Businesses are famous for using legal clout like mad, even when it ends up hurting them.
Interestingly enough, some businesses are also famous for intellectual property theft, patent infringement, and copyright violations.
I'm sure Hasbro employs fairly intelligent people. Regardless of the merits of the case, which are interesting, I'm willing to trust them to make a judgment as to whether or not their business is being harmed.
You'd think so, but money makes people idiots, 3kronor. I'll point you towards the company behind Warhammer, Games Workshop. They're trying to sue someone for using the words "Space Marine" in their book title.
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[I was permabanned and all I got to show for it was .... well, nothing.]
Whats frustrating is cockatrice isn't cannibalizing MTGO (which is one of the points I'm sure Hasbro will try to make). I know I would NEVER invest in an online card game (not with the prices to play MTGO anywhere near where they are at now anyways). From what I gather most of us use it to playtest a new brew or just practice with an existing deck.
As someone stated before cockatrice primarily replaces having to sharpie up a 60 card deck and grind through games (as you constantly have to read every card on the table to gather the current board state instead of just being able to visually recognize pictures) OR having to venture down to your LGS to play with friends/random other players. Hasbro makes no money off the above activities.
And at least for me, even when I decide to build a new deck, I'll trade away my old deck to build the new one and buy the singles I'm missing (which is a SECONDARY MARKET THAT HASBRO HAS NO PART OF). Most of the time we're talking about cards that have been out of print for years now anyways. I don't know anyone that goes about building a new deck by buying mass amounts of sealed product.
So now were at a point where the founder of cockatrice is not making any money from the project (AFAIK), is not cannibalizing the business of WotC, is parsing the pictures of cards for free from wizards' own website, yet Hasbro is taking legal action against him.
Whats frustrating is cockatrice isn't cannibalizing MTGO
i tried to find any sort of evidence in your post following this statement and failed, but you nailed it down confidently as the premise for your entire argument. is there some evidence im missing?
even more confusing, you listed some things cockatrice is used for, which are the same things MTGO is often used for, and again you seem to say its not cannibalizing MTGO. which one is it?
To me this just seems like another case of corporate greed. As a company you cannot feel like other businesses are taking your customers because your customers do not like your product. If I wanted to test a 500 dollar deck I am not going to buy it twice and I am definitely not going to just wing it and hope for the best. Cockatrice for me was solely an outlet to test before I buy and brew. Therefore, as a customer that would never buy online cards to begin with they are not losing a customer in that aspect and since I would not buy cards without first testing them online first they would be losing a customer outright by taking away my means of creativity and testing.
Obviously, I am just one example and there may be people who do as I do and there may be people that are just looking for a free alternative to play mtg.
The fact that all of the cards and their pictures are not only posted on gatherer but also magic.card.info and various sellers really makes the infringement of the pictures and text accusation a tad bit silly seeing as all someone needs is the name to just look and see what the card does anyways, so including both in one place isn't much different than looking at a blank card with a name on it in one window and the cards picture in another.
Cockatrice could even be used as an outlet to test a deck before buying it on MTGO if that is the way a person likes to play magic.
Its a creative game and creativity really shouldn't be silenced over dollar signs Hasbro's move on cockatrice seems out of place and really uncalled for if they looked at the reasons why people use the program. Not to infringe or avoid paying but to develop and lead to a healthier game as a whole.
This just in, Hasbro suing Sharpie over the use of their product in the making of "fake" cards.
but this is instructive isn't it? do you think cocatrice would be nearly as popular as it is/was if all of the card images in it were replaced with blank rectangles with scrawled card text in it? Do you think Hasbro/WoTC would be doing this is Cocatrice didn't use any images at all (even if they try to get by with the fig-leaf of "we're not downloading, our users just download them").
but this is instructive isn't it? do you think cocatrice would be nearly as popular as it is/was if all of the card images in it were replaced with blank rectangles with scrawled card text in it? Do you think Hasbro/WoTC would be doing this is Cocatrice didn't use any images at all (even if they try to get by with the fig-leaf of "we're not downloading, our users just download them").
