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Vulpes Vulpes posted:I keep seeing this ad and it's incredibly weird to me every time that they don't have the actual name of the game anywhere. Yeah, the game's title is in Swedish and the system has zero recognition among non-Swedish gamers, which is why they're going with it, I guess. It's why news media usually go "Creator of [popular IP] died" instead of their name, if the general public knows the IP but not the name. Megazver fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 13:51
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I mean, it did get me to click through and see what the hell it was, so I guess it worked in that one edge case?
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Sep 21, 2022 14:35
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Jimbozig posted:Was he just "some teenager"? I thought these chess kids got titles when they were teenagers. This was just a few years ago, right? And he's a GM now? Seems like he would have been more than a nobody.
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Sep 21, 2022 14:40
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Leperflesh posted:lol guess what, magnus carlson quit an online match against hans neimann after taking his first move, because why would this not continue to be a spectacular show of pettiness and oddity? The story is showing up in serious/major news outlets now. OK, now he's going the full Bobby Fischer.
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Sep 21, 2022 14:55
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I can't find it now, but did one of you say that Niemoller couldn't explain his strategy to the commentators? That's more persuasive to me than the fact that he cheated on the website I visit to remind myself how stupid I am.
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Sep 21, 2022 14:58
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:I keep seeing this ad and it's incredibly weird to me every time that they don't have the actual name of the game anywhere. You've never played Original Scandinavian Tabletop RPG and you're willing to post in this thread, you unrepentant scrub? You can gently caress right off.
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Sep 21, 2022 15:23
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In case someone's still wondering, Original Scandinavian Tabletop RPG™ is just 1980's BRP RuneQuest with the serial numbers filed off and everything Glorantha-related except the ducks removed.
Comrade Koba fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 15:42
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Comrade Koba posted:If someone's still wondering, Original Scandinavian Tabletop RPG™ is just 1980's BRP RuneQuest with the serial numbers filed off.
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Sep 21, 2022 15:45
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90s Cringe Rock posted:I vaguely remember the preview on the ks having something interesting ish, but not what. Yeah I have no idea about what they're putting in this new edition, but it seems they're going for a somewhat retro/OSR vibe, so I don't imagine they'll make any radical changes. 3-18 ability scores, hit points and d20 roll-under for skills is 100% still going to be the thing. EDIT: Looking at the quickstart PDF, it looks like they shoved Advantage/Disadvantage and long/short rests straight out of 5E in as well. Comrade Koba fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 15:51
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neaden posted:His claim is when he was 12 he cheated at Titled Tuesday which is a weekly tournament with some prize steaks when a friend gave him some engine moves, then when he was 16 he cheated in no steaks games to increase his rating. Chess.com is saying there were more instances then that but hasn't specified more. I can't believe someone would hold a chess tournament without steaks. What next, getting rid of the frites too?
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Sep 21, 2022 17:30
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:I keep seeing this ad and it's incredibly weird to me every time that they don't have the actual name of the game anywhere. To Swedish gamers, that's like a picture of a Beholder or a cybernetically augmented troll with a huge gun. So famous that you don't need to say it out loud, the fantasy duck is that iconic. Comrade Koba posted:In case someone's still wondering, Original Scandinavian Tabletop RPG™ is just 1980's BRP RuneQuest with the serial numbers filed off and everything Glorantha-related except the ducks removed. That's selling it short. It's an officially licensed BRP RuneQuest setting, and the ducks were not originally part of that setting. Then Swedish gamers discovered Glorantha setting material, and it was Kalle Anka time. (Which is why, while Glorantha ducks tend towards not looking like Donald Duck, Original Scandinavian Tabletop RPG™ always look like Donald Duck.)
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Sep 21, 2022 17:59
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$37 for a boxed set feels... really cheap.
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Sep 21, 2022 18:25
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CitizenKeen posted:$37 for a boxed set feels... really cheap. You'd be surprised what you can accomplish with the right printers. Burning Wheel Gold Revised goes for $35, and that is a huge, astonishingly beautiful book with production values superior to just about everything on the market. But the extra labor involved in a boxed set, yeah... It'll be interesting to see what the finished product is like.
