The Business: Wizards Confirms The Fortnite Strategy

Wizards of the Coast dropped their keynote at GenCon.

What I told you is on the cards is confirmed.

WOTC's taking Official D&D down the Fortnite route of All The Brand crossovers while outsourcing its own IP to aligned 3rd parties to make stuff and going mobile-centric with MXT. Time for the smug face. pic.twitter.com/bnQAF6U4SY

— Bradford C. Walker (@MrBCWalker) July 30, 2026

Major Announcements

Dark Sun returns (Season of Survival, 2027) as D&D’s first mature-rated fifth-edition setting. The harsh world of Athas features defiling magic, psionics, and sorcerer-kings. Releases include the gameplay expansion Dark Sun: Blood and Power, the adventure expansion Dark Sun: Edge of Oblivion, a map pack, DM screen, and a limited-edition Player’s Handbook with alternate art. It introduces the Scion/Psion class and carries content warnings for violence and mature themes (shrink-wrapped with a warning). Localized editions (French, Italian, German, Spanish) follow later in 2027.

Universes Beyond launches as a new crossover initiative:

• D&D: World of Warcraft (Season of Champions, November 2026; early access ~Nov 3, full release Nov 17) brings Azeroth to the table with 13 classes (new/reimagined subclasses and specializations), 16 species (including Dracthyr, Vulpera, etc.), 60+ spells, monsters, dungeons (including reimagined iconic ones), factions with renown, mounts, and more. A map pack with Icecrown Citadel content and other accessories are planned.
• A Star Wars collaboration (Season of Rebellion, 2027) was teased, with more details to come.

D&D Icons (led by Joe Manganiello) pairs legendary creators with the studio:

• Dragonlance with Tracy Hickman.
• Greyhawk with Luke Gygax (drawing on Gary Gygax’s notes, partly through Melf’s perspective).
• Drizzt Do’Urden content with R.A. Salvatore.

Greyhawk: Crown of the Witch Queen is a full-length adventure expanding on Drelnza (vampire daughter of Iggwilv/Tasha) from classic material.

Studio partnerships for more setting content: Ghostfire Gaming (Ravenloft, 2027), Visionary Productions (Eberron adventure featuring the Lord of Blades, 2028), and Kobold Press (Forgotten Realms content, 2028).

D&D Beyond

updates emphasize making the game easier to play together:

• Live Looking for Group tools (Event Finder for stores, rebuilt Discord LFG, limited-time cheap sessions via StartPlaying).
• Upcoming features: rebuilt search, DM prep tools (scene manager, map pins, etc.), mapless encounter tools.
• New mobile app (early 2027) powered by a new rules engine.

Other notes: The Warlock video game protagonist’s patron is the archfey Tasha (voiced by Maggie Robertson); full gameplay reveal at Gamescom Opening Night Live (Aug 25). The official actual-play series Dungeon Masters will visit Azeroth then return to the Forgotten Realms (Icewind Dale). Arcana Unleashed (Season of Magic) arrives in September 2026 with subclasses, backgrounds, feats, spells, and more.

The presentation positioned these as additive to core D&D worlds, with staffing increased to support both classic settings and crossovers, aiming to bring more players to the table across formats. Official details and the full roadmap are available on D&D Beyond and the Dungeons & Dragons site.

Told you so.

All that's missing is the AI bots to run games and fill out parties; those are still in the works, so we'll hear more about those down the road.

The Business: This Is What Fighting A Dominant Network Effect Looks Like

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:

1. There are Vidya analogies to Tabletop issues.
2. World of Warcraft is the D&D of MMOs.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

The Business: Yes, Blizzard Broke MMOs

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Mobs should always have something that requires CC on pain of either instant death or loss of control- not just bosses.
4. Bosses should require Tank mitigation to endure being hit at all; against Healers and DPS, squish.
5. 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.
6. 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..

The Business: This Shit's Coming To Corporate Tabletop

Recently the devs for Final Fantasy XIV announced what the new Beastmaster Job will be.

Since most of you don't play this MMO, allow me to define what "Limited Job" means: a Limited Job is a type of character class that is intentionally unbalanced on the understanding that it cannot engage with playable content as the non-limited Jobs do; how these restrictions manifest, and what exclusive content they access, varies by the Limited Job.

So no, Beastmaster (BSM) cannot join parties with the other Limited Job (Blue Mage) or the full Jobs (Dragoon, Machinist, White Mage, Red Mage, Warrior, Black Mage, Ninja, Dancer, Viper, Reaper, Paladin, Gunbreaker, Sage, Scholar, Summoner, Samurai, Monk, Bard). It cannot go the current level cap (100), or even access any expansion content due to being capped at level 50 and thus only to the base game of A Realm Reborn- which would be acceptable if it was open to Free Trials, but it's not (unlike Blue Mage) as you need to have Dawntrail (the current expansion as of this post) on your service account to do so.

Put this in Tabletop terms.