All the images are available freely on the internet in multiple places. Are secondary market sellers guilty because they use the images to actually make a profit off of Hasbro's intellectual property?...no that would seem silly. Truth is Cockatrice was/is loved by many because of the ability to deck build and take it for a spin before making a heavy investment (the game is already expensive enough), the ability for friends across countries to play together...should we really have to pay twice to have cards on paper and digitally? It also could be something as simple as Hasbro being PO'd that the project of someone works better than their own MTGO client.
From my view its just an unnecessary show of muscle aimed in the wrong direction...cockatrice if anything expanded the card buying player base and fans of the game.
maybe if MTGO didn't suck so much ass people wouldn't have a problem paying for it
As much as I love magic, I could never support using the MTGO servers, and this honestly makes me want to quit magic all together, I understand they have a right to their product, but just shut things like cockatrice down, don't go after the guy legally
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EDH Decks:
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:symu:Kami of the Crescent Moon:symu:
:symr:Tahngarth, Talruum Hero:symr:
:symu::symg:Prime Speaker Zegana:symu::symg:
:symu::symr:Melek, Izzet Paragon:symu::symr:
maybe if MTGO didn't suck so much ass people wouldn't have a problem paying for it
As much as I love magic, I could never support using the MTGO servers, and this honestly makes me want to quit magic all together, I understand they have a right to their product, but just shut things like cockatrice down, don't go after the guy legally
that's the thing, they have to crucify this dude so people will want to shy away from development on the program, making set XMLs and setting up servers. with Cockatrice being open source, nothing can really kill it aside from the community splitting up for some reason.
Take your monoblack deck, then set aside 14 swamps. Add 4 Creeping Tar Pits, 4 Darkslick Shores, 4 Drowned Catacombs, and 2 Jwar isle Refuge and add 4 Jace, the Mindsculptors. Your monoblack deck is instantly better. Better yet, drop those refuges, throw in some islands and some mana leaks, and lo and behold, you're now playing a real deck. Congratulations. Welcome to the world of competitive M:TG.
All the images are available freely on the internet in multiple places. Are secondary market sellers guilty because they use the images to actually make a profit off of Hasbro's intellectual property?...no that would seem silly. Truth is Cockatrice was/is loved by many because of the ability to deck build and take it for a spin before making a heavy investment (the game is already expensive enough), the ability for friends across countries to play together...should we really have to pay twice to have cards on paper and digitally? It also could be something as simple as Hasbro being PO'd that the project of someone works better than their own MTGO client.
From my view its just an unnecessary show of muscle aimed in the wrong direction...cockatrice if anything expanded the card buying player base and fans of the game.
any unauthorised reproduction of a copyrighted image (as all cards images are) is an infringement. Believe it or not, this even includes a photograph of the original work. And this is about the time when people normally say something along the lines of "but fair use" and "non-commercial" without realising that fair use is actually extremely narrow - generally only clearly applying for genuine news reporting and educational purposes - and that non-commercial use of itself is absolutely insufficient to amount to fair use. Also, there is no use it or use it with copyright - Hasbro may or may not choose to litigate every unauthorised use of its images, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the legality of any particular infringement. I think it's pretty likely that ebay and secondary market sellers are technically infringing copyright too (unless they've been explicitly authorised by Hasbro in some way, which is also possible), but obviously Hasbro isn't silly enough to sue them.
Hasbro has authorised the use of its images over the gatherer website in certain ways. It has not authorised for those images to be downloaded and copied in an automated, mass, way for use with a third party game software. I would say that Hasbro would have a pretty strong case to argue that Cocatrice has explicitly or implicitly facilitated or encouraged that unauthorised copying of the gatherer images by its users. That facilitation (it'll be termed differently in different jurisdictions) amounts to copyright infringement.
You can argue that this is a bad business move or whatever all you like,* but I'm pretty sure you're wrong on the legality side of things.
