Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history(mtgrocks.com)
mtgrocks.com
Magic the Gathering players lament the loss of 30-year history
https://mtgrocks.com/mtg-players-lament-the-loss-of-30-year-history/
154 comments
I'm actually surprised that ASP & Access were cheaper than PHP & (assuming) mySQL.
In Belgium it was the other way around. PHP and MySQL was cheap, anything Microsoft related was more expensive.
In Belgium it was the other way around. PHP and MySQL was cheap, anything Microsoft related was more expensive.
...probably running on pirated windows lmao
Must have been a hell of a fight?
Pirates from the British or the Spanish crown?
What was the website name?
I started playing Magic in Italy around 2002/3, maybe I've stumbled upon your site
Loved this story. Is this a peek of your site on the Wayback Machine? The late 90s and early 2000s were such a magical time for the early web!
https://web.archive.org/web/20020930072241/http://www.thebib...
https://web.archive.org/web/20020930072241/http://www.thebib...
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.
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.
Between this and the recent attempt at looting the D&D community for all it's worth that horribly backfired (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/dd-maker-retreats-fro...) what is there not to hate?
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.
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.
> what is there not to hate?
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.
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.
> Much like Star Wars fans have learned to put up with Disney's attempts to wring every last dollar out of the franchise.
They're just continuing in George Lucas' footsteps. IMHO, either you accept the money grabs, or your acknowledge only the two films, Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back; even Return was money grubbing.
They're just continuing in George Lucas' footsteps. IMHO, either you accept the money grabs, or your acknowledge only the two films, Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back; even Return was money grubbing.
Lucas made 6 Star Wars movies in 30 years. That’s not even close to what Disney is doing.
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.
Of note here is Null Signal Games - https://nullsignal.games/
Android: Netrunner was a great cyberpunk-themed, asymmetrical card game which ran 2012-2018, and ended because of a licensing disagreement between FFG and WotC.
Null Signal Games is a donation and volunteer-driven organization which has been shepherding the game - designing new sets, commissioning artists, providing prize kits, and organizing big events to let the game continue. For the most part, they've been knocking it out of the park. New cards are freely available as print-and-play files. Proxying is allowed and encouraged.
Just to not give a purely rosy picture, I'll note that they foster a very combative social justice element which drove some heavy-handed choices and sour community interactions, but on the whole it's been a laudable effort, and continues to do great work.
Android: Netrunner was a great cyberpunk-themed, asymmetrical card game which ran 2012-2018, and ended because of a licensing disagreement between FFG and WotC.
Null Signal Games is a donation and volunteer-driven organization which has been shepherding the game - designing new sets, commissioning artists, providing prize kits, and organizing big events to let the game continue. For the most part, they've been knocking it out of the park. New cards are freely available as print-and-play files. Proxying is allowed and encouraged.
Just to not give a purely rosy picture, I'll note that they foster a very combative social justice element which drove some heavy-handed choices and sour community interactions, but on the whole it's been a laudable effort, and continues to do great work.
I'm quite into this space. I played virtually every LCG that FFG published. I still have all of my original Netrunner LCG cards.
I'm very interested in seeing how Null Signal progresses. The LCG community has always had problems with gaining new members. A new game would launch, tons of people pick up the core sets. The games get into their first few cycles, and then no new people start to join. Then another LCG would come out, and people would go play the new hotness. I don't know if Null Signal is trying to overcome this problem though.
I did find it interesting that WotC has seemingly abandoned their Netrunner trademark [0]. I wonder if that means they Null Signal is effectively in the free in clear. They always seemed to be operating in a bit of a grey area. I don't have a lawyer friend who I've been able to ask.
In this same vein, Pinebox Entertainment [1] has been keeping AEG's Doomtown: Reloaded alive in a similar way. Another fantastic "LCG"* that a big company quit supporting but was picked up a by another small group. Neither of these games have a big following, but I'm interested if either of them will make an economically viable competitive LCG game. As it stands, FFG and AEG have abandoned all of their competitive FFGs. And FFG had several. Only their cooperative LCGs remain.
[0]: https://uspto.report/TM/90791419
[1]: https://pineboxentertainment.com/
* I say "LCG" because that was a trademarked term by FFG. AEG wasn't allowed to call it LCG. I forget what they called it. But it had an identical distribution model.
I'm very interested in seeing how Null Signal progresses. The LCG community has always had problems with gaining new members. A new game would launch, tons of people pick up the core sets. The games get into their first few cycles, and then no new people start to join. Then another LCG would come out, and people would go play the new hotness. I don't know if Null Signal is trying to overcome this problem though.
I did find it interesting that WotC has seemingly abandoned their Netrunner trademark [0]. I wonder if that means they Null Signal is effectively in the free in clear. They always seemed to be operating in a bit of a grey area. I don't have a lawyer friend who I've been able to ask.
In this same vein, Pinebox Entertainment [1] has been keeping AEG's Doomtown: Reloaded alive in a similar way. Another fantastic "LCG"* that a big company quit supporting but was picked up a by another small group. Neither of these games have a big following, but I'm interested if either of them will make an economically viable competitive LCG game. As it stands, FFG and AEG have abandoned all of their competitive FFGs. And FFG had several. Only their cooperative LCGs remain.
