Grifting Beast has been a lying faggot for years, but this shows a bit more ambition than usual.
Below is a series of videos all building up a conclusion.
The conclusion is that the Cargo Cult is right and both WOTC and the Bros are wrong.
You have to be in the grips of a psychotic break with reality to believe the former; WOTC knows far better than Grifting Beast what is actually going on in the commercial side of the hobby, has a far superior position, and reshapes the commercial side to fit its preferences as it wills that to be and fuck everyone else- thus is the power of control over the Network Effect.
You have to be a two-faced liar and con artist to believe the latter. That Grify-boy has to do this AT ALL is proof that the Bros are not only right and correct, but that our way of play is superior and desirable.
Fuck this gay-assed faggot, sideways, with a shovel covered in shit and burrs and then get deported to his spiritual homeland of India.
You want to help a Bro? Take Rump's survey; link here.
Betty Wolheim carried on her father's work, in spirit if nothing else; she's a second generation Fanatic.
She was part of the cohort that began moving into power in the industry in the 1970s, reaching critical mass in the 1990s and seizing power openly from 2000 forward. You can find her successors in the Longhousing of all culture. She was a witch. Her succcessors are witches. Do what is required to deal with this.
PDFs are free, gamer. You just need to know where to look, such as the Internet Archive.
That's assuming you need Harlock to hook you up. Play via Discord? Dicebots are free. Don't even need a VTT. Rules? Free. Dice? Free. Play space? Discord is free. You need not spend a penny, gamer.
This is what Wizards of the Coast aims to fix, and they're going to fix it by forcing a trade in costs in return for frictionless convenience. WOTC can, and will, get people paying for the game by microtransacting the hell out out it. People are already hopelessly yoked to Beyond; WOTC has already won here, so now we're just going to see repeated victory laps as the Cargo Cult gets crushed.
Only the Clubhouse competes and wins by not competing on the same terms.
Archvaldor is notorious for his clever use of game mechanics in WOW Retail and Classic. His Patreon has more devious such stuff.
He cut this video last Wednesday. He shows why he comes to his conclusions and how; he's on to something here and folks ought to be paying attention to what he's saying.
People routinely ignore Second Order effects as a mechanism. Archvaldor shows one such example in action; Forever ressurected entire sections of YouTube and Twitch that had been withering on the vine due to how Retail and Classic had been and how hostile Blizzard is to private servers.
Furthermore, Forever fulfills the promise of a fully-enclosed Walled Garden that Preach explained years ago when they launched Classic.
The reason Forever will do this where Classic relaunches do not? No resets. No vertical progression, only horizontal.
The issue is that vertical progression--raised level caps, raised item level caps, new abilities, gear upgrades--means that content tied to a past tier gets abandoned and thus induced Fear Of Missing Out in players who could access it but aren't with the cresting wave and those too far behind might as well (and do) quit until the reset hits and then they can attempt to catch up to ride the wave thereafter.
This is a nightmare. It's stupidly expensive to run, only going up over time, and it is no surprise that this always results in a seasonal business model just like Fortnite or any other multiplayer game with a meta-driven endgame mode. Better and cheaper to avoid it entirely.
That's what Forever does. That's the source of the appeal.
For Blizzard it is the catch-basin. Retail/Classic turndowns are now caught by Forever, since the same subscription fee pays for access to all three modes. Retail players, finished for the patch, can come over to Forever and pick up where they left off without missing anything. Classic players, ready for another Wrath relaunch or the rumored (but WHY?) release of "Classic Warlords of Draenor") can safely bench their Forever toons knowing that whatever they're doing will be fine while they're rushing to punch Arthas in the face one more time or reliving why WOD was such a shitfest.
And for the aging core player audience, having a mode where they can fuck off for weeks or months at a time and not lose anything is HUGE. That's why we're seeing this do big numbers. This is a win for Blizzard, and that's going to reflect well beyond what is obvious; the new Official WOW D&D releases are going to do even better because of this, which makes that alliance between WOTC and Blizzard look even better now.
Don't be surprised to see Hearthstone rolled into Magic in the future because of this.
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 shill channels are cutting videos on the new WOW tie-in book for Official Edition.
Told you that this was a defacto merger strat. Now you're seeing it in action.
You can expect more of this when the Mouse Wars book hits.
The Networks are merging.
The end goal is that THERE IS ONE ENTERTAINMENT MONOCULTURE where all IP engagement is corpo-controlled across ALL media.
People refuse to look past their own noses, so I won't be surprised to see people being unable to comprehend this being the objective, but it is.
WOW Forever pioneeers official controller support for the MMO. That can be done with a Steam Deck, which means it's a half-step away from being playable on mobile.
Tabletop, via Official Edition, is also moving to being playable on mobile.
