Blizzard is Big Corpo. They answer to their parents, who in turn answer to Private Equity and PE gets assmad over anything at all resembling a Brand Risk.
Having seen several of the names people come up with, oversensitivity to Brand Risk must have had a fainting spell or 42 over the last few days. Slurs, pro-Commie faggotry, and more go on without issue; it's only those left of Mao or otherwise disliked by the mods. (Someone go for "Izzat Juggaad" and see what happens.)
Hell, I still remember when I got forcibly logged out just because some faggot didn't like that I named my Hunter's pet Gorilla "Harambe" (it was a white Gorilla too).
Therefore, shitposting via names must be done with subtlty and a bit of class. This is not the game of Tiggole Bitties anymore, and it hasn't been for many years.
The legend returns. This man couldn't be bothered to stay with Retail all this time, and he wasn't around much for the Classic releases, but here he is now for this.
Yes, the memes flowed.
But if someone who, now middle-aged, is willing to come back into the public sphere then there's sufficient enthusiasm to carry the launch forward into the long-tail business model that Blizzard promised.
Reports out of the Beta confirm that this edition of the game is sufficiently changed to make this no-FOMO, no-GOGOGO play paradigm practical and achievable. Explicit shutdowns of whines by Retail Andys about things in the Classic vein, coupled with implementation of systems that guarantee economic stability via strong gold sinks (Black Market Auction House) and solid price ceilings (vendors selling rare materials at a fixed gold cost, making it impossible to corner the market on them to jack up the price- no more Devilsaur Mafia bullshit).
I am impressed with what's there so far. I even think Air Elves are going to be fine, especially if they do tie them into the Thunderfury story somehow.
This concept of friction needs to be seen in other contexts to grasp what Wizards of the Coast is after. Let's look next door at Blizzard Entertainment.
You can see that friction is clearly on the mind of the Dangerhairs and Remorseful Trolls at Blizzard.
While what I've embedded above is supposition, it is clearly informed supposition and likely is 80% correct given both present trends and past performance. The Retail game, the one that's all whatever it is coming out of the Political Commissar's Office there this week, is very much a disposable and seasonal game now; you play the patch, not the game, and if it weren't so loaded with Fear Of Missing Out triggers you'd be able to come and go at will (much like FF14).
The argument being made here--that the new Classic rollout is to deliberately silo the legacy audience into their own paypig pen so that Retail can become whatever the Dangerhair Brigade wants it to be without fear or shame (or expectation of shouldering the company, i.e. consequence free if a failure) is mostly correct.
What's wrong is the idea that this is where new players will go. No, that's for Retail.
Why? Retail is being made increasingly frictionless. Normies, Casuals, Tourists- they go where friction doesn't exist. That's why WOTC wants them too. Make your game piss-easy to play--Free To Play, No Scheduling Your Fun, Lots Of Pay For Convenience (that is often Pay To Win in Asian titles; they love to flex like that for some reason)--and Normies (et. al.) swarm you, but are fickle and fair-weather so you need to keep them coming back frequently with new stuff. This is the basis for the Seasonal Model: MAXIMIZED NOVELTY!
If Retail WOW goes this route, all of the things legacy players claim to hate (but, via Revealed Preferences, show that they do not) are going to be maxed out and present trends (such as AI party members) will be fully standardized such as by making their use mandatory for a first-time through an instanced content option (and it will be sold as "The Story Mode"). Crafting, gathering, etc. will be depreciated in favor of doubling-down further on Doing Stuff (dungeons, Delves, raids, PVP, etc.) that can take no more than an hour- and that's for clearing a raid, so for everything else it 30 minutes or less- often a lot less.
In Tabletop, this translates to WOTC pivoting iteratively (drawing it out over years, not all at once via an edition change) to the things I mentioned: AI DMs and party members, gameplay being based on the Encounter and not Adventures or Campaigns (and Encounters being timed at 5-10 minutes so you can do them on a smoke break at work on your phone), paid enhancements for convenience (e.g. pay to Never Fail Saving Throws), and plenty of Branded tie-ins (oh look the Ninja archetype got a new subtype thanks to the Naruto/Boruto collab, and you can adventure out of the Hidden Leaf Village now) to keep drawing in new (and luring back lapsed) players.
Frictionless Convenince means that All Content Is Always Available on the player's side. You want to play using the Newtype rules for the Psion class, have a background with the Swordmasters of Ginaz, be the daughter of Storm Shadow, and fight with a lightsaber? You can, because Restrictions Are Friction and Big Gaming doesn't want to scare the Normies.
Frictionless Convenience on the Referee's side doesn't exist because WOTC's taken the Referee out back, shoved him into the ditch, and shot him in the head. The bots do that now, and so long as what the players want is Brand Safe it's AOK! Sure, the bots can only do what WOTC allows, but most Normies won't go beyond that anyway (and never have) so this is no drawback for WOTC.
This also means that WOTC is, within a decade (maybe within five years), going to be like Blizzard in the hunting down of alternatives.
Unlike Blizzard, WOTC won't be siccing Attack Lawyers on Your Temu D&D. What they will sic them on is attempts to breach their Walled Garden, in the form of trying to make content for The Only Game That Matters, and the Temu D&D crowd will do it because with the gates to the garden being shut and a gatekeeper installed it'll be like USAID money drying up: lots of people who front like they matter are going to start closing shop or lashing out because they can't suck off WOTC's teats or eat WOTC's scraps anymore. They are also going to find out how badly they needed WOTC for acquiring customers because this new Universes Beyond scheme kills their core offering: We Have The Fantasy WOTC Doesn't.
