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I ended up going to the Regional. It's on lunch break right now, so far I've swept once and split once.
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May 27, 2017 21:50
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CirclMastr posted:I ended up going to the Regional. It's on lunch break right now, so far I've swept once and split once. What store is hosting?
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May 27, 2017 23:44
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Pair-a-dice in Vista, CA. Of course in the games after lunch I got swept hard, with Timmy Wong personally delivering the finishing blow.
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May 28, 2017 03:36
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Film Critic is a bad card that blanks too many other, interesting cards for very little downside. Its cost is not even close to being comparable to its benefit and blanking cards is just about the least fun mechanic in any card game: it should go on the MWL.
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May 29, 2017 07:30
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Regionals this Saturday, no idea at all about what Runner to bring. Give me ideas people.
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May 29, 2017 09:30
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Temmy-J Whizz with Maw, Hacktivist and Slums / AI . ie the safe, boring but reliable option Zephro fucked around with this message at 09:55 on May 29, 2017 |
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May 29, 2017 09:50
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Is it safe? People are saying that Moon is going so fast that not even Whizzard can keep up. The top Moon deck is running like 3 barriers, 3 code gates and 3 sentries. Should I just give up on competing with the board state and go aggressive with early high-impact run events? Kit/Leela/Adam with Indexing?
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May 29, 2017 11:05
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AgentF posted:Is it safe? People are saying that Moon is going so fast that not even Whizzard can keep up. The top Moon deck is running like 3 barriers, 3 code gates and 3 sentries. Should I just give up on competing with the board state and go aggressive with early high-impact run events? Kit/Leela/Adam with Indexing? Timmy Wong's Poutine deck also does (relatively) well against Mooninites. The corp draws through their deck really quickly so milling is definitely an option.
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May 29, 2017 17:03
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The new informant card should do some work against asset spam as well.
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May 29, 2017 19:35
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Well I just had to replace all four tires on my car over the weekend, so I find myself in a bad spot financially. Would anyone be interested in purchasing some alt-art cards? Drop me a PM or contact me at my username at gmail. 1x Chaos Theory 1x Swordsman 5x Mushin No Shin 5x Bank Job 1x Haley Kaplan 4x Political Operative 1x Leela Patel 1x PAD Campaign 3x Plascrete Carapace 2x Pop-up Window For FFG plastic tokens, I've got: 2 sets of NBN click trackers 1 set of power counters I've also got Silhouette and Enforcer 1.0 deck boxes and a Run Amok playmat I could sell if anyone's interested. CirclMastr fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jun 8, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 01:47
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What happened that everyone is up in arms about Dan D'Argenio? I see everyone being outraged, but I can't find anything saying what actually happened.
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Jun 5, 2017 02:27
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Basically he revealed the top 3 cards of his R&D when he fired beta test to show that none were ICE, because he's lost next turn. Judge ruled that he had to reshuffle the cards into R&D and refire.
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Jun 5, 2017 03:38
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berenzen posted:Basically he revealed the top 3 cards of his R&D when he fired beta test to show that none were ICE, because he's lost next turn. Judge ruled that he had to reshuffle the cards into R&D and refire. Gotta play clean!
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Jun 5, 2017 03:47
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EnjoiThePureTrip posted:What happened that everyone is up in arms about Dan D'Argenio? I see everyone being outraged, but I can't find anything saying what actually happened. He got drunk and did commentary for the Euro grand finals and said some stuff. Here is the stream, starting at about 4hr15m. Edit: I wouldn't really recommend watching it, for what it's worth. Listening to a couple plastered dudes have a pretty gross conversation isn't a good way of spending half an hour. fomo sacer fucked around with this message at 13:33 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 04:02
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I would be perfectly happy to never hear any of that ever again.
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Jun 5, 2017 13:11
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I ain't clicking that link for love nor money, but I'm gonna guess it was some gross poo poo?
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Jun 5, 2017 13:14
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It started with your standard obnoxious drunken bullshit. After a while it escalated to some pretty distasteful comparisons of cards, the kinds of stories that make gaming communities unwelcoming to women and lots of just generally gross descriptions. I closed the stream out of disgust and annoyance at around the 4:35 mark. Dan could be voted best Netrunner player ever and I wouldn't want to listen to his commentary on anything.