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Sep 21, 2022 18:44
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Halloween Jack posted:I can't find it now, but did one of you say that Niemoller couldn't explain his strategy to the commentators? That's more persuasive to me than the fact that he cheated on the website I visit to remind myself how stupid I am. The video I linked earlier has him explaining his strategy. He's kind of hard to listen to, he's obviously hyped up and kind of struggling to make his points calmly and in order, but I found his explanation (basically facing a position that is a transposition of a position he's played before) at least plausible. I am not a "chess expert" though. Jimbozig posted:Was he just "some teenager"? I thought these chess kids got titles when they were teenagers. This was just a few years ago, right? And he's a GM now? Seems like he would have been more than a nobody. Yes, there's children who play chess at a very high level. There's tournaments just for kids, and there's a few kids who are so good they crush adults in open tournaments too. FIDE tracks rankings in four categories: Open, Women, Juniors, and Girls, and in different game categories - standard, rapid, blitz. But over-the-table chess rankings aren't the same as the ranking chess.com gives to an online account. Here's a chart of Niemann's FIDE ratings over time: https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2093596/chart It goes back to 2013 so it does include his junior rankings.This is unrelated to chess.com game rankings, although apparently top players often post their FIDE rankings on their chess.com profiles? I'm really getting into unfamiliar territory here, but I think the tl;dr is that yeah just because he was a kid doesn't mean cheating is meaningless, but he also wasn't really on the radar for FIDE chess until 2015 when he got up above 2200 (master), he got into the "people might know his name" level of 2300+ in 2016 (candidate master, national master) and he started being listed in top 100 Juniors rankings in 2019 (https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2093596/top) with rankings sticking above 2400 (grandmasters etc.) So to answer your question, I think his over-the-board play had already established him as more than a nobody when he was admittedly cheating in matches on chess.com at the age of 16. Niemann is 19 now, that was just three years ago. Cheating on chess.com had no effect on his FIDE rankings. Nobody has actually directly accused Niemann of cheating in FIDE events, nor has any evidence been presented of that: Magnus is just hinting at it while giving himself total cover of not having actually made an accusation, which I think is kind of bullshit. He's the world champion, his allegations mean something, he doesn't get to escape responsibility for making them by being extremely coy. I think it's also important to understand that a kid playing on chess.com may not view cheating there as "serious." The stuff he did at age 16 wasn't even for prize money, he says he was cheating to beat lower-ranked players so he could be matched up with higher-ranked players quicker. I can understand a 16 year old who is already playing as a national master in over-the-board FIDE-ranked chess viewing that as reasonable, since there's little at stake and games against sub-2200 players on chess.com wouldn't be challenging for him, and chess.com is its own ranking system. When you're matched against similar-ranked players, your ranking can only go up a tiny amount for each game. If chess.com won't let you intentionally challenge much higher ranked players, you are going to have to grind out a lot of trivial games before you get to actually play the players who are at your level. So he claims he used tools to win fast so he could get through more of those games faster. That may also be a bullshit explanation, though. I don't know. It's still a little fuzzy to me what the cost of that cheating might have been to other players. I had not heard anything about actual prize money being won or lost. I think if chess.com says they have more evidence of additional cheating they need to publicize it. They should have either done that immediately, or not said anything. Suggesting he did more cheating while providing no more details gives Niemann no opportunity to refute what they're claiming. His reputation is at stake. As to the question of why he hasn't been sanctioned at all by the governing bodies in the chess world, I think if they did that he's at a point now where he could reasonably bring a defamation lawsuit, since it would be harm to his career and income and reputation. Chess.com and FIDE are unrelated entities, FIDE has no access to whatever Chess.com says they have on Niemann. So this isn't even like if a baseball player had failed a drug test in high school and that drug test was published somewhere; this is more like if the high school newspaper published a story stating that a former student player was having their records from 3 years ago disclaimed, and alleged that the player was now discovered to have broken PED rules back then, without giving any more details than that, and with the high school staff refusing to give any additional details. What is the NBL supposed to do with that, exactly? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 20:26
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LatwPIAT posted:Original Scandinavian Tabletop RPG™ always look like Donald Duck. I’m sure that’s an exaggeration, I don’t remember it being that b…   
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Sep 21, 2022 20:28
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Leperflesh posted:
Everything else is just he said she said. And is generally whatever, we will probably never know unless dude gets caught like absolutely red handed which is unlikely. But there is no world where Chess.com is ever going to come out and give more information than they have about his cheating, They don't give a fuuuuuck about FIDE or other tournaments. They just care about their own service, and giving more information out and their evidence, would just be more data points for people to use to try and circumvent said cheat detection.
