Gyokuyoutama

At least you can still buy it.

Better than Beamdog's policy of updating an old game (mainly either adding unwanted features or adding things that were already available with mods) and then making sure that the original version can't be obtained individually anywhere on the internet.

Speaking of Paradox, here's an interesting article from 2010 from them (well really from Gamersgate, which was part of paradox until shortly before this article.)

The best parts are when Berquist says that Steam is a bad platform because Valve can't be trusted to be impartial when they release their next AAA game, and the general theme that Steam can't "win," while since that point Paradox Interactive has done pretty much everything on Steam, even removing all of their games from Gamersgate without any prior warning.

Ditch the Timmy dragon cards, put Taigam into a deck with a bunch of dumb removal, card draw, and time walk variants.

I started watching the pony show again at season 5.

I'm legitimately curious to see whether anyone has watched season 5 or beyond.  It seemed like all pony threads suddenly and mysteriously died right when season 4 ended.

40 minutes ago, A 1970 Corvette said:

I don't think there's been an emergency ban but the fact that there's bans at all is pantsu-on-head retarded.

 

But this is WOTC. I wish I had the image that showed the article where they didn't even know what their own card did.

They banned it four days after the normal round of bans.  I've understood "emergency ban" to mean any ban that occurs outside the normal review schedule.

Of course, the timing shows that they really could have banned it on time if they had been thinking ahead, so maybe it doesn't count for that reason, but if anything that makes things worse.

I kind of want to dig through the archives to find their articles from Mirrodin standard, both with the skullclamp ban and with the later "affinity is dead this time for sure" set of bans.  I'm guessing that there will be a lot of promises that explain how they check and double check things now so that this can never happen again.

It's still amazing to me though that they let the combo get printed in the first place, given how obvious it was, and even more so that they didn't realize how combo-friendly an environment with poor instant speed removal and poor counterspells is.

Has there been an emergency ban for standard since Memory Jar?

While searching for the answer I found this rather amusing article.  I especially like this part:

Quote

If you compare this situation to the current situation in Extended, you can see that there are two crucial differences: 1) The problem spanned all Constructed formats, 2) There was a huge buildup of angst about the format before the emergency ban candidate was even printed. I do not expect the DCI to issue any emergency bannings in the future unless both of these conditions are true -- there would have to be a preexisting problem (that included both public outcry and previous bannings) and the problem would need to span all formats and audiences. Furthermore, there was a real changing of the guard inside R&D as a reaction to the problems of the Urza block. If those of us who left the Pro Tour to join Wizards over the last four years do our jobs correctly, these conditions will never come up again.

Why would anyone preorder anything.

Just the fact that everything is downloadable now defeats most of the purpose, even without getting into how many companies treat the official release as a public beta.

Just now, A 1970 Corvette said:

I was going to write out "TF2 1 DOTA 2 0" but that just looks weird cuz of the numberings.

Team fortress is still wining 21 to 20 though, so it's okay.

I was going to wait until the last second to join up (i.e. when SPUF had actually officially died) but it's almost impossible to post anything with those database errors.