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Jun 5, 2017 13:33
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The Deleter posted:I ain't clicking that link for love nor money, but I'm gonna guess it was some gross poo poo? Yeah, it's basically Dan + Jakob (terrificy) + Kenny (simonmoon) being huge pieces of poo poo and having a pretty disgusting conversation on stream while grand finals are taking place. Dan and Kenny seem genuinely ashamed and apologetic now that they've sobered up and thought about things at least, but being sorry doesn't really excuse their behavior at and I expect a number of people are still rightfully upset with them. fomo sacer fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 14:09
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Oh, nerds. Never stop letting us down. It's kinda worse in a way, because people who play Netrunner like to make a big deal out of the game being more inclusive than other nerd hobbies. So this kinda thing really takes the legs out from under that premise. 
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Jun 5, 2017 14:34
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I dunno. When I went to Friday night magic, depending on the store there would usually be at least 1 female player and sometimes as many as 25% of the people there would be girls or women. With Netrunner I've seen exactly one and that was at a tournament where her husband spent a lot of the time making passive aggressive put downs directed at her. In my area the game is basically dead so maybe that has something to do with it but it doesn't seem to have a lot of female players for whatever reason so I don't know how inclusive it really is.
Eggplant Squire fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 14:39
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Radish posted:I dunno. When I went to Friday night magic, depending on the store there would usually be at least 1 female player and sometimes as many as 25% of the people there would be girls or women. With Netrunner I've seen exactly one and that was at a tournament where her husband spent a lot of the time making passive aggressive put downs directed at her. In my area the game is basically dead so maybe that has something to do with it but it doesn't seem to have a lot of female players for whatever reason so I don't know how inclusive it really is. This has been my experience as well. I tend to find the Netrunner community over all has less "That Guy"s than MTG but the basic toxic level is much higher. Might just be the side effect of dying game syndrome that is effecting Netrunner right now tho.
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Jun 5, 2017 14:59
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LordNat posted:Might just be the side effect of dying game syndrome that is effecting Netrunner right now tho.
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Jun 5, 2017 15:48
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It's that thing where nobody buys into a game any more because everyone's saying it's dying, I bet.
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Jun 5, 2017 15:51
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I instinctively have an idea what "Dying Game Syndrome" is, but can I get your definition of it? I assume nerds getting mad because their game is dying, and when nerds get mad apparently they get really sexist (and probably racist and homophobic too) While I never saw any grossness from my local group of Netrunners, there was only ever three girls I saw at the events - one played just on her own, one played because her boyfriend got into it, and the other was just there (and not playing) because her boyfriend was playing. So not a fantastic track record, and I live in a really progressive / liberal city that I would expect a lot more from. I definitely would see a more even distribution at MtG events, but I think that could maybe be written off as it being a more popular / successful game?