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Sep 21, 2022 20:50
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN3zNrvO8b4&t=844s Like this is him breaking down a game and just being completely wrong in his calculations and evaluations. To be clear, I don't think he cheated or anything, but like the people who have been saying that he generally sucks at explaining or talking through his moves for whatever reason that is are correct. I think it's more likely he just played the game of his life and beat Magnus.
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Sep 21, 2022 21:04
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Anyone who's played strategy games knows that there's a big gap between being good at something and being able to explain why you're good at something. It might be a little surprising in the case of someone who's this good at something as analytical as chess, but it's not unbelievable.
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Sep 21, 2022 21:06
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Especially a 19 year old
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Sep 21, 2022 21:08
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The transposition argument falls a little flat since, as I understand it, the transposed position was also one that he claimed to have studied because Carlsen had played it before... Except Carlsen hadn't (although one of his coaches did). At least, that's my understanding from the Hikaru stream.
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Sep 21, 2022 21:24
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Also chess is not quite the same as like a free form strategy game. It is so much more about line calculation and positional pattern recognition. It's why chess GMs/Super GM's can just loving start rattling off old games that had this position, and will just be able to instantly like rattle off 7 moves deep. To play consistently at that level seems to require just an insane amount of pattern recall and line calc. Other people at that level notice it instantly, while he kept talking about how a losing position was actually winning. Age maybe has some to do with it, but he was just very very obstinately wrong. Edit: At this point though it's whatever, it's all speculation and trying to read tea leaves. Magnus is probably just not going to ever play that dude again, they probably aren't going to catch him cheating over the board. And Now he's going to have to deal with these accusations and people bringing up his online cheating for the rest of his career. There really is no chance exoneration here. Which sucks if he's innocent, but such is life. Dexo fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 21:33
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I like Hikaru a lot but I'm not sure how much I trust his commentary because I have the impression he's firmly on Magnus' side from the outset. They're friends maybe? Still it's clear that Niemann gives off insanely fishy vibes and whether that's a genuine tell or just an unfortunate personality quirk, it's not helping obviously. Dexo posted:Also chess is not quite the same as like a free form strategy game. Yes, particularly at this level, although it's not an absolute thing. Like if you watch speed chess there's a ton of moves at the beginning that are super rapid and it's because every good player knows all the standard openings and their different lines and vulnerabilities; but the top players can maintain that pace through the whole game because they are so familiar with board state eval that they don't have to do a ton of line calculation. In longer-form chess though they absolutely do that calc because the opponent is going to do it too and you can't win if you don't. These players have played thousands and thousands of games of chess. It's a lot more like poker than a strategy boardgame, in that in 95% of hands an experienced poker player knows exactly what the optimal play is already: but you do have to adapt to what your opponent is doing, their psychology does matter, and then there's that 5% where the situation isn't exactly like one you've encountered before and you need to make some tough decisions, do a lot of fast calculations to test ideas because you're just not sure if this next move is going to be a disaster until you do that. All that said, I don't find it surprising that a player like Niemann could beat the world champion in one match. Every player, even Magnus, makes exploitable errors and in any given match, any opponent could either notice one and exploit it, or just get lucky with a move they didn't calculate (correctly) but happens to have been advantageous anyway.