[0]: https://uspto.report/TM/90791419
[1]: https://pineboxentertainment.com/
* I say "LCG" because that was a trademarked term by FFG. AEG wasn't allowed to call it LCG. I forget what they called it. But it had an identical distribution model.
Yeah, LCG seems like such a great and ethical model, but has a proven track record of being hard to keep alive.
I'm currently a very happy player of Flesh and Blood TCG and think it's a fantastic game with great stewardship, but I have very mixed feelings about game economy entirely based on boosters, especially now that I work on games myself.
I'm currently a very happy player of Flesh and Blood TCG and think it's a fantastic game with great stewardship, but I have very mixed feelings about game economy entirely based on boosters, especially now that I work on games myself.
> Just to not give a purely rosy picture, I'll note that they foster a very combative social justice element which drove some heavy-handed choices
This is also true of WotC.
This is also true of WotC.
As far as I know, it's a whole different scale of issue. WotC did some fashionable corporate virtue signaling. Some of it sounded reasonable enough to me, some of it was a bit eyerolly but nothing I'm aware of seemed too egregious.
To give one example - Netrunner has (had, I guess) a mechanic called Brain Damage, tied to effects which in lore terms did just that to the runner (hacker) character: heavily damaged by nasty corp tech while jacked into the cyberspace, and having to operate with less capacity/limited resources from that point on. Pretty standard cyberpunk stuff.
Null Signal decided one day that the term is grossly insensitive and now purged from the game, and while they might've told you to print cards containing it up until yesterday, reading it off your cards is now considered literal violence and will get you booted off tournaments. If you're not immediately 100% on board with this decision, you are a morally deficient person and not welcome in the community.
To give one example - Netrunner has (had, I guess) a mechanic called Brain Damage, tied to effects which in lore terms did just that to the runner (hacker) character: heavily damaged by nasty corp tech while jacked into the cyberspace, and having to operate with less capacity/limited resources from that point on. Pretty standard cyberpunk stuff.
Null Signal decided one day that the term is grossly insensitive and now purged from the game, and while they might've told you to print cards containing it up until yesterday, reading it off your cards is now considered literal violence and will get you booted off tournaments. If you're not immediately 100% on board with this decision, you are a morally deficient person and not welcome in the community.
Null Signal's blog post[0] about the topic seems to entirely contradict your narrative about how this change is being approached. Have there been further developments since this was first announced?
"You will not be banned for referring to brain damage. We prefer that you switch to core damage, and will remind you, but it’s not an enumerated infraction.
However, if a fellow player is harmed by any aspect of your behavior (including using the old term instead of the new term) and politely requests that you stop, you are expected to do so. We have always asked players to be polite and make easy accommodations when asked, as is clarified by our Code of Conduct. This is not a change in policy."
[0] https://nullsignal.games/blog/core-damage/
"You will not be banned for referring to brain damage. We prefer that you switch to core damage, and will remind you, but it’s not an enumerated infraction.
However, if a fellow player is harmed by any aspect of your behavior (including using the old term instead of the new term) and politely requests that you stop, you are expected to do so. We have always asked players to be polite and make easy accommodations when asked, as is clarified by our Code of Conduct. This is not a change in policy."
[0] https://nullsignal.games/blog/core-damage/
You'll notice that was added in an addendum, they must've backtracked. I haven't seen it before. What I saw was the original announcement and the resulting Reddit discussion, in which the article author and several other members of the organization had a very different, self-righteous, and downright combative tone. The threat of banning people for not complying was explicitly spelled out.
That Reddit thread is here. It seems to have been thoroughly cleaned up, but you can still see some slivers. I don't think it's worth wading through it, especially if Null Signal learned to be more diplomatic from it - just wanted to make it clear that I was being truthful, or at least as best as I could. I remember the "violence" and "morally deficient" bits as direct quotes, but my memory might be faulty and hyperbolized.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Netrunner/comments/vvr25h/nisei_an_...
(NISEI is the former name of Null Signal Games, that's also a term they deemed insensitive, and chose to fully rebrand.)
That Reddit thread is here. It seems to have been thoroughly cleaned up, but you can still see some slivers. I don't think it's worth wading through it, especially if Null Signal learned to be more diplomatic from it - just wanted to make it clear that I was being truthful, or at least as best as I could. I remember the "violence" and "morally deficient" bits as direct quotes, but my memory might be faulty and hyperbolized.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Netrunner/comments/vvr25h/nisei_an_...
(NISEI is the former name of Null Signal Games, that's also a term they deemed insensitive, and chose to fully rebrand.)
I think this was true in the past, but communities like Premodern, cEDH and, of course, Old School, have managed to sidestep this issue: in the case of Premodern and Old School by sidestepping new releases, and for cEDH by being lenient on proxies.
I don't think Magic will ever _die_, but if it did, these communities could well go on for a lifetime longer.
Let me introduce you to the Star Wars Customizable Card Game by Decipher. It lasted from 1995 until 2001 when Lucasfilm sold toy rights to… Hasbro. Hasbro made a terrible card game to replace it for Episode 2 that has fallen into obscurity. The original game still lives on with a Players Committee and new virtual sets. Compared to Magic the game was a niche of a niche and still exists. If magic ever ‘dies’ I am sure there will be a huge community that steps up to keep it alive.
