Yugioh Online1-3: The Tragic Tale of a Children's Card Game
Jul 28, 2014 17:29:53 GMT -5
Slick, jaedrik, and 1 more like this
Post by Dumien on Jul 28, 2014 17:29:53 GMT -5
And Dumien's Online Life's Story
So, this isn't a game you can actually play anymore. However, it represents an important moment in TCG history and an important 7 years of my life. Thus, this will be a bit of a life's story and a bit of a begrudging eulogy as well. Shut up DUMIEN GOSH NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOUR LIFE'S STORY COME ON.
shhh.... Our adventure begins....
I was in 8th grade when I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh. It was a cheaper alternative to MTG. It was more fast paced. It had a TV show that my friends and I could watch. As I got more interested I started going to Toys R Us to participate in mini-tournaments and play wager duels.
This is actually how I met my best friend in life. He was a classmate that I knew was very good at yugioh (much much better than me. I lost my most precious card (Lava Golem) to a hustler type kid in a wager duel the previous week. My friend went with me and won me back my Lava Golem. Many years later, I would be the best man in his wedding.
At one point I gave away all my cards to a friend because a young impressionable Dumien believed certain cards to be evil. This was my first introduction to the fantasy vs. reality debate that often goes on with religion X vs. Dungeons and Dragons/Harry Potter. Suffice to say, I asked for my cards back and like a good friend, he gave them back.
After countless sleepless, card game filled sleepovers and toys R Us tournaments, I realized that this amount of gameplay was not simply enough. I was constantly building new decks and reorganizing my cards. Actually building the decks was my favorite part. At one point I had a super-competitive deck that revolved around a combo using cards called "Last Turn" and Jowgen the Spiritualist." The deck could FTK and its only method of winning was OTK.Because this was not very fun to play against, I was not a very popular player in tournaments and young, careless, naive Dumien had his deck stolen. For a while I didn't want to play, but I still wanted to build decks. I needed something new.
In enters Yugioh Online released in 2005. It began as a free CD-rom that I feel like I got from a cereal box. After a rather lengthy download You were given a free deck and could play in a beginners lobby against other beginners. After 30 wins you get to play with the big boys. Generally they did a good job of pitting you against players at your experience and collection level. You could purchase "Duelist passes" which would give you 90 BP (and 10 mileage which you could trade in for promo cards) with which you could play games. Every time you play a single game you get a single card from a pack. This cost 1 BP. If you wanted to play a match it would cost BP - to however many games you played, but both players got 3 cards from the pack of their choice. This led to the hidden rule of forfeiting the second game if you lost the first.
Eventually they let you play for free (not using BP) but at the expense of not earning any cards. There would be weekly events called Gunslinger and Duelist Trials. There two events were the main attraction to YGO and the major frustration for many players. You see, you had to pay BP to play each game, but you would only receive prize cards by winning. For Gunslinger you had to win 7 games in a row to get the GS7 promo card. The GS7 promo was usually incredibly competitive AND exclusive to this event only. There were GS5 (5 wins) and GS6 (6 wins) but they usually were not as game shattering as GS7. Duelist Trials wa a bit less nerve wracking. You simply needed to win 7 games in order to get the 7th card. You didn't need a win streak. There were also seasonal championships with actual physical prizes. It was cool because it was like the olympics of yugioh. This was called YOC (Yugioh online champions)
I started looking into places so I could learn to get better. This led me to the premier yuigoh online forum Officialjmhjr.com. There were creative deckbuilders, very good tech advice for the game, and a generally positive community. There were the Marvel4s of the community Lemlock and MadTechie. I had previously only known the Tactics Arena Online community as very acidic... (a tale for another day). I was accepted into the community very quickly and one of the mods shared my enjoyment for creative building. His name was Coret. Among the community members was a player who would eventually qualify for the final YOC tournament. Den Kirson's very own Slick (the Joker avatar).
Eventually there was an upgrade. Yugioh online 2 (Duel Evoluution) was released in 2007. Jmhjr himself was never around and so there was little in the form of updates for our home turf. This led to a split of the forum. Many left to form DuelistPortal and the majority of the moderators from Jmhjr left to form ygo-academy.net. Coret sent me an entire copy of the jmjkr forums since it included my deckbuilding archives. I was invited by one TheMightyNamek to moderate DuelistPortal and I accepted. This place never even left the ground. There was barely any activity and we didn't really have a good tech wizard on our team.
Yugioh Online 2 itself was pretty fantastic. They introduced duel recording (in addition to duel watching that YGO1 had). This lent itself to the online community in a way that YGO1 did not. This game also introduced Anniversary trials. This was an incredible yearly event that would include 100 promo cards from the past year. All you had to do was win 100 games in a week. For a playset you would have to win 300 games. This was a fantastic catch-up mechanism for new players and a gauntlet for older players. in addition, the 100th and 50th card were usually new cards that could only be gotten through this trial. They also used this opportunity to release championship promos that previously only 16 players in the world had access to. YGO2 also included new payment methods and more mileage prizes.