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Sep 21, 2022 21:49
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Tibalt posted:The transposition argument falls a little flat since, as I understand it, the transposed position was also one that he claimed to have studied because Carlsen had played it before... Except Carlsen hadn't (although one of his coaches did). At least, that's my understanding from the Hikaru stream. I don't know enough to check this myself, but this guy is apparently #184 in the world and found two transpositions that Carlsen played, one in 2006 and one in 2019: https://twitter.com/nigelshortchess/status/1567020771528130561
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Sep 21, 2022 22:32
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Literal child put in bizarre, stressful situation is acting kind of weird, news at eleven, is all I can say.
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Sep 21, 2022 23:47
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Getting really focused on prior cheating is also a relatively common thing among various kinds of highly competitive gamers, IME. You see it pretty frequently in high-level Magic, tons of people have beefs with other people because they're convinced they cheated once decades ago (even though no tournament officials made that conclusion). I've even known folks to claim that everyone who was super successful before some nebulous time between 2000 and 2010 "had to be" a cheater because cheating was "all over the place" back then. (I have no idea how true that is - I followed the game in those days but didn't have any contact with it - but I've played against a fair number of the good players from back then, and while a few didn't much impress me with their play, many of them are highly skilled and definitely could have succeeded without cheating.) It gets even more intense if there's any fire with the smoke - I already mentioned (apparently) innocent mistakes on camera getting frequently called cheating, but people are also quick to assume any error made by any reasonably experienced player is a cheat. And if someone is disqualified for cheating, they tend to be a pariah for a long time, even after the official suspension has run out, they've apologized, etc. There's definitely a "once a cheater, always a cheater" attitude that's pretty common. To some extent this is of course understandable, especially in something like Magic where cheating is relatively easy compared to say Chess (cards and hidden information and so forth). But some people do go incredibly hard about it, often to the detriment of basically everyone including themselves, as far as I can tell. And there's frequently a sort of indignation about it that can feel performative or dishonest. I'm sure in some cases people really are just so honorable that cheating is utterly repugnant to them, but I suspect in a lot more they're saying it because they have been tempted by shady behavior in the past and are covering for their own guilty feelings, or because it's psychologically appealing for aspiring players to believe that players who are more successful than they are are dishonest rather than skilled. (In this case it seems the opposite, where Carlson can't believe he could possibly lose to Niemann legitimately; that's rarer in Magic just because the variance element means you can lose to almost anyone occasionally, but it seems like a similar thing to me.) I wonder if part of the reason we're getting this sort of thing in Chess right now is that it attracts a lot of the same kind of people, but until recently it's been difficult to effectively cheat. So the problem is similar, but exacerbated by not being something folks are used to dealing with. But maybe that's not right, I don't know how long computers have been good enough to make cheating like that feasible.
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Sep 22, 2022 00:12
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Mike Long was a really influential Magic player in the early days, who was caught palming extra copies of his combo piece into his hand. So even if cheating wasn't super common, a high profile example can leave an impression.
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Sep 22, 2022 01:52
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Magic was the Wild West of cheaters from 1993 until at least 2001. High level idiots at WotC wrote articles about wanting multiple-time-caught-and-suspended cheaters deserving a place in the Magic Hall of Fame because "People Like A Villain". Then, there was a big resurgence in the publicity of cheating in Magic ~2014-17 with a lot of people getting caught live on stream multiple times. Most of the big name Magic/Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh cheaters have migrated to scam games like Flesh & Blood, now, though.