Which brings me back to Ryan Dancey and his 1999 revelation of Network Effects.
Part-and-parcel of that revelation is that Normies don't want to waste time relearning How To D&D. That's because they see ALL of Tabletop as D&D, and every Cargo Cultist pretending to be a publisher knows it- the more honest ones confess it. (Yes, MMOs are still the same way; all of them are WOW.)
Every single difference is a point of friction. Points of friction add up to Quit Moments VERY FAST for Normies. That's why they never take up alternatives, but instead kitbash D&D into what they want- assuming they bother at all, and very few do. They instead just quit the hobby entirely, something that happened with increasing frequency over the last 50 years as competing media began being able to give them the less-frictive alternative media offerings that they wanted out of D&D but did not get. They didn't see any other Tabletop product as something other than a D&D knockoff, so they assumed that they were all the same and thus a waste of time. Oldfags did not do jack shit to dispel this mistaken notion. (They say they did, but their actions proved that they did not.)
This is why WOTC's gambit will succeed if they can figure the tech end out. Now that vibe-coding is a thing, that's far more likely to happen such that I can count on it being the case; the Dangerhairs can vibe-code to Minimum Viable Product state, hand it off to someone who knows what he's doing with code (and it will be a man, since we know there is no woman or Jeet with the skills needed available over there) to finish it as Work For Hire, and then be on call when the H-1B maintaining it inevitably fucks it up (usually by subcontracing it to his cousins back home on the downlow against company regulations and in return for kickbacks).
Yes, there will be the legacy game we know. It will be depreciated in perpetuity, siloed into its own paypig pen (because that's what buying PDFs and PODs on Drivethru is), in favor of the mobile-friendly game where you play by the Encounter and may or may not have other players in your party- like you will know or care, as you're in it for Phat Loot and whatever else counts as high status play by then and they will never listen to your pitches because they're moving between one-shotting Storm Shadow to farm for his sword, doing Ranked in Apex with the boys, stream-sniping Dr. Disrespect in Warzone for lulz, and having Netflix on a second monitor playing at 2x speed- and you want that guy (or gal, or whatever they think they are this week) to show up at a specific time and place to do the same fundamental activity, but slower? Bitch are you high?
No, you Cargo Cultists get Unlimited L Works now due to this.
There is a way out, but that means admitting Jeffro Johnson and the Bros were right about everything and you are nowhere near ready for that ego-death yet.
Remember what I said about the private server scene being the MMO equivalent of Tabletop's Retroclone movement?
Well, we just saw yet another expression of that being the case. Yesterday, Project Ascension launched their latest game mode: Conquest of Azeroth.
Since a lot of you are neither current nor former World of Warcraft players, I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I'm playing Ranger and Witch Hunter right now and enjoying it. I tried Barbarian during the pre-launch Stress Test, which took a bit to figure out but also turned out fine. Trying the new Support role with the Ranger class. Can't say about the rest.
What I want to explain to you is this:
There are Vidya analogies to Tabletop issues.
World of Warcraft is the D&D of MMOs.
Due to long-running antagonism to its legacy audience, there's been splintering that lead to cloning of past editions; this would lead to official Classic realms, but that was not enough, and neither did the recent Remix limited-time servers do that either, but rather a "Classic Plus" (Vanilla with different decisions implemented, and more content added) is what folks want.
Private servers fulfill this demand- as retroclones do for people who want their specific flavor of B/X (etc.) put into a single plug-and-play product. This is mostly a WOW thing, but private servers are also how dead MMOs carry on (e.g. Star Wars Galaxies).
Blizzard has become more hostile to this over time, and operators are becoming more savvy about protecting their operations- and not just in immediately rebranding and relaunching after a shutdown (as Turtle WOW did, twice). Other corpos are no friendlier.
Network Effects dominate MMOs harder than they do Tabletop, as Josh Strife Hayes proved a while back, so the only viable way to compete is to fight WITHIN the Network Effect.
Therefore, only WOW can kill WOW- and thus a superior private server is a threat to Blizzard.
Due to the nature of the medium, and the specific game, something like the Bros happening is going to take a different form than it did in Tabletop.
Instead you're seeing OSR, not BROSR, insurgencies; they're doing the retroclone thing because that's what works. Some wipe their asses with IP law (like Ascension), some pretend it's real and do the "legally distinct" thing, but both of them are doing clones of MMOs with proven audiences because the risk calculation of MMO launching for anyone that is not Le Big Corpo now is too high to be acceptable- and recently failures only doubled-down on that perception (Ashes of Creation also being outed as a scam).
That's why the real expansion is in competing with the dominant Networks from the inside, and as private servers have already proven to work they're going to keep working.
The next step will be to find a way to make a WOW server that finds a way to do Braunstein style play--which, in this context, means somewhere between EVE Online, Warhammer Online, Dark Age of Camelot by way of Guild Wars and its sequels--as was done in many a MUD before that.
And the crazy thing is, I bet some guy--and it's going to be a guy--is going to be the one to take things like Winning Secrets and find a way to make that happen.
In the name of making it easier for the dads on the dev team, Blizzard permanently broke the game and thus the entire product category.
The correct response was to do the following:
Make dungeons harder, but make the loot better- both in potency and in acquisition. "Fuck You, Pay Me" always applies. Loot must drop for everyone involved, and be immediately useful; you should always get either an upgrade or (if none are to be had) the gold equivalent. If you put in work, you get paid GUARANTEED.