The mobile app for Official Edition is a few years away. The merging of the two games into a single property briding over multiple media is even further away, but it is now clearly on the table; Fortnite paved the way, and this is the next step in that same business model.
I underestimated how bad the commercial side of the cataclysm that came upon the Cargo Cult is, and how devastating this damage shall shake out to be.
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.
I'll put up a longer thinkpiece on this video at another time, but for now know that the woman who exposed Lester Del Ray as the man who made "Fantasy" a thing has a new (and very good) video- especially if you have children or grand-children under your care.
I may narrow this down into something for gaming in particular, since there is so much remedial work that needs to be done.
Do note that other language cultures have works of similar seminal status; if you're in or of that world, adjust the plan proffered above accordingly.
I don't care about Hearthstone, Overwatch, or Heroes of the Storm.
Given how both the core Blizzard audience and Blizzard itself treats these games, neither do they. Therefore I haven't paid any attention to their announcements.
Warcraft matters. Starcraft matters. Diablo matters. Those three IPs sit on top--control the Network Effect for--their respective niches (MMO, RTS, ARPG) Everything else does not because it does not (CounterStrike, League of Legends, Magic- those three rule the Effects in those niches).
I implore you--Vidya and Tabletop alike--to stop being fucking retarded faggots about this. You want to know why Blizzard and WOTC signed that deal allying together?
NETWORK EFFECTS, MOTHERFUCKER!
Each recognizes the other as the dominant Network. Only a superior Network can defeat an enemy Network. They both see Fortnite and Roblox as their real enemies, so their alliance allows them to join forces on a long-term plan to defeat those threats by first consuming and assimilating their own also-rans. This is going to be far easier to do on the Tabletop end, and not just with Official DND, as it will be in Vidya but it can be, and will be, done.
Blizzard has AI expertise. WOW is making AI DMs and players. You better believe that Blizzard's expertise will be applied to WOTC's aims.
You Tabletop and Vidya people gainsaying me now are going to be apologizing to me before this is over.
Lots of problems solved by their Cargo Cult and Theater Kid priors being taken out back and shot.
Meanwhile, over at Substack, Jeffro recently talked about unfucking this crap.
Why would you “convert” your game to a Braunstein? This is just weird framing all around.
Consider:
1) You can delegate monsters to an adversary player in order to work out how a particular entity will respond to player activity.
2) You can set up a session Braunstein in a single region of the campaign map and then fold the results into the overall campaign state.
3) You can run more traditional style adventure scenarioswhile exploring a mix of competition and cooperation both during session play and also in down time.
4) You can set up a fluid conflict between two distinct adventure parties to be played out over several sessions.
5) You can run a sessionless battle scenario over a span of several weeks with troop movements and a mix of strategy and tactics.
None of these options require a consensus or significant cooperation from more than a handful of people for any length of time.
The only person preventing you from doing this is you.
Not there won't be resistance, but until the AI DMs come online it's Dexter or Death for these people so wear the black hat and Dexter them for their own good.
That resistance has its root in its wrong assumption of what this hobby is, as Rule of Thule explained.
It’s not an objection to something happening elsewhere, it’s an objection to something real happening—to the game being actually played.
Consider an abstract game played in a vast abstract space. Within the spaces are two kinds of players: Navelgazers (Ns) and Conquerors (Cs). The Ns believe that all players are Navelgazers and have a shared common understanding of rules that don’t actually exist in the game such as “don’t be unkind towards the pieces of other players” or so on.
The Ns are playing a fundamentally different game from the Cs because they presume restrictions and protections etc. which do not truly exist (i.e. they are not actually rules of the game). When they see something that is the product of real play, they will immediately identify that it doesn’t accord with their presumptions. “No one who was trying to Avoid Unkindness [or other such presumptive descriptors] would have engineered this situation.”
As soon as they see signs of the game being played to win, they are immediately on the defensive. This explains much of the maligning of powergamers, as Meffridus intuitively understood, because they represent the same threat: that someone will undo the fake game by leaning into the real one.
David Sirlin talked about this concept in the context of versus fighters. There are players (he calls them “scrubs”) who come into a tournament with the idea that e.g. certain moves are “unfair” or “cheap” and, despite the obvious signs that these moves are clearly powerful, will be shocked and appalled when they are blasted to pieces by other players “abusing” them.
The scrub’s false internalization of the rules has caused him to become blind to the game’s actual rules and has led him, on his path of player development, to not only navigate false spaces but to arbitrarily close doors whose opening is necessary for him to achieve his real potential.
In the arena of RPGs, we see that scrubs have found ways to form coalitions. They have the ability to aggregate in collectives. Their particular internalizations are not only sanctified by Rule Zero, but each distinct collective can claim membership under a united Rule Zero collective—so long as they acknowledge all the others—and they feel emboldened to claim that no one can tell them they aren’t playing the game, even when they’ve thrown out half the rules and added others.