I don't think it's that hard. I gave that a bit of thought when I finished my degree. At the time, I had written an M:tG expert system, for my end-of-year project, that included a rules engine and an ability text parser [1]. The parser was written in Prolog with Definite Clause Grammars so it could generate new ability text as easy as it could recognise it [2].
I realised that all it would take to make a community version of Magic would be to change all the parts of ability text that are IP in my grammar [3]. For example "tapping", "kavu", "merfolk" and "phyrexian mana" would be out. But other than that, about 60% of the game could be basically replicated. That's 60% because it was just a degree project and so incomplete (e.g. Planeswalkers had just come out and they weren't implemented).
Alternatively the entire engine and its language could be re-written from scratch, though that would take a lot more work.
As to having actual cards to play with, I thought it would be a great idea to let the players make their own cards, just like many casual players make their own proxies of published cards. That would add a creative element to the hobby, similar to modelling in Warhammer games, that I thought would make it into something entirely new.
Suffice it to say, after my degree I never had the time to actively pursue this. But I still think it's perfectly possible.
Edit: just to be clear, the reason why it's interesting to have a generator for rules text is that you can generate, and validate, new cards automagickally. Then you can let the players script their own cards and validate them against the parser. So the entire game is completely decentralised with the only authority being the parser (and its maintenance team). Game balance is a problem but that, too, can be dealt with by tweaking the parser so it won't generate or accept imba cards.
_______________
[1] M:tG Arena uses the same idea today, but that was back in 2011. To clarify, the idea is that the ability text on cards is parsed and interpreted just like a scripting language. The interpreter, then, is the rules engine. The alternative is to code each individual card separately, which was done by earlier systems but is complete madness given the thousands of M:tG cards that have to be treated this way.
[2] Prolog programs can be "run backwards" under some conditions, so a parser is also a generator.
[3] Again this was in Prolog so the grammar was the parser. Definite Clause Grammars are syntactic sugar for Prolog so they're executable as any Prolog program. So you write a grammar, you have a parser, and it's also a generator.
I realised that all it would take to make a community version of Magic would be to change all the parts of ability text that are IP in my grammar [3]. For example "tapping", "kavu", "merfolk" and "phyrexian mana" would be out. But other than that, about 60% of the game could be basically replicated. That's 60% because it was just a degree project and so incomplete (e.g. Planeswalkers had just come out and they weren't implemented).
Alternatively the entire engine and its language could be re-written from scratch, though that would take a lot more work.
As to having actual cards to play with, I thought it would be a great idea to let the players make their own cards, just like many casual players make their own proxies of published cards. That would add a creative element to the hobby, similar to modelling in Warhammer games, that I thought would make it into something entirely new.
Suffice it to say, after my degree I never had the time to actively pursue this. But I still think it's perfectly possible.
Edit: just to be clear, the reason why it's interesting to have a generator for rules text is that you can generate, and validate, new cards automagickally. Then you can let the players script their own cards and validate them against the parser. So the entire game is completely decentralised with the only authority being the parser (and its maintenance team). Game balance is a problem but that, too, can be dealt with by tweaking the parser so it won't generate or accept imba cards.
_______________
[1] M:tG Arena uses the same idea today, but that was back in 2011. To clarify, the idea is that the ability text on cards is parsed and interpreted just like a scripting language. The interpreter, then, is the rules engine. The alternative is to code each individual card separately, which was done by earlier systems but is complete madness given the thousands of M:tG cards that have to be treated this way.
[2] Prolog programs can be "run backwards" under some conditions, so a parser is also a generator.
[3] Again this was in Prolog so the grammar was the parser. Definite Clause Grammars are syntactic sugar for Prolog so they're executable as any Prolog program. So you write a grammar, you have a parser, and it's also a generator.
All very cool stuff (awesome to see serious work done in Prolog!) but...
Actually cloning the rules isn't the issue. Convincing the community to use your off-brand version is the issue, and trying to keep the community together in the absence of the trusted central authority of the company producing the game. That can't be easily replicated.
Consider Wargaming: Every tabletop wargamer I know eventually designs their own rule system. Yet none of them can displace Warhammer 40k, despite 40k's rules not even being very good in the first place and GW frequently alienating fans.
Actually cloning the rules isn't the issue. Convincing the community to use your off-brand version is the issue, and trying to keep the community together in the absence of the trusted central authority of the company producing the game. That can't be easily replicated.
Consider Wargaming: Every tabletop wargamer I know eventually designs their own rule system. Yet none of them can displace Warhammer 40k, despite 40k's rules not even being very good in the first place and GW frequently alienating fans.
Yep, that's exactly right. The big problem with a project like that would be to get enough players on board to have an actual community.
But, I know how to write code, not how to make people follow me in my hare-brained schemes :)
>> All very cool stuff (awesome to see serious work done in Prolog!) but...
There's plenty of serious work done in Prolog. My new job is maintaining a 30-year old behemoth of a Prolog project used to manage company car rentals. I'd never heard of it before starting to work with it and I'm betting there's plenty more where it came from.
But, I know how to write code, not how to make people follow me in my hare-brained schemes :)
>> All very cool stuff (awesome to see serious work done in Prolog!) but...
There's plenty of serious work done in Prolog. My new job is maintaining a 30-year old behemoth of a Prolog project used to manage company car rentals. I'd never heard of it before starting to work with it and I'm betting there's plenty more where it came from.
