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PTR had showed up with a copy of “Guess Who”, but he had replaced all of the faces with pictures of players who were gravy trainers at the time. This was clearly an attempt to mock as many of them as possible, and one of the questions he asked was something along the lines of “are you really, really, fucking fat? Like really fat.” and when his opponent said no, he turned down the picture of Alan Comer.
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:story:
 
Anonymus Fluhre said:
Before this he was known as a prankster and someone who take jabs at their opponent during a game (something WotC frown’s on and will get you a loss automatically). Why did he do such things? At the time he wanted the game to be more competitive and more accessible for a wider audience, think what esports are today, he wanted the game to be like that, back then Magic’s shoutcaster alone could bore the paint off a wall with their commentary.
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Regarding the eSports part, FGC games (mostly Smash, IIRC) tend to be more loose in terms of letting players take jabs and trash talk each other, but some leagues, i.e. League of Legends's various regional leagues, and the Overwatch League, hold their players to maintain a professional image, and would most likely punish players for the things that Szigeti did in the day. On one hand, keeping it professional is a must to make sure that sponsors don't go away, but on the other hand, it tends to water down the players, forcing them to hold their feelings back at times, to avoid breaking any rules.

I also wonder how the game would turn out, from a viewer/eSport perspective, if they allowed people like Szigeti to do their antics, to a reasonable limit of course.

Anonymus Fluhre said:
Today asking someone "are you a bitch" would get you a five year ban, back then it got you some laughs. My have things changed.
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Yeah, this is even spreading into video games, with companies trying to crack down on toxicity. Of course, things like death threats have absolutely no place in video games, but it feels like it's getting to the point that light-hearted jabs can be seen as offensive, and the perpetrator much be punished for such.
 
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Is there any sport where that sort of shit is tolerated? NFL and NBA penalize excessive celebrations. NHL and MLB players enforce it themselves and violators are punished with violence.
 
Anonymus Fluhre said:
eSports was supposed to be "sports entertainment" with teams and personalities, similar to what you would find in wrestling, then things changed and it wanted to be more professional complete with sponsors who would get you to plaster their shit all over you like you're in Nascar.
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There are several reasons for that change in eSports.

-The huge flood of money into eSports scenes, from various sources such partnerships with sports teams or large corporations, Venture Capital funding, or rich people that want to own an eSport team as their personal toy. This leads to players and teams needing to be professional, as well as ensuring good performance in-game, to keep the sponsors satisfied.

-The rise of Korean players and teams, who practice for long hours daily, and have very little personality player and team-wise, who then start dominating in tournaments, which then makes other teams have to adapt to similar practices to keep up with them. Do note that in the games where Koreans aren't dominating in them, i.e. DOTA 2 or CSGO, the practice routines for teams aren't as extreme.

-Gaming companies are trying to push their games into being the Next Big Thing in eSports, due to all of the money flooding in.

Going back to MTG though, according to Wizards' TOS about fan-content for the game, drawing Rule 34 of MTG characters is not allowed, although I'm not sure if WOTC ever went after someone for drawing MTG porn. It is telling though that amount of R34 for MTG is a lot less, compared to most other fandoms.
 
Thiletonomics said:
There are several reasons for that change in eSports.

-The huge flood of money into eSports scenes, from various sources such partnerships with sports teams or large corporations, Venture Capital funding, or rich people that want to own an eSport team as their personal toy. This leads to players and teams needing to be professional, as well as ensuring good performance in-game, to keep the sponsors satisfied.

-The rise of Korean players and teams, who practice for long hours daily, and have very little personality player and team-wise, who then start dominating in tournaments, which then makes other teams have to adapt to similar practices to keep up with them. Do note that in the games where Koreans aren't dominating in them, i.e. DOTA 2 or CSGO, the practice routines for teams aren't as extreme.

-Gaming companies are trying to push their games into being the Next Big Thing in eSports, due to all of the money flooding in.

Going back to MTG though, according to Wizards' TOS about fan-content for the game, drawing Rule 34 of MTG characters is not allowed, although I'm not sure if WOTC ever went after someone for drawing MTG porn. It is telling though that amount of R34 for MTG is a lot less, compared to most other fandoms.
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Rule 34 art does exist for the game and quite a bit of it, but I think a lot of it is Yaoi as there are more male characters in the game.
 
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Blagher said:
Zach Jesse is still the most controversial one in my opinion. Essentially he was convicted of rape, got out of jail and was in the process of trying to move past it. It all came to a head when he won a major tournament and one of his competitors got salty and outed his criminal record.

A large portion of the community bandwagoned against him (before sjws in magic were really a thing) and wizards banned him as a result. It was really fascinating because it seemed like the guy was reformed. The mental backflipping the left did to justify it was also amazing at the time considering players with drug felonies were allowed to play and weren't targeted.
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I think you're soft selling the stupidity of this controversy:
(The perception was that) Zack got an unbelievably good plea deal, served 3 months "of time" which was actually him checking himself into jail at night so as not to interfere with law school.
I want to specifically ignore that aspect of the event and merely say that many thought his sentencing was unjust.

There reaction to that was not to look at reform, not to contact their representatives, not to make it known that their judge voting at a local level would be impacted by rape sentencing, and not to donate to victim's advocacy groups.

Their response was to ask a corporation to take over punishment in this incident. Disenfranchising themselves and asking a company to be their judicial system.

Classic liberal grandstanding, lashing out in the most ineffectual way possible. Certainly they got their "way" in this case, but I certainly hope that punitive measures against one man wasn't their end goal.

What's that? It was? And then that tide of righteous indignation dissipated? Pathetic.
 