These coalitions are akin to a rogue tournament scene where everyone involved must abide by the new made-up rules, and anyone who insists on following the plain rules can be exiled. We can see the effects of this everywhere. I think it’s no coincidence that Sirlin’s book is titled Playing to Win.
I know the ritual. Folks in the family want to know what I want for my birthday, and since it's two months before Xmas I might as well put my Wish List in order.
Additions this year include: a year of Twitter Premium, upgrading my PC's graphics card (not by much; I'm aiming for the 6GB version of my current card), a Palladium Grab Bag (if live by that point; if not they will before XMas) and this print of the original cover art for A Princess of Mars, a hardcopy of D&D: An American Institution, and someone somehow finding a print copy of the Robotech: Expeditionary Force Marines Sourcebook.
Last Thursday Chubby Funster cut this video on the new Vampire edition.
Aside from dumping the offenders face-down in a ditch or giving them one-way trips to the Titanic, there are ways to gatekeep.
The first, and most obvious, is to (a) stay within the Network by (b) either using a previous edition or (c) putting our your own fork and filtering out those who do not- and making acquiring copies of that edition piss-easy to do. You are competing on pre-existing presence being your means of lowering friction. If your edition is easy to acquire and use than the new crap, you seize control of the Network and now YOU control what Is and what Is Not.
This is how you win: make your edition less frictive than theirs, take the high ground, seize control (and thus the gates), then freeze them out.
The man behind Star Wars Theory put out a fan film that clowned on the Devil Mouse.
I am not exaggerating; compare this to what we saw out of D23 for the new season of Ahsoka and you can see that it does make Disney look poor by comparison. SWT isn't the Axanar gang; he doesn't have professional actors, costuming, practical sets, etc. and the expense that goes with it. He's made a CG fan film, but he did it right and thus it puts to mind the trailers for SWTOR that Blur did years ago- trailers that also clowned on the official live-action media.
This is what is coming.
No, Disney can't stop this- try as they might. The savvy will just lie about it, then upload it from jurisdictions that tell Disney's lawyers to pound sand to ensure that once up it stays up (even if you may need a VPN to access it).
"But Muh Copyright!" stops meaning anything when you have a global Internet and several countries that are more than happy to host this stuff Because Reasons. Couple that with the ready availability of hardware to burn things to disc, flash drives being cheaper than batteries, and all other forms of DIY distribution being available (including Torrents and FTP servers) and you have the conditions for the long-awaited Fan Coup.
Network Effects are real. Fighting within them matters. This? This demonstrates Proof Of Concept, and with it comes the test of what defines Uncle George's Space Opera now that Uncle George has abandoned his creation. You can argue that this should be spent on original creations, but then I must respond with the Enemy's words: "No one will watch it."
The people want the Brand. Now the tools are here for the people to make their own Brand media, and they will with increasing skill and frequency henceforth. Revealed Preferences are Revealed.
Vee dropped a reminder to us all on Sunday last weekend.
Normies run off vibes. They are the low-T men and women of the meme.
And we know that Commies Always Lie, thus fulfilling two other memes.
Thus do Commies always run off vibe-fuckery to get and keep power. They are a Christian Heresy based on Envy and Resentment, run by Elite-class cohorts that are on the outs and with dim prospects for fulfilling their class ambitions otherwise- same as it ever was.
They are your enemy. They hate you and want you dead. They hate God and side with the Enemy. They made their choice. Give them their just reward: flame and fire.
Vidya continues to make the Cargo Cultist offering look as bad as it is.
Light No Fire in particular is a threat to Temu D&D and even to Official D&D because you have a Domain Game.
Better than others like it (Valheim, Enshrouded, Pax Dei, etc.), this threatens the Cargo Cult in particular because of--you guessed it--reduced friction compared to Cargo Cult play and it being full of fake and gay lameness.
Want to play solo? You can. Want to get the boys together? You can. Build up your own domain? You can.
Lots of what makes Vidya in general a superior alternative to Official D&D and Cargo Cultist knockoffs is here, is refined, and is going to be far easier to acquire and play (and get others to play with you) at a cheaper price compared to Cargo Cult non-gaming.
Unlimited L Works, Cargo Cultists. All the Ls. All for you. All the time.
On Tuesday of this past week, Wizards of the Coast confirmed what we all suspected about the Dark Sun revival.
This was not a surprise. This was merely a disapponting confirmation of what was expected.
The entire point of the product release is to push Communist propaganda, removing all of the nuance that existed in the former edition of the setting in the process; you can count on the writers imposing their inverted morality upon the setting's moral compass.
The fantasy that is being sought here is the fantasy of the Party Vanguard establishing the Communist Uptopia. That is it being done in a wasted world where iron and steel is more scarce and precious than gold, where the conditions of life are so precarious that it only compares to Arakis, and as such the implied anarchy championed by the Revolution is Extinction with extra steps.
