Cockatrice Shut Down

[Caspid]

I still play on Cockatrice (http://play.woogerworks.com/).
It's just like piracy. No one's losing money; if I couldn't play for free via Cock, OCTGN, etc, I wouldn't play at all.

[Tom Servo]

I still play on Cockatrice (http://play.woogerworks.com/).
It's just like piracy. No one's losing money; if I couldn't play for free via Cock, OCTGN, etc, I wouldn't play at all.

What sorcery is this... Witch!

[Nuwen]

A free-at-the-point-of-delivery platform is the best model to introduce high testing rigor to a game or dataset.

Hazbro shut down a high-quality platform because it competes with their lower-quality MTGO platform. Unsurprisingly Hazbo is viciously protecting their online market from possible competition. If you truly believe in the powah of free market and capital (i.e. are taking Hazbo's side here), ask instead why Hazbo deigned to stifle a competitor instead of improving their product.

I could also argue that Hazbro's analytics are just wrong; the target market of Cockatrice & MTGO aren't congruent. IMO, Cockatrice seems to be favored by a significant spread of individuals who:

1. Will not buy a physical card > $x just for playtesting purposes.
2. Will not buy a digital card license > $y just for playtesting purposes.

If x and y are respectively
met, THAT'S when I usually see an individual spring for a free way to try out a card's functionality. Proxies/write-ins are one solution, Cockatrice is another. Money does not get spent on MtG either way, because the individual never allotted a budget for a purpose that could be free. Does Cockatrice replace official events, the primary profit engine behind MtG? A little. I've seen full drafts fired off in a separate picking platform and then loaded into Cockatrice. Is that a threat to renewable revenue? A little, but that quantity can't be anymore significant than the dollar amount conserved by building a physical pauper cube in lieu of weekly draft.

So where is the threat to Hazbo? Well, I think they've overestimated how many players would begin buying digital cards (or a license to co-opted Magic Workstation) if no other alternative is available. I'm certainly not springing for tix now that Cockatrice is on the decline.

tl;dr I'm a computer nerd with server space. Do any of you have links
to the Cockatrice daemon source? I'd love to keep the project online.

[( G_R )]

You could only call it competition if it was an entirely different TCG, actually "competing" with MTGO.

But hey, I see the point of the "piracy is either good or neutral for businesses, not really bad" camp, with arguments such as "if I can't have it for free, I won't buy it anyway, so they're not really losing money". And I'm definitely not one in capability to throw the first stone here, so if you want to help host Trice, by all means, be my guest.

WotC still needs to give us an alternative for play testing. Otherwise, MWS, Cockatrice, OCTGN and the like will only be replaced by the next platform.