KillThemCrackasBabies said:
So explain the mental backflipping to me. I realize yo didn't say that specifically but you seem to be on the same train of thought.
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Covered much better in the post above but Zach never actually did anything after that to deserve a ban, other than the fact that he was a sex offender. This has to be taken in context of the fact that one of the people in the hall of fame is drug felon who caused someone to OD on drugs and die, and there are constantly top rank players caught cheating at the game who only get slaps on the wrist to this day.

It was very clear from the get go that he was outed as revenge for winning a tournament and the bandwagon just wanted to see him further punished and isolated because of the crime he committed years ago and it was being done by white knights.

Here's an example
https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2015/07/wwl-zach-jesse/
Reasonable article right? Except Patrick Chapin mentioned in the article served 3 years in jail trafficking ecstacy and legally can't enter Japan as a result. Notice how the writer subtly doesn't mention that and instead refers to marajuana to bolster his case. A lot of that went around when Zach got banned. To this day I'm pretty sure it's a banned word on reddit.

In their minds a man who was caught with the intention of selling enough drugs to be a felony is not a safety or reputation concern but a guy who's law professor even wrote an open letter defending his character is.
 
Quite a few people trying to dismiss the expulsion of a lightly-punished rapist as leftist grandstanding and unfair because he didn't break mtg tournament rules when the forum's general attitude about child rape is that a guy who so much as looks at cartoon loli porn in his spare time and never touched an actual child should be castrated with a hot poker and hanged from the castle's front gates. Just saying.
 
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Alec Benson Leary said:
Quite a few people trying to dismiss the expulsion of a lightly-punished rapist as leftist grandstanding and unfair because he didn't break mtg tournament rules when the forum's general attitude about child rape is that a guy who so much as looks at cartoon loli porn in his spare time and never touched an actual child should be castrated with a hot poker and hanged from the castle's front gates. Just saying.
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people here actually don't care about pedos unless they disagree with them ideologically. look at how many people came out of the woodwork to defend Roy Moore
 
Alec Benson Leary said:
I don't think that's true across the board but there is a double standard in play with a number of people.
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I think that's a much different argument considering Roy was never punished for his actions while in the eyes of the law Zach was. The better analogy would be if you believe football players should be retroactively punished for spousal abuse.
 
Also we only know, now and then, only the sketchiest details of his crime, maybe aggravated sexual battery was a more appropriate charge.
 
Alec Benson Leary said:
Quite a few people trying to dismiss the expulsion of a lightly-punished rapist as leftist grandstanding and unfair because he didn't break mtg tournament rules when the forum's general attitude about child rape is that a guy who so much as looks at cartoon loli porn in his spare time and never touched an actual child should be castrated with a hot poker and hanged from the castle's front gates. Just saying.
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Please discuss my posts on their own merits, and not on any deviation from the oeuvre of the community.

I can't force you to agree with me on what's humorous, but people desperately asking the world's largest toy company to handle judicial sentencing is fucking hilarious to me. The fact that they then dusted off their hands and went back to their card game instead of attempting real reform is just the cherry on top.

Blagher said:
Notice how the writer subtly doesn't mention that and instead refers to marajuana to bolster his case.
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This is a really outstanding catch, and something that I totally missed when I read this article back in 2015.

Chapin was convicted of selling 10,000-12,000 tabs of ecstasy over the course of a year, that's not "hey I used to be a drug dealer".
 
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The whole thing's pretty murky to me. Letting a rapist in to play a game that likely is involving minors doesn't sit well, though on the other hand I appreciate the argument that guy's debt to society is paid after he served his sentence, as long as he isn't violating the sex offender terms. Also, so far as I was aware he never misbehaved at the tournaments themselves; some other player was just digging up dirt to get the competition thrown out, which is just a bitch move in any event. All told I don't think I would've opted to ban him, but can see why they would have chosen to.
 
I think with the way the game is going, not only will store owners, employees and tournament judges need background checks, but players will as well. This is just the first steps to killing the game because WotC decided to do what SJW's on both sides of the political spectrum ha to say. That's fine though, because it'll make single cards cheaper to buy and more people will open up Cube and EDH games at home.

Just remember, a crime you did a decade ago is the same as pushing someone at a convention, calling a woman a "whore" on your personal Twitter account, or cheating and getting caught. They all get lifetime bans. There's no consistency in how WotC does things.
 
Boss Bass said:
I can't force you to agree with me on what's humorous, but people desperately asking the world's largest toy company to handle judicial sentencing is fucking hilarious to me. The fact that they then dusted off their hands and went back to their card game instead of attempting real reform is just the cherry on top.
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Oh, you'll get no argument from me there. It's equivalent to people thinking their political opponents will magically disappear if twitter bans them, and likewise doubly laughable coming from socialist progressives who abhor capitalism but - once again - feel confident that handing all power over the situation to a corporation and then washing their hands of it is a justifiable course of action.

I won't hold you responsible for the wider attitudes of the forum, I just think it's odd that there are people (again not you specifically, just using your words because I see others say them) both here and in other like-minded places online who will reasonably suggest that a rapist has paid his debt, while frothing at the mouth that a pedophile can't pay their debt with anything less than being burned at the stake even if they haven't acted on their thoughts.
 
I have no particular beef with a pedo who's minding their own business, though I can see why they'd be unwelcome at an event involving children. Someone dealing with urges along those lines also shouldn't be putting themselves in close proximity to the subjects of their obsession, either. An actual child molester, on the other hand, is likely under legal restriction not to be hanging around places like magic tournaments in the first place, and I'm all for organizers telling them to GTFO.
 
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