You'd think that this was willful and deliberate on the part of WOTC and its partners, but no these Dangerhaired Dipshits are not that cunning or savvy. They are the Useful Idiots that get shot when the Revolution is achieved, the Genestealer Cultists that get eaten when the Tyranids arrive, the Chaos Cultists that get used as ritual fodder when their masters need to summon something with power into the world or meatshields when the Inquisition comes calling. They are the minions, not the masters.
They are mask-off with this because they believe that they have achieved the Revolution, at least in Tabletop, and in this they are mostly correct in that because they hold the Network Effect and have successfully achieved an Enclosure of the Commons through erecting the technical architecture required to seal up the funnel that Cargo Cultists rely upon to acquire customers and thus 100% capture the commercial side of the hobby (and with it most of the hobbyist acquisition) into their Walled Garden.
So long as this is deemed Brand Safe by WOTC's C-Suite this is going to continue.
That is the only form of leverage you have left. You must convince, by word and deed, that this direction IS NOT SAFE FOR THE BRAND!
If you are neither willing nor able to do that, then your only other option is to leave that entire model of hobby organization for the older model revived by the Bros.
Or you can quit, which you will inevitably do if you do nothing because you're going to lose players over time and be unable to replace them.
We are past the Collapse now. You either follow the majority into the Walled Garden, you change your ways and earn your place in the Clubhouse, or you're done. Choose before it is chosen for you.
Therein he posted a video of himself demonstrating his use of Agentic AI. He showed the vibe-coded agent that lets him do solo play of Official D&D.
Sit with that.
This is exactly what Wizards of the Coast is pivoting towards. All of the signs, for over a year now, point this way. As WOTC is Big Corpo, this takes time to execute and not just because they have Danger-Haired Dipshits on staff. The rest of the company's operations need to be brought inline, and then the Narrative massaged to make acceptance of these changes a fait accompli.
Jon showed--not told, SHOWED--how WOTC is going to kill the Cargo Cult.
The reason? Frictionless convenience. That agent is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. It never says "No". It can add additional AI-controlled party members, run sessions wherever on the map and (once mobile-deployed) wherever you get reception, run for as long as you want, all the time.
Cargo Cult Dexters have no leverage anymore. "Not at my table" gets you kicked to the curb; the bot is always there, doesn't cheat, doesn't fuck with the rules Because Reasons, and doesn't play favorites. As Cargo Cultists deal with attrition on the regular, recruiting replacements is required; agents like this kill that deader than disco because you will NOT convince the Casuals, Tourists, and Normies that WOTC targets to put up with friction of any kind once they are aware that agents like this exist.
The Cargo Cult model dies whimpering due to this.
Only the Clubhouse, rooted on Braunstein, can compete because it doesn't try to fight WOTC on its own terms.
Vitality/Wounds got rejected for a fucking reason, retard: it was more bothersome than the problem it claimed to solve.
Consider the normal way it works: Roll Damage, Track Hit Points. Crits don't matter unless and until they impose additional effects; recovery is equally standardized.
Now: Did I crit? No? Roll damage, Track VP. Yes? Track WP. Took WP? Complications on recovery.
What happens next? Anyone serious about being effective optimized for crits. This happened in previous WOTC Star Wars editions. It happened with Spycraft (and its deratives such as FantasyCraft), and it happens every single time this is implemented because PEOPLE FOLLOW INCENTIVES YOU FUCKING MORON!
What did you do with this? You introduced a means to bypass the ordinary damage capacity mechanic, which rewards those who are better able to achieve that bypass effect with superior combat performance, which incentivizes players to optimize for achieving most-consistent-bypass-performance and thus compels opposition to do the same lest all sense of challenge disappear.
Congratulations! You just made the game into Stealth Archer Rocket Tag. Everyone has to become a Stealth Monkey just to stay alive. Combat comes down to Who Can Detect Whom First; the losers get Alpha Struck with Overkill levels of Firepower and get the Swifty One-Shot Macro treatment. When players saw this in action 20ish years ago, they rejected it en masse which is why it disappeared from d20 Star Wars and Spycraft ended up losing hard to competing offerings.
No, it didn't make the game more fun. No, it didn't speed up gameplay. No, it wasn't fun to be on the wrong side of. No, it got boring to be on the shooting side of in short order too. It also lead to Narrative Faggotry when things went against the players, further degrading the integrity of the game and the hobby.
You should have been bitch-slapped for even thinking about this failed idea, DD. It failed for damned good reasons, such that even the obstensible source (HERO) is notorious for being janky and wonky in the execution of it- thus part of why HERO remains obscure to this day vs. The Only Game That Ever Fucking Mattered.