Make certain that all mans of a given role can perform necessary functions. Tanks and healers should not be doing interrupts or crowd control; that's the DPS' job, and fulfilling such utility cannot be a DPS loss or they won't do it. Healers should be situationally aware, not locked on the healthbars; either healing happens while doing utility or DPS work, or they have off-OCDs that light up to be instant nukes after doing enough GCD heals whose net effect is DPS neutral.
Mobs should always have something that requires CC on pain of either instant death or loss of control- not just bosses.
Bosses should require Tank mitigation to endure being hit at all; against Healers and DPS, squish.
Instant spec-change/gear-change upon entrance to the required group role, assuming that you are foolish enough to not hard-lock classes into them in the first place. This is one place where FF14 is correct in its design.
Design dungeons to be completable in 10 minutes or less on average. That means cutting bosses to one, and reducing trash to a handful of packs at most. Winged dungeon complexes should be the norm. This is the core problem, not the grouping issue. The reason for pre-DF being a pain was due to the time required; cut it down to something you'd see in a Scenario out of MOP and you'd see participation skyrocket. Going with a winged complex approach means that you can turn one area into three or more distinct dungeons to run, and each run would actually feel like a proper delve and not a reckless roller coaster ride.
In short, increase the friction in the content, reduce the time commitment, and spread around the tools to handle the friction..
Late last weekend, Jon Del Arroz cut this video on the end of Rise of the Merlin.
Near the end he makes plain the same thing that Professor DM did with regard to his YT channel: if you are not talking about The Dominant Thing YOU DO NOT MATTER!
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Google (i.e. SEARCH ITSELF) deliberately tanks whatever is not the dominant thing in a niche; this is a Second Order Network Effect because what is happening is that one technology utterly dependent upon Network Effects exerts its power over a lesser (and yes, Trek is lesser than Social Media in itself) Network by culling all discussion within its network of anything but The Thing On Top within that niche.
This is before any deliberate manipulation. The technology, by its nature, does this.
You can't blame Elon, Dorsey, the lizardman at Meta, the Illuminati, or whatever for this. This is entirely on the Nomries themselves. What the technology did is give real power in real time to the Revealed Preferences of the anonymized mass of Normies, Tourists, and Casutals that dominate all niches within the global culture industry.
You are seeing, in real time, just how difficult it is to fight against an undesirable position when Network Effects are so strong a factor in How Society Works.
No, you can't Thousand True Fans your way out of this; mass media, by its nature, cannot be splintered down to such small silos that you can have that be a viable option and yet maintain the mass media cultural institutions- nevermind seize control of them.
What this means is that a lot of discourse about the corpo-controlled mass media brands and their Network Effects is 100% wrong.
Paramount gave no fucks about JDA's book. Paramount brought out the big guns against Axanar, and Paramount is dog-fucking Seth MacFarlane over The Orville. The Revealed Preferences are the tell. Books DO NOT MATTER. Comics DO NOT MATTER. Film, Television, and Streaming matter.
We see this repeated in Tabletop. WOTC ignores most of Tabletop because Not-D&D DOES NOT MATTER. Games Workshop only cares about minis (still, for now, the cornerstone of their business model) and tie-in mass media (i.e. videos and Vidya). Not-40K? DOES NOT MATTER. Not-Fantasy? DOES NOT MATTER.
Normies, et. al.--i.e. THE AUDIENCE YOU'RE AFTER--will not, even if God Himself said so, turn away from the Brand until it is so disgusting and repgnant that it triggers a critical mass of them all at once; then something equally ruinous (for us) happens- they switch off THE ENTIRE CATEGORY permanently, barring successful rehabilitation attempts (rare, expensive, but possible), and nothing will convince them otherwise- and no, you're not going to rehabilitate it.
Network Effects are the strongest Walled Garden system that there is. They reinforce Brand Loyalty by making the friction for defection so high as to be ruinous for Normies to do so, until it is preferable to amputate that cultural element entirely than suffer futher.
If you want to win, you have to be seen by the people you're fighting over. Like it or not, "Complain about Brand, then offer The Same But Different alternative actually fucking works and moves the needle. No one would care about the Bros if we didn't talk about D&D. No one cares about what Josh Strife Hayes says if he didn't talk about World of Warcraft. You get the idea.
You are not fighting this war as an equal. You are waging an insurgency. Your job, right now, is to generate and sustain support by the population. You cannot do that outside the Network, so you cannot succeed outside the Network; you have to learn how to leverage it to your advantage- the Bros successfully did this by changing the discourse about The Only Game That Matters such that YT grifters try so hard to either steal them for their own gain or to defame the Bros to the same end.
Therefore a different approach must be taken, one that well-meaning dissidents will balk at, but the tells from the corpos show--by their fears--what needs to be done.
Make your own Branded material. Corpos play dirty; you gotta play dirtier to win, and the tools they use--information disparties, global arbitrational arbitrage, etc.--are now at your command also.
Make that 40K fanfilm. Host it where GW's lawyers get told to pound sand. Hide your names behind global privacy rules. Learn how outlets like Caribbean Thule publish and distribute actually banned books and shamelessly copy their methods; this includes their finances. Make that Trek series; host it where takedown requests get routed to /dev/null. Make a 40K rulebook that isn't shit, share the PDF freely and include a POD-friendly version so folks can run off their own copies at-cost via unlisted Lulu uploads (or something like it). You get the idea; this is Samizdat Territory, so act like it.
