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Originally posted by WeedIan:
Only affects me if it kills local magic scenes.

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Well this will kill some local scenes. At least in Europe. The Nationals are now pointless for Europeans.
We had two ways to get into the protour - by winning a qualifier and, nota bene, most of the qualifiers, if you won it - would not give you an airline ticket. The only thing you got were a couple of boosters and the invitation to the protour. When they introduced the new rating system they reduced the number of ptq's in Europe.
The second way to qualify to the protour was through the National team. Now they removed this as well.
There are a lot of people I know who were aspiring professionals or semi-professionals who made some money on the Protour - now their chance to qualifiy again is reduced almost to 0.
People are already complaining that they will leave the scene and once they leave it no new players will have any incentive to try and go pro since the possibility to achieve such a thing is extremely low.
Semi professional players with this change are dead.

This is what De Rosa thinks of this:
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/pvs-playhouse-organized-play/

Add the possible complete failure of the planeswalker points:
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/an-open-letter-regarding-planeswalker-points/

__________________
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“And we’ve seen that in many of those countries, the pride of being your country’s champion is a primary motivation for players.”

Really? Reeeeally? The pride of being your country’s champion is the primary motivation? Are you insane? What’s next, the pride of being world champion is enough too? Perhaps we can remove your payroll and have the title of Director of Organized Play Programs and Operations be enough a motivation? I mean, don’t get me wrong – it is very sweet to be a national champion and represent your country at Worlds, but that tournament no longer exists!

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To make it simple, now that none of the organized play is interesting, I'd rather play another game, especially one that's not crippling my budget and that I can play with anyone, not just people that already know the game.

Here's what I posted on the facebook group:

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I don't even know where to start.

I picked up my first boosters when mirrodin came out. I tried some prereleases and it was a lot of fun. I've been told there was tournaments named PTQs, apparently a lot of people were attracted to those, and I played my first one during the Lorwyn block. It was a blast to get to play against people from all around the country, and sometimes let a chance to people who didn't have it otherwise to get into the PT. Then I learned about the Judge program, became a L2 in a growing community that is Switzerland.
The old system had it's advantages. Even if you wouldn't play in meaningless tournaments to keep your rating up, you would care about winning and had to play well to get rewards from this, either getting top16 at a GP, top 4 at Nats, and keeping the rating you get from professional tournaments.

Now, as Finkel and other well-respected pros pointed out in a Channelfireball article, the limit that's been put to 100 persons, and even worse, calculated from planeswalker points will not allow for much change. The top 100 will probably already be professional magic players, since the investment to get there is huge. Plus, you don't get a shot at being the world champion anymore. You already have to be a pro to get there. There's no place for the underdogs anymore. It all looks like the fanboys are directing WotC's policies, keeping small tournaments with better level the rule. The problem is that this game is popular. You can't keep tournaments the same size with a growing playerbase, and more importantly, you can't keep them insanely hard to get into, with byes to secure three wins in each GP a player shows up in and thus helping them a lot with their planeswalker points.

I am now probably retiring from any activity except for cube drafting and MTGO play, since you seem so eager to kill the small communities like in Switzerland we had trouble to keep alive, and I don't think I'd even bother with all that if the MWS playerbase was bigger than MTGO's. I gave a lot to this game because I thought it had potential, but now that you choked the progress by doing less PTQs and rendering GPs and Nats less attractive, I can't help but think if you're living in an Utopia where everyone loves playing regular events, certainly this is where some gullible people are, you know the ones who will give you their money without a thought, but you now killed all hope for the competitive people who traveled to GPs far away to get those pro points or PT invites, who showed up at every national championship, who were giving advice and lent cards to newer players to help them step up to the level.

Of course it isn't over, WotC already showed us they didn't care as much about the players than about their profits before that. The reserved list was only the first mistake, but now that every step is a huge leap backwards I feel the need to speak up. I wasn't complaining that much before. Some change may happen, Modern was a choice, certainly not the best one, but a decent one to keep an eternal format with affordable cards, despite the reserved list.

When companies care more about their profits than their userbase, it might end up badly. Remember your actual goal? Making people have fun with your games. And there are other companies that are getting better at making games (See the LCGs? Yep, it's cheaper, more accessible and just as much fun, at the condition you find someone to play it with). If you stop the fun for the players and just focus on profit, well, your product lost all it's interest. If there was no organized play, magic would never have been like it is right now, attracting Spike and Jhonny. Without that the game would've been limited to Timmy who just likes to make a 60 card pile and play against other random unbalanced decks that just don't have a metagame as strategic base.

I'm now probably switching focus on the very good board games that are out there. I can't help but think how great it would be if we could pull 60+ players to play the same game as regularly as PTQs do. Especially since a board game doesn't cost more than your average sealed PTQ in Switzerland, and has a lot more of replay value than 6 boosters.

You are not alone in the world, WotC. It's not over, but as long as you keep those changes, it's probably not going to do good to the game. Maybe you'll get that record profit, but it's probably not worth it if noone is having fun doing it anymore.

Thanks for reading, whoever you are

Benjamin Savoy, L2, Switzerland

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Originally posted by dfitzg88:
I couldn't care less. I just try to go to tournaments with my friends to have fun. If there happen to be less than 800 people at such a tournament now because people are upset about organized play changes, GOOD! Maybe I'll have some damn elbow room.

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