I read today that the Microsoft vs. Sun case was still
raging.
If you've been under a rock for the better part of a year,
Sun is charging in court that Microsoft took their Java language, violated their
contract with Sun, and added specifications to it to customize it for Windows 95
and 98. Sun created Java so that people wouldn't need Windows 98 or a
specific type of computer to run the software created in Java. So they figured
it was just another predatory attempt by Microsoft to prevent something as silly
and utopian as a Mac/Windows/Unix programming language (Sun's) from wrecking their whole
damned monopoly (Microsoft's).
I didn't really want to talk about Microsoft, but how can
you talk about anticompetitive behavior without mentioning it? I suppose
I could mention Standard Oil, but who the hell in my generation knows anything
about the breakup of that?
United States airlines used to be some of the biggest monopolistic
bastards. When a new airline would start up, maybe offering service from
Boston to New York, the existing airlines on that route, having the
luxury of a big budget, would lower their prices to almost nothing and just
lose money for a while. The result would be one brand new airline
bleeding red and having to cease business on that route. Then the existing
airlines would raise their prices again.
That sounds a little familiar to me. Here in our very own
world of Magic, it takes all ten fingers and most of your toes to count all the
conflicts of interest.
Conflict of Interest #1: The DCI
It doesn't take much imagination to see that when a
company creates a game, and that game is composed of cards that have
monetary values, and those monetary values are affected by the rarity and
the desireability of playing with such a card, and the desireability of
cards is based on the tournaments in which they can be played... well, it's just
pretty darned obvious that if they create their own tournament organization,
they're directly manipulating the value of their product.
And in addition to all this freaky conflict-of-interest
stuff, they also have some teeth to bare when it comes to being anti-competitive.
Killing the Competition
Consider the case of the E-League. E-League
is an organization dedicated to running Magic tournaments online. It created its
own rankings lists, and its own sanctioning body, and uses Apprentice to
allow thetice to
allow the participants to duel.
Wizards of the Coast actually sent the legal department
to E-League to ask them to stop running their private online tournaments.
E-League was guilty of nothing more than creating a direct competitor to the
DCI. WotC thought it was challenging their intellectual property rights.
As if nobody on this whole planet had ever heard
of creating points and rankings for a game before!
Another report came down the wire a couple years ago, that
WotC was punishing a guy in Australia who had set up his own local sanctioning
body for the fun of the guys in his area. If I remember correctly, the DCI no longer
allowed him to run DCI sanctioned tournaments unless he stopped sanctioning his own.
The DCI's Conflicting Mission
The most amazing thing to me is how the DCI has been given the
freedom to not only manipulate the starters-and-packs market, but also to manipulate
their #1 marketing vehicle: the Pro Tour.
Everyone knows that there's cheating in Magic. Everyone knows
that crazy unethical stuff goes on during tournaments, before tournaments, after
tournaments, anytime there's a number to be manipulaa number to be manipulated or a point to be had. We had
a group of guys from Italy who faked a bunch of tournaments to qualify them for
PT Rome. We had a bunch of guys in Malaysia who did the same thing for the
World Championships. Tournament reports don't get turned in by TOs who are
sympathetic to a friend's poor performance. Results get rewitten by friends of
TOs who are allowed to handle sensitive judging paperwork. Rankings get
manipulated, period.
The DCI was created with a charter that could not be
fulfilled. Much like the FAA, whose job is to both promote American
air travel as well as promote flight safety, the DCI's job is to both
promote the Pro Tour and sanctioned tournaments while attempting to keep
them honest.
"Air travel is safe"
The FAA learned a long time ago that this was impossible.
If they raised safety concerns, confidence in air travel eroded. So they
did much what the DCI has been prone to do. Pretend there are no problems.
It's just easier that way. As long as the public doesn't know the full scope
of the problems, their confidence remains high and both the DCI and FAA have
done what they can to promote their products. It's a matter of survival.
The DCI would not exist without confidence in sanctioned tournaments and
the FAA woaments and
the FAA would not exist without confidence in air travel.
If you want an historical analogy to what happens
when an organization like the FAA has conflicting goals, and resolves their
problems in secret, look back to the midair incident suffered by an American
Airlines DC-10 over Canada in 1972.
The summary is this: the DC-10 suffered a disastrous
decompression during the flight when the rear cargo door blew open and collapsed
the cabin floor, damaging many of the control cables of the aircraft. Miraculously,
the pilots landed the crippled plane with no injuries. Investigation revealed
that a safety flaw in the door latch allowed it to be closed without being
securely locked. There was no way to know if it was properly latched.
McDonnell Douglas was worried that such a safety threat
would hurt their business. The FAA had the choice to ground all DC-10s until the
problem was fixed. This would produce bad press for the DC-10. McDonnell
Douglas fought and convinced the FAA to merely issue a service bulletin instead,
which would generate almost no public interest and would allow airlines to fix
the problem at their own leisure. Because the bulletin generated no public
interest, only US DC-10s were repaired. Foreign ones were not.
Then in 1974, a Turkish Airlines DC-10 flying from Paris
suffered a similar cargo door blowout. The cabin floor collapsed, destroying all
the controls of the airplane. The plane crashed, killing all 345 people.
