No one who wants to keep a business alive would think to replace a money making asset (just lease out the other floors of the building) with a money losing ongoing expense. But it gives you one quarter of extremely high profitability in exchange for lower profits for the rest of time, so they did it.
That's how it's done in most of the world. But the US and "at-will" employment tends to benefit the company much more often than the employee. These kinds of layoffs elsewhere would mean you need to throw out a gigantic severance to compensate. 2-3 months is generous for the US tech sector, but we're easily talking 6+ months severance if this happened in most of Asia. You'd need to prove multiple quarters of loss or such a drastic loss that you are physically unable to pay labor for layoffs to go through this way.
Why do so many people think the economy is in a healthy position? Strong performance now means nothing. e.g., Department Store Sales 3-month average was $17B in 2008 and is now down to under $11B. It's a bloodbath. It has been steadily trending down since 2008.
"Bill Ackman warns economy will fall off a cliff if the Fed doesn't hurry and cut rates"
The Fed isn't going to cut rates for years. They're refusing to blink. These are Volcker-sized balls on JPow.
Any rallying now is squeezing blood from the stone. Any massive layoffs, sales, mergers, bankruptcies, or consolidations is hedging for the unavoidable cliff.
These are just smart, safe moves by corporations -- getting their affairs in order, per se.
And now the workers are going to suffer because they didn't organize labor when the economy was booming and they weren't feeling the pinch. Hopefully they learn this time and don't let the unions weaken if they want to avoid being battered and left for a cheaper workforce or replaced with automation.
> Department Store Sales 3-month average was $17B in 2008 and is now down to under $11B. It's a bloodbath. It has been steadily trending down since 2008.
No comment on the rest of your post, but I suspect this particular metric has more to do with the rise of online retailers and less to do with falling purchasing power.
I think you in this case missed the tree for the forest. Hasbro right now os doing well. A company doing well should not be able to simply fire the labor that helped them succeed like they are tools.
Layoffs wouldn't be an issue of they were respectable. Some mix of either foresight or proper severance. In reality, it's rarely either unless you're in a sector that is likely already well compensated. I think thars more in the heart of what the GP was talking about.
>And now the workers are going to suffer because they didn't organize labor when the economy was booming and they weren't feeling the pinch.
If we had good government labor laws, unions wouldn't be necessary. I don't know why everyone feels collective bargaining is the only road here. Moreover, they aren't mutually exclusive; we can vye for both unions and better government regulation of jobs and how easily you can lay someone off on a profitable quarter.
Readit News
They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them (just a few pieces of paper, not enough dice, sub par instructions ). Or really expensive character toys.
D&D has undoubtedly gotten more popular, but I wish it were under the stewardship of someone more deserving, like a geekier board game shop than greed-enthralled Hasbro. They've become the Disney of board games, all quantity and profit and no real concern for a high quality gamer experience. I bet someone like Larian (Baldur's Gate 3) would've taken better care of the IP and rulesets (and they're working on a Divinity tabletop game!)
For me this is the most telling part that Hasbro doesn't quite get what you're actually selling if you have a tabletop company; it's not the ruleset, that will be leaked as soon as you sell a single copy and people actually play the game. It's instead ideas and world building visions from the people who were directly involved in creating the world and rules the company tries to sell to people. People are creative, but even the best story tellers wouldn't turn their nose up at some lore to help spark creativity, long as the lore isn't needlessly restrictive.
I understand that groups generally have one DM and 4 players, do if you include player options you might sell 5 books instead of one. But that's the shallow, cash-in-now-fuck-next-decade mentality.
Meanwhile they haven't put out a decent adventure in a decade. The internet is awash with people trying to glue their ramblings back into coherent campaigns and running D&D (always a huge time sink) is becoming a worse experience every year as they keep flooding the market with crap.
I love running games but I've come to the point where I'm not really interested in starting a D&D group anymore because of all the bullshit.
WOTC: support your DMs or die.
Yes, but someone needs to impress their boss/shareholders this very Quarter, and then the next, and then the next. Planning for the long haul requires a vision and patience that is not on the table. Hasbro mentality is (probably) "release the game mid-December, let it sell tons for Xmas, rake it in, start planning for next Xmas release".
