NetRunner: More Unapproachable than a rezzed Curtain Wall

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > NetRunner: More Unapproachable than a rezzed Curtain Wall

Slio: Jan 17, 2009

StashAugustine posted:

I am reading "ignoring all costs" right? Including play cost?

Yes, it's actually that good.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2016 21:56

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 20:33

Slio: Jan 17, 2009

Dr. Angela Ziegler posted:

Is NetRunner "spoiler season" more or less insufferable than Magic's spoiler season?

Netrunner spoiler season is certainly more annoying because it's like an American election cycle, it has no beginning and just when it's about to end it all starts up again. At least with Magic there's downtime where you get to play with your new cards for 2~ months before the next standard set rather than always having to look forward to the next data pack.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 22:00

Slio: Jan 17, 2009

Literally always fire that ABT. If you didn't want to fire it, why play it????????

berenzen posted:

Blackmail val is probably the easiest way to find out if your deck can handle runner tricks or not, because it's the simplest way for a runner to deal with corp ICE. I can understand frustration playing against it, but how is it different than a nexus bypass or your big barrier getting femmed? Or just straight up the runner making enough money to handle any sort of ICE that you put up on a server? Breaking ICE has always been the last option for a runner in order to get into a server. Usually they use tricks to bypass it in some way. Like, if your deck can't handle blackmail val, how does it deal with other bypass methods. If blackmail Val really has you down, either play shell games with 2 ICE remotes, or splash in Ark lockdown to get rid of them.

The reason Blackmail gets the most hate compared to those other options you mentioned is setup cost and scope. Blackmail is a 1 cost event that you get to recur for 0 and some clicks or 2 and a click. Security Nexus is 8 to play and needs credits or other link setup to function, Femme is 9 and also at least requires some credit to use. They're also both single target, and yeah they can both easily be moved around (easier for Nexus) they can't just invalidate an entire server alone like Blackmail.

# ¿ Nov 1, 2016 19:49

Slio: Jan 17, 2009

Anarch/NBN all the way. Can't say I'm at all surprised, they're both far and away the best factions on their respective sides.

At least with Anarch that hasn't been true for the last 4 years, NBN is going to be, and has been king for life.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2016 22:07

Slio: Jan 17, 2009

The Deleter posted:

I'm going to assume incompetence as the playtesters of Netrunner are volunteers and not paid professionals who should be doing this poo poo for a living.

Your mistake here is assuming that the playtester feedback on cards like this is taken into account rather than ignored. There's no way anyone who's played the game would look at this card and say "Yeah, this looks like a thing we should print." knowing that Parasite/Mimic/Yog exist.

Why play ICE at all if it's this easy to kill. Lowering your handsize by one for a turn isn't even a real cost, you still avoid Scorched Earth at 4 cards and BOOM! kills you regardless with 4 or 5 with Placrete saving you in both instances.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2017 22:20

Slio: Jan 17, 2009

CodfishCartographer posted:

Disclaimer: I have not worked in the tabletop games industry, but have worked for almost ten years in the video game industry, with a lot of those years being involved with testing, both for bugs and gameplay stuff, and the rest being involved with game design. So I guess take what I�m saying with a grain of salt, but there is a little foundation here.

I suspect that FFG has a really small playtesting team, probably around 5-10 people, if that. Most of those people are probably just casual Netrunner players, with maybe 1 or 2 of them having a hand in the competitive scene of Netrunner. The small team does their best to come up with as many different ways to break cards as they can, but poo poo slips through the cracks. They probably have 1 or 2 folks that are either on this team or work with this team to actually balance the cards, figuring out values and numbers and stuff. These one or two people probably have a pretty solid grasp on how to balance stuff, but we don�t know for sure - and their views likely skew the balance quite a bit.

I suspect that the lead designers like Damon and Lukas don�t actually do that much balancing, and maybe not even a shitton of individual card designing. They�re probably much busier with the overall design of the overarching sets / cycles, and the main themes of cards and their mechanics. Another, lower-level designer probably comes up with the idea of �a console where you can lower ice strength once per turn by making yourself more vulnerable to meat/net damage� and then plays with different ideas of how to do that. I�m sure taking tags was an early idea, but no that�s too easy to avoid with NACH or something. Discarding cards could work, but then the player could just draw more after using it. How about lowering hand size? That�ll work great! They mark up some rough numbers to try it out with, then hand it over to the 1-2 people who balance, then THEY hand it off to playtesting. Maybe the 1-2 people who balance poo poo love parasite and yog and anarch and so subconsciously make cards supporting those stronger. Maybe this is the case for one of the lead playtesters, so they discourage their team from reporting issues with those factions, or ignore said reports. Maybe the lead playtesters report those kind of issues, but maybe there�s some pipeline inefficiencies and the problems take too long to get to, so there�s not time to fix them.

All of this is pure speculation, but the history of the game kind of points to stuff like this being probable. Museum of History not being unique, there being tons of weird wording that doesn�t make sense, NBN and Anarch getting all the best cards, etc. I feel like people get this mental image of Damon handcrafting all the cards and numbers himself, but it�s likely a huge effort of many many different people, any one of whom could be the cause of the various balance issues that can be present. The playtesters for the cards are probably no more skilled / experienced than your average group that comes to netrunner tuesdays down at your local game shop.

The tricky part here is that nobody can refute your speculation, as any playtesters are going to be unable to directly contradict you due to the NDAs involved, doubly so for a product that is yet to be officially released, and any other party is not going to have the information about how FFG does their playtesting.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2017 23:19

Slio: Jan 17, 2009

LordNat posted:

http://ancur.wikia.com/wiki/Blood_and_Water_UFAQ

I just love FFG's amazing typesetting.

That's absolutely dreadful in multiple ways. Not only is that completely not what the card says, now it changes the card from "Spend my turn to trash your stuff" into "Spend my turn to Trash All My ICE".

# ¿ Jun 23, 2017 21:11

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 20:33

Slio: Jan 17, 2009

namad posted:

Didn't FFG promise that the core set and the four major expansions would never rotate?
Maybe this is best for the health of the game but they've made cards I bought from them, that they promised would always be playable, unplayable. Or did I misread all their original promises in the first place?

When they announced rotation, the specific language they used for the Core Set and Big Boxes was "The Most Recent Printing Of This Box Will Be Legal" giving themselves wiggle room to do this with.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2017 05:00

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