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Sep 22, 2022 02:37
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Terrible Opinions posted:Mike Long was a really influential Magic player in the early days, who was caught palming extra copies of his combo piece into his hand. So even if cheating wasn't super common, a high profile example can leave an impression. Magic had a few cases of really high profile cheaters and slimey players early on because there were very small consequences, like just being given a match loss without a DQ from the tournament. Hell Mike Long for example was caught cheating multiple times. There's even some instances like Mike Long vs Mark Justice where it's known one of them cheated but we don't know who: Mike knocked over his life die while adjusting his deck, at which point either he adjusted it wrong and gave himself extra life, or Mark Justice wrote down extra damage on his notepad so he could win on the next turn. My favorite scummy magic cheating is the stuff where people would bait their opponents. It included stuff like offering your deck to be shuffled then calling a ref over to get them DQed if they weren't paying attention and accepted, since it was performing an illegal action. A player ate a ramping 18 month ban for very obviously doing that in a pro tournament game he had clearly lost. The same player had just been DQed for bribery at another tournament, though that was chalked up to translation errors in discussion of the prize pool. There's also a famous incident of a player feigning a winning combo, where he had two of the three cards needed in play, grinned as if he topdecked the final piece, tapped his cards, and offered the opponent a handshake -then when thr guy began scooping up his cards to reshuffle called the judge on the opponent.
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Sep 22, 2022 02:39
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Toshimo posted:Magic was the Wild West of cheaters from 1993 until at least 2001. High level idiots at WotC wrote articles about wanting multiple-time-caught-and-suspended cheaters deserving a place in the Magic Hall of Fame because "People Like A Villain". That's not an accurate timeline, the Magic Hall of Fame didn't even start until 2005. I think it was MaRo who thought the HoF should include notable people even if bad, which is definitely a Terrible Take, but I don't think there's any reason to think he ever had anything to do with action against cheaters, certainly not in the Long era - he wasn't made head designer until 2003, and never had any position related to organized play (though he did advocate for it). I'm certainly willing to believe that cheating was common early on. People didn't take it seriously in the same way, the rules weren't as good, and most folks weren't as experienced at looking for cheats. But a few examples of high-profile people getting caught and punished and an unrelated WOTC employee having terrible opinions years later are not the kind of evidence I'd like to see if I'm going to repeat that as fact, when I've heard it said many times, but never seen much in the way of trustworthy evidence. There were certainly some cheaters (and always are), but on the ground level of playing PTQs and things (and later running them) it's never struck me as incredibly common, though I was just a kid to teenager in the 90's so I'd have been much more likely to miss stuff. But I'm pretty well versed in the history of it in any case, I just don't think it's wise for me to claim to know how widespread cheating was early on when I've never seen much of any convincing hard evidence of it. Coolness Averted posted:Magic had a few cases of really high profile cheaters and slimey players early on because there were very small consequences, like just being given a match loss without a DQ from the tournament. Yeah, it's possible that people claim cheating was rampant early on because both the culture and the RAW of what was an acceptable "angle" to play was incredibly different. One of Magic's best decisions was to consistently revise the rules to eliminate gotchas that were unrelated to the game like that (or really punitive corrections for mistakes, like trying to cast a spell on an illegal target resulting in material loss rather than just reversing the play), and it's far better now for it. While I'm not confident outright cheating was all over the place early, bad and scummy behavior was certainly rewarded in a way that they're wise to have gotten rid of.
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Sep 22, 2022 03:12
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Coolness Averted posted:Magic had a few cases of really high profile cheaters and slimey players early on because there were very small consequences, like just being given a match loss without a DQ from the tournament. Reminds me that back in chess club in the 90s we were taught that if you're winning and they offer their hand ask for clarification because if you shake it you just accepted a draw. The coach also heavily implied that any of us who tried that would leave the team via the window. We met on the second floor.
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Sep 22, 2022 03:26
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I don't know why you're on a crusade to put your fingers in your ears, but seriously go read articles by Chris Pikula, Zvi Moshowitz, Rob Dougherty, and Ben Bleiwess on cheating in MtG, especially anybody writing about Neutral Ground. These dudes were there and are extremely candid about all the stuff they saw. And I've been playing since '94 and watched those behaviors propogate out of NY and spread to the rest of the country to the point around '98-99 I'd be seeing a new cheat in one of the local stores almost every week.
