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Comment by Our_Benefactors | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The only way to get companies like this to cooperate with what the fans really want is to vote with your wallet.

The DND community recently won a large battle against WOTC over the proposed open gaming license changes. Fans saw wizards taking away some of the freedom that made DND great and decided they wouldn't put up with it.

Huge numbers of people cancelled their subscriptions and paizo, DND's biggest competitor announced that they sold 6 months volume in 2 weeks after they announced their own open license as a replacement to the OGL.

All of this culminated in wizards backing off the updated license, and actually publishing the DND 5.1 SRD under creative commons 4.0.

I reckon wizards will try again with the next edition and their virtual table top, but for now the DND fans have proven they can get wizards to bend under enough pressure.

yeah i mean this is why i stopped buying magic cards, stopped drafting, stopped doing anything related to the game. It stopped being fun. It became obviously "pay to play". Same with dnd. i stopped playing new editions. Why do i need to learn new rules, buy new books, etc.? It is a complete waste of resources. Especially given that

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Hasbro and their injected pointy-hairs don’t care about hardcore fans. Or fans. Or players. Or even the odious non-playing collectors. Or the game. Or it’s history. Or their workers.

All they care about is how much more money they can wrong out of their cash cow.

While all of that may be true, it's hard to see how the deletion of a website fits into that grand plan. We're talking about saving a few bucks to maintain this old information at a cost of huge waves of bad will? Seems incredibly short-sighted.

“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.

Agree.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> they just care about creating limited run products to juice the fans

Fans need to start refusing to be juiced. Stop paying them money.

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