So... WOTC is shutting down it's forums?

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 10:16 pm

On October 29th WoTC will shut down it's forums and delete all remaining content:

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/ar ... 2015-09-16

This is affecting both the MtG and D&D forums so it's hard to say exactly what prompted this. Any thoughts?

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 10:43 pm

Too many flame wars? Not enough staff?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 10:46 pm

Making way for something more tamable as a PR machine?

Pixels · Post by **Pixels** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 11:20 pm

That's kind of sad. I haven't posted there in ages, but I had a great time with the CharOp boards back in the golden age of 3.0/3.5. Rest in peace, Wizards boards.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Sep 16, 2015 11:21 pm

WoTC's general tendency to fuck around with their social infrastructure with or without an identifiable reason? Possibly someone looked at their hosting costs, did a spit-take, and decided to let Facebook pay them instead.

MisterDee · Post by **MisterDee** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 3:26 am

Oh God. Do they still have the Gleemax team on board? ARE WE GOING TO SEE GLEEMAX 2.0?

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 3:34 am

I was gonna say, isn't this story like a decade old. It's been ages since they killed their forum off.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 3:53 am

erik wrote:I was gonna say, isn't this story like a decade old. It's been ages since they killed their forum off.

The part where they delete the old forums is new.

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 4:08 am

Is it? Their shitty archival process was effectively deletion since it made it about impossible to find old posts.

I mean, can we even find posts from 2000-2005 short of the wayback machine?

[edit: ah, I found one from 2003 that was stickied, so I guess they aren't all gone]

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 6:52 am

The D&D forums have been circling the drain for a long time. I'm not surprised to see them pull the plug altogether. I am surprised to see them kick the Magic forums to the curb, because Magic makes all the moneys. I assume they are going to reboot with shiny new Magic forums that aren't based on such shit technology, but I wouldn't be surprised if D&D didn't get any forum space back.

The claim that they can get all the magic conversations they want out of Tumblr seems crazy to me, but people in WotC have made dumber pronouncements (see: ending the OGL). It's possible that some suit is dead fucking serious about this because they noticed that TappedOut has their own forums whose hosting fees are payed externally. If so, that wouldn't even be one of the top five dumbest things a WotC suit has done with their community outreach this century, so bqhatevwr.

-Username17

Silent Wayfarer · Post by **Silent Wayfarer** » Thu Sep 17, 2015 1:17 pm

Pixels wrote:That's kind of sad. I haven't posted there in ages, but I had a great time with the CharOp boards back in the golden age of 3.0/3.5. Rest in peace, Wizards boards.

erik wrote:I was gonna say, isn't this story like a decade old. It's been ages since they killed their forum off.

Ever since they changed to Gleemax and broke all the links to their optimization stuff, the WOTC forums have been dead to me.

Although I should be grateful, because it brought me here.

Krusk · Post by **Krusk** » Fri Sep 18, 2015 1:23 am

They are basically abandoned at this point anyway. Even the new editions forums get only slightly more traffic than this one. The older edition ones are 3-4 posters tops.

Whats really weird to me is that they are shutting down forums a few months after lanuching their brand new thing (5e). Is that just the official "we give up" Or is it just them finally admitting they are terrible at the internet and nothing is better than something in this case.

Shutting down mtg forums seems weird, considering thats doing better than it has in a long time. Does it mean we should brace for some new incarnation of forums that is more terrible than anything we have seen yet?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Sep 20, 2015 5:58 pm

So Magic the Gathering has some really sophisticated web tools available put out by third parties. The deck builders and forums on, for example, Tapped Out are quite good. I don't mean that the deck listed there is good, if you're going to make an Elf Deck you need to have a means to recover from the inevitable Elf Genocide (such as Rally the Ancestors or Corpseweft), and you need a means to push through on stalled board states (such as Sigil of Valor or Joraga Invocation). That and Yeva Forcemages are crap and should be kicked out in favor of something that doesn't suck and the deck doesn't kick in the ferocious trigger on the Winds and what the fuck is that about? The point is that the tools are there. And they aren't on the fucking official Wizards website. They are hosted elsewhere.

What's weird is that Wizards seems to be basically surrendering on that point. Rather than try to match the community functionality that people want and get elsewhere, they are just letting the fans put it all together off site. That probably passed muster with some bobblehead suit somewhere ("all the functionality people want is being outsourced for free, we spend nothing and get everything we need") but holy crap is that playing with fire. They are letting people who don't work for them make all decisions about presentation of their product to other people. I mean, that seems to be going fine now, but what do they do if the Channel Fireball or Pucatrade people start promoting a card format that involves only cards found on the secondary market? What if the off-site community decides for whatever reason to straight up boycott whatever the latest set is?

