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sc_griffith

the enshittification of magic: the gathering

awful.systems/post/2705466

awful.systemsthe enshittification of magic: the gathering - awful.systemsi haven’t played magic the gathering in ages but i still follow it for some reason. if you’re not checked in with the game, here’s what’s been going on in recent years: it’s been enshittifying. i’m fascinated by when gacha games (which this essentially is) start putting the screws to players. here are some of the ways it’s gone down - the game used to have rigorous processes for managing balance, processes which sometimes failed spectacularly, but held up most of the time. empirically, that’s pretty much gone. almost all of the cards that have ever been banned in the standard format have come from the last several years, and they printed a mechanic so broken that they errata’d it to cost more. to be clear, this is a game that is played with physical cards that the text can’t be changed on. the situation was so dire that they just said “ok everyone should know, ignore the text on the cards, they are too broken the way we made them.” - they thought a bit about how the majority of their playerbase wasn’t playing the somewhat competitive 1 vs 1 style the game was originally designed for. instead, most people play several person free for all formats, in particular these days a format called commander. so they’ve been absolutely shredding these people’s wallets and ruining their games by designing rare cards specifically to end up being powerful in commander. recently they printed a commander card so busted in various formats that the former friend of mine who designed it ended up falling on his sword, writing an extremely apologetic essay about how he personally fucked up by letting it slip through. - there’s a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven’t got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn’t make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it. - they found out that the more cards they come out with, the more cards they sell, so they’ve just been cranking out designs at greater and greater volume. at any given time there is a massive chunk of cards that are about to hit the shelves, and which they’re ‘teasing’ and fomoing players about. the game is about 30 years old and they’ve been hitting a pace of printing something like 10% to 15% of all cards ever, every year. - every once in a while they release joke sets, with weird or silly mechanics like having to yell things or tearing up cards. generally, these cards are not allowed in semi competitive play. well, they thought the most recent one would sell better if that wasn’t the case, so they marked as many of these cards as they could as being tournament legal (but to keep the outcry tamped down, not in their standard format). one of these cards in particular, a goblin that makes you put stickers on things, was so miserable to have in tournament play that they ended up backtracking and banning all the joke cards. - they found out they could make a big chunk of money by ditching their own setting and making cards for licensed IPs. they’ve been printing ever increasing numbers of cards themed around everything from the walking dead to fortnite to marvel to street fighter to spongebob, which sell like hotcakes. people who are invested in the style and theme of magic the gathering aren’t super pleased. again, to placate the haters, these cards are not allowed in the standard competitive format, giving people who want to do wizard shit a refuge. the last bullet point brings us to today: just kidding, frog boiled, you will now have captain america and kefka fighting each other at your table whether you like it or not. reactions are not entirely positive: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gc3w97/universes_beyond_will_enter_through_standard/ [https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gc3w97/universes_beyond_will_enter_through_standard/] something that’s quite interesting to me is how few people i’ve seen bootlick for wizards of the coast in recent years. i’ve looked at reactions to other games enshittifying and always saw lots of defenders of the company in charge, with four lines of attack being most common: - they have to put bread on the table - whew i know this seems bad but i would be ok with it if they just gave us 2% more crumbs. it’s sooooo close to the right level of abuse - stop being poor - bro, just vote with your dollar bro i’ve been seeing very little of that in regards to mtg. some people have denied the pot was getting warmer, but mostly, people have just turned into haters. not sure why; perhaps it has to do with the small scale social aspect of magic. if you’re playing marvel snap and having the blood drained out of your neck, you don’t really have a group of specific people you’re experiencing that in concert with; with mtg you do. it could be the strength of small scale personal ties that both keeps people invested in this game, and makes people angry at how that investment is being treated unfortunately i don’t see any reason that this anger is likely to put a stop to things. after all, arch-enshittifier facebook is still making ultrabucks, despite having destroyed its reputation on every possible level and despite constantly enraging its users. you can do horrible things to people and just coast! it works! EDIT: this is election relevant btw https://awful.systems/comment/5086076 [https://awful.systems/comment/5086076]
Public
Soyweiser

While magic has always been exploitative, this feels like ‘there is just too much’. Not sure if that makes sense. But more and more I see these franchises bloat and bloat and bloat with more and more content. And it just shatters any desire I have to even get back into it. And this isn’t just a problem with magic, it is a problem with all these IPs. It feels very late stage superhero comics, where every character had such a long incomprehensive background that it was impossible to follow (and also a lot of 'to understand this storyline completely, you need to also buy a few random comics from a different story line. What do you mean to understand the last star wars movie I need to have played fortnite?).

And you know when the IP’s fill up too much and the sales finally slump they will just kill half the content anyway, to refill it with more slop later (AI is going to be grand for this), or rebrand it, marvel ultimates style (but wait, it is all part of a universe, so it is all true. Eurgh). At least star wars killed their expanded universe so these old storylines no longer intersect (ow wait, they are selectively bringing stuff back of course. But wait, if new Thrawn has not done what old Thrawn has done, how is he cool? He didn’t even throw rocks at people, this is all a scam!)

And don’t take me as some sort of design minimalist btw, I do at times like kitchen sink designs (like nethack/slash’em for example). But this eternal milking and adding more and more to IPs is just too much. And it isn’t just the world building, it is also nothing is just one thing anymore. Everything has the book(*)/videogame/movie/boardgame/bathsoap/mouthwash tiein. Anyway bit of a rant sorry.

*: you know the strange character that was underdeveloped in Rebel Moon (No not that one. The other one)? Well it is worked out better in Rebel Moon the directors cut. You saw that and it actually made the plot worse because of a glaring plot hole? Well that is explained in the book. AAAA

YouTubeENDLESS TRASH (RedLetterMedia)By Izral
Public
self

the Chick-Fil-A streaming/entertainment app

the worst chicken place[*] has a fucking streaming app? of course it fucking does, chick-fil-a can’t fuck off

[*] if anyone replies to this to kneejerk slobber over chick-fil-a’s nasty fucking chicken: why. which part of it is good. it’s not the sauces or the brine or the breading and it’s definitely not some combination of all those things. why the fuck is this garbage fried chicken popular when literally every other choice is better. please for the love of fuck eat some Church’s or try a local place, you’ll discover the idea of flavor and it’ll astound you

Public
LordKitsuna

they are pretty good as far as fast food chicken goes. Their chicken sandwiches are well above most places. Sure i could get better at a restaurant but i don’t always have time to do that as those require a decent chunk of time.

The streaming app is fuckin stupid though.

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self

who the fuck said anything about a restaurant? go eat better fast food

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LordKitsuna

And what would you recommend for supposedly better fast food chicken? Certainly not McDonald’s certainly not Burger King definitely not KFC’s overcooked dry as fuck chicken. Maybe sonic? I don’t know if they even have chicken I haven’t looked

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self

literally the one I recommended in my post?

why was your list of chicken places so bad by the way?

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wizardbeard

Because those are your only options beyond bigotry chikin in most places. If you live somewhere with other dedicated fried chicken options, you’re aleady significantly ahead.

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