* it may or may not be, my guess is that Hasbro is the best position to judge this - it's not suing people on ebay posting pictures of cards that they're selling, but it is suing/c&ding cocatrice so they're obviously making these kind of judgments.
but this is instructive isn't it? do you think cocatrice would be nearly as popular as it is/was if all of the card images in it were replaced with blank rectangles with scrawled card text in it? Do you think Hasbro/WoTC would be doing this is Cocatrice didn't use any images at all (even if they try to get by with the fig-leaf of "we're not downloading, our users just download them").
Define sarcasm. Re-read my post.
Edit: To contribute to the conversation, Pokemon has the right idea for moving forward with online games. Hasbro wants to continue to have exclusivity while also making MTGO more reasonable, they need to take a page out of their book. Giving out codes in packs for virtual packs gives people incentive to actually buy physical cards. Then they can take it a step further and make it available to purchase the packs online still and now you have two sources of pack income. It rewards people for purchasing packs still.
Edit: To contribute to the conversation, Pokemon has the right idea for moving forward with online games. Hasbro wants to continue to have exclusivity while also making MTGO more reasonable, they need to take a page out of their book. Giving out codes in packs for virtual packs gives people incentive to actually buy physical cards. Then they can take it a step further and make it available to purchase the packs online still and now you have two sources of pack income. It rewards people for purchasing packs still.
of course i know you were being sarcastic, but there was actually a serious point there. if cocatrice was nothing but an online equivalent of sharpies on the back of playing cards, then do you think they'd be in the situation they are now?
The issue is that they were doing much more than that, particularly wrt images.
any unauthorised reproduction of a copyrighted image (as all cards images are) is an infringement. Believe it or not, this even includes a photograph of the original work. And this is about the time when people normally say something along the lines of "but fair use" and "non-commercial" without realising that fair use is actually extremely narrow - generally only clearly applying for genuine news reporting and educational purposes - and that non-commercial use of itself is absolutely insufficient to amount to fair use. Also, there is no use it or use it with copyright - Hasbro may or may not choose to litigate every unauthorised use of its images, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the legality of any particular infringement. I think it's pretty likely that ebay and secondary market sellers are technically infringing copyright too (unless they've been explicitly authorised by Hasbro in some way, which is also possible), but obviously Hasbro isn't silly enough to sue them.
Hasbro has authorised the use of its images over the gatherer website in certain ways. It has not authorised for those images to be downloaded and copied in an automated, mass, way for use with a third party game software. I would say that Hasbro would have a pretty strong case to argue that Cocatrice has explicitly or implicitly facilitated or encouraged that unauthorised copying of the gatherer images by its users. That facilitation (it'll be termed differently in different jurisdictions) amounts to copyright infringement.
You can argue that this is a bad business move or whatever all you like,* but I'm pretty sure you're wrong on the legality side of things.
* it may or may not be, my guess is that Hasbro is the best position to judge this - it's not suing people on ebay posting pictures of cards that they're selling, but it is suing/c&ding cocatrice so they're obviously making these kind of judgments.
So if every maker of a tool that can potentially facilitate copyright infringement were to be sued, then why haven't makers of Playstation / Nintendo / Arcade emulators been sued?
I don't think you can argue that a program that lets you play a version of Magic but only *if you provide the data* is infringing on copyright or even facilitating it.
Again, the makers are only providing a shell with which the user can do whatever they want. How is that wrong according to the law? If it were, then so many things in this world could be held liable for "facilitating". Guns facilitate murder, but they aren't outlawed or their manufacturers sued.
So if every maker of a tool that can potentially facilitate copyright infringement were to be sued, then why haven't makers of Playstation / Nintendo / Arcade emulators been sued?
All of these devices are potentially infringing (even putting aside the DMCA which explicitly deals with this type of thing in the US), and in fact the maker of one such chip (Sony region coding) was sued in Australia (case). This applies for all sorts of things - libraries and universities which provide photocopiers can be held liable if they authorise mass infringement through turning a blind eye, to take a real case example, and how do you think they shut down Napster, Kazaa and other P2P services? Just because someone hasn't yet been sued for something doesn't mean it's not infringement.
I don't think you can argue that a program that lets you play a version of Magic but only *if you provide the data* is infringing on copyright or even facilitating it.