You're Wizards of the Coast. You announce a new Class or Subclass for Current Edition, but it's paywalled behind a specific tier on Beyond and not in any digital or print product; you can't use it in Organized Play unless you're rolling alone or in a single (sub)Class party, and you're capped at 10th level while everyone else can go to 20th or more. (N.B.: Roll For Combat has a Third Party take, which is Please Don't Sue Me Nintendo: The Class.)

Does this sound like good product design--nevermind game design--to you? It does if you're a Mammon Mobster. Those folks occupy WOTC's C-Suite as well as Hasbro's.

"This can't work."

Bullshit. It already has. The majority of Current Edition players and Referees are already hopelessly yoked to Beyond; they damn well will go along with being milked in this fashion if the value proposition for microsubscription is good enough and WOTC is smart enough to deliberately release new stuff under this model in an overpowered state (as is further incentivized with the adoption of a Seasonal content release schedule; make the new Season's new widgets overpowered and players will pay to win every single time because if they don't they lose, hard).

The only thing needed to finish this pivot is to yank Referee discretion on what players can access to use, meaning that the same optimize-your-fun dynamics we see in MMOs, Battle Royales, and Extraction Shooters will come to Corpo-Approved Tabletop because theirs is a model that maps closely to Blizzard's World First Raid Clear race model and the parallel Mythic Plus Tournament race model (and will incorporate a lot from the more PVP sort of competitive play). Racing to see who can clear modules fastest, mapping out routes, optmizing parties, all of that stuff- this is what WOTC wants for Current Edition because it's proven to make people pay, pay more, and pay more often.

Normies want this. Casuals want this. Tourists want this. They say they don't, but Revealed Preferences prove that they do.

WOTC wants Normiebux. This is how you get it. Cargo Cultists can't even grasp what's going to happen, but they're going to find out sooner than later and they'll be forced to either conform to stay in the Network or get left behind.

This is as radical a change in their Just So Cargo Cult paradigm as the Clubhouse model is, and like the Clubhouse it's far more social and Normie-friendly so they'll lose out by resisting it. The pressure from above will be overwhelming; the Clubhouse coming from below removes their road of retreat, trapping them in the middle and unable to move out of the way.

Their time is over. Shit like this will be why, and they will not be admitted into the Clubhouse; they're done.

The Culture: The Magic Comes From Unexpected Interactions And Their Consequences

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.

The Business: The Unspoken Strength of Network Dominance

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.

The Business: Proof That MMOs Are The Digital Counterpart of Tabletop, Down To The Retro-Clones

I said previously that the private MMORPG server scene is the Vidya version of Tabletop's retroclones. This proves it.

That is the Vidya version of Dark Dungeons, Basic Fantasy,Labrynth Lord, and other D&D/Chainmail clones.

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 Business: There Is Only Competition WITHIN The Network

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.

The Culture: The Endless Clone Complex Is Not Just A Tabletop Thing

You all know World of Warcraft even if you never played any version of it.

It is the D&D of the MMORPG marketplace. Therefore it would not be surprising that, just as later D&D editions aped WOW to varying degrees, so would WOW somehow ape what's going on in D&D.

"Clones?"

Yes, like all the B/X clones that the OSR still publishes. That's been a thing in the WOWsphere for several years, called "private servers", and like the B/X Clones all of them are different takes on the same idea: "Do (X) but 'better'." For WOW, the latest Classic Plus server (going live this weekend) is Project Epoch.

The two others of note are Turtle WOW and Project Ascension. Yes, there are more; yes, you can waste time on a subreddit about them; no, most of them are not worth your time unless you're out to scratch a specific itch.

"But why all the clones?"

For the same reason B/X clones clog off so much shelfspace: it's what gamers will buy and (sometimes) play, save that the three aforementioned are all Free To Play.

And, as with Tabletop, most WOW players suck harder than a 12 volt Hoover on overdrive; the Hardcore clip videos (where there is no ressurection spells, so if your man dies he stays dead) show this daily. The Soup Aisle is real, and not just a Tabletop problem.

20 year old game, more extensively documented than World War 2, and people still can't be bothered to Git Gud- especially the Muh 20 Year vets. Sound familiar?

So cheer up, folks, we're not the only gaming sector plagued with these problems.

The Business: Commercially-Driven Product Design In Action

It is difficult for some people to comprehend what I am talking about when I say that commercial incentives have perverse effects when it comes to game design.

That is why I have to go outside of Tabletop to find comparable examples from time to time, so again I'm pointing to World of Warcraft to illustrate the point.

TLDR: Blizzard's game design for Retail WOW is so bloated that most players can't execute their bloated rotation of abilities to achieve the necessary damage/healing output while staying alive and avoiding mechanics. To rectify this, they are putting that rotation on an in-built macro so that most players--those unable to not stand in the fire and meet the damage thresholds required--can meet those requirements on the two lowest difficulties (because no, you still won't be able to do that on Heroic or Mythic in raids or high levels of Mythic+ in Dungeons).

Why?

