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Rat_Bastardsen wrote:

Magic is made by the same company that alienated a huge part of the player base of another of it's games with D&D v4. Veteran players of D&D didn't take long to conclude that they would continue to play by older rules. They were aware though that this meant a fractured played base, that new players would not be playing the same D&D that they played, and that this would mean fewer players for each version of the game.

As it happens, I am an older player of D&D (started watching late 2nd, playing through 3rd), and I am yet to find a change in 4th Ed. that isn't simply removing rules only the most niche players ever used anyway, or otherwise improving the functionality of the game. The change to 4th Ed (and to 3rd Ed, before it) was analagous to the 6th Edition changes; they were changing the rules to make it more functional as a game (or power-balancing in some case).

As I've said elsewhere, I feel that the M10 changes are qualitatively different to this; they are an attempt to make the game less functional but more intuitive to players who can't (or don't want to) learn the rules properly. My grievance with this is not that they're attempting to make the rules more intuitive, but that making the game playable without knowing the rules is an impossible task and hence they're ONLY damaging the functionality, and not really reaping anything extra from the intuitiveness.

With D&D4, they were also faced with DIRECT competition from both other well-selling tabletop publishers, and also the MMORPG obsession, which why several flavour aspects particularly in 4th Edition are reminiscent of Warcraft mythos. MtG's closest non-WotC competitor is Yu-Gi-Oh, and that's not really competition at all because their markets only overlap in a small sense.

Magic players can make the same choice, and play by the old rules. But it isn't the same, because organized, sanctioned play is such a large part of the game. And because while D&D players have all that they need to continue playing their game, Magic players, to keep playing, will continue to buy cards, and to contribute to the wealth of the company that places other interests before the player's love of the game.

Good points.

I'd like to see Magic players take a short-term loss for a long-term gain. I'd like to see Magic players put aside a game that is a cash cow for a for-profit company, and create their own, community-based game that is created by players, for players. A game whose designers are not influenced by the profit motives of a gigantic game company, but in the interests of making the game fun for the players - themselves. In time such a game can become everything that Magic is now, but it will always have the advantage of being free - in every sense of the word.

The problem with this mechanism is that you lose the tournament circuit. You have no brand power, no commercial profit-influx, and hence you cannot set up prizes and you lose one of the primary factors to the game; indeed the very factor you labelled in your above paragraph as being distinctly critical to the game's success and the significance of the rules changes.

Rat_Bastardsen wrote:

I stopped playing D&D long ago, but a friend still plays and seemed to find quite a few things missing that he found important.

From what I've seen, it's only very niche things in particular areas. And as was mentioned before, D&D is very flexible; 3rd and 4th Edition are specifically designed that way. Any DM who wants a particular rule can institute it with only nominal work.

That's a short-term loss; ideally the game becomes popular enough to support all of these things. Supporting prizes is something that could go a lot of different ways, but to use a simple example, in small tournaments the number of packs won is the number that can be bought with the entry fees paid. I imagine the game starting with digital cards only, possibly moving to cardboard available for more personal, in-person play at the cost of the cardboard and the printing. There are lots of ways it could go.

It doesn't matter how popular the game is, without money coming in you can't be giving money out.