Even if the program didn't instruct people on how to do mass downloading of gatherer images (which I understand it did), it could still be held liable if the owners were basically providing a service with a nudge and a wink for users to slot the data in to use it, particularly if they knew what their users were doing and did nothing to stop it (all of which would be obvious here).
I'm not making this up, go do some research on "secondary" infringement, or authorisation or facilitation. It's well established legal doctrine.
Again, the makers are only providing a shell with which the user can do whatever they want. How is that wrong according to the law? If it were, then so many things in this world could be held liable for "facilitating". Guns facilitate murder, but they aren't outlawed or their manufacturers sued.
Getting way off topic here, but all sorts of product owners are held liable for the actions of people using them IF they knew what people were doing with their product and did nothing to stop it. It's tort law 101. The same would be true of gun manufacturers in the US except that there's NRA sponsored legislation which specifically prevents that from happening with guns (unlike every other product in the market).
At one time, maybe.. 15 ish years ago, must have been around 1997 or 98. whomever made NES Emulators WERE sued, or at least C&D'd ~ because, one day the Emulator, and others like it were there. You could play Zelda and pause/save it.. it was awesome... then.. nothing.. anywhere on the internet. It was like an Emulator Ghost town. It was like a pic Beyonce's chocha had gotten out and Jay-Z shut down the internet or something it was crazy, at the time.
Today, perhaps they reached an agreement, or the emulator's are made BY Nintendo, or producing income for them somehow, IDK ~ but, it did happen.
In regards to this shutting down of Cockatrice, it's clear whomever is making the decisions for Magic: The Gathering, doesn't play, never has played, has no idea who their customer is, and I would love to see it back in the hands of someone as passionate about the game as the people that play everyday.
Because until you are up til midnight making a deck for a tournament the next day, wanting to test it, you'll never understand; and Cockatrice was a perfect way to do just that.
I remember my roommate and I were practicing for a limited GP last year and we used one of those limited sealed pool generators to get our cards and made the decks on cockatrice and play tested for hours and days. You just can't even do that on MTGO without paying for more new virtual cards...which, I may add, and even though I have and will continue to use MTGO as well, is my biggest problem with MTGO.
**THE PACKS COST THE SAME AMOUNT AS THE REAL THING -- BUT THE VALUE IS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THE SAME IN MOST CASES** so, you can't even really justify an investment... if you're looking to justify pulling the trigger on buying tickets to get the cards on their system. And all those bots just ruin the trading experience for me, personally. Yes, it's convenient to be able to get singles and such anytime, but there needs to be a Human only trading section at least so you can filter through all of the losers looking to just rip you off any chance they get. It's really not an inviting experience. I can take my cards to any Magic shop and trade with people, not the case on MTGO, IMO. Yes, you can trade, but everyone on MTGO is the same type of person. They are all grinders. They are all looking for the same cards to build and test the same decks, so, cards that often have value to people who play EDH or just casually that you always find at a card store, you just never find.. and those cards that are 3 or 4 bucks each that you can at least put together towards something you can use, are reduced to near worthless, literally... like 0.012 tickets. Like, for real? It's just a bad bad bad bad system.
However, they do offer you the ability to collect an entire set and trade it in for the real cards, but in the years I have been playing MTGO off and on, I have done that exactly zero times. I'm a Magic player... I am not trying to put in all that effort, say what you will, to go and search out to make a set... then I wouldn't have my virtual cards anymore to playtest... but then you could sell them on ebay and buy more virtual cards yay! Just, no. stop it! Bad penguin! ..................... >,>
I'm rambling.
Point is.... Magic Online is NOT being hurt by Cockatrice. The people that play each are different. Most people who play Magic Online do so because they grind QPs, they grind sets to resell, they stream for people, or they just aren't good with money and don't care what they use to burn it with. And the people who play Cockatrice just want to play Magic, without having to pay out any more than they have to already 4 times a year+ to continue playing...... I happen to be the exception, where I play MTGO mostly because I go in these phases of being addicted to draft, like literally. Super addictive personality and it's fun~ but they people on that game are the same. Trying to all draft the same types of decks, min/max, elitist jerks... the same tools you find on MMORPGS in the Raiding guilds... I know, because I used to lead those winners... anyways, rant off... I just don't think Hasboro gets it.