Commercial incentives. Specifically, the incentive to maximize player retention by making low to mid-level endgame content participation metrics higher by reducing the barrier to entry present because over 80% of the population cannot perform to standard and execute encounter mechanics competently.

"Really?"

Fuck yes, it is. It's been a problem since Vanilla--Classic, these days--such that there's been PARODIES.

And at the high level, that capacity max out performance while executing mechanics is what wins World First races- and with it, prizes and prestige. PVP is no less a massive filter for attention and execution capacity, which is why those that are hardcore about it are as big on practice as professional athletes.

To keep the participation rates up, they nerfed the requirements to perform in order to beat encounters. Participation rates means retention rates go up, which in turn keeps revenue from subscriptions up and increases revenue from the Cash Shop.

There's your real incentive.

This has nothing to do with making the best possible game. This has everything to do with Line Must Go Up.

You can see this same thinking take place with commercially-driven Tabletop publishers also, like Wizards of the Coast and Games Workshop (but this drives so many others), and it is this force that perverts game design away from making a proper game into a Viable Product (and now, the Minimal Viable Product) as the basis for Endless Product Slop.

This is what the Colony Drop ended by killing the commercial viability of Tabletop.

This is why you need to stop bothering with selling product as anything but a self-sustaining hobby; the incentives by themselves are sufficiently corruptive to pervert it into something that cannot meet requirements.

Now consider what would done to actually unfuck WOW if commercial incentives weren't driving everything, but instead the incentive was to refine how the game worked to achieve the promised gameplay experience 100% of the time. That's what Tabletop is again able to do, and should because the money's gone- and with it, the clout.

That's the difference. If you need to be paid to be in Tabletop, you don't belong.

The Business: Confirmed That WOW Is To MMOs What D&D Is To Tabletop

I have stated for years that Official Edition competes with WOW, not with any other Tabletop product.

I stated that this is because WOW and D&D are the same thing in different media, and following Preach's video about how Blizzard copied Wizards' business model homework we now have this confirming it.

That's right, this is the Top Five:

1. World of Warcraft (Retail)
2. Final Fantasy XIV
3. World of Warcraft (Classic Expansion)
4. World of Warcraft (Season of Discovery)
5. World of Warcraft (Classic Anniversary)

That doesn't include just plain Classic Era. That's right, four versions of Classic. It also doesn't include the dozen or so private servers either, which would be equavalent to the OSR Retroclone movement.

Flat-out, WOW dominates the MMORPG business in ways that only those familiar with how D&D dominates Tabletop can comprehend. In both cases, their Network Effects are so strong that nothing short of a catastrophic Out Of Context event from outside the entertainment media sphere entirely--like a nuclear war--can do anything to damage it. Blizzard screwed up a few times, only to come back stronger every time. WOTC's screwed up more than once, only to come back stronger also. That Josh Strife Hayes video I linked to previously explains all of that, and it applies to both Tabletop and MMOs because what drives both media is the same thing.

This is why, despite the Sigil thing blowing up, I don't see this changing anything. There is no one in Tabletop able to capitalize on this like Paizo was for the 4e screwup, so this will pass with WOTC still on top and as soon as they gin up something Good Enough (not good, nevermind great, just Good Enough) for the disappointed to be mollified all sins will be forgiven (as we saw with D&D5e's release) and it will be as if nothing happened once more.

Like I said previously, I've seen this dance before. There's been no changes to the pattern; merely variations on trappings, and that is nowhere near enough to dethrone a king even if there were someone willing and able to usurp him and there is not, and at this point there never shall be.

The same now applies to Blizzard. Square Enix wasted their opportunity to do so when they had the chance (because man was Shadowlands a major mistake) but SE hesitated and Yoshi-P doesn't have the killer instinct required to play the Apprentice to Blizzard's Master. What could have happened didn't, and everything sucks harder for that failure to act.

The Colony Drop has come to Tabletop. Don't think MMOs are immune; it's just going to take longer, and you'll see the same collapse pattern appear (those on the fringes die first, with WOW at the center and likely to survive).

The Business: The Alt-D&Ds Are Tabletop's Private Server Scene

These are the same video.

When I say that World of Warcraft is the D&D of MMOs, I mean it.

There are nowhere near as many private servers for the would-be Apprentices to WOW's Master, and yes how many private servers an official MMO has is a reliable metric for measuring the power of its Network Effect. WOW, like D&D, has one so strong that soon we'll be saying of WOW what is now being said by the other publishers of D&D: There Is No Competition.

In addition to every edition of Official D&D there is also the near-alikes that are the Tabletop version of private servers. Yes, PDF Slop Merchants, that's how you compare: you are the private server scene of Tabletop, something that will become more obvious as the Big Move progresses and Wizards of the Coast transitions the official game out of Tabletop in all but name.

This is why (a) I say that the Network is not the Brand and (b) it is possible for hobbyists to take over the Network, but not any commercial competitor.