I don't know if 'slow burn' is in their scope. It would be interesting to hear from them on this.
I still play in one D&D campaign, but it was started before the fiasco, but I have already decided that at least I won't be running another D&D game.
Personally, I'd love to see more systems that are less "wargaming" oriented than D&D but with a focus on long term play and, where possible, player growth.
Which is to say, I am clearly part of the problem here.
I've found Paizo's pricing to be much more reasonable than WotC and they work well with open source projects. I've been using the open source system for Pathfinder on FoundryVTT with Paizo's official content packs and it's amazing. My experiences with DnD in Roll20 and AboveVTT don't even come close.
Proper quality engineering is delivering good robust solutions to companies, and Java is great for that in many many aspects, moreso than most other platforms. And who steers it, that's a question I couldn't care less about, just keep it working as expected, completely cross-compatible across all platforms and all previous version (looking at ya Microsoft, that clusterfuck with 'MS Visual C++ redistributable' requiring 20+ sometimes conflicting installations, often ending up in games not working at all even if required version is present - that's just bad engineering, they don't even have solid internal registry to prevent these FUBARs requiring full clean reinstall of Windows).
Isn’t that the core business model of Hasbro?
There are plenty of fantastic alternatives, we really don’t need the DnD universe. I mean, as highly acclaimed as BG3 is, people in general seem to feel that the dev’s previous game Divinity Original Sin 2 has better combat mechanics… so idk I just think it’s time to move past wizards of the coast and embrace better systems.
I enjoyed the Original Sin series and played them for many hours,but never finished either one. The characters and stories weren't their strong suit IMO (they were kinda cheesy, honestly), but yeah, tactically they played better than BG3. That's the downside of trying to accurately transfer tabletop mechanics, I guess, and combining it with the poor UI of the BG3 series (too many different types of actions and reactions to squeeze in the toolbars). Anyway that's beside the point.
I agree new IPs would be great, but those are rare! It would be cool to see an open source fantasy world where high quality fanfic could be curated into canon.
Wizards of the Coast did a great job with the balance of customization vs simplicity of 5e and that's why DnD did so well recently. But the alternatives always were there.
Its a big community of literal house-rule makers (everyone plays DnD with their own houserules). Its a community used to making rules for themselves, buying 3rd party rules packages or discussing balance things online. The community will figure something out one way or the other.
While I think the combat in 5E combat in BG3 is fairly simple by comparison, DOS2 combat was definitely not better. All combat devolved into status effect versions of “the floor is lava” and a lot of builds become unviable late game.
One of my most memorable encounters happened entirely by accident: I had just learned how to make my characters fly, and was exploring a new city by gliding from rooftop to rooftop. I ended up on top of some big castle thing by chance, and pissed off all the guards in what looked like a throne room. They chased me out onto a small patio, where I set up a perfect ambush: https://share.cleanshot.com/tPHhWk6p
A cloud of darkness blocked vision out of the only exit, with only my fighter visible at the end of the ledge. Each enemy would come stumbling out of the darkness, only to be ambushed by arrows fired from a dust cloud. Enraged, they'd run towards the ledge, engage my fighter, only to be blown into the chasm below by my warlock hiding on a tower above. Over the next couple hours, I ended up killing like 40-60 of these huge guards, a pile of bodies at the river bottom. (Apparently this was some sort of boss fight, which I had no idea lol). It was just such a perfect tactical setup to blow them off the ledge, one by one, unaware and so angry :D
One of the best moments I ever had in any video game.
My full review, with more silliness: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561199138390397/recomm...
Or go back to AD&D 1e like the good lord ... err gygax intended :)
I wish we could go back to that, because I was so excited about collecting cards back then. Nowadays I feel like unless I open a pack with a crazy reprint or a REALLY lucky list card, there are essentially no cards worth anything. I remember pulling some shock lands and even when they were only 8 bucks it felt really great, like it was gambling. Now, I only ever get packs of remastered sets, and standard sets are wholly uninteresting. I do a $40 draft and get $3 worth of cards, and it is to be seen if these EVER go up in value.