As the game got more popular, ygo-academy became more popular. It was run by Lemlock, Coret, and MightyC. LemLock produced the only yugioh card database and deckbuilder with images. It was elegant and updated based on on the game's files. He also came up with a way for Mac users to run the game. Coret handled the deckbuilding sections and strategy. MightyC took care of the chat room. A female gamer, bluenosed also created a massive free-card collection. You could donate cards to the fund and receive cards from the fund. One of my most impassioned posts involved me attacking another member that was trying to monetize a similar system to bluenose's free card fund.Soon after, they made me a moderator (and eventually a super-moderator). They asked me to assist Coret with the strategy and deck sections and together we produced a large body of guides and free reading content.
I started winning GSs and doing so with unique and interesting budget decks. I made a goal of winning each GS with a new deck. Many people actually donated cards for this cause and I was honored. It was also around this time that I began producing videos for the game. This was the golden age of yugioh online. It was a good time. Our community was fantastic. We didn't allow any sort of acidity.
Yugioh Online: Duel Accelerator was released in 2009. This marked the tragic downfall of Yugioh Online and remains one of Konami's single greatest blunders. New card mechanics were released in line with the physical version of the game. This looked to be good for forum traffic as many new players came searching for exactly how to abuse these new mechanics. They also overhauled the card purchase system. All games were free. You didn't earn cards through dueling. Instead, you purchased card packs from a shop with BP. This seemed to be a really good sign. No longer would you get people trading wins in lobbies to get the maximum benefit from their BP. The playerbase became massive and it seemed like YGO would not stop.
Until they stopped releasing content.
Then they started recycling content. GSs and DTs included the same cards. Years past. One anniversary trial included the same cards as the last year's. We saw the signs. We just didn't want to acknowledge them. On September 30, 2012 at 19:00 EST Yugioh Online closed its doors for good... a full year after it was due for an update. Konami handled this very poorly. They had the resources to continue the game, but they flagrantly abused their community. Even after the announcement of closing they still had paid events and advertised their online currency.
Most of the community had died out by then. Our forum stayed open and many of us had met each other in person for IRL yugioh tournaments. It was that kind of a close knit community. 6 months after it closed, we shut our doors as well. We are still all friends of Facebook and I still have an open-ended invitation for Dinner in Detroit.
If you are interested here are some of my videos from the good old days.
So, this isn't a game you can actually play anymore. However, it represents an important moment in TCG history and an important 7 years of my life. Thus, this will be a bit of a life's story and a bit of a begrudging eulogy as well. Shut up DUMIEN GOSH NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOUR LIFE'S STORY COME ON.
shhh.... Our adventure begins....
I was in 8th grade when I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh. It was a cheaper alternative to MTG. It was more fast paced. It had a TV show that my friends and I could watch. As I got more interested I started going to Toys R Us to participate in mini-tournaments and play wager duels.
This is actually how I met my best friend in life. He was a classmate that I knew was very good at yugioh (much much better than me. I lost my most precious card (Lava Golem) to a hustler type kid in a wager duel the previous week. My friend went with me and won me back my Lava Golem. Many years later, I would be the best man in his wedding.
At one point I gave away all my cards to a friend because a young impressionable Dumien believed certain cards to be evil. This was my first introduction to the fantasy vs. reality debate that often goes on with religion X vs. Dungeons and Dragons/Harry Potter. Suffice to say, I asked for my cards back and like a good friend, he gave them back.
After countless sleepless, card game filled sleepovers and toys R Us tournaments, I realized that this amount of gameplay was not simply enough. I was constantly building new decks and reorganizing my cards. Actually building the decks was my favorite part. At one point I had a super-competitive deck that revolved around a combo using cards called "Last Turn" and Jowgen the Spiritualist." The deck could FTK and its only method of winning was OTK.Because this was not very fun to play against, I was not a very popular player in tournaments and young, careless, naive Dumien had his deck stolen. For a while I didn't want to play, but I still wanted to build decks. I needed something new.
In enters Yugioh Online released in 2005. It began as a free CD-rom that I feel like I got from a cereal box. After a rather lengthy download You were given a free deck and could play in a beginners lobby against other beginners. After 30 wins you get to play with the big boys. Generally they did a good job of pitting you against players at your experience and collection level. You could purchase "Duelist passes" which would give you 90 BP (and 10 mileage which you could trade in for promo cards) with which you could play games. Every time you play a single game you get a single card from a pack. This cost 1 BP. If you wanted to play a match it would cost BP - to however many games you played, but both players got 3 cards from the pack of their choice. This led to the hidden rule of forfeiting the second game if you lost the first.