By not only preserving past editions, but unfucking their mistakes, the private WOW server has successfully captured a significant portion of the User Network and thus benefit from the Network Effect. As with alt-D&Ds, the servers vary a lot in quality and thus only a few are worth playing long-term (Turtle WOW for certain) while others are good because they are playable dev environents for all intents and purposes (Ascension is this; play solo until you can dungeon grind to the cap, using a totally classless build system to break the game in raids and PVP)- all the fun, none of the money going to people that hate you (as these are always free to play).

What are these clones attempting to do? Preserve and unfuck, with varying degrees of success.

Should WOTC decide to take its ball and go home, the Real Hobby is already prepared to keep the game going indefinately because--like the private servers--we have the source code and can spin up our own. Now that we know how to do so without needing to follow the folly of making a business out of it, we can expect that what WOTC says and does to become increasingly irrelevant as more people see that we're having more fun than they are without having to pay Big Corpo a penny.

And given how things have gone, we should not dismiss this as a possibility.

The Business: Network Effects Demonstrated By A Snarky Brit

Josh Strife Hayes, without intending to do so, explained how and why D&D is The Only Game That Matters.

All of this applies to Tabletop. Not only does it apply, it started here. That Network Effect briefing Ryan Dancey gave 25 years ago is built off data demonstrating this very cycle in the older Adventure Game medium. (Side note: This is why MMOs are the direct competitor to Tabletop; they are directly comparable.)

What Josh described is the process by which D&D, once it hit a critical mass, became the unstoppable juggernaught that it is now. He is showing you how Network Effects work EXACTLY as Dancey said they would: to reinforce the dominance of the Top Network.

There is only a short window within which a would be Apprentice is able to shiv and replace the Master. As multiple Roll For Combat episodes of late revealed, no one is even close to that status. Wizards of the Coast has no competition at all within the Tabletop Adventure Game marketplace, and all of the "competitors" agree that this is the case- that is why all of them that can are following WOTC's abandonment of Tabletop for Vidya.

Back in the 1970s, when this all kicked off, there was sweet fuck-all momentum for any one actor in the market. You could, if you were on the ball, get into that space and fight for dominance. Some tried, but D&D won that early knife-fight and by 1980 it was already very late; by 1984--the 10 year mark--the window rapidly closed and by 1989 (and Second Edition) it shut.

What happened every single time someone tried? Look at the video; the same thing happened- folks would try out Something Else for a bit, and then like clockwork come back to whatever the current edition was. You'd get a few Also-Rans out of this, which would benefit from the same thing in their specific subniche, but by the time Dancey came out in 2000 to explain Network Effects to sell the Open Game License all of the actors that matter now were there then- all that happened since was the winnowing of the outer rings of the circle.

That's where we're at now: a massive culling of Also-Rans and Never-Weres. The Only Game That Matters will be fine. The oldest and most massive of the Also-Rans should survive (such as Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, BattleTech, Shadowrun/Cyberpunk, and All Things Palladium Books) but most of these will either stop pretending to be anything but hobbyist publications (which, I remind you, is not only fine but desirable) or stop existing at all (most of them) because they can't or won't make the leap.

Note the thing that keeps tripping people up when we talk about Network Effects: this is not about YOU, it's about what everyone agrees is worth playing. The reason D&D (in all its editions) survives is due to the massive number of people that are willing and able to play it, even if they prefer something else, because this is the only game everyone will agree to play. Consensus matters, which means numbers and ease of connection matters. D&D has it; most alternatives don't.

This is what WOTC has focused on improving with its digital initiatives, and why its C-Suite (biased as they are, coming from Tech and Vidya) concluded that going to Vidya is best for D&D. They saw how Revealed Preferences showed that the people they target as customers prefer the ease and convenience of playing online from home over meeting in person so they're going to make that the norm going forward.

It's going to work, for them. For everyone else?

Especially if WOTC gets critical mass adoption of their Walled Garden system, as Blizzard did with their Launcher-based system (itself a Walled Garden), making it too much of a hassle to go outside of it to play other games.

And yes, this same thing applies to the wargaming end; there's a reason that (a) Warhammer is the D&D of that niche and (b) those who quit Warhammer quit the hobby entirely instead of going on to other games and then (c) only to come back to Warhammer when a new edition releases and they think the changes are to their liking. Same process at work, gang.

In order to pull off what Blizzard (with WOW) did to Sony (with EQ), you need to be a peer actor. No one in Tabletop is even close. That's why There Is No Alternative, in Conventional Play terms. Your viable solution is (a) to go non-commercial and (b) to retreat to the Clubhouse and accept that the Real Hobby is neither commercially viable nor Normie-friendly. It's an occult practice, and it always will be, by its very nature.

You can't stop the Colony Drop. You can only run as fast as you can away from it, so haul ass!

The Culture: Some People's Long Career Consists Of Nothing But Naps And Meals

World of Warcraft is over 20 years old now. It is still the most popular MMORPG in the world; it is the D&D of that market niche.

There are many livestreamers that made their career playing WOW. For many, they come back to WOW or never left it because it always pays the bills and--for a few, like Asmongold--made them into millionaires.

