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Mar 27, 2012 -- 11:56PM, willpell wrote:

If they wanted a good writer, they could find one easily enough - me, for example.  But they don't want (or at least don't just want) someone who writes well - they want someone who writes what they're told, writes glad-handing syrupy stuff that will drive sales and further the The Company Cannot Fail image they are determined to create.  They will never hire me again because I am not an obedient corporate shill.  They don't lack for good writers; they lack for obedient corporate shills.

It's pretty astonishing to me that they haven't already rehired you.  You seem like a real team player: modest, respectful of others' opinions, and thoughtful in your criticism.

Mar 29, 2012 -- 6:09AM, willpell wrote:

No doubt the Romans regarded Jesus as obnoxious, or the Klansmen of the early 60s did Martin Luther King.  Innovators and reformers must always be willing to bloody the nose of the villains who profit from the current quagmire.  The evil of our society is small-minded capitalism, and I will not apologize for speaking bluntly in condemnation of it.

Drawing parallels between yourself and two legendary men that perished at a young age for their beliefs is not only insulting in its condescension
 - it's borderline megalomanic.  Wizards would be out of their gourd to give you a weekly column, and even then it would likely be called "Illusions of Grandeur" and would be an object lesson in effete ranting.  

Anyway: thanks for the good run Doug, and we'll all look forward to seeing more great things from you from behind the scenes.   

 

Mar 28, 2012 -- 11:18PM, willpell wrote:

They drive sales by reducing the quality of their product so that it may be sold to the lowest common denominator.

How do you figure? They're not reducing the quality of the game at all; they're just designing for a different game today than they were in the past: Limited, while still giving Constructed players cool stuff, just typically at higher rarities.

Wizards is only interested in paying the bills and earning a profit for Hasbro, a typical example of the small-minded, short-term thinking that powers capitalism, and exactly why capitalism is completely inviable in the grand scheme of things.

Wizards of the Coast is interested in making money, which is required to keep the game alive. If they stop making a profit, the game disappears, and then all that flavor you love so much ceases to exist as well. If what Wizards wanted to do was tell a story, they'd be writing novels or making movies. Instead, they're making a game, and that means that first and foremost in their minds is making sure that the game plays well, and makes money; flavor is a tertiary goal to those two, though they are all interlinked.

Wotco wants to make sure people keep buying and playing Magic for the next ten years.  I want to make sure people keep telling the story of how Karn the silver golem surpassed his creator Urza's intentions and became the first artificial planeswalker, for the next ten thousand years, because it is (or at least could be) that good of a story.

Wizards wants to make sure that the game continues to exist (and thus be able to tell stories) indefinitely. Sure, the stories might not be as polished as those told by an author of novels, or a filmmaker, but that's because the platform they use to tell them isn't designed to tell stories. The fact that they manage to tell the stories they do tell at all is impressive.

If you owned the copyright on Beowulf or the Epic of Gilgamesh and went about dumbing it down so you could sell cheaply-made commemorative paintings of the characters to people who will grow up and forget about them, you would be doing much the same as Wizards is doing today.  The products are dust on the winds of history; the ideas that they contain can change civilization forever, and the best way to make that happen is to treat them with all the reverence of a religion's holy text or a culture's epic sagas.

You can't compare a one-and-done medium like novels to a continuing medium like a trading card game. Once the novel's done, you no longer have to worry about continuing to turn a profit lest you then lose the story that novel told.

The canon of Magic's multiverse, and the concept of the color pie which underpins it, is a mythological treasure which is not being treated with a tenth of the reverence it deserves.

It is treated with exactly the reverence it deserves. The flavor is just one part of the whole; if you focus exclusively on the flavor, ignoring the gameplay and the marketing, then the whole thing collapses.

If by some miracle I obtained a free hand to write for Wizards, I would entirely ignore its status as a business, and write tales of flavor that would make the multiverse come alive for the people who truly need it to do so.

Which is exactly what Savor the Flavor did. I don't recall seeing Doug Beyer continuously ramble on about "The relative value of this card as compared to other means of entertainment of similar price is much higher, so you should buy more cards" or any such marketing talk. No, he, and those who guest wrote, gave us things like "The flavor of combat is this!" and the Planeswalker's Guides which built a rich world, or the short stories that focused on characters who would never even appear in the card game, like the young woman in cathar training. How is any of that not writing tales of flavor that make the multiverse come alive?
Doug did a great job, and he deserves to be praised, not attacked moments after announcing what was probably the hardest decision he's had to make in a long while.

As I alluded to before, people who play Magic because it's a fun game will eventually grow out of it; it isn't important enough to them, and so I don't think it should be targeted to them.  I want to add value to it for the benefit of people who NEED it, people whose lives it has changed (such as myself, and AlexaM, and Matt Cavotta, and hundreds of others, as opposed to millions of bored teenagers with allowance money to burn which are more interesting to the company).

Hey, more power to you if you want to take the burden of all the money that those millions of bored teenagers spent on Magic all upon yourself.

What I definitely would not do, for any reason, is allow this column to go unwritten for even a single week.  Nothing short of being smeared into paste by a tractor-trailer truck would stop me from continuing to feed and grow the saga of Dominaria, until it seemed a more real place than the far side of the Earth.  I have always believed that the quality of a product is its absolute value, and that nothing else matters but doing the absolute best job imaginable, even if you kill yourself in the process.  A creation crafted with enough love and pride is a thing of legend; it can outlive nations, like the Pyramids or the legend of Robin Hood or the concept of a life after death.  Humanity deserves nothing less.

I don't know if this is an attack on Doug Beyer, or on Wizards of the Coast. It sounds like you're attacking Doug Beyer for thinking that working on actually crafting the flavor of the game is more important than a weekly column, but that contradicts your entire point about wanting the game's flavor to be made as good as it can possibly be. Doug knows that the game's flavor would suffer as long as he continued to take effort away from maximizing it, so he stepped down. I have to laud him for that, as it can't have been easy to give up on something into which he's poured so much time and effort over the years.
If you're attacking Wizards of the Coast, then you need to realize that they didn't have a choice. Doug stepped down, and there was no one set to take his place. It's not like they sat down and said "You know what, let's just dump that flavor column, because it's not pulling its weight." If they had any way to keep the column going, they would do so immediately.

TL;DR: Willpell, if you had your way, the game would die and then nobody would be happy.