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Jun 5, 2017 15:54
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It's probably just that Magic's way more popular. There's also a bunch of reasonably high-profile female players and content creators nowadays, too.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:03
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:I instinctively have an idea what "Dying Game Syndrome" is, but can I get your definition of it? Once a games community stops growing it condenses more and more into just the hardcore loaner types holding on. Those type of people tend to have limited social skills and drive more people away from the game. I see it less in tabletop games, it tends to be a more video game related thing but Netrunner has the stink of Dying Game Syndrome all over it right now. FFG really needs to fix game balance and work on reviving the kitchen table side of the game to keep it alive.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:10
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LordNat posted:FFG really needs to fix game balance and work on reviving the kitchen table side of the game to keep it alive.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:23
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LordNat posted:Once a games community stops growing it condenses more and more into just the hardcore loaner types holding on. Those type of people tend to have limited social skills and drive more people away from the game. I see it less in tabletop games, it tends to be a more video game related thing but Netrunner has the stink of Dying Game Syndrome all over it right now. FFG really needs to fix game balance and work on reviving the kitchen table side of the game to keep it alive. I think netrunner would probably need a complete overhaul / redesign to improve the problems it has on the kitchen table front. It’s a really drat complicated game, and there’s a lot of things you gotta try to teach people new to it. Compare to MtG, where the teaching basically goes “you can only play one of these land cards per turn, which you can turn sideways to gain mana, which you use as energy to play cards. you can attack with monsters, the left number is how much damage they deal and the right number is how much damage is needed to kill them. if you attack with a monster, you can't block with it on your next turn. you need to deal 20 total damage to me in order to win.” and that’s BASICALLY the whole game. There are more finnicky parts to the rules, of course, but those four sentences are enough to get someone playing. When you try to teach netrunner, you need to explain all the different actions you can take on a turn, you need to explain how running works and how ice encounters work and how damage works and if the runner runs out of cards in hand they lose but the corp doesn’t and if the corp runs out of cards in their deck they lose but the runner doesn’t and also the corp draws a card every turn but the runner doesn’t and and and etc. this is a lot of info, especially when I suspect most casual / new players’ eyes start glazing over as soon as you go “okay, so there are three TYPEs of ice..” e: god help you if you're teaching a new player and they run into a psygame or a trace. CodfishCartographer fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 16:25
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I think the fundamental problem with Netrunner as it stands is that the fantasy we're sold (cyberpunk mind games as runners slip through layers of corporate ice) is orthogonal to the metagame as designed (win by avoiding ice interaction, controlling economy, never leaving your agendas on the table). All these cool ice cards but how often does a subroutine actually fire in a game between experienced players? Ice destruction and econ denial are king. I don't know if that's a solvable problem. The issue is that in a pure breaker vs. ice game the corp will always win. I stopped playing when NBN fast advance was really taking off, the old astrobiotics days, and by the time I had interest and money to get back in there were too many packs ahead of me on the treadmill. I was a big Weyland ultramodernism player, I liked that deck and thought it was pretty interactive.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:39
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Honestly I have no idea what they can do. You are both right, the core complexity of the game while something I love is what is hurting it the most at this point. Maybe Netrunner just grew to fast and we are seeing a bubble bursting kind of effect. That said I have not played in a few months since I got tired of toxic players on Jenteki.net. I am more or less all in on jumping ship to L5R later this year crowd.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:39
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A hypothetical Netrunner 2.0 should probably come with a built-in Jackson Howard. Or some other tool for controlling agenda flood/drought.
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Jun 5, 2017 16:40
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Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:Other than "stop giving Orange and Yellow ALL THE CARDS", how would you do this? Specifically, the "kitchen table side" of things. NetRunner strikes me as a Vs. System-level complex game designed explicitly for die-hards; it's immensely complex and unapproachable (hence the thread title). What on Earth could you do to make it more casual? The game could definitely be changed to be more casual-friendly, but again it’d need a massive overhauling to make it work. It might be an interesting / fun game design experiment to try and simplify it down, actually. Probably would need to get rid of ice types and ice breakers, streamline it so both players have the same number of actions and both draw (or don’t) cards at the start of the turn, get rid of memory limits (and probably traces in general as well), smooth out how upgrades / assets+agendas all fit into servers together, make deck construction for corp easier in terms of agendas and agenda points, maaaybe standardize the name of things (R&D vs stack, archives vs heap, etc). Like I said, the game would need a massive overhaul, as basically every one of these suggestions would require entire redesigns of almost every facet of the game in order to still function afterwards. I'm also not saying any of these suggestions would be GOOD for the game or make it better, but they would certainly make the game much more accessible for new players. It also would lose some of the complexity that the current fanbase enjoys, but that may be necessary if the game is going to stay alive. General Battuta posted:I don't know if that's a solvable problem. The issue is that in a pure breaker vs. ice game the corp will always win. See, I actually don't agree with this. I wrote up a bit of an effort post a while back on how the game has a dynamic shifting balance of power built into it: CodfishCartographer posted:Ice is binary, but ideally that binary state changes throughout the game and that’s what makes (made) ice interesting. When you’re new to netrunner and playing with other newbies, ice serves the purpose of shifting the balance of power back and forth. The pacing of the games tend to go: I think that this shifting balance of power is really elegant way to design the game and will come very naturally to newer players, but is lost as players gain more experience with the game. I think if FFG kept this design as the focus, the game could have shined much more. If a Netrunner 2.0: Casual Edition ever happens, I think THIS should be the focus of the design. CodfishCartographer fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 16:46