There is also a parallel development of Totally Not D&Ds (other MMOs), some hewing closer(Final Fantasy XI/XIV, Guild Wars(2) to the model than others (EVE Online). There are even precursors and would-be competitors (Meridian 59, Everquest, Runescape) that are still around but permanently cast down to Also-Ran/Never-Were status whose presence wouldn't be missed for long if they died.

Which means that there is also a curious parallel to the Tabletop world in that there are a lot of Muh 20 Year veterans who turn out to suck at the game that made them famous and well-off if not rich- a fact proven every single day thanks to the official Hardcore (i.e. permadeath) Classic WOW servers.

WOW is the most well-documented adventure game ever. Moreso than any Tabletop game, every last little thing you want to know about any version of WOW is documented and archived; there are two sites devoted to this (WOWHead, Icy Veins), multiple Discord servers, scores of YouTube channels, and more dead sites and blogs than there are undead in Azeroth.

This means that there is no excuse for these Muh 20 Years veterans to not know what to do and how to do it. Yet here they are, fucking up the most basic things and getting killed for their errors every single day.

Why, then, would you listen to people who demonstrate that they don't know what the hell they are doing? You wouldn't. You'd listen to the folks who have mastered the game to the point where They Cannot Get It Wrong.

This is where were are now in Tabletop with the OGs and Muh 40 Years and all the other folks who should know better but prove by their own confessions that they don't- and thus torch their credibility as a result.

It is long past time to do what should have been done over 40 years ago: teach people How To Play The Fucking Game Properly.

As usual, the Boomers made the mess and it's Gen X and later that get to clean it up. That's where this has to go now, so it's time to queue up the Whitesnake song.

The Business: Network Effects Proven By Science

Josh focuses on MMOs. Everything he did here applies to Tabletop games.

Also, this is a far more honest and ethical approach than most academic works- including those done in government think tanks.

While Josh tries to say "Play what makes you happy" at the end, he knew as he said it that it wasn't true- and it was on his face. (Go ahead, go look at it; he knows he's bullshitting.)

There is a Master (WOW) and an Apprentice (FF14), and they are contending to see Who Is The Master. Everyone else is a an also-ran that does not matter. Yes, even EVE Online.

People value playing with (or around) others over "fun". That's why WOW and FF14 are Master and Apprentice, and each is attempting to convince the same audience that they do what the audience wants better.

You won't see another MMORPG become a contender without figuring out what both of these games gets right, what they get wrong, fix the latter and sell it to that same audience. Furthermore, the only reason this state of affairs exists is because the company owning the Master screwed the pooche so hard with Shadowlands that is caused a notorious mass exodus of users to FF14 and Square Enix more or less successfully capitalized on that fuckup. That's why WOW did its abrupt turn with Dragonflight and going forward have tried to keep that going- to notable success. (That, and it successfully set up "The WOW Bubble", which also helped Blizzard a lot.)

As WOW is to MMOs, D&D is to Tabletop.

The problem? There is no Apprentice.

What Apprentice does Current Edition face? Pathfinder fucked itself. ACKS doesn't have that critical mass yet. No other retroclone ever came close, and no not-D&D did either. (Yes, Uncle Kevin, that includes yours.) Current Edition's only competition is itself, in the form of Past Editions that had critical mass popularity: 1st, 2nd, 3rd. If not for TSR and WOTC missteps, no one would know or care about anything else ever.

The proof that I am correct is in the attitude of Wizards of the Coast towards Tabletop: utter disdain and disrespect. WOTC doesn't see Tabletop as competition, but instead as unruly supports that need to be tard-wrangled from time to time to keep in line. WOTC sees Vidya as competition, which is why Next Edition is Vidya and not Tabletop at all.

The only other alternative is to go outside the commercial publishing business paradigm entirely. That's what the Clubhouse is about: a return to non-commercial hobbyism.

The Bifurcation of the Tabletop Adventure Game Scene

The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play in Tabletop Adventure Games is in a bind.

The Crushing Force Hammering From Above

Sorcerors By The Sea continue to demonstrate that their intention is to take Current Edition, and the supreme Network Effect that powers it, out of the tabletop medium entirely in favor of an all-digital, online-only business and user model centered around a propreitary virtual tabletop.

That VTT will use Fortnite-style brand crossover deals to add value on top of being supported by the owner of Current Edition to its use over competitors, and it will be tied to a virtual storefront where Gatcha-style monetization will be in place to turn Free To Play suckers into simps and whales- and now proven and ridiculously profitable model. Do the sort of balance passing that A Certain Winter Store is infamous for with Globe of Gankcraft to compel paying for content unlocks on a seasonal basis, be it via some form of Battle Pass or something more simple than that, and you can see why the C-Suite at SOBS and Stupid American Toy Company see this as a money printer in all but name.

Given how well it's worked in videogames, and to a lesser extend in SOBS' own original properties (as it created "Collectable Card Game" as a product category), they have every reason to believe it. Given how well everything we've seen to date caters to the Revealed Preferences of the targetted Normie audience, they are right to believe so- hobbyists are not the target audience anymore.