Then promote the hell out of it; show off your hardcopies on your socials. Screen it at cons; have QR codes on hand for folks to access it online. Get folks to donate to Uncle Gene's Better Space Literature Society and be surprised (LOL) at getting your own copy of The Trek Show That Paramount Won't Make arrive in a 20 disc BD boxed set a month or so later.
"But that's-"
No one cares. Normies run off vibes; corpos went hard after Axanar because it has better Trek vibes than anything official so the Normies embraced it as legit. That is what must be done; make things with superior vibes and shove it into their faces. Trek, Star Wars, D&D, 40K- you name it, it can be done. Now YOU control the Netwok Effect, and that vast mass media audience will default to listening to YOU.
That's what the enemy understands--go read Edward Bernays; this has been in the open for over 100 years--and it's time to face that these are the rules of the game.
Josh Strife Hayes, again, uses World of Warcraft to explain Network Effects in gaming.
Dungeons & Dragons also set an impossible standard for Tabletop.
Yet that standard is what Normies, Casuals, and Tourists expect and demand from all Tabletop products. They expect to be able to go wherever and play The Game--not your game, The Game--and if they can't do that, they quit.
Tabletop, therefore, cannot be a "Thousand True Fans" thing and Wizards of the Coast knows this. That's why their smarter, more successful moves are those that reduce or kill an element of friction keeping those three segments from playing the game (and thus connecting to and engaging with the Network Effect).
Publishers that refuse to acknowledge this are those that fail. Ryan Dancey recognized this, which is why he tried to reduce that friction by introducing the Open Gaming License (reducing/eliminating friction between products). Some of his successors at Wizards of the Coast have tried to do this from other angles--this is why Beyond is now the primary arm of the D&D busienss and not any form of retail; digital Walled Gardens have far less friction than dead tree books and in-person meetups--while others fucked things up.
What Network Effects do is reduce friction in the most fundamental manner: the ability to do the thing at all. The larger the Network, the easier it is to do the thing and the more likely that other friction-reducing powers come to bear to further reduce overall friction inhibiting Doing The Thing. If you play D&D, you are likely to Do The Thing; if you play it properly--i.e. as the #BROSR has described--in a Clubhouse environment that is globally-networked that reduces friction to near-zero; you'd have to play WOW to get a comparable situation.
In the wake of Ashes of Creation's collapse, we get several takes. Nix gets it: Network Effects trumps all.
Josh Stryfe Hayes explained this (again, in the MMO context) previously.
And, as Preach showed, Blizzard gets that the Network Effect is real- and they seek to capture that utility within its own brand bubble.
Tabletop works the same way.
This is Network Effects in action. This is how and why There Is No Alternative to The Only Game That Matters.
All the folks who quit WOW inevitably return to it; Preach did, Zepla (FF14's Bunny Queen) returned, I quit and came back, everyone does this. The same is true of D&D, and like Blizzard, Wizards of the Coast captures its own disaffected by making older editions legally available thus severely inhibiting attempts to use them to compete from within its own Network Effect. (Not that they don't try; also, private WOW servers exist- same concept, different media.)
The reality is that, due to the very nature of the medium, it is inevitable that it collapses on the dominant Network Effect. What already exists within Roblox comes for ALL of them in due course: one dominant player, within which users generate what they want with the tools at hand.
With a proper game, that's not a problem. That's not the case with most crap on the shelves.
Over the weekend, Ashes of Creation--the long-developing ArcheAge style MMORPG--collapsed. Lots of videos dropped about it, but only Josh's matters.
This will start unraveling over the rest of this week and information gets checked and either confirmed or denied.
From what's been revealed: Private Equity bought the studio, goat-fucked the former owner and his team, fired everyone in the US, and will relocate to India (because that's what "overseas" means) to do whatever with it (what "finish" means). In practice, this is dead; divest--economically, socially, emotionally--now.
The Steam release was a surprise for the team; they were not told until the last minute. That's the red flag for insiders.
AoC is Kill.
Network Effects spare no one. This is all due to two things: (a) having to compete with World of Warcraft, and (b) developing a game contrary to the Revealed Preferences of the MMORPG Player Network.
AoC did not compete with WOW of 2004. AoC has to compete with WOW as it is here and now. That's a very big wall to climb, and AoC could not climb it. No Kickstarter game, nor any more conventional alternative (e.g. New World, Throne & Liberty), can compete with World of Warcraft now. It has attained the same position in MMORPGs that Dungeons & Dragons has in Tabletop, Magic: The Gathering has in CCGs, and Warhammer in wargaming. These properties reached a point of absolute, utter and PERMANENT dominance in their niches where competition from without their Network Effect is no longer possible AT ALL.
Instead, each of these are now Eternal Kings of their niches such that they are the Kleenex or Xerox of that space. They do not compete with others within their niche; they compete with comparables in other niches (i.e. all of them compete with Fortnite, Roblox, etc.). They have a Containment Option, an Also-Ran to act as Controlled Opposition that keeps players who need a break within the network by shunting them into a Designated Containment Zone.
(Periodic wiping included, though that tends to run on Sith Succession Principles.)
The MMO scene really has room for THREE: WOW (which has its own sub-retention structures within its model), FF14 (faltering hard at the moment; they screwed up bad with Dawntrail thanks to Death Cult sabotage), and Guild Wars 2. Tabletop really only has one--D&D--and only the various clones (including Palladium) is as close as it gets to a Containment Option; all other niches are so small compared to Fantastic Adventure that even the D&D analogs are only known if they have videogame adaptations of note. The lawsuit over Magic will not kill Magic as the King of CCGs- too many users exist now and there is no alternative.