The whole point of having a company controlled forum is that you can control it as the company. Wizards doesn't seem to think that's important anymore. Right now, community response is relentlessly positive for Magic and relentlessly negative for D&D, and they don't seem to be able to impact that much by having house forums. But there are reasons for that, and it seems very short sighted to simply bin their house forums altogether.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sun Sep 20, 2015 10:11 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:But there are reasons for that, and it seems very short sighted to simply bin their house forums altogether.

-Username17

Sure, but what else is new? WotC's been slowly strangling in the clutch of Hasbro's suits for years.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Sep 21, 2015 7:07 am

Prak wrote:Sure, but what else is new? WotC's been slowly strangling in the clutch of Hasbro's suits for years.

As far as I can tell, that narrative is false. Hasbro bought WotC in 1999, well before the renaissance of D&D in 3rd edition and several years before Magic the Gathering got its modern golden age. Hasbro is often blamed for every bad decision that WotC makes, but the reality is that Hasbro owned the purse strings since before WotC started making anything really good. Also both of their main properties grew by about two orders of magnitude while under Hasbro ownership.

The reality is that WotC made bad choices since 2005 with D&D because they made bad choices. Not because anyone forced it upon them, but because the people who made 3rd edition D&D a success didn't work there anymore and WotC put some egotistical careerist corporate backstabbers in charge of the property and ran it into the fucking ground.

WotC has a toxic work environment. Not because Hasbro demands it of them, but because the internal leadership is a bunch of jealous promoted fanboys from the Seattle area who have no idea what they are doing.

But remember: the part of the company that makes children's card games is still going extremely strong. They just flipped off the world and told everyone that cards were going to rotate out of standard every 18 months instead of every 24 months for no reason and the public said "Yes! Please take 33% more of my income!"

It's that last part that makes me think that letting the community handle its own communities is a long term mistake. Right now, they pretty much have those communities as trained parrots and can imperiously declare that peoples' cards leave formats whenever they want. But what if there is a revolt? What if people start talking about "Standard Classic" or something where they revert cards to 2 year windows or something? The tournament scene is currently committed to bow to anything the company says, but it doesn't have to be like that forever. WotC is really playing with fire and courting a schism of the "official" playing base. Won't happen this year obviously, but it seems a completely pointless risk to take.

-Username17

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Sep 21, 2015 7:20 am

Huh, interesting. I always figured that the larger things were a toy company not knowing how to run a game company (sets and editions look a lot like action figure series).

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Mon Sep 21, 2015 8:43 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
Prak wrote:Sure, but what else is new? WotC's been slowly strangling in the clutch of Hasbro's suits for years.
As far as I can tell, that narrative is false. Hasbro bought WotC in 1999, well before the renaissance of D&D in 3rd edition and several years before Magic the Gathering got its modern golden age. Hasbro is often blamed for every bad decision that WotC makes, but the reality is that Hasbro owned the purse strings since before WotC started making anything really good. Also both of their main properties grew by about two orders of magnitude while under Hasbro ownership.

The reality is that WotC made bad choices since 2005 with D&D because they made bad choices. Not because anyone forced it upon them, but because the people who made 3rd edition D&D a success didn't work there anymore and WotC put some egotistical careerist corporate backstabbers in charge of the property and ran it into the fucking ground.

WotC has a toxic work environment. Not because Hasbro demands it of them, but because the internal leadership is a bunch of jealous promoted fanboys from the Seattle area who have no idea what they are doing.

-Username17

You might want to read the comments made by Rick Marshall in the comments section here.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Sep 21, 2015 11:12 am

ishy wrote:You might want to read the comments made by Rick Marshall in the comments section here.

He's got some interesting stuff to say, but his storyline fails on a bunch of counts. The claim that everything went downhill before his wife left the company is a hard pill to swallow when you remember that everything good the company made came out after his wife had gone. The reality is that 3.5 didn't address a lot of problems with 3rd edition. The nerfing of Haste, Harm, and Hold Person was pretty much bad for the game. The nerfing of Power Attack for TWF users was completely pointless. The nerfing of Overrun solved absolutely nothing.

3.5 did have higher production values, and the books straight up look nicer. Clearing up the clutter of Inuendo and dropping exclusive skills like a bad habit was straight up good. But let's be real here: almost everything in 3.5 was just fucking around. There was no concerted effort to fix anything or even find out what problems there were, otherwise it wouldn't have been released with an essay about how they were making the "tweener classes like the Druid" more powerful.

I'm sure that Hasbro demanded that they put out more hard bound crap to sell for real money. But it's not at all obvious that production schedules actually increased at any point. For all Rick's rantings that WotC only wanted the purest and smallest samplings of books to be released, I certainly don't notice any ramp-up of total books. 3.5 Books are a lot longer than 3e books, but books per month seems to have been about the same all the way through. Or to put it another way: 3rd edition lasted from 2000 until 2003 and came out with a Monster Manual 2, Monsters of Faerun, and a Fiend Folio; 3.5 lasted from 2003 until 2008 and came out with a Monster Manual 3, 4, and 5. 3rd Edition brought out Sword and Fist on January 1st of 2001, and brought out the other four books in the series (Tome & Blood, Lute & Loot, Defenders of the Faith, and Masters of the Wild) over the following 13 months; 3.5 brought out Complete Warrior on December 1st, 2003 and brought out the other three books in the first complete series (Arcane, Divine, and Adventurer) over the next 13 and a half months.