But the Cargo Cult cannot grok this. Their reactions, as both end users and as third party/competing product publishers shows this with every word out of their mouths.

They honestly think this will fail. They think it will fail because they think they are still the target audience, when every indication of the company's performance with regard to The Brand overtaking The Product as the primary source of value--maybe the only source of value--driving their decision-making.

Anything Brand-driven always becomes Normie-driven because Normies use Brands as shorthand for value and Brand-driven businesses always rely on Normiebux to drive their growth, establish their power, and maintain their dominance. This has been known since the days that Montgomary Ward shleps mail-order catalogs in magazines and newspapers over 150 years ago. (Formally acknowledged by Edward Bernays and Walter Lippmann in the 1920s, after proving in in World War I as Allied Propagandists.)

Why do you think SOBS went so hard on Normie-facing media productions that made their Brand look good in Normie eyes? Why do you think they don't give two shits about the tabletop medium or the hobbyist audience? They know what Normies want, so they are making the product conform to Normie expectations to farm Normiebux using a Normie-friendly Brand pivot.

Which means that everything the Cargo Cult thinks is normal will be depreciated, denigrated, and destroyed to make way for Normiebux and Normie acceptance.

This is nothing less than SOBS' turning The Only Game That Matters into a giant corpo-run, corpo-operated Clubhouse aimed at gatekeeping the hobbyists out in favor of Normies. This is not due to some Death Cult ritual dogma. This is not due to some calls from this or that politician or NGO. This is not at all about Molech-facing bullshit. This is nothing more MBA Bro, Line Go Up, Stockholder Value Uber Alles, Mammon worship.

It's only going to get worse, and I can already see folks mainlining Copium like it was Black Tar Heroin.

The Cthonic Force Rumbling From Below

That Cargo Cult also faces the consequences of its past actions Memory Holing how the medium actually works coming back to bite them in the ass.

Turns out that you can't destroy the past forever. You can only hold it down, which is a lot like blowing up a balloon and then trying to hold it down underwater; you have to occupy precious time, energy, attention, and activity in maintaining that suppression indefinitely because the instant you fuck up or relent that force--like the balloon--instantly pops back up where everyone can see it.

That, folks, is what the #BROSR has done. Timekeeping, Patrons, and most recently Braunstein- and with that the confirmation that there are two distinct tiers of play, whose interactions form a stable gameplay loop that powers campaigns to their conclusions. Player-vs-Player Conflict drives the campaign at both tiers of play. The rediscovery of how Diffusion and Convergence also act as occilating forces that power the gameplay loop, and often in a fractal manner, was also restored from the Memory Hole by the Bros.

With this restoration of suppressed knowledge and wisdom, again encouraged by Mammon and not Molech (commercial incentives to exploit apparant naivety of hobbyists instead of instructing them on good hobby practices like a brother does), at last undone the missing component of a long-dysfunctional hobby is restore and now the machinry of the hobby is again compete and delivering on long-promised play experiences.

The catch? Doing so directly undermines all of the commercial operations of the Cargo Cult and their hangers-on. Why? Because how the games operate eliminate the need to constantly buy more product to solve deliberately-inflicted problems imposed by publishers to sell stuff they don't need.

The Cargo Cult, outside of the OSR, isn't feeling the effects just yet but they're effected all the same and that will just grow as hobbyists contrast what they hear from the Bros with what they're seeing from SOBS. Big Corpo says "Fuck you, paypigs. Give money or get stomped on by Normies who will, while the Bros keep showing folks how to play Real Games dirt cheap (buy ones, cry ones, on the cheap or free) without ever needing to buy any addons. Cargo Cultists can't maintain their own operations in such an environment, so they fold.

And those same people, when wondering where they can play, will be forced to confront that they either have to deal with Normies in SOBS' Clubhouse or they have to shape up and stop being Soup Aisle Sadsacks so they can get into a (or form a viable) Clubhouse run by and for hobbyists because the culture at-large won't be willing or able to make room for them anymore.

Either way, the future is now Clubhouse Or Quit.

Because the status quo is no longer viable, and the Cargo Cult cannot endure any longer either. Time is running out, Conventional Play people. Choose.

The Culture: The Consequences Of Memory-Holing The Past

Yesterday we had a one-two punch of Why Your Conception Of Fantasy Is Pants-On-Head Retarded.

One came from Cirsova and the other from Grames Barnaby. I'll put both threads' first posts here; click through to the linked threads for the rest.

Something I've observed and repeated is that most people's idea of "Tolkienian Fantasy" and the modern state of the fantasy genre is actually Warhammer filtered through the lens of Warcraft. https://t.co/jGb44EPdxH

— Cirsova - JD Cowan's Star Wanderers Live Now on KS (@cirsova) May 11, 2024

Daddy Warpig's post starting all this, regarding Tieflings, had in turn exposed just how degraded our culture has become.

Modern day “Twee & D” isn’t for me.

It makes epic evil into something cute, harmless, and twee.