> Between this and the recent attempt at looting the D&D community for all it's worth that horribly backfired (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/dd-maker-retreats-fro...) what is there not to hate?
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.
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.
I don't know, I think maybe there was a lot of the kind of comment that you mean, in what has been deleted, but there was a time that Wizzards' site published high quality articles on strategy and competitive play. I'm thinking of the time when Fires (of Yavimaya) was the deck to beat and Zvi Mowshowitz was one of the contributors, along with other members of ... team fireball, I think it was?
The articles by MaRo weren't that bad either, but I guess those won't be going missing.
The articles by MaRo weren't that bad either, but I guess those won't be going missing.
From what I can tell they kept the good stuff and deleted the fluff that no one was visiting. Here’s a classic Zvi article:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/top-50-artifacts-a...
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/top-50-artifacts-a...
Good stuff! I actually remember reading that one, thanks for sharing.
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).
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.
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.
I think reality is that bad products can simply just be ignored or not bought.
The insane level of overreach that might destroy all other content, yeah that is something that might really hurt. And fundamentally TTRPG is community of content creation, even if only for private use. Now company like WoTC somehow owning it or taking stupid cut. That really riled up the players.
The insane level of overreach that might destroy all other content, yeah that is something that might really hurt. And fundamentally TTRPG is community of content creation, even if only for private use. Now company like WoTC somehow owning it or taking stupid cut. That really riled up the players.
Somehow, Games Workshop still thrives with a lot longer of a history of fan and customer abuse.
They’ve very much turned things around in that respect over the last few years though
Or make plans to anger them in ways that are useful to the gaming company.
As you say: hating invigorates a community
As you say: hating invigorates a community
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCIYCaXNe88&list=PLJ_TJFLc25...
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...
Nerd Crew is brilliant.
I think one of the biggest documented cases was Microsoft being caught by FTC(a) for using ad agency thru Machinima to bribe content creators.
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/...
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/...
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)
When you think about it, exclusivity of early access to information is essentially free advertising for these companies. Just break up your next product into chunk and distribute it to those eager to do free work and advertisement for you. Just for a chance to get that first chunk of audience.
Actually it is kinda genius. And then on the other side you have those that are potentially manipulating the market for their gains, who don't need that access.
Actually it is kinda genius. And then on the other side you have those that are potentially manipulating the market for their gains, who don't need that access.
[deleted]
I don't think the nerd crowds like influencers. Can't be bothered. Just release better content and less drama.
One piece of Magic history that is still well-preserved is the ancient usenet groups:
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.deckmaster https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.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.
https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.deckmaster https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.trading-cards.magic.mi...
The most recent posts are spam, but if you use the advanced search to go back to 1994/1995, it's fun to read about the way people looked at the game nearly 30 years ago. You can find people selling Black Lotuses (now worth many thousands of dollars) for a few bucks.
> 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...
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...
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...
I have a box with some third and fourth edition decent card somewhere.
Some first edition lands, because that’s all my 15 yo ass could pay for.
Same as you m, unclear where it is.
Some first edition lands, because that’s all my 15 yo ass could pay for.
Same as you m, unclear where it is.
I'd like to imagine they, like other tcgs from that era, ended up in a landfill after a parent decided to toss those "baseball" cards telling you years later, "...but you don't like baseball anyway".
Oh that definitely what happened and I’m not even mad. That’s on me. Keep your own shit if you care enough.
To come back to the discussion at hand…maybe someone who care should have back to article up?
A webscrapper and a zip, then torrenting it.
To come back to the discussion at hand…maybe someone who care should have back to article up?
A webscrapper and a zip, then torrenting it.
Another piece of MTG history which, surprisingly, is still up and running (albeit very poorly): http://forums.magictraders.com/Ultimate.cgi
Magic Online Trading League, or MOTL, is incredibly special to me. It was the premier place to discuss and trade MTG cards on the web in the year 2000. This is the first website I created an account on using the Internet. I was 11. I chose the name "Meowmix2.0" which slowly evolved into my permanent, online username of Meo / MeoMix. Heck, my profile still exists - unmodified since it was written 22 years ago, http://forums.magictraders.com/ubbmisc.cgi?action=getbio&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. :)
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. :)
TBF Hasbro bought WotC in 1999. They just didn't start milking it until a few years ago when they realized most of their money came from cardboard...
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.
I got my first programming job because of MUDs. I also met my wife at my first programming job.
I guess I owe MUDs a lot.
I guess I owe MUDs a lot.
I used to sell magic via Usenet auctions and made enough to pay my tuition and rent.
It’s funny because when eBay was released I thought “why needs that? Anyone can just do their own with excel and Usenet.”
It’s funny because when eBay was released I thought “why needs that? Anyone can just do their own with excel and Usenet.”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Well, I take papers note, like our forefather had plan for us.
And then I spend the session scribbling on it.
It’s actually nice little artifact of long evening with friends
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.
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.
They tried with online league because they wanted a piece of the esport pile during peak esport hype. They failed completely.
I feel like that’s quite the stretch. What other competitive endeavors were killed due to MeToo in your estimation?
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.
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.
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.
Same really goes for most media production too.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Agree.
Not a Magic player, but this is your business, what do you think you should be doing?