There is no way to compete and win from without. There is also no way to compete and win from a lesser position. You must wield a superior Network Effect to crush a Network Effect.
There is only D&D. There is only WOW. There is only Magic. There is only Warhammer. There is only Windows (sorry Linux and Mac guys; if you really were superior, you'd be the top Network Effect by now). That's where the money is, that's where the users--especially the Normies and their money--are, and that's where the Social Proof lies. You ain't neo-patroning your way out of that like you might with music, books, or comics (and even then you're outside the Normiesphere so you have no cultural impact, so you don't move the needle). EVERYTHING ELSE EITHER CEASES OPERATIONS OR GOES NON-COMMERCIAL.
This is what justifies the Clubhouse as being superiot to the Basement or the Retail Shop for hobbyist organizing; the former is atomized and easily broken by life events and the childish stupidities this hobby is so notorious for that there's a comic about it (Knights of the Dinner Table), and Diamond just killed the latter. Cons are a no-go for all but a few, by percentage. Clubhouses, on the other hands, are a local social institution by and for hobbyists that are non-commercial in nature- and Clubhouses are where the hobby will survive and thrive, not the corporate Walled Gardens, again due to superior Network Effects.
The pressure on Vidya studios will force them back into the $20 Game space.
There is more to that pressure than just all the AI companies sucking up all the hardware for their expansion. The other pressure is the back catalog available for sale, much of which has far more generous hardware requirements than the titles at full AAA retail, and more people will do as I do and not even look at any new release unless it's on sale and content-complete.
Live Service? Goat-fucked. That's the sector that will crash first and hard, and I expect it will reduce to the dominant Network Effect holders in each niche (Fortnite, World of Warcraft, League of Legends/DOTA2, etc.) and it will not care about flushing out crap (Warzone) and gold (ARC Raiders) alike. The already shaking MMORPG scene will freefall down to WOW, FF14, and (maybe) Guild Wars 2. All in-development titles should be expected to be cancelled and shut down if they don't launch and hit next year- looking at you, Ashes of Creation.
Western AAA Slop? Craters, then rebuilds around AI-powered workflows, and relaunches; give it to 2030.
Eastern AAA? Will hold out for a few years, then go through the same cycle as they are forced to catch up and tech up to survive. The ChiComs will move first, forcing South Korea and Japan to follow or get left behind and eaten.
Indie, quite frankly, need to scale down or die. The $20 price point has been a known things for years; this is just going to force Normies to notice.
Oh, and don't expect a bubble sitaution here; AI is a National Security priority for every state that has the capacity to execute on it, so there is no bubble.
Pat here demonstrates a common delusion among the Terminally Online sort.
The delusion: That Wizards of the Coast has any competition within Tabletop.
WOTC is not stupid. They know who their competitors are--Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Genshin Impact, etc.--and there is not Tabletop operator that matters.
Most people who play Current Edition are not Terminally Online and do not care about anything but Current Edition, the same way that most wargamers are 40K Only Andys and don't care about anything else and that cardfloppers are Magic Only Andys and don't care about anything else. If they aren't playing The Only Game That Matters, they aren't playing at all. This has been known for 25 years thanks to Ryan Dancey.
This has been reinforced multiple times, in multiple media where Network Effects are the source of value, over those 25 years. The majority of players in a given medium of that sort are not general players; they are Top Dog Only Andys and refuse to play anything else because, rightly, they see anything else as a waste of time and money. We see the reason most clearly with MMORPGs, but it is there in all of them: the sheer size of the Network enables these people to play how they prefer, and smaller competitors do not. Josh Strife Hayes proved this with math a while back.
Skip to the Conclusion; it's the Highlight skip. That gets to the point I've made, which he independently arrived at.
Pat's assertion that any of these defections matters is delusional. If that were the case, Palladium Books would have overtaken WOTC (or TSR before that) by 1990- by 1995 at the latest. That never happened, and it never will happen. All of these folks, like folks who quit WOW for another MMO, will be back in short order once it becomes clear that Current Edition is where the action is.
Watch for it, and watch how shameless they're going to be about it.
Never let it be said that your hobby has no greater value to society, not after World of Warcraft has generated more than one research project due to fuckery done by players.
Oh, that PVP incident? That video is still up.
To this day, no regrets for ganking those folks.
This, like it or not, are the sort of moments that hobbyists remember. Not the popping of Loot Pinata #1138 and the collection of Best In Slot Item (For This Season).
The Real Game in Tabletop is likewise made up of such moments. The #BROSR has already had several of them, some of which I've participated in (Too Cute To Die!), and the consequences of these events are still playing out up to several years later.
This, again, is why Tabletop is not a Narrative medium. You can't storywank your way to making the magic happen, and you never have.
You're going to see this happen more and more as (a) the collapse continues and (b) the dominant Network Effect flexes its power by proving why it's the dominant Network in that niche. For MMOs, that's World of Warcraft; it's the game that everyone knows and will agree to play, such that it defines what MMOs are and how they work, confirmed by would-be alternatives only able to change up the variables- a practice that, inevitably, ends up feeding the winning Network just as Ryan Dancey said would happen 25 years ago.
You're going to see this more and more.
CCGs are going to collapse on Magic. Wargames on 40K and Historicals. Adventure Games on D&D. Normie games will fall back on The Games Everyone Knows (Monopoly, Uno, Clue, Catan). Risk-taking by going outside the Network is already falling off, and what is now slow will become sudden within the next year or so.