Tieflings are Demonspawn and Demonspawn GET THE KNIFE.#BringBackActualEvil pic.twitter.com/d3BmNdilSP

— Daddy Warpig (@DaddyWarpig) May 9, 2024

Which feeds back to Jeffro Johnson's quip: "Don't read anything after 1980."

The Cargo Cult of Conventional Play coincided with the latter generation of the Fanatics in American adventure literature ("fantasy" and "science fiction") taking over OldPub during the 1970s, with 1980 being the tipping point. You did not see today's "fantasy" and "science fiction" before then.

This older, better literature is what Gygax put into Appendix N. This is also literature which most Cargo Cultists have never read, as we have seen after Jeffro Johnson wrote his book on the subject years ago- something so threatening that there's been deliberate attempts to gaslight people away from Jeffro's book.

That includes many of those making deratives of the game, in any medium, and that definitely includes Fightstick and Fightcraft. The most charitable take is that this is the result of information degredation via a long game of Telephone (aka Chinese Whispers).

The more likely take, given the histories involved, is deliberate Memory Holing by a few and the exploitation of the laziness of the many; it is no surprise that every edition of D&D after AD&D1e deliberately went further from its literary (and thus cultural) roots, sometimes for crash and petty reasons (e.g. anything to do with Lorraine Williams and the Blumes) and sometimes for ideological ones (e.g. the latest gaslighting out of Sorcerors By The Sea).

Severing a people from their roots takes many forms, but one manifestation is persistent across incidences: making it easier to gaslight the targetted people into believing lies that their forefathers knew to be such.

"It's not evil. It's just misunderstood and unfortunate."

"Alignment is just a personality marker."

Both of these are lies, and it would not be possible to say them with a straight face had the culture of yesteryear not been deliberately hijacked, suborned, shivved, and tossed into the Memory Hole. This is what Daddy Warpig got at, and thus what Grames and Cirsova followed up with, to predictable blathering from Death Cultists (arguing in bad faith, as usual) and others engaging in Normie-style Ego Defense freakouts.

In short, non-answers. Just bullshit and tantrums.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the same Memory Holing that threw the real game--and thus the real hobby--into a dank dungeon of its own until Jeffro rescued it was also the same process that pulled a Satanic inversion of morality on the hobbyist subculture as part of the larger cultural inversion via lesser successors of a great original game.

The literature that persists is that which is grounded in the real. Fantastic literature is no different. Folks already forgot about Westeros, but remember Middle-Earth.

The same thing will be true when Globe of Gankcraft finally dies; no one will remember it for long. The same has, to a great degree, already happened with the "legendary fantasies" and "epic science fiction tales" from 1980 to the present.

They are built on lies, from the cornerstone on up, across all media. No one wants to watch, or play, a Humiliation Ritual- which is what Death Cultists make everything they take over into.

This is why AD&D1e is one of the few games that are worth playing, long after it was Current Thing; it is rooted in the real, while its successors are not and thus why they fade ever-faster once they are replaced by a new Current Thing.

This is why Call of Cthulhu persists, above and beyond Network Effects, while others like Chill and All Flesh Must Be Eaten are forgotten.

This is why Traveller persists. This is why BattleTech persists. This is why RIFTS (and all things Palladium) are in deep shit once Siembiedia is gone.

That rooting in the real, in a real more real than mere material existence, matters.

And that's why severing that connection, even in something that seems so inconsequential as tabletop adventure games, matters. It's not the only thing that matters, but it is often the decisive thing, and too many find out too late why that connection matters when they're ruined due to something that their severed connections would have prevented.

Your game sucks because it's fake. Simple as.

The Culture: Cargo Cult Cancer Is About A Brand, Not A Game

(Continuing from yesterday's post.)

A Broken Frame Turned Cargo Cult

Most of the games in this hobby exist because a Cargo Cult arose blindly aping what Gygax and Arneson created, misunderstanding what they beheld and tossing out what they did not understand in their failures to comprehend what this hobby is.

What is now, by some, referred to as "conventional play" is a broken frame of reference. This conventional style is under increasing stress from competing media, media that do their style of play better than they do across the board- topping it with superior user convenience. Why bother with terrible rules, scheduling issues, and the occassional social misfunction that makes for hilarious black humor ala Neckberdia videos when you get a cleaner, easier, more convenient and--if bought on sale--cheaper alternative that delivers an equal or (often) superior experience via PC or console?

Why deal with ongoing commitments to such a broken medium when boardgames and cardgames have all the same excuses for socialization in person without the ongoing commitment?

Why put up with this, which all its fake non-agency and Illusion Of Gameplay,--

My Life As A Gamer: It's About Mastering The Game, Not Making Better Bulldozers

The other day, I concluded that there was a way out of the problem that Build Culture and Instrumental Play combined to create in both videogames and especially in tabletop RPGs.

That solution is simple: Eliminite Build Culture.

Eliminating Build Culture means eliminating player ability to construct their character as if it were a robot, be it in the mode seen with Developer Kits products like GURPS and HERO, or Talent/Feat selection (d20), or being able to target powers/gear for deliberate acquisition.