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Sep 22, 2022 03:37
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Magic also changed its tournament rules for where you put cards a couple of years ago in response to a case where someone lost a very winnable game because they didn't realize one of his opponent's Lands was also a Creature and thus didn't send enough Creatures in to attack (it was a Dryad Arbor to those of you to whom that will mean anything). Given that the particular print of the card looked nearly identical to a regular Forest from a distance such that it blends in with other Lands, and that it caused a lot of bad feelings Wizards changed tournament policy such that you have to keep your Creatures distinctly separate and in front of your Lands, even if that Creature is a Land. On the other hand a still broadly legal and arguably scummy move is "Chalice Checking", related to a card called Chalice of the Void. To explain to the uninitiated, Chalice is a card that basically lets you choose a number and any card that costs that much is automatically negated for as long as it is on the field. Now it's a little bit more complicated than that in how you set it up, but a relevant detail is that it doesn't STOP you from being able to play cards that cost that number, rather the card automatically reactively negates it when you try to play the card. Thus, Chalice Checking, where someone DELIBERATELY casts a spell of the forbidden cost in the hopes that you, the player with the Chalice will forget about your own Chalice and let the spell go through. If that happens often you can get a judge ruling that it's "accepted board state" and the spell fires normally even through the card that completely shuts it down. And in the worst cases the person with the Chalice of the one who gets in trouble because it's actually the ability of their own card and so keeping up with that is their responsibility.
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Sep 22, 2022 03:39
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Hell, just because you were kind enough to timeline check me: Here's Mark Rosewater commentating Pro Tour '96: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/35a7i8/mark_rosewater_doing_coverage_at_pro_tour/ And Long was still getting popped cheating by Randy Beuhler against Osyp Lebedowitz in Mirrodin limited in 2003.
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Sep 22, 2022 03:45
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My personal favorite rule change they did was to make it so that you no longer have to use a card's exact name when a card asks you to declare another card. My understanding is that this was in response to a player getting screwed over for naming a different version of the card than they actually wanted. Back in 2016 Bradley Carpenter was in the semifinals of a tournament and wanted to name "Borborygmos Enraged" with his Pithing Needle to shut down his opponent's wincon. But because he just said "Borborygmos", which is a different card that was also legal in the format they were playing, he ended up losing the game. Later on they changed the rule from "you must name the card exactly" to "specific names are not required, though you must use enough detail to make sure both you and your opponent understand which card you mean, and if either side is unsure of which card is meant then additional clarification must be sought and given".
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Sep 22, 2022 04:14
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Yeah that also solves the problem where a person can't pronounce the card they want to say.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:19
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Omnicrom posted:Magic also changed its tournament rules for where you put cards a couple of years ago in response to a case where someone lost a very winnable game because they didn't realize one of his opponent's Lands was also a Creature and thus didn't send enough Creatures in to attack (it was a Dryad Arbor to those of you to whom that will mean anything). Given that the particular print of the card looked nearly identical to a regular Forest from a distance such that it blends in with other Lands, and that it caused a lot of bad feelings Wizards changed tournament policy such that you have to keep your Creatures distinctly separate and in front of your Lands, even if that Creature is a Land. No one gets in trouble for missing their own beneficial trigger these days, but yeah, I think that's why they frequently word effects like this as cost increases or "can't" these days, rather than a counter-trigger like that. It makes Chalice awkward in a few ways, both the one you mention and that it can "gotcha" you in a way that the other cards can't. (If your opponent has a card on the table that makes it illegal or more costly to play something and you forget about it, it just gets rolled back, whereas if you forget your opponent's Chalice, the card gets countered, which generally feels worse.) Of course, then they printed Ward, which works sort of like Chalice, including the feel-bads, so who knows. Toshimo posted:Hell, just because you were kind enough to timeline check me: Okay, I guess doing commentary is technically a position related to OP, sure. But I don't believe he was making decisions about how to deal with cheating investigations, was what I was trying to say. Long certainly got more chances than he deserved, regardless. (Magic's gotten even worse about that lately, sadly, either because of privacy concerns or just because they've stopped caring about local play much. They stopped publishing the suspended players list a while ago because their software tracked it, but in 2020 they updated the software so it no longer does so, and