Not a Magic player, but this is your business, what do you think you should be doing?
Well this is the first time I hear about magic in a few years. So maybe it's a PR stunt?
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> they just care about creating limited run products to juice the fans
Fans need to start refusing to be juiced. Stop paying them money.
Fans need to start refusing to be juiced. Stop paying them money.
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.
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.
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.
Something like IPFS?
https://ipfs.tech/
https://ipfs.tech/
Tangentially related: An MTG art project the explores “owning culture and people’s participation in culture through copyright”
Writeup by Cory Doctorow: https://doctorow.medium.com/provocateur-copyrights-a-magic-t...
Writeup by Cory Doctorow: https://doctorow.medium.com/provocateur-copyrights-a-magic-t...
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.
*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.
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.
It's really not that hard to get info taken down from IA if you are the site owner. Official blog from 2017 https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea... and more recent third-party blog with a survey of several ways to remove content (that you control) from Wayback https://blog.reputationx.com/block-wayback-machine
robots.txt only prohibits people from using the wayback machine to view the archive. The IA still has it archived. If someone later changes the robots.txt to something more permissive it will put back everything on the wayback machine.
Wrong. (If you know better than I please cite a credible source).
I requested to purge the archive from a domain I have since the former owner put semi legal crap there. Apart from robots text, I was asked to set up one specific page with a hash-like url to signal that I am really, really sure about the purge. Thats all that is needed.
The process is described here: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...
I requested to purge the archive from a domain I have since the former owner put semi legal crap there. Apart from robots text, I was asked to set up one specific page with a hash-like url to signal that I am really, really sure about the purge. Thats all that is needed.
The process is described here: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...
Well there is this example from 2007 https://archive.org/post/133690/robotstxt-only-gives-tempora...
I only have anecdotal evidence from a domain becoming parked with a restricted robots.txt and then it getting unparked and the archive still existing.
>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.
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.
Note that takedown doesn’t mean delete - it just means inaccessible to the public. IA still hold a copy, and the public will be able to see it again in ~120 years when the copyright expires.
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.
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.
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.
"I'm imagining it's mostly text and images."
You are almost certainly correct and, further, it is likely the text represents almost 100% of the value.
There is no excuse for this buffoonish behavior. Just absurd.
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.
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.
> People will feel an immediate theoretical loss but that they never did really access old articles so it wasn't a big loss and they'll move on.
There's so much history that gets lost for that reason: it's ephemeral, and nobody misses it at the time. It's hard to get people to think about what historians 500 years from now will be frustrated by not knowing. There's no immediate profit in it, we don't view it as all that important right now, and it's slightly inconvenient, so it'll probably just be lost to history.
There's so much history that gets lost for that reason: it's ephemeral, and nobody misses it at the time. It's hard to get people to think about what historians 500 years from now will be frustrated by not knowing. There's no immediate profit in it, we don't view it as all that important right now, and it's slightly inconvenient, so it'll probably just be lost to history.
What is also ridiculous is how links and search for merely half a year old articles were broken too.
I agree, but also : apparently that content is still accessible on IA, under the older link scheme.
If it’s that important, someone should scrap that, zip it and put it on a tracker.
If it’s that important, someone should scrap that, zip it and put it on a tracker.
Free rsync.net space to anyone undertaking this or any efforts like this.
Just email.
Just email.
Yet another proof that having `wget` to download websites, `git` to control for versions (what changed since last pull) (or restic/borg to do more of less the same) and/or host them somewhere is (a) extremely easy and (b) somehow mind-blowing to a lot of people who call themselves "technical" or even "programmers".
Weird. I get what not having time and energy is, I truly do, but if you cared so much about this community and its history, surely SOMEBODY will find the time AT LEAST ONCE and archive these precious bits of history?
I have a very and I really mean VERY benevolent spider bot -- we're talking from 2s all the way to 10s waiting between each link visit -- that crawls sites I care about weekly and does exactly that. The only thing I am worried about is if I can rely on my GIT hosting but I'll get to that at one point. I already have a NAS and everything goes in it, and everything on it gets deduplicated / compressed / encrypted and sent to several cloud storage services, but still, you never know.
Weird. I get what not having time and energy is, I truly do, but if you cared so much about this community and its history, surely SOMEBODY will find the time AT LEAST ONCE and archive these precious bits of history?
I have a very and I really mean VERY benevolent spider bot -- we're talking from 2s all the way to 10s waiting between each link visit -- that crawls sites I care about weekly and does exactly that. The only thing I am worried about is if I can rely on my GIT hosting but I'll get to that at one point. I already have a NAS and everything goes in it, and everything on it gets deduplicated / compressed / encrypted and sent to several cloud storage services, but still, you never know.
Based on your description (wget + git), I think your bot is going to miss a lot of content on modern websites. Have you tried viewing the content you've archived recently?
A lot of modern websites don't even download the actual page/article content until some JavaScript runs. I noticed this in particular when I was collecting daily Monkeypox stats from the CDC website.[1] The Internet Archive had indexed the public URL every day, but that page used JavaScript to download the actual daily stats from a separate JSON or XML file and used that data to render the page. The Internet Archive bot was only downloading that data file maybe every 2-3 weeks, so even though they had archives of the page for almost every day, nearly all of the per-day data was missing.