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With the exception of something to control agenda flood, I don't think Netrunner has problems that couldn't be solved with a redo of the card pool
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Jun 5, 2017 17:07
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I feel like FFG could make a really good beginner-friendly box built around a similar concept as the demo decks FFG was sending to shops a couple of years ago. Get people to dip their toes in for way cheaper than a Core Set, learning the game mechanics along the way.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:13
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Media presence and visibility. Magic made a big push starting around 2010 to revitalize Friday Night Magic -- pushing it to be far more approachable than other kinds of "organized play." There isn't an expectation that an FNM player needs to be running a perfect deck, or even be knife-sharp familiar with everything in the game. FFG's Game Night kits occupy a nebulous space of competitiveness, and frequently get put in their pyramid of events as a step towards Regionals and higher -- they don't need to be. Second, even a modest YouTube series in the vein of MtG's "Spellslingers" would do wonders for approachability. That series took players from all levels, showed off different decks at simple, but not stripped down levels of play. It's kind of surprising to see FFG not copy that show's model for any of their games like X-Wing or Destiny even. With regards to women, (and non-white dudes across the hobby more broadly), there's a theory of critical mass. Basically, when 30% of a space represents a group, it becomes self-sustaining. Here in St Louis, I worked with one of our locals to get a Lady Netrunner's night going at her shop. (Obviously, I couldn't personally take the lead on that.) It's still going for what that's worth. But organizing takes loving work, it burned me out for a good long while. I'm playing Terminal Directive tomorrow, but I don't want to describe myself as back by any stretch. If that organizing isn't driven by FFG then shops often only want to if they're deeply invested in it. If it's driven by the players, then the game has to be putting forward good gameplay. Clawing back the game from the degeneracy it experienced, and it absolutely did drop in quality as prison and non-interaction decks took over, is happening, but it's fallacious to suggest that's a panacea when there are other things that must be broached as well.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:38
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As someone obsessed with cyberpunk (and who really likes ANR's take on it) I'd be really sad to see it go. However, it's really hard to get new players into the games. With MTG you can get people hooked with simple decks and let them gradually move to more complex archetypes/cards by themselves, but in ANR the baseline of thought required for even the simplest decks to work is higher in my experience. Not to mention that you need a corp and a runner. One of my friends prefers corp while I prefer runner, so that's nice... but in our group of traditional gamers it's very lopsided towards runner.
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Jun 5, 2017 17:40
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Netrunner has a few problems for beginners. The first is that it's fairly complicated and has a lot of nuances to the run and a lot of stuff that isn't immediately obvious. It also has a ton of traps that can kill new players from seemingly out of nowhere. The amount of knowledge of individual cards you have to have in order to really understand how to play and have a good match is considerable. I've tried teaching it to a few people and it's difficult because they feel a lot of stuff is unbalanced because they don't understand how it all work as a package. Even after explaining how they are supposed to play around certain things they felt a lot of the elements were confusing or that they didn't have a chance once the corp build up a huge defense (meaning they should have been putting on more pressure) or the runner just slips through all their ICE. Games like Magic and Hearthstone not being asymmetrical are a lot easier for people to see how the parts work. The biggest issue though is the price. It's now absurdly expensive to get into the game. I've gotten some people past the initial hump of learning the basics and then when they see the price tag on building current decks they decide they aren't that interested. The idea behind the format of buying the data packs was good as opposed to Magic but now it's more expensive to get into the game and the cards have very limited resale value and a tiny community to use them in. I really, really like the game and theme but it just feels like they have to reset something since there's such a huge barrier to entry at this point and there's not this Friday Night magic push to get it going. A year or so ago a few stores tried to do Fantasy Flight nights and they all died within a few months from lack of interest. I think it needs some way to get new players in also without the caveat that they will have to buy three base sets to get all the competitive cards. Eggplant Squire fucked around with this message at 02:11 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 02:08
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Really, I don't think that buying three core sets is even the biggest wall. People point to it a lot since it's the most obvious, but I think the datapacks are a much bigger offender. Ironically, their non-random element was their downfall: since FFG can rely on players having easy access to any given card, they can design silver bullets easily with knowledge that those cards will be available to everyone. Unfortunately, they relied way too heavily on this, so now every other datapack has a mandatory silver bullet for any given deck to function. Games with random card pools can't rely on players having free access to everything, so they don't design silver bullets as easily. FFG going whole hog on silver bullets means that to make a functional deck you need to buy multiple data packs (and maybe some big boxes) in order to have a deck and not need to worry about getting exploded / FA'd / tagstormed / SIFR'd / Agenda Flooded / R&D locked / etc. The fact you need to do this for both Corp and runner just exacerbates the issue.