In the Single-Player space, this will be a collapse on Brand and Genre; only the proven forms will survive, and only the proven Brands therein will remain strong while all else struggles. Be ready for more Metroidvanias, more Roguelikes, more knockoffs of Vampire Survivors, and so on.
This is the time to hunker down, retreat, retrench, and prepare for the next window of expansion- not the time to launch, to risk, to dare as it's clear that this is a Dying Time that needs be weathered.
Winter has come. Sit out the cold and the snow, doing that underground planning and preparation, so that when Spring comes you are ready to act- to move.
I said quite some time ago that we were in for a collapse.
That hit a few months ago. At the time I thought it would be confined to Tabletop; I was wrong- it's across all media. What I did get correct was that this would be an Outside-In collapse pattern of implosion, where--despite the Professor attempting to gainsay this--the historical pattern was, and is again, that Normies (the majority) and their adjacents (Tourists and Casuals) will abandon everything but the top brands in that sector: they are going to retreat to the safety of Brand and Dominant Network.
Why? Despite that too being dogshit, why?
Because it is What Everyone Knows And Agrees Upon. Everyone will collapse back on D&D in Tabletop. Everyone will collapse upon Mouse Wars (which is going to blackpill so many). Everyone already has returned to World of Warcraft. Magic, 40K, etc. are all going nowhere while all of their competition within those niches are increasingly falling away: they're shutting down, downshifing to a self-funding hobby, or (vainly, as it turned out) attempting to swap media to remain viable.
Viable, that is, as a commercial enterprise (i.e. as a business) and thus as a means of farming and accuring prestige and status. All of that is over unless you're The One That Matters.
It doesn't matter if you have talent, or grit, or even acumen and the intelligence to fuel it. You cannot command the attention required because you are outside the dominant Network and its associated Brand.
There are only two ways to fix this, both of which you cannot pursue: be backed by an institutional player (thus negating all risks you otherwise must face), or be independently wealthy (so this is already just a hobby for you), but if you are chosen by one or the other then you can compete from without that dominant Network.
You're not.
Therefore you must learn to compete from within the Network. This is the realm of the "spiritual sucessor" and the "legally distinct not-a-spinoff" where we can and do see success arise, sometime where the offering is a quality work (Xenonaughts) and sometimes not (whatever that not-a-Potter-smutfic thing BookTok femcels are getting off to as they complain about how Wrongthink it is about as of this post). It is this ill-acknoledged element that led to the success of RetroClones in Tabletop; they cloned (a past edition of) The Game That Matters, so folks played them when Official Game did the same stupid shit that WOW did with Shadowlands and Warlords of Draenor (and came back when WOTC did what WOW did with Legion and Dragonflight): come back in greater numbers than what left.
We are a civilization dominanted by Network Effects in all things, from entertainment to firearms ("Does it take Glock mags?") to geopolitics (rail gauges, yo), and more.
The collapse we're seeing are the marginal players and non-aligned actors going first- those least loyal or least valuable to the dominant Network. The collapse will stop when everything surplus to requirements, defined as "Not 100% aligned with the Network", has fallen away or been rendered irrelevant. Convenience, ease of end-use, and conformity to the standard are the measures for survival; successful competition leverages these while tweaking on the margins, like we see with private WOW servers or D&D retroclones.
The bots--"AI"--will only accelerate this process, and it has already begun.
Here’s a handy formula to help you distinguish between the two:
Magic = using preternatural means for natural ends
Sacraments = using natural means for supernatural ends.
For a couple of examples under this model, consulting a fortune teller to find your car keys is magic. Having water poured over you to obtain remission of all your sins and new birth in Christ is a sacrament.
Yes, he goes on from there; read the article for more on the matter.
For our purposes in game design what this means is that "magic" is directly tied to cosmology; what is possible within a given practice of magic is defined by what supernatural presence the magic-user draws upon to achieve those natural ends.
You want to know why I object to the Cleric as a generic priest class? This is why; what a specific religion believes, and why it believes as it does (and therefore how and why it practices its religion as it does) is defined by the mythology that explains it. You don't get Fireball tossing tome-hunting obsessives from Van Hellsing In Plate, but you can from the Temple Cult of Molech.
(Yes, this means that the core premise of White Wolf's Mage: The Ascension is sound; it's everything else that turns it into a complete dumpster fire.)
This means that every form of magic-use needs distinct rules and procedures.Runequest had the right idea, and it is sad that this did not catch on in wider use in the hobby. It also means that games with multiple forms of magic use had better be designed with interaction in mind, that the rules of the game are the reality of the world (as we are well aware after 50 years that players certainly see it that way), and thus the cosmology behind any given practice of magic has to be mechanically reinforced or it will not be taken seriously.
This also means that some games present magic systems that players will not take into the typical adventuring party, but instead are only viable in strategic-level play due to what their magic does and how it works, and without the full array of play that the Real Game possesses these magic systems and their practioners cease to be obviously useful to the typical player. (e.g. you want an Alchemist in your strategic panapoly; you don't want one in your dungeon delving or commando raid team)
This explains why you can't have a generic fantasy game; the very rules you have for magic tell you what is and is not true about how things work. This also means that (A)D&D is not a generic fantasy game, and why every edition plays and feels different- they are different.
N.B.: The Holidays page is updated; I have added a new Wish List on Amazon specifically for Appendix N literature.
Turns out that there is now a sufficient amount of acumen and tools available for MMOs to be cloned with an ease analogous to Tabletop.