I don't write bots often anymore, but for the last ten years or so I've defaulted to using an automated instance of an actual browser, because it's the only way you'll get all of the page content to load accurately, especially on sites that use the "lazy loading" anti-pattern.[2]
Even if you do that, it's still another step (probably several steps) to archive the content, because the browser just loads the page and resources, it doesn't save them, and in a lot of cases images in articles are downscaled and you want to archive the full-res version as well.
TLDR: make sure you're really backing up what you think you're backing up.
[1] At the time, the CDC was only showing the current figures, not the historical data, so if you wanted a graph based for sure on their real data, not some third party, you needed to collect it yourself.
[2] I know a lot of devs think lazy loading is great, because it reduces load on their servers, but it's an anti-pattern for UX IMO because it causes the page to take longer to load than if the browser were allowed to continue loading resources before the user even started scrolling.
A lot of modern websites don't even download the actual page/article content until some JavaScript runs. I noticed this in particular when I was collecting daily Monkeypox stats from the CDC website.[1] The Internet Archive had indexed the public URL every day, but that page used JavaScript to download the actual daily stats from a separate JSON or XML file and used that data to render the page. The Internet Archive bot was only downloading that data file maybe every 2-3 weeks, so even though they had archives of the page for almost every day, nearly all of the per-day data was missing.
I don't write bots often anymore, but for the last ten years or so I've defaulted to using an automated instance of an actual browser, because it's the only way you'll get all of the page content to load accurately, especially on sites that use the "lazy loading" anti-pattern.[2]
Even if you do that, it's still another step (probably several steps) to archive the content, because the browser just loads the page and resources, it doesn't save them, and in a lot of cases images in articles are downscaled and you want to archive the full-res version as well.
TLDR: make sure you're really backing up what you think you're backing up.
[1] At the time, the CDC was only showing the current figures, not the historical data, so if you wanted a graph based for sure on their real data, not some third party, you needed to collect it yourself.
[2] I know a lot of devs think lazy loading is great, because it reduces load on their servers, but it's an anti-pattern for UX IMO because it causes the page to take longer to load than if the browser were allowed to continue loading resources before the user even started scrolling.
Good points, yep. I'm too indifferent to try and fight to have an automated browser download stuff for me I admit, plus the websites I archive are server-side rendered, but if I ever get to the point you speak of then I'm much more likely to find how are they downloading the data that they're rendering, download their CSS and turn the page to a static one after downloading the data myself.
They're interesting problems for sure but I don't have as much time and energy for it if I'm not get paid to do it.
But I also feel it's a dying art so I try to keep up-to-date every now and then.
(If you can share how you do the automated browser workflow, that will be valuable.)
They're interesting problems for sure but I don't have as much time and energy for it if I'm not get paid to do it.
But I also feel it's a dying art so I try to keep up-to-date every now and then.
(If you can share how you do the automated browser workflow, that will be valuable.)
Check out the SingleFile browser extension. It's open-source and automates Firefox/chrome to turn any content page into a static HTML file with everything bundled in (js is stripped out). In my experience it handles anything you throw at it remarkably well.
It can be automated from the command line too.
It can be automated from the command line too.
Oh right, I completely forgot about that one even though I have it bookmarked. Thanks.
> or it no longer meets our current editorial standards.
i.e. their lawyers advised them to remove some articles that don’t comply with the latest “sensibilities”.
i.e. their lawyers advised them to remove some articles that don’t comply with the latest “sensibilities”.
Sad if nobody manages to archive this all properly. Obviously a huge part of Magic culture is the tournament report, which became something of an art-form at its peak:
https://amzn.eu/d/3TcYK4o
I used to be an avid follower of tournaments online, moreso than playing once I was a bit older. A lot of old pros got into gambling and hedge funds, and there’s even an overlap with the sports analytics industry I work in now - my cofounder used to travel the world running Pro Tour coverage. I’m hoping some of the old magic returns with this year’s big tournaments. Still, Magic memory is pretty good. You can still find archives of stuff like The Dojo out there:
https://www.classicdojo.org/
https://amzn.eu/d/3TcYK4o
I used to be an avid follower of tournaments online, moreso than playing once I was a bit older. A lot of old pros got into gambling and hedge funds, and there’s even an overlap with the sports analytics industry I work in now - my cofounder used to travel the world running Pro Tour coverage. I’m hoping some of the old magic returns with this year’s big tournaments. Still, Magic memory is pretty good. You can still find archives of stuff like The Dojo out there:
https://www.classicdojo.org/
Does archive.org scrape data for historic preservation even if they are not allowed to make the content available publicly?
What is it going to take for the new millennium generations to learn that a corporate product is not your "community"?
This article reinforces something that has been irking me more and more. The word content. I think the thing that annoys me about it is that it erases the uniqueness of the... content. This is even reflected in it being an uncountable noun. And, as a believer in the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, I think this changes how we think about it. Sunsetting some content in favor of newer more engaging content sounds almost reasonable, until you realize it amounts to erasing unique and irreplaceable works, and along with it the historic record.
You're right, although maybe late to the conversation. The idea is to set up frames first, like boxes around tweets, or a five-paragraph blog post with a placeholder hero image and lorem ipsum. Then pour in your content to fill the frame.