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Jun 6, 2017 02:23
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I don't think datapacks (vs random boosters) necessitates Netrunner's silver bullet design philosophy. MtG R&D basically balances constructed around pro players having access to every card and moved away from oppressive silver bullets a long time ago, and on the flip side Damon specifically was/is on the record of being a big believer in narrow cards and silver bullets. Busted cards and overpowered silver bullets are not at all endemic to the LCG model or ANR's mechanics, they're problems entirely of FFG's own creation. That being said, I completely agree that the large card pool is a pretty big hurdle for new players at this point. I think the world champs decks mitigate this somehwhat (although somewhat less so thanks to the MWL and rotation), but the game would've really benefited from slower datapack releases, faster rotation, and/or less chaff in the datapacks themselves. Part of the reason I'm pretty hesitant about jumping into L5R, even though the mechanics look super solid and I have at least a few friends who are really excited about it, is that a lot of ANR's issues stem from the way FFG manages it. The problems with the size of the cardpool, balance/absence of playtesting, organized play, and marketing/promotion are going to be just as relevant in that game as well.
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Jun 6, 2017 02:36
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Something like Terminal Directive would have been an interesting direction for a more casual, less onerously chase-the-latest-meta sort of Netrunner to go but even the most positive reviews I've seen of it describe it as "okay but not great," and it's also not self-contained which means you can't just tell a newbie to go buy this one thing and they're set. Fundamentally there's nothing inherently flawed about the basic Netrunner gameplay loop, it just sounds by all accounts like the issues are a result of FFG's card design which are further exacerbated by a release schedule that I would characterize as oversaturated. So now there's a glut of cards, many of which are also-rans while another chunk are reactionary counters to other cards and there's no easy way to hit the reset button without risking the alienation of all the people who bought in big, and simply telling people "don't pay attention to/care about tournament play" doesn't really work as a band-aid because there's no way for casual players to have the ability to make informed decisions about what they should and shouldn't avoid on their path to casual funtimes. "Wow, this Astroscript Pilot Program card seems pretty cool, I should put three of them in my deck" is not a thing that only cutthroat tryhards intend on grinding every last bit of fun out of a game would say, which means that if you want to pitch Netrunner as some kind of casual kitchen table thing that now you have to lead off with some sort of hazard guide for new players which acts as an additional barrier to entry, etc. Another issue I see with FFG's version of the game is essentially how they broke things down into factions, which seems to have led to further stratification of the card pool as they've done an uneven job of balancing the various factions, faction IDs, and their respective card pools into cohesive wholes. Instead you wind up with cards from one faction which become must-haves because they're better than anything else to be found in another faction's pool so everybody uses these Anarch breakers, everybody uses Jackson Howard, you wind up measuring cards not only based on how good the individual card is but whether you can afford to squeeze it into a deck where over half your influence may already be spoken for, you've got the various iterations of the NAPD Most Wanted List to try and curtail things, etc. Remember that the original Netrunner was just a generic runner against a generic corp and while that may not have all the flavor of three main runner factions and four main corps and three weird offshoot indie runners and a zillion different faction IDs it would at least streamline and simplify matters on the design end of things. It wouldn't necessarily curtail card bloat but it would prevent the current scenario where two factions get all the good poo poo, five factions fluctuate up and down depending on what the new hotness this month is, and three might as well not exist.
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Jun 6, 2017 03:31
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