It's like an auditor at a big corporation. He or She looks at the bottom line, makes cuts to areas they feel are being "overspent"... never seeing the people who feel the real effect of their cuts by being laid off, no longer having an income or health insurance. That's real. This is the same.
Get the game back into the hands of gamers. It doesn't mean you can't make money. Just make money while taking care of the people who give it to you.
I tell you what. If Hasboro wants to do something smart, hire the dude that made Cockatrice. Charge $10 a month across the board for the exact same thing, but improve the UI, let it use the rules system and hell, I'd pay for it and not even feel ripped off... MMOS, which I don't play anymore are $15 a month, and overall, on average, between the people that have their cards already on MTGO and never buy more product and the people that play limited, I bet you'd a) make more money and b) attract even MORE Magic players to use the service and the GAME
Something to consider~
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Interestingly enough, some businesses are also famous for intellectual property theft, patent infringement, and copyright violations.
I'm sure Hasbro employs fairly intelligent people. Regardless of the merits of the case, which are interesting, I'm willing to trust them to make a judgment as to whether or not their business is being harmed.
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As someone stated before cockatrice primarily replaces having to sharpie up a 60 card deck and grind through games (as you constantly have to read every card on the table to gather the current board state instead of just being able to visually recognize pictures) OR having to venture down to your LGS to play with friends/random other players. Hasbro makes no money off the above activities.
And at least for me, even when I decide to build a new deck, I'll trade away my old deck to build the new one and buy the singles I'm missing (which is a SECONDARY MARKET THAT HASBRO HAS NO PART OF). Most of the time we're talking about cards that have been out of print for years now anyways. I don't know anyone that goes about building a new deck by buying mass amounts of sealed product.
So now were at a point where the founder of cockatrice is not making any money from the project (AFAIK), is not cannibalizing the business of WotC, is parsing the pictures of cards for free from wizards' own website, yet Hasbro is taking legal action against him.
:confused::confused::confused::confused::confused::confused:
even more confusing, you listed some things cockatrice is used for, which are the same things MTGO is often used for, and again you seem to say its not cannibalizing MTGO. which one is it?
Which doesn't matter, copyright infringement does not require financial gain
Proof?
And is using them in a way that infringes on Hasbro's IP
As they should.
I still have the program on my old computer (just upgraded). How do I transfer the sets over, I already transferred the program via flash drive.
If anyone has them, please PM me.
Obviously, I am just one example and there may be people who do as I do and there may be people that are just looking for a free alternative to play mtg.
The fact that all of the cards and their pictures are not only posted on gatherer but also magic.card.info and various sellers really makes the infringement of the pictures and text accusation a tad bit silly seeing as all someone needs is the name to just look and see what the card does anyways, so including both in one place isn't much different than looking at a blank card with a name on it in one window and the cards picture in another.
Cockatrice could even be used as an outlet to test a deck before buying it on MTGO if that is the way a person likes to play magic.
Its a creative game and creativity really shouldn't be silenced over dollar signs Hasbro's move on cockatrice seems out of place and really uncalled for if they looked at the reasons why people use the program. Not to infringe or avoid paying but to develop and lead to a healthier game as a whole.
RGW Burn RGW
U Mono U Tron U
EDH:
UR Niv-Mizzet UR
but this is instructive isn't it? do you think cocatrice would be nearly as popular as it is/was if all of the card images in it were replaced with blank rectangles with scrawled card text in it? Do you think Hasbro/WoTC would be doing this is Cocatrice didn't use any images at all (even if they try to get by with the fig-leaf of "we're not downloading, our users just download them").
RUG
Enchantress
All the images are available freely on the internet in multiple places. Are secondary market sellers guilty because they use the images to actually make a profit off of Hasbro's intellectual property?...no that would seem silly. Truth is Cockatrice was/is loved by many because of the ability to deck build and take it for a spin before making a heavy investment (the game is already expensive enough), the ability for friends across countries to play together...should we really have to pay twice to have cards on paper and digitally? It also could be something as simple as Hasbro being PO'd that the project of someone works better than their own MTGO client.