I genuinely don't know how far up in your own asshole you have to be to unironically say "When we put out I, Tyrant at the tail end of AD&D 2nd Edition, that was a laudable make-work program to keep the D&D creative team employed; but when Hasbro put out Lords of Madness at the tail end of 3.5, that was a cynical cash grab."

If you look at the actual release schedule, there is no changes that can be identified on the order of what Rick Marshal is talking about. It simply didn't happen. The 3.5 books are longer and have more shovelware text and better production values. That's a thing. You could even say it's bad. But it's a thing brought about by changes in production methodology and better computers. It doesn't support Rick's history in the slightest.

-Username17

Archmage Joda · Post by **Archmage Joda** » Mon Sep 21, 2015 8:49 pm

Minor tangent, Frank, but how was the nerfing of Haste, Harm, and Hold Person bad for the game? Genuinely curious, because I never got to play with the 3.0 versions of those spells, 3.5 was my first D&D edition.

erik · Post by **erik** » Mon Sep 21, 2015 11:04 pm

Archmage Joda wrote:Minor tangent, Frank, but how was the nerfing of Haste, Harm, and Hold Person bad for the game? Genuinely curious, because I never got to play with the 3.0 versions of those spells, 3.5 was my first D&D edition.

Their nerfs were worse for the game than the original spells, and not really needed. It was done to appease morons who didn't understand the game.

- Haste was a good buff for martial characters and got taken away. And non-casters cannot afford to have their best buffs taken away. How many casters were winning encounters via Haste self? None. How many non-casters did Haste benefit? Most.

- Hold Person used to take someone out of the battle but made it likely to survive if your team won, since nobody's going to waste their time attacking the held guy, new version incentivised immediate CDG to finish off the character before they break free. So they made it more deadly to players mostly.

- Harm didn't need nerfing. It was a solid spell, but reasonable. It was effectively nerfed to be an inferior option to other killer spells. They could have just removed it and it would have been just as useful a change.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Tue Sep 22, 2015 2:42 am

I would disagree on Haste, as there was really no cost at higher levels of hasting oneself. The presence of Haste also visibly distorted monster design. At least making it multi-target meant that it remained a top-tier buff without being better than spells twice it's level.

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Sep 22, 2015 10:40 am

But casters didn't win because of haste. You only need 1 I win spell. But it helped keep the non casters relevant in higher levels. So yes it was a no brainer to use it at higher levels but the main reason was to let the melee and archer guys get more done.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Sep 22, 2015 11:23 am

erik wrote:But casters didn't win because of haste. You only need 1 I win spell. But it helped keep the non casters relevant in higher levels. So yes it was a no brainer to use it at higher levels but the main reason was to let the melee and archer guys get more done.

The belief that you would only cast one spell a combat is so amazingly fucking weird to me that I don't know how you can say it with a straight face.

Haste at high levels was dumb as fuck, because you had more 3rd level slots than god, and haste went in all of them. Like, bully on the Fighter who gets to move and full attack and all, but that doesn't mean you didn't start off by hasting yourself because then you got to cast another spell, and then if you wanted to haste the fighter you could haste two of them next round, or one and do something else, or you could have cast haste on yourself and the fighter at the same action cost as casting it on the fighter.

Like, people fap super hard to Acid Fog + Wall of X around the outside, and it isn't shit, but it obviously requires casting more than one spell.

Haste not giving an extra standard action is good for the game, so long as fighters get other things to let them do shit. Really, it is. There is a reason that in a Core only game you will spend half your time Shapechanged into a Choker, because two spells a round is fucking awesomesauce.

This claim that Haste didn't benefit casters has absolutely got to go.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Tue Sep 22, 2015 11:40 am

I also have no idea why Frank claims Haste nerf was bad. It warped the game around itself in 3.0. It was the 3rd level spell. You either had Haste or you sucked a barrel of cocks. In 3.5 it becomes a martial multi-target buff so the wizard can buff all the party and minions with just one action without doubling his output power.

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Sep 22, 2015 11:59 am

You'll cast more spells in combat but that advantage doesn't come until you've burnt your 4th spell in round 2. So you have to burn 4+ spells to start coming out ahead at all. That can be overkill and if you are burning all your top spells then you're not pacing yourself for later encounters that day.

I thought shapechange choker form was a 3.5 thing since in 3e it was a Su ability which you couldn't get with shapechange. It isn't quite the same since you can cast it ahead of time to start with 2 spells per round rather than having it effectively kick in on round 2. But still, at 10 min/level on a 9th level spell, I could care less if people are using that for choker form "half your time". I'd pat them on the head like a newbie using magic missile if they did so.