when they removed DCI numbers they got rid of any way to prevent multiple registrations regardless. I suspect Mike Long won't be welcomed back to the Pro Tour ever at this point or anything, and they have different software for big events that might still track it somehow, but several notorious cheaters who had lifetime bans have returned because stores that don't know them or had staff turnover don't know to turn them away and WOTC no longer communicates or software-enforces the bans in their store level software, which is pretty outrageous. It's the software used for the store-level qualifiers, for example, so a player who was supposed to have a lifetime ban could play in one of mine and I'd not know unless I recognized their name.) Anyway, I've also read those articles (including when they came out) and I've seen everyone involved accused of cheating by someone over the years, including the article writers. Except Pikula, everyone seems to agree Pikula's a good dude. It seems pretty likely that cheating was more common back in the day, and I probably came off harder than I should have as implying not-that because I've heard "you couldn't succeed back in the day without cheating" unironically often enough that I read that into what you were saying when I shouldn't have, which is my bad. It's also possible that literally everyone was cheating back in the day and just accused the people they didn't like of it while doing it themselves (except Pikula), but that strikes me as not the most likely situation. Anyway, what I was attempting to convey was that I think it's unlikely that everyone who succeeded back then was cheating (particularly those who continued to have success later on, like most of YMG and Finkel) and that I rarely see the kind of evidence that outright cheating was rampant at the highest levels that I'd want to make an assessment like that. It was certainly a worse time to be playing in lots of ways, and at the local level I'd definitely believe your experience is more typical than mine was, especially with people who aspired to the highest levels. And while I was rarely outright cheated during that time, norms for things like how badly bystanders would accept you fleecing someone else in a trade and so forth have changed a ton for the better - the standards back then seemed to frequently be "if you can get away with it it's all good," and that's not a good culture. Let alone the sexism etc (which, given that's still way too common, is saying a lot). So I get I came off as more kind to the old days of the game than is accurate, I just find it really frustrating how people throw cheating allegations with little actual support, and came on stronger than I should have based on that.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:20
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senrath posted:My personal favorite rule change they did was to make it so that you no longer have to use a card's exact name when a card asks you to declare another card. My understanding is that this was in response to a player getting screwed over for naming a different version of the card than they actually wanted. Back in 2016 Bradley Carpenter was in the semifinals of a tournament and wanted to name "Borborygmos Enraged" with his Pithing Needle to shut down his opponent's wincon. But because he just said "Borborygmos", which is a different card that was also legal in the format they were playing, he ended up losing the game. Yeah, that was a great update for sure. I had someone trying to use that gotcha not long after and they were not happy when they found out that by letting their opponent not name a Magic card, they were the one breaking the rules. (The opponent had played a Pithing Needle naming "Jace" when both Jace the Mind Sculptor and some other Jace were legal in the format.)
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Sep 22, 2022 04:25
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Leperflesh posted:Yeah that also solves the problem where a person can't pronounce the card they want to say. What, you can't pronounce Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar? Also doing more reading it seems it was more of a rule change from "we haven't ever explicitly defined what it means to name a card" to a codifying of what was already being done by most people, plus an insistence that any ambiguity be settled with additional clarification in instances where multiple cards could be the one meant, rather than previously having a rule requiring an exact name match. Ultiville posted:Yeah, that was a great update for sure. I had someone trying to use that gotcha not long after and they were not happy when they found out that by letting their opponent not name a Magic card, they were the one breaking the rules. Oh, yeah, it was really common with Planeswalkers because none of the cards are named just their first name, but that's how everyone refers to them.
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Sep 22, 2022 04:26
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Comrade Koba posted:I’m sure that’s an exaggeration, I don’t remember it being that b… This looks like one of the pregen characters from the introductory adventure they put out. The game also inspired me to do this: 
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Sep 22, 2022 04:36
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DocBubonic posted:This looks like one of the pregen characters from the introductory adventure they put out. If nothing else I really appreciate their consistent creative response to the serious business RQ take on ducks being “LMAO gently caress YEAH IT’S FANTASY DONALD DUCK LETS GOOOOOOO!!”.
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Sep 22, 2022 07:06
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