That means that the comparison of Network Effects is also easy to do, which means that indeed you can see that World of Warcraft is the D&D of MMOs because WOW alone has so many private servers (this scene's retroclones) that it dwarves the rest. Furthermore, it is again the case that it is these servers that keep Cult Classic games alive because the original publisher is either unwilling or unable to do it themselves.
I look foward to seeing the MMO version of the #BROSR.
Speaking of "competition from within", Blizzard's doing a certain degree of Return To Form after getting a scare from Final Fantasy XIV.
Much as TSR and Wizards of the Coast change how the game plays when they make new editions of The Only Game That Matters, Blizzard does the same with every expansion of The Only MMORPG That Matters.
What they have done is nuked the capacity for Addons to read combat data and thus tell the player what to do during a fight, triviallizng all but the most difficult encounters (and yet somehow not stopping Bob there from standing in the fire; it's been 21 years, and he still stands in the fire- you've been kicked from every raid group in the game for a reason, Bob)
The reason is to regain control over encounter design. The cover is FF14, which has maintained a total ban on Addons since A Realm Reborn and nukes the hell out of those that get caught, demonstrating that--contra the naysayers--such a ban is viable to implement and enforce; now Blizzard is doing just that to go live with the next Expansion release next year.
The reveal of the new Player Housing system is also a reaction to the (very flawed) system in FF14.
In both respects, this is Blizzard returning to form; taking the most successful elements of a competitor's offering, clone it, and refine it to perfection. Blizzard does not have a single original thought and never has; they copy, steal, and refine- they do not innovate at all.
You may not think that this is enough to neuter any threat from FF14, which is the only MMO to present a challenge in years and only because WOW shot itself in the foot with Shadowlands while Square Enix had a one-two punch of fantastic Expansions (Shadowbringers and Endwalker) followed by a massive disappointment (Dawntrail) while Blizzard recovered with Dragonflight and started doing Memberberries hard with its Classic and Remix seasonal servers.
Blizzard, once again, neutered a rising threat by Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing the threat's most popular elements.
Now we have The WOW Bubble, which includes the private servers (despite Blizzard's wishes), slowly choking out all other MMOs- starting with those closest to it.
This is why Network Effect-based dominance is so hard to beat; you have to wait for the leader to massively fuck up, exploit that fuckup, and then continue to beat that leader like it owes you money--preventing its recovery--until you pull off the Sith Succession Strategy and usurp the Network to become the Dominant property.
Blizzard with WOW, like TSR/WOTC with D&D, have fucked up HARD more than once but the would-be coup-masters always run out of gas before they can seal the deal so when the inevitable comeback hits they get shattered and tumble down the rankings below where they started (most of the time). That's what happened with WOW, and more than once with D&D, but now both properties are so dominant that an Out Of Context Blcak Swan now has to hit--and to hit directly---like a Colony Drop to allow any future wanna-bees the chances that others squandered.
We are now in a world where, if you care about actually playing the game no matter what, you are stupid to defect from the Network; you just find a specific iteration within it. This story is yet more proof of it.
Compare this against the videos for Turtle WOW and Project Epoch. You'll see that just in the World of Warcraft niche, the most dominant one (as it is to MMOs what D&D is to Tabletop, including its total domination of the niche to the point of reaching escape velocity and leaving all competitors behind due to its Network Effect strength) specifics on how a given server interprets the prompt of (Version) Plus--as there are other servers focus on specifc expansions--varies significantly from each other and from the official version of that iteration of the game.
If Blizzard--and now Microsoft--were smart they'd do what WOTC did 25 years ago and do their own version of the OGL and d20 System Trademark license, but they're not so they won't and instead Lawfare is the order of the day; Ascension, Turtle WOW, Epoch (partially) are set up to be immune to this due to international jurisdiction arbitrage rendering US court judgements moot. Tabletop, by comparison, need only either use a given license (OGL formerly, now Creative Commons) or scrupulously avoid Trademark and Copyright violation (a lot easier in Tabletop) to do the same- Palladium's continued existence proves this.
What is going to happen after this wave of Lawfare fails to knock out the designated targets--the biggest private servers--is that Blizzard and Microsoft are going to attempt a more grayzone approach by pressuring payment processors to deplatform these servers or get them on Mastercard's shitlist (which does the same thing).
If that doesn't work, and it may not, the lobbyists beseige DC, London, and Brussels to get (Super-)State regulation to do it for them. If they frame it properly, that will happen and it may work against all but the Big Two: Ascension and Turtle, both of which structure their operations to be proofed against that using the same rules that the Billionaire Set use to protect their wealth and influence. (Read the Panama and Pandora Papers, folks.)
Any further attempts to fuck with the system will be shut down because it touches that Third Rail; Blizzard and MS will either have to do Cyberpunk Dystopia things like hiring mercs to murk them, or call Ryan Dancey to consult on how to pull off an OGL scenario. Count on the latter, eventually.
Project Ascension is Free To Play; this specific server goes live on Friday the 3rd at 9:00AM Central Time, and others have other play modes including one still in the works: Conquest of Azeroth (all new classes on a fresh class-based server). Ascension also hosts Project Epoch (also F2P), the other recent Classic Plus World of Warcraft private server and--after recent developments--handles all administration. Turtle WOW (also F2P) remains the oldest surviving private server, the MMO counterpart to Labrynth Lord.
The Critical Role revelation confirms what I have long explained: There Is Only One Game That Matters.
While D&DTube continues to huff that copium like they're having heart attacks (because they are; they need to hold their delusional beliefs that their dogshit matters), what I am seeing manifest as concrete reality is what Ryan Dancey explained 25 years ago: there is no competition between Network Effects within a niche, but only within that network (and thus only within that brand).