I still love the game, and I play it more than ever. But there are three groups of people: investors, people that realize it is a TCG, and people that think all cards should be worthless. The first is greedy, the middle is realistic, and the latter is idealistic. But I am solidly in the middle, and there is so much pushing on both sides that the middle group is demonized for wanting to play a game and have cards have relative value too.
What I don’t like is wotc printing new powerful cards in non-standard sets. Modern horizons, commander sets, etc print absolutely must play busted cards but the sets are limited print quantity and artificially scarce.
If it was up to me all new cards would be printed in standard sets and supplemental sets are reprints only.
2016 magic was nice because you could play reserved list cards without having to sell a kidney…
I personally think cards should be for playing, and am pretty opposed to cards being valuable if that means that playing the actual game becomes prohibitively expensive. Standard decks costing hundreds of dollars is not a good thing.
It's not that black and white. I used to play the game in the mid nineties. The most expensive card I bought back then I paid the equivalent of 5 EUR (the Euro didn't even exist yet) because I needed it for a deck but that card came out before I started playing.
I'm not an investor in MtG cards. But my collection went up in value. Nothing crazy (I don't have any of the "power nines") but with 28 dual lands, the most valuable card from Legends (The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale) and the most valuable card from Arabian Night (Bazaar of Baghdad) and a few others, I'm sitting easily on 20 K EUR atm.
I didn't do it on purpose: I simply never got rid of my cards, not paying attention to the price. I just like my old cards and they bring me back memories when I look at them.
I'm take it I'm in a third category: nostalgic people who simply like their very own (and very old) cards.
for the owl collector, who at the time of posting seems to have missed a few.
This is the fundamental scam of the game-piece idea: it kills the secondary market and basically means instead of having the option to recycle your old decks into new ones you have to always pay $50/deck or whatever Hasbro is selling decks for.
I mean, isn't that a collector? I doubt there are more "investors" than "people who thought the card looked cool". A collector might turn into an investor, but people who aren't looking to flip their cards in months time are more likely to be a "collector". So for there card and art quality is key.
If you want my anecdote: I never seriously played YGO but there was a point where I tried to get every single Blue Eyes I could grab. I didn't care about mint condition or even the dozen of rarities. I just wanted to see the different ways Blue eyes was portrayed, even if it was the same exact card with different art.
Meaning if I spend $500 on packs of cards, I should get $500 worth of cards on the secondary market immediately (or even slightly less, like $300 would be reasonable), and then if I hold that for 5 years, it should be like $700. This is how it has been for all of magic's history pre-Throne of Eldraine (nothing particular about that set, but that is the last set that I really see this happening on)
Cutting staff implies that, perhaps, they anticipate more Universes Beyond and reprints, and fewer original sets with original mechanics. Universes Beyond is great for Wizards because they don’t have to really invent cards, and fans will pay whatever they ask for cards from their favorite shows and movies and games.
This month people are losing their minds over the Princess Bride and Dr. Malcolm Secret Lair sets.
Wonderful art on the Princess Bride set.
I can't help but notice that if Inigo Montoya gets into combat with the Man in Black... he'll win.
And, if you've only experienced a few set releases, price swings will seem weird. Keep in mind that more boxes will be opened for a while, thus making more copies of coveted things available. It's a different story when a set goes out of print.
(Not trying to be snarky. Just started playing a few months ago and that seems to be the best way to make decks without gambling. What's the point of buying packs?)
Draft is probably the best MtG style of playing.
A lot of MtG turns into pay-to-win, since the best cards of the meta inevitably cost more. Drafting on the other hand, ensures that everyone has zero-cards upon the start of the draft and have to make due with the booster-cards that come in the draft.
In many ways, drafting is cheaper. You don't have to worry about making the best deck ever... instead you just have to make the best deck given the cards you draft. Then you can sell the expensive singles after the draft.
Sure you can get a better deal that way - meaning a higher win rate deck while spending less money, but a lot of the fun of MtG is (or at least was when I played) the discovery of new cards in the set, trading cards with your gaming group(s), and trying to build the best deck(s) you collectively had access to. When people started to just look what wins tournaments and just order whole decks as singles from web stores it ruined the hobby.
A) There was less cards to go around for the rest of us
B) they were just playing something someone else designed and play tested and tuned for GP or PT
Prices of swaggy stuff is always irrational until the smallest attention spans have moved on.