"There is no cheating on the Pro Tour"
If you don't see the analogy here, just think back to the
recent mega-cheating episodes involving forged tournaments and false rankings.
To expose such things on a regular basis would erode confidence in the DCI
sanctioning procedure and drive people away from Magic. They pretend to the
public that nothing is wrong, and meanwhile try to clean up the problems
silently. But the problems keep happening, because nobody is informed enough to
prevent them, and secret cleanups have no accountability to anyone or
anything except the profit margin of the company.
The butt ends of airliners will never be safe as long
as the FAA is married to the airline industry. Likewise, tournament Magic will
never be honest and the Pro Tour will never be anything other than a slick
marketing tool while the DCI is a part of WotC.
Conflict of Interest #2: The Duelist Online
"I'm sure the Duelist Online will be as wildly successful as the pry successful as the printed Duelist." - Jack Stanton
Recently, the Duelist announced that it will cease printing
their magazine on paper, and instead attempt to break into the wild and crazy
world of internet TCG sites.
I am, obviously, a big fan of all the Magic sites that
have sprung up over the years. They've done a good thing for the game, namely,
to give the players a forum for their ideas and their concerns.
Perhaps you didn't notice, but the Duelist has always been
a magazine devoted to those players that a few of the editors really like. In a
circular way, I'd suppose they like those players because those players happen
to espouse the same beliefs as the editors. So the Duelist has struck me lately as
being a propaganda mag using named players as mouthpieces.
The Duelist reaped its reward for elitism, namely that
the magazine did poorly and now has to be resurrected online. Now it will
finally be worth what we pay for it.
Dojo Risin'
Sites like the Dojo responded to the community's need.
Players and readers wanted timely coverage, from
players much like themselves. They wanted different levels of coverage,
to accomodate the beginners and the e the beginners and the more experienced players. They wanted theory,
but they also wanted concrete examples. They wanted to be heard, too.
Thus, the Dojo and the sister sites prospered. Meanwhile, WotC was
busy castrating the Sideboard by ending the early RealAudio broadcasts and
later by pursuing suboptimal online event coverage centered around, you guessed
it, the names we were already sick and tired of. Then they handed their reporters
a beating by cutting their wages to DCI Certified Judge levels. I heard their next plan
was to make all their reporters bring their own cameras, laptops, pens, notepads, drinks,
consumables, hotel room reservations and round-trip tickets, plus something
they could use as a press pass and presumably a bribe to the lady in the press room
not to beat them senseless with a crowbar.
Slurp Slurp Slurp
So you're a big corporate giant with gobs of
liquid cash. You're being run out of town in a hail of rotten vegetables
by some upstart kid who doesn't even have a triple-digit art
budget. What do you do?
You do what you've done all along. You wait for somebody
to innovate, then you descend upon them and either purchase them or
Xerox them. Slurp! If it's a really good day, you run them out of
businn them out of
business then do whatever they did. That's more cost-effective in the long
run. I'm sure that was the plan for Apprentice.
Now The Sideboard has a site which miraculously
looks almost exactly like the Dojo, with the exception that they can use
Magic art to decorate. I think this proves their intention.
It seems to me that their creation of a competitor
site only indicates that they have been waiting like vultures for some
gutsy people to open up a market, and now they're going to throw gobs of
cash at it until they dominate it. Previously, all independent sites could
request and post the results of an event. Now, those sites must link to
the Sideboard's page, forcing every previously innovative site to funnel
traffic directly to WotC's copycat pages.
The final intent seems to be to undermine the coverage
of all the other independent sites. They're doing this by slowly creating and
enforcing rules of media coverage that clearly give an advantage to their own
magazine, such as restricting access to information.
Independent Sites in Jeopardy
"I can't wait to see Quart and his imaginary trained typing anteater make us all laugh in Quart's Korner on the Duelist Online." - Vince Navarino, aka Quard
The Duelist may be horrible, but it is no fool. The
editors there know that most of the best writing comes from the independent
writers who have raised themselves by their bootstraps and gained a following.
They also know that with the exception of Newwave, almost all of the independent
sites are operating off a mythical principle known as "love for the game",
and therefore haven't got doodley-squat for finances.
So one of the first orders of business for The Duelist was
to contact every single independent writer with any talent and following whatsoever
and beg them to write for the Duelist instead.
In the meantime, the monopolistic gods at WotC decided to
implement a rule restricting the number of people from competing sites. Now
only three people from the Dojo may receive press badges. I don't think I need
to mention that the Duelist guys have their own press room and "Staff" badges.
So what is going on here?
We've got a company that creates a card game. To market
the game, they create their own sanctioning, their own tournaments, their
own magazine. Their own magazine extensively covers their own tournaments
and their own card game. The DCI reports to WotC. The Duelist reports
to WotC. WotC reports to the bottoC reports to the bottom line.
What other games have created their own tournaments
and their own official magazines, while aggressively threatening to litigate
against everyone else? Why should WotC have an in-house sanctioning body
while all others are prohibited? Why should their in-house website have full access
to decklists, pairings, rankings and results while the other sites do not?
In the future, it seems inevitable that WotC will step
up their harassment of the online sites, restrict their presence at events,
limit their access to decklists and results, and try to throw so much money
out there that all the other sites can't compete and fall into ruin.
Where's a good antitrust lawyer when you need one?