Crippling Instrumental Play means eliminating all of the external aides that allow a player to go outside the game to learn how to optimize his performance.

Make the player make do with what he gets as best he can. Random rolls for character attributes. If classes are used, they are stripped down to the core functions necessary and have no other features. Eliminate irrelevant things like skills; characters are presumed competent within their defined spheres. Gear/powers are never guaranteed; all of them are subject to some form of scarcity or similar availabilty gate.

In short, you need the game to have simple character generation procedures--from scratch to play in five minutes or less--and give no control over development thereafter. For videogames, this means removing the ability to repeat playable content--to farm or grind--to chase down desired treasures or other improvements. (Yes, this destroys current ARPG and MMO business models; no, I don't care.)

The matter of Instrumental Play is harder, but for now--in addition to removing farming and grinding--removing player access to information that isn't character-facing should suffice; this will not be as hard as it seems because by destroying Build Culture you destroy most of the external assets right there, so this is a matter of clearing out those that remain. No sites, no mods, no guides- and no game designs that leads to "solving the problem" with such things.

Once the only way to beat the game is to play it, learn it by playing it, and master it by playing it--not by watching, not by building a robot that overpowers the game, not by having a solution handed to you--in a play environment that is not static but rather is always in motion and thus always changing due to the consequences of player actions then this self-inflicted problem solves itself.

This is what those who are #EliteLevel comprehend.

My Life As A Gamer: How Mech Piloting Arose To Dominance

Three weeks ago, Folding Ideas posted this hour-plus video essay regarding Globe of Gankcraft.

To summarize: Gamers playing the game successfully identified what actually matters in the game, then ruthlessly pursued how to beat the game to get to the results that matter and have been refining it ever since as an ongoing regime of Best Practices that have had serious consequences for the game, for the players, and for the brand. The developers, themselves gamers and players of the game in particular, accepted this and incorporated player-generated solutions to past problems into later encounter design forcing an arms race that fueled the refinement of Best Practices into the current circumstance.

That's a nice way of saying "Once the objectives are identified, the skilled player solves the problem of how to get them and then refines the solution until perfection is achieved." This, in turn, becomes "Best Or Benched"; once a problem is solved, that solution becomes the norm and it is not acceptable to deviate from it.

What is not mentioned in the video is that there is something else, something deeper than what they mentioned, that made all of this possible: Build Culture.

This means that you do not merely roll and play a Warrior. You build one, as one does a machine- or a robot.

See the tab above on Mech-Piloting. Build Culture fosters the ability to optimize character performance--something Build Culture fosters as its objective--and Gankcraft does this through Gear and Talents; there are always Best in Slot gear lists and Optimal Talent Builds. That's working on a machine, not on your skill at the game.

The mentality this produces is a brute force mentality. You are expected, with your fine-tuned and optimized character build, to bulldoze everything in your path. These days you rarely see Crowd Control abilities used outside of specific mandated cases, and God forbid you try otherwise or you get shat upon- and likely kicked out of whatever you're doing. Why? Against Best Practices.

You're expected to maximize your damage output regardless of your place in a group. You're expected to max out your healing throughput as a healer, and to maximize your damage resistance as a tank; the tank is also expected to know exactly where to do, what to do, what hostiles to engage, when, where, and how. Failure to conform means you get kicked.

While this is a video specific to Gankcraft, this attitude is commonplace in MMOs--even ones that try to discourage it, like FF14 does--because it is effective. In short, it's the Grade A asshole who nonetheless (a) is always right and (b) gets it done first, best, and isn't shy about it. You can't be it, so you have to join it or you're culled from the game.

Over the last 20 years, starting with D&D3 and its design that's all about character builds, this began creeping into tabletop RPGs also. In any RPG where character abilities and performance can be controlled by the players, a cohort of theorycrafters will identify what the game is about and optimize performance to achieve those objectives. Thanks to the Internet, this information is easily crowd-sourced and disseminated, making the same phenonemon seen with Gankcraft apply to those games.

D&D3 was the first to see this manifest. D&D4 reacted to it by making a game that (a) catered to that cohort by (b) making it impossible to play contra-intention and that turned a lot of people off. Current Game and Pathfinder are a mess because of tensions between this unconquerable force and the mushes masses of poseurs.

Not that it couldn't be detected before that point, but there was not a mass play environment or a social scene where its practitioners couldn't prove their position superior by Actual Play results that others would verify as legitimate. The Internet changed that, first with talk and then with tools--tools that showed proof--and backed up with videos and livestreams demostrating this in action.

In short, once everyone could see the superior performance in action, everyone had the same realization that everyone seeing breach-loaders vs. muzzle-loaders in action did: either conform and catch up or get wrecked and left behind.

Until the publishers and developers are willing and able to do what it takes to put an end to the means that allow this culture, it will persist.

This can be done. There is just insufficient will in nigh-all MMO businesses and too many tabletop businesses to do it.