I assume you know about Collector Packs, those are my favorites for splashing a chunk of money on a set. If I can afford to preorder a box, or pick one up on some random sale, they have the highest swag tier.
The only card I've sold in the past several years has been a copy of Parallel Lives. It got me enough store credit to cop a Chatterfang, and some other goodies to build a first Commander deck after not touching my cards in years. I had 4 or 5 copies, so it was easy to part with. I also gave one copy away to a friend who had just bought some sort of 'Hobbits and food tokens' precon deck.
If all the cards were free and we were competing for $500 instead of decks cost $2k and we're playing for a $600 card I wouldn't care. I probably would enjoy it. But we live in a society and as it is, I would rather modern cards have more value than none.
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There is no "smart" way to destroy your business.
Also as a player right now is one of the worst lore breaking and general worst story related times to care in any way about these characters, assets, places or anything else.
Hasbro blows
The company is struggling and likely pulling out all the stops the avoid bankruptcy, when you need liquidity this could very much include cuts to otherwise profitable segments.
They still own the underlying IP[^1], so as long as the contract is a decent one, Paramount has to deal with the actual making/distributing the film, and Hasbro just gets the money, and a toy line off the back of the film. Feels like an easier set up than taking the risk on movie-making yourself (which they did attempt with eOne for other properties, but seemingly have decided that it's probably not a good deal with them)
[1] yes, yes, it's a bit more complicated with Takara in the mix too, but you can essentially view it as a Hasbro-owned property
Notably, the entire Death Row Records catalog, Grey's Anatomy, Criminal Minds, international distribution for The Walking Dead, etc.
I guess they don't want to be in the legacy media licensing business.
Edit: Also, this decision isn't a single data point. We can look at the track record and business trajectory to make an informed decision. I am not particularly well informed about Hasbro, but based on historical stock price, industry trends and comments here, it really seems like they are fucking up
Also it would be hard to know from numbers anyway. Maybe if they managed it better it would be up 30% Neither product has significant competition so you couldn’t even really guess by comparing to an overall market.
Broader Hasbro numbers might be a little more comparable (there is an overall toy and games industry) but still tough.
It’s often hard to tell from the numbers that a company is being ruined until it is too late.
I found out they fired a community manager... and I had no idea who that person was without a bunch of googling, which tells you a bit about how effective that spending was for wotc.
Not to say that I think wotc corporate is at all infallible, they are clearly not very good at doing anything besides designing the cards themselves, and even then, they have largely inherited a very good game rather than really doing anything amazing.
Wotc could really use a shake up that raises the standards of what they produce to the level of eg riot games, but that's unlikely to happen any time soon.
I approve of this unit of measure.
(I missed a chance to use "thrice".)
You should have to prove some economic need to make those kind of layoffs similarly how you have to prove economic need for work visas.
"Bill Ackman warns economy will fall off a cliff if the Fed doesn't hurry and cut rates"
The Fed isn't going to cut rates for years. They're refusing to blink. These are Volcker-sized balls on JPow.
Any rallying now is squeezing blood from the stone. Any massive layoffs, sales, mergers, bankruptcies, or consolidations is hedging for the unavoidable cliff.
These are just smart, safe moves by corporations -- getting their affairs in order, per se.
And now the workers are going to suffer because they didn't organize labor when the economy was booming and they weren't feeling the pinch. Hopefully they learn this time and don't let the unions weaken if they want to avoid being battered and left for a cheaper workforce or replaced with automation.
No comment on the rest of your post, but I suspect this particular metric has more to do with the rise of online retailers and less to do with falling purchasing power.
Layoffs wouldn't be an issue of they were respectable. Some mix of either foresight or proper severance. In reality, it's rarely either unless you're in a sector that is likely already well compensated. I think thars more in the heart of what the GP was talking about.
>And now the workers are going to suffer because they didn't organize labor when the economy was booming and they weren't feeling the pinch.
If we had good government labor laws, unions wouldn't be necessary. I don't know why everyone feels collective bargaining is the only road here. Moreover, they aren't mutually exclusive; we can vye for both unions and better government regulation of jobs and how easily you can lay someone off on a profitable quarter.