Eventually they let you play for free (not using BP) but at the expense of not earning any cards. There would be weekly events called Gunslinger and Duelist Trials. There two events were the main attraction to YGO and the major frustration for many players. You see, you had to pay BP to play each game, but you would only receive prize cards by winning. For Gunslinger you had to win 7 games in a row to get the GS7 promo card. The GS7 promo was usually incredibly competitive AND exclusive to this event only. There were GS5 (5 wins) and GS6 (6 wins) but they usually were not as game shattering as GS7. Duelist Trials wa a bit less nerve wracking. You simply needed to win 7 games in order to get the 7th card. You didn't need a win streak. There were also seasonal championships with actual physical prizes. It was cool because it was like the olympics of yugioh. This was called YOC (Yugioh online champions)
I started looking into places so I could learn to get better. This led me to the premier yuigoh online forum Officialjmhjr.com. There were creative deckbuilders, very good tech advice for the game, and a generally positive community. There were the Marvel4s of the community Lemlock and MadTechie. I had previously only known the Tactics Arena Online community as very acidic... (a tale for another day). I was accepted into the community very quickly and one of the mods shared my enjoyment for creative building. His name was Coret. Among the community members was a player who would eventually qualify for the final YOC tournament. Den Kirson's very own Slick (the Joker avatar).
Eventually there was an upgrade. Yugioh online 2 (Duel Evoluution) was released in 2007. Jmhjr himself was never around and so there was little in the form of updates for our home turf. This led to a split of the forum. Many left to form DuelistPortal and the majority of the moderators from Jmhjr left to form ygo-academy.net. Coret sent me an entire copy of the jmjkr forums since it included my deckbuilding archives. I was invited by one TheMightyNamek to moderate DuelistPortal and I accepted. This place never even left the ground. There was barely any activity and we didn't really have a good tech wizard on our team.
Yugioh Online 2 itself was pretty fantastic. They introduced duel recording (in addition to duel watching that YGO1 had). This lent itself to the online community in a way that YGO1 did not. This game also introduced Anniversary trials. This was an incredible yearly event that would include 100 promo cards from the past year. All you had to do was win 100 games in a week. For a playset you would have to win 300 games. This was a fantastic catch-up mechanism for new players and a gauntlet for older players. in addition, the 100th and 50th card were usually new cards that could only be gotten through this trial. They also used this opportunity to release championship promos that previously only 16 players in the world had access to. YGO2 also included new payment methods and more mileage prizes.
As the game got more popular, ygo-academy became more popular. It was run by Lemlock, Coret, and MightyC. LemLock produced the only yugioh card database and deckbuilder with images. It was elegant and updated based on on the game's files. He also came up with a way for Mac users to run the game. Coret handled the deckbuilding sections and strategy. MightyC took care of the chat room. A female gamer, bluenosed also created a massive free-card collection. You could donate cards to the fund and receive cards from the fund. One of my most impassioned posts involved me attacking another member that was trying to monetize a similar system to bluenose's free card fund.Soon after, they made me a moderator (and eventually a super-moderator). They asked me to assist Coret with the strategy and deck sections and together we produced a large body of guides and free reading content.
I started winning GSs and doing so with unique and interesting budget decks. I made a goal of winning each GS with a new deck. Many people actually donated cards for this cause and I was honored. It was also around this time that I began producing videos for the game. This was the golden age of yugioh online. It was a good time. Our community was fantastic. We didn't allow any sort of acidity.
Yugioh Online: Duel Accelerator was released in 2009. This marked the tragic downfall of Yugioh Online and remains one of Konami's single greatest blunders. New card mechanics were released in line with the physical version of the game. This looked to be good for forum traffic as many new players came searching for exactly how to abuse these new mechanics. They also overhauled the card purchase system. All games were free. You didn't earn cards through dueling. Instead, you purchased card packs from a shop with BP. This seemed to be a really good sign. No longer would you get people trading wins in lobbies to get the maximum benefit from their BP. The playerbase became massive and it seemed like YGO would not stop.
Until they stopped releasing content.
Then they started recycling content. GSs and DTs included the same cards. Years past. One anniversary trial included the same cards as the last year's. We saw the signs. We just didn't want to acknowledge them. On September 30, 2012 at 19:00 EST Yugioh Online closed its doors for good... a full year after it was due for an update. Konami handled this very poorly. They had the resources to continue the game, but they flagrantly abused their community. Even after the announcement of closing they still had paid events and advertised their online currency.
Most of the community had died out by then. Our forum stayed open and many of us had met each other in person for IRL yugioh tournaments. It was that kind of a close knit community. 6 months after it closed, we shut our doors as well. We are still all friends of Facebook and I still have an open-ended invitation for Dinner in Detroit.
If you are interested here are some of my videos from the good old days.