I have never played MTG, never even read the rules (are there rules?) But I watched the video [1] linked from this text:
> Whether it’s a crazy top-decked Lightning Helix...
and listening to the play-by-play I swear to God I felt like I was watching a Simpsons parody of a geek convention. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, on idea what half the words meant, and no idea why everyone freaked out at the end. Can someone explain what happened without having to explain the whole game?
[UPDATE] OMG, yes, there are rules. Pages and pages and pages of them [2].
---
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t0pzLnSWw0
[2] https://media.wizards.com/2022/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020...
> Whether it’s a crazy top-decked Lightning Helix...
and listening to the play-by-play I swear to God I felt like I was watching a Simpsons parody of a geek convention. I had absolutely no idea what was going on, on idea what half the words meant, and no idea why everyone freaked out at the end. Can someone explain what happened without having to explain the whole game?
[UPDATE] OMG, yes, there are rules. Pages and pages and pages of them [2].
---
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t0pzLnSWw0
[2] https://media.wizards.com/2022/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020...
I took a quick look at the video. Quick info—you can deal damage to creatures and players. Creatures die if they take enough damage in a turn, and the damage resets each turn. Players die if they take 20 damage total over the course of the game.
Craig is “chump blocking”—he’s getting attacked by strong creatures, and uses weak creatures to block them. The weak creatures (the “chumps”) die, and the strong creatures remain. This leaves him extremely vulnerable, but alive. The strong creatures can attack again next turn, and he will be even less able to block them because the creatures he used to block are now dead.
He has a spell called “Char” which deals 4 damage to a target creature or player and 2 damage to himself. This could be used to destroy the attacking creature, but destroying the creature won’t win him the game. At that moment, he is at 3 life, his opponent is at 7. After chump blocking, the opponent will be able to attack and win the game next turn.
Craig decides to Char the player, rather than targeting any creature. This brings his life total to 1 and the opponent to 3. It's then Craig’s turn (because he played Char at the end of his opponent’s turn). At the beginning of his turn he gets to draw a card. He draws a card that can deal 3 points of damage. (That card is Lightning Helix.)
It was exciting because it was a gamble. He could only win if the right card was on top of his deck, and therefore, it was the right move to play assuming that he had the right card. There’s a maximum of 4 copies of any card (except basic lands) in your deck, which must be at least 60 cards. By that math, you get 1:15 odds of drawing the right card here (undoubtedly the odds were not exactly 1:15 but some other number, based on however many cards were left in the deck and however many Lightning Helix were left). The commentary on the game was that this was the “only correct play”.
Edit: And he won $31,000. Second place was $16,000.
Craig is “chump blocking”—he’s getting attacked by strong creatures, and uses weak creatures to block them. The weak creatures (the “chumps”) die, and the strong creatures remain. This leaves him extremely vulnerable, but alive. The strong creatures can attack again next turn, and he will be even less able to block them because the creatures he used to block are now dead.
He has a spell called “Char” which deals 4 damage to a target creature or player and 2 damage to himself. This could be used to destroy the attacking creature, but destroying the creature won’t win him the game. At that moment, he is at 3 life, his opponent is at 7. After chump blocking, the opponent will be able to attack and win the game next turn.
Craig decides to Char the player, rather than targeting any creature. This brings his life total to 1 and the opponent to 3. It's then Craig’s turn (because he played Char at the end of his opponent’s turn). At the beginning of his turn he gets to draw a card. He draws a card that can deal 3 points of damage. (That card is Lightning Helix.)
It was exciting because it was a gamble. He could only win if the right card was on top of his deck, and therefore, it was the right move to play assuming that he had the right card. There’s a maximum of 4 copies of any card (except basic lands) in your deck, which must be at least 60 cards. By that math, you get 1:15 odds of drawing the right card here (undoubtedly the odds were not exactly 1:15 but some other number, based on however many cards were left in the deck and however many Lightning Helix were left). The commentary on the game was that this was the “only correct play”.
Edit: And he won $31,000. Second place was $16,000.
So... he drew to an inside straight and won?
But... don't players get to stack their own decks? Would he not have known what was on top?
But... don't players get to stack their own decks? Would he not have known what was on top?
No, you shuffle your deck (and in tournament play your opponent will cut your deck as well). There are some cards which allow you to partially manipulate or inspect your deck by looking at the top card and/or putting cards on the top or bottom, as well as cards which allow you search your deck for cards, but anything which allows you to look at your whole deck will generally also require you to shuffle it afterwards. (there are combos which allow you to stack your whole deck but they're generally not as good as combos which just let you draw your whole deck).
In terms of the length of the rules, generally people don't read them all, especially not in the process of learning the game. The comprehensive rules are basically just a way to resolve disputes about exactly what happens in a given scenario, and the only people who will be familiar with the whole of it are judges at tournaments.
A top comment on the video you linked explains it.
>FOR YOU GUYS WHO COULD NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED: CRAIG JONES HAD 1 TURN TO DEAL AT LEAST 7 DAMAGE TO OLIVIER, SO: AT THE END PHASE, CRAIG USED A CARD CALLED "CHAR", DEALING 4 DAMAGE TO OLIVER AND 2 TO HIMSELF, BRINGING HIM DOWN TO 1 LIFE POINT. AT THE DRAW PHASE, HE DRAWS LIGHTNING HELIX, DEALING 3 MORE DAMAGE, DEALING A TOTAL OF 7 DAMAGE TO OLIVER AND WINNING THE GAME WITH 1 LIFE POINT.