From my view its just an unnecessary show of muscle aimed in the wrong direction...cockatrice if anything expanded the card buying player base and fans of the game.
As much as I love magic, I could never support using the MTGO servers, and this honestly makes me want to quit magic all together, I understand they have a right to their product, but just shut things like cockatrice down, don't go after the guy legally
:symb:Seizan, Perverter of Truth:symb:
:symu:Kami of the Crescent Moon:symu:
:symr:Tahngarth, Talruum Hero:symr:
:symu::symg:Prime Speaker Zegana:symu::symg:
:symu::symr:Melek, Izzet Paragon:symu::symr:
that's the thing, they have to crucify this dude so people will want to shy away from development on the program, making set XMLs and setting up servers. with Cockatrice being open source, nothing can really kill it aside from the community splitting up for some reason.
any unauthorised reproduction of a copyrighted image (as all cards images are) is an infringement. Believe it or not, this even includes a photograph of the original work. And this is about the time when people normally say something along the lines of "but fair use" and "non-commercial" without realising that fair use is actually extremely narrow - generally only clearly applying for genuine news reporting and educational purposes - and that non-commercial use of itself is absolutely insufficient to amount to fair use. Also, there is no use it or use it with copyright - Hasbro may or may not choose to litigate every unauthorised use of its images, but that has no bearing whatsoever on the legality of any particular infringement. I think it's pretty likely that ebay and secondary market sellers are technically infringing copyright too (unless they've been explicitly authorised by Hasbro in some way, which is also possible), but obviously Hasbro isn't silly enough to sue them.
Hasbro has authorised the use of its images over the gatherer website in certain ways. It has not authorised for those images to be downloaded and copied in an automated, mass, way for use with a third party game software. I would say that Hasbro would have a pretty strong case to argue that Cocatrice has explicitly or implicitly facilitated or encouraged that unauthorised copying of the gatherer images by its users. That facilitation (it'll be termed differently in different jurisdictions) amounts to copyright infringement.
You can argue that this is a bad business move or whatever all you like,* but I'm pretty sure you're wrong on the legality side of things.
* it may or may not be, my guess is that Hasbro is the best position to judge this - it's not suing people on ebay posting pictures of cards that they're selling, but it is suing/c&ding cocatrice so they're obviously making these kind of judgments.
Define sarcasm. Re-read my post.
Edit: To contribute to the conversation, Pokemon has the right idea for moving forward with online games. Hasbro wants to continue to have exclusivity while also making MTGO more reasonable, they need to take a page out of their book. Giving out codes in packs for virtual packs gives people incentive to actually buy physical cards. Then they can take it a step further and make it available to purchase the packs online still and now you have two sources of pack income. It rewards people for purchasing packs still.
of course i know you were being sarcastic, but there was actually a serious point there. if cocatrice was nothing but an online equivalent of sharpies on the back of playing cards, then do you think they'd be in the situation they are now?
The issue is that they were doing much more than that, particularly wrt images.
So if every maker of a tool that can potentially facilitate copyright infringement were to be sued, then why haven't makers of Playstation / Nintendo / Arcade emulators been sued?
I don't think you can argue that a program that lets you play a version of Magic but only *if you provide the data* is infringing on copyright or even facilitating it.
Again, the makers are only providing a shell with which the user can do whatever they want. How is that wrong according to the law? If it were, then so many things in this world could be held liable for "facilitating". Guns facilitate murder, but they aren't outlawed or their manufacturers sued.
All of these devices are potentially infringing (even putting aside the DMCA which explicitly deals with this type of thing in the US), and in fact the maker of one such chip (Sony region coding) was sued in Australia (case). This applies for all sorts of things - libraries and universities which provide photocopiers can be held liable if they authorise mass infringement through turning a blind eye, to take a real case example, and how do you think they shut down Napster, Kazaa and other P2P services? Just because someone hasn't yet been sued for something doesn't mean it's not infringement.