I started saying "Just play D&D" for a reason. Note that I did not say which version.
I can get people to play 1st Edition. It is far harder to get people to play anything Not D&D, even if it's close like a Palladium game, because they trust the brand and disdain all else. Furthermore, being that this is a group-centered hobby, everyone can agree on D&D and will refuse Not D&Ds. Thus you get people not playing anything but D&D because no one else can agree on anything else.
The Off-Brand D&Ds (the clones) get traction because they are still D&D, to the point where even the most lame retroclone beats the most successful Not D&Ds.
Why? There is no risk to the Normies in playing it because it's still within the network, brand or no. To overcome this you need a massive brand, and that is not at all guaranteed as the Star Wars, Warhammer, and Conan experiences show. (Call of Cthulhu endures because it is the D&D equivalent in its niche, same as why Traveller and HERO/Champions does.)
What does this mean? There is only a VERY NARROW window of competition in the hobby, commercially speaking. Since most folks don't get it without parallel examples from beyond the hobby, here it is:
Because WOW recovered from its Shadowlands botchjob in record time with Dragonflight, and Final Fantasy XIV flubbed its chance to pull off the Sith Succession Scheme by botching its follow-up to Endwalker with Dawntrail, WOW retained its position of dominance in the MMORPG marketplace. Furthermore, the recovery was so strong that WOW has begun to break away from everyone else as WOTC pulled off with D&D when 3e arrived 25 years ago.
The reality is that most people do not bounce between MMOs. They stay within a single MMO, either playing that game or not any MMO at all, and only Blizzard has figured this out.
What WOTC has figured out under Dancey is how Network Effects create that bubble effect. Blizzard figured it out almost 25 years later, but they tacitly allowed for it for years by ignoring the rise of the clones--private servers--until Nostalrius got too loud to ignore; this would later lead to official Classic WOW servers, mirroring WOTC having to make past D&D editions available again to blunt the demand for retroclones.
Now WOW players that don't want to play Retail have Official Classic (past editions) and private servers (clones) to stay in the WOW bubble indefinitely. They never need to learn a non-WOW game. D&D is not only in the same boat, it's been there for three generations longer.
This is why the #BROSR is a viable threat, and Le Indie Darlings and other Non-D&Ds are not; the Bros compete within the network, so what they say and do is recognizable and applicable to the doings and interests of hobbyists and Normies whereas Non-D&Ds might as well be aliens pretending to be real people.
You want to challenge D&D? Do it from the inside. You get nowhere otherwise, and after 50 years that is not a conclusion that you can gainsay in good faith anymore.
This is something that a lot of people in all forms of entertainment media are going to slam their heads against in frustration.
Yes, right now almost all of the old gatekeepers are gone. That opened up a lot of opportunity for those willing and able to exploit that opening. However, chaos and opportunity are the same thing; the liminal time between the fall of the old and the rise of the new is a time that Normies have never liked and do not appreciate even if it is ultimately very beneficial for them.
You want to know why Your Indie Darling--in Tabletop, in Vidya, in Film/TV, in Books/Comics, etc.--aren't getting any traction?
Like it or not, it's not even a failure to breech the Normiesphere; you are at a time where the chaos in the culture has totally turned off the Nomries and those adjacent to them (Tourists and Casuals). If you do not have a well-oiled marketing machine shoving your stuff into Normie faces, or you do not have that dedicated cult of One Thousand True Fans (who give you money because they love your stuff), you're fucked.
Why?
Normies run off Brands.
Brands create Order in the minds of Normies. It's why there are, no joke, "(Brand) households" ("We only drink/use/buy (X) here") and that extends to Tabletop.
As shit as Mouse Wars is, Normies stick to it at this time because it is a Brand that they can rely upon. Big Anime gets audiences while Quirky New IP Anime flounders for the same reason. AAA had to shit the bed hard for years on end to make it at all probable that those Brands could get damaged in reality, and only in single digit percentages; one Good Enough release and All Is IMMEDIATELY Forgiven in the Normies' minds.
This applies to Tabletop. Tabletop is in totaly chaos right now. That's why, despite Wizards shitting the bed, Current Edition remains The Only Game That Matter and only Past Editions and Also-Rans have any place in the conversation. Don't think so? Why do you think all of the whining shithole publishers pay their bills by supporting Current Edition, while only a couple others can even claim otherwise (e.g. Palladium, Catalyst).
In business segments that run off Network Effects, they also run off Brands; not the same thing, but one feeds into the other, which is why neither of them are Lindy Effects either.
The Normie always retreats to the safety of the Brand in times of chaos; they know it gets used, they know it'll be on the shelves, they know it gets played, and they know that everyone else is talking/playing/using that Brand. Going beyond the Brand IS A LUXURY that Normies cannot afford. Neither can Tourists or Casuals. That's 80% of the folks that spend money in Entertainment Media across the board, so when you see retards like the Roll For Combat crew simping for Le Indie Darlings you can tell them to go fuck themselves as you know they're bullshitting and gaslighting- first, and foremost, themselves.
Conventional Play has no future. They're dead orgs walking but haven't stopped shambling yet. As the combination of tarrifs, falling discretionary income, larger economic reconfiguration, and rising costs for inputs take their toll we'll see more and more whining about it all (because Pop Cultists DO NOT LEARN) while Wizards tanks these hits like a boss.
Stick to games that get played. Stick to D&D.
(PS: If you need this in Academic jargon to put before Academic or Corporate shotcallers, that translation is here.)