>FOR YOU GUYS WHO COULD NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED: CRAIG JONES HAD 1 TURN TO DEAL AT LEAST 7 DAMAGE TO OLIVIER, SO: AT THE END PHASE, CRAIG USED A CARD CALLED "CHAR", DEALING 4 DAMAGE TO OLIVER AND 2 TO HIMSELF, BRINGING HIM DOWN TO 1 LIFE POINT. AT THE DRAW PHASE, HE DRAWS LIGHTNING HELIX, DEALING 3 MORE DAMAGE, DEALING A TOTAL OF 7 DAMAGE TO OLIVER AND WINNING THE GAME WITH 1 LIFE POINT.
Don't be derisive of things that other people enjoy.
I feel your pain.. Not on MtG, but the loss of fora. Back in the day the Spanish speakers in Spain had a literal Slashdot clone in Spanish, Barrapunto. The server shut down a few years ago and just a very little of it has been preserved under archive.org. A great loss.
Like GW, gamers can't and shouldn't entrust their joy or dollars to WOTC.
These companies only exist to exploit; they have no respect for or understanding of their customers (except maybe that they will probably keep buying no matter how poorly they're treated).
These companies only exist to exploit; they have no respect for or understanding of their customers (except maybe that they will probably keep buying no matter how poorly they're treated).
I don't see much difference between the business model of trading card games and the business model of the EA Sports Ultimate Team mode other than the existence of physical items.
This business model is really good from the company's perspective because it increases revenue and involves less effort and less risk than releasing complete games at a single price. But it means that the way to win is to be willing to spend more money than everybody else. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that companies that base their business model on pay to win would have about as much respect for their customers as a typical OnlyFans personality has for her customers.
I think people who enjoy card games would be better off making alternatives where the focus is on skill rather than how much you're willing to pay. Even if you aren't a competitive Magic or Pokemon card player, playing those games casually supports a company that exists to extract money from "whales" just like EA Sports or the companies making those awful freemium phone games. And it is at least an order of magnitude easier to make a good card game without pay to win than it is to make a good football simulation game without pay to win.
This business model is really good from the company's perspective because it increases revenue and involves less effort and less risk than releasing complete games at a single price. But it means that the way to win is to be willing to spend more money than everybody else. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that companies that base their business model on pay to win would have about as much respect for their customers as a typical OnlyFans personality has for her customers.
I think people who enjoy card games would be better off making alternatives where the focus is on skill rather than how much you're willing to pay. Even if you aren't a competitive Magic or Pokemon card player, playing those games casually supports a company that exists to extract money from "whales" just like EA Sports or the companies making those awful freemium phone games. And it is at least an order of magnitude easier to make a good card game without pay to win than it is to make a good football simulation game without pay to win.
I feel we as a society are not yet adapted well to culture being in ephemeral electronic form, and we will keep losing huge chunks of cultural history because some corp doesn't care about stuff not reflected in the yearly plan. There are laudable preservation efforts like archive.org but they can't get everywhere and are hindered by copyright regime. We need to develop a model which would allow us to preserve our collective cultural memory.
Hopefully the end result is that the community decides they don't need WoTC and moves on without them. I mean the links to the past have been scrubbed. What's left to hang on to?
> Wizards of the Coast announced these changes in an article dating back to November 2022.
"The Internet" collective was disappointing here. I am used to read the story of how, after an announcement like this, a lot of the users and archivist types would hurry to make a backup of the whole website when the parent company makes such claims. Surprising that it didn't happen.
"The Internet" collective was disappointing here. I am used to read the story of how, after an announcement like this, a lot of the users and archivist types would hurry to make a backup of the whole website when the parent company makes such claims. Surprising that it didn't happen.
A lot of the outcries lately could be seen as the result of letting a company own your community.
Nothing on the internet is permanent. If you want to preserve something it back it up.
Back in May/June of 2020, they scrubbed cars deemed racist. One card “Invoke Prejudice” corresponded to a URL that contained an obscure neo-Nazi symbol.
Geek culture has a nasty side to it. Maybe they found more where that came from, or maybe they just didn’t want the press.
Geek culture has a nasty side to it. Maybe they found more where that came from, or maybe they just didn’t want the press.
I don't know about URL, but the card had very blatant symbology and WOTC were rightfully ashamed of it.
I don’t know if it was just the imagery - the card itself “Invoke Prejudice” removed all opponents players of a different color.
I could see some very inappropriate banter happening if a player used it - regardless of the imagery.
The imagery was the obvious outcome of the card’s functionality.
I could see some very inappropriate banter happening if a player used it - regardless of the imagery.
The imagery was the obvious outcome of the card’s functionality.
Your story is true, but I think this is far too broad a loss to be something like that, even providing a smokescreen. An article I wrote has been lost, and there's nothing controversial in there!
Oh phew I thought they'd changed the card backs. That would be a big change - a strong partition between new and old. I really like that they've kept it as-is.
WOtC is on a real charm run eh?
Who is going to tell them about the Wayback
Machine (archive.org)
29athrowaway(6)
Ten years ago I made a bunch of money trading o the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange. Great Times.
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.