Even if the program didn't instruct people on how to do mass downloading of gatherer images (which I understand it did), it could still be held liable if the owners were basically providing a service with a nudge and a wink for users to slot the data in to use it, particularly if they knew what their users were doing and did nothing to stop it (all of which would be obvious here).
I'm not making this up, go do some research on "secondary" infringement, or authorisation or facilitation. It's well established legal doctrine.
Getting way off topic here, but all sorts of product owners are held liable for the actions of people using them IF they knew what people were doing with their product and did nothing to stop it. It's tort law 101. The same would be true of gun manufacturers in the US except that there's NRA sponsored legislation which specifically prevents that from happening with guns (unlike every other product in the market).
Today, perhaps they reached an agreement, or the emulator's are made BY Nintendo, or producing income for them somehow, IDK ~ but, it did happen.
In regards to this shutting down of Cockatrice, it's clear whomever is making the decisions for Magic: The Gathering, doesn't play, never has played, has no idea who their customer is, and I would love to see it back in the hands of someone as passionate about the game as the people that play everyday.
Because until you are up til midnight making a deck for a tournament the next day, wanting to test it, you'll never understand; and Cockatrice was a perfect way to do just that.
I remember my roommate and I were practicing for a limited GP last year and we used one of those limited sealed pool generators to get our cards and made the decks on cockatrice and play tested for hours and days. You just can't even do that on MTGO without paying for more new virtual cards...which, I may add, and even though I have and will continue to use MTGO as well, is my biggest problem with MTGO.
**THE PACKS COST THE SAME AMOUNT AS THE REAL THING -- BUT THE VALUE IS NOT EVEN CLOSE TO THE SAME IN MOST CASES** so, you can't even really justify an investment... if you're looking to justify pulling the trigger on buying tickets to get the cards on their system. And all those bots just ruin the trading experience for me, personally. Yes, it's convenient to be able to get singles and such anytime, but there needs to be a Human only trading section at least so you can filter through all of the losers looking to just rip you off any chance they get. It's really not an inviting experience. I can take my cards to any Magic shop and trade with people, not the case on MTGO, IMO. Yes, you can trade, but everyone on MTGO is the same type of person. They are all grinders. They are all looking for the same cards to build and test the same decks, so, cards that often have value to people who play EDH or just casually that you always find at a card store, you just never find.. and those cards that are 3 or 4 bucks each that you can at least put together towards something you can use, are reduced to near worthless, literally... like 0.012 tickets. Like, for real? It's just a bad bad bad bad system.
However, they do offer you the ability to collect an entire set and trade it in for the real cards, but in the years I have been playing MTGO off and on, I have done that exactly zero times. I'm a Magic player... I am not trying to put in all that effort, say what you will, to go and search out to make a set... then I wouldn't have my virtual cards anymore to playtest... but then you could sell them on ebay and buy more virtual cards yay! Just, no. stop it! Bad penguin! ..................... >,>
I'm rambling.
Point is.... Magic Online is NOT being hurt by Cockatrice. The people that play each are different. Most people who play Magic Online do so because they grind QPs, they grind sets to resell, they stream for people, or they just aren't good with money and don't care what they use to burn it with. And the people who play Cockatrice just want to play Magic, without having to pay out any more than they have to already 4 times a year+ to continue playing...... I happen to be the exception, where I play MTGO mostly because I go in these phases of being addicted to draft, like literally. Super addictive personality and it's fun~ but they people on that game are the same. Trying to all draft the same types of decks, min/max, elitist jerks... the same tools you find on MMORPGS in the Raiding guilds... I know, because I used to lead those winners... anyways, rant off... I just don't think Hasboro gets it.
It's like an auditor at a big corporation. He or She looks at the bottom line, makes cuts to areas they feel are being "overspent"... never seeing the people who feel the real effect of their cuts by being laid off, no longer having an income or health insurance. That's real. This is the same.
Get the game back into the hands of gamers. It doesn't mean you can't make money. Just make money while taking care of the people who give it to you.
Something to consider~