How do we save Netrunner?

[PizzatimePlayer]

@inniscor

We have to stop pretending that the people who talk about Netrunner online for hours are the bulk of the people who play Netrunner. They’re (we’re) not! This is the extreme end of the bell curve.

Do we have data that there are massive numbers of “kitchen table players” who only buy a core set and play in small groups? Or is this just an assumption? Are there so many more that the fact that these casuals are just buying core sets while ‘competitive players’ are buying every single box and pack all year outweigh their demographic’s profitability?

Speculating as to a business model we don’t know anything about seems like a bunch of unfounded assumptions being thrown back and forth pointlessly without that data.

If, as you suppose, a game designer has to choose between either making something fun for a broad ‘kitchen table’ audience or a dedicated core audience that is less profitable, what an awful either/or to operate from. I would think the healthier goal would be to support both audiences and gently convert players who don’t buy a lot of cards into the kind of players who do buy a lot of cards.

Some commenters seem to have an active disdain for the idea that buying more cards to play the game with adds more fun to the experience for players. These are self-hating Netrunner players and wouldn’t last a minute on Billions.

I just don’t think it’s that weird, even to these theoretical kitchen table casuals, to suggest that having more cards makes the game more fun. Honestly, if buying new cards didn’t make the game more fun, why would any of us have ever bought them? If we love the game enough to buy all the cards, why is there this attitude that more casual players wouldn’t get as much out of the expanded purchases as we all evidently do?

Make buying a set of all the playable cards not cost the equivalent of two months rent and the line between casual and competitive becomes less of a thing anyway.

[nutritionalzero]

@PizzatimePlayer

If, as you suppose, a game designer has to choose between either making something fun for a broad ‘kitchen table’ audience or a dedicated core audience that is less profitable, what an awful either/or to operate from. I would think the healthier goal would be to support both audiences and gently convert players who don’t buy a lot of cards into the kind of players who do buy a lot of cards.

They do support both. As Horkeimer and Adorno put it in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), “Something is provided for all so that none may escape.” FFG actually does a really good job of catering to different types of players. I’m not saying they always get it right once they’ve acquired their target, but their games usually seem relatively well-made, good enough art, and fun to play. I won’t massively invest in their ecosystem but if I’m bored and drinking beers, FFG can pretty much always come through with a fun game overall.

[hypomodern]

@nutritionalzero

As Horkeimer and Adorno put it in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), “Something is provided for all so that none may escape.”

!http://replygif.net/i/160.gif

[Anthony_Pearson]

Hi everyone! Hope we’re all having a fun chat.

I think we get into this interesting cycle on this topic because we’re missing several things. Unless I missed it, do we have an operational definition of what it means to “Save Netrunner?” If we’re talking about increasing player attendance at GNKs, well, let’s spotlight that. If we’re talking about it from the framework of: We want FFG to produce content for the game we love (i.e., don’t kill netrunner), then we let’s talk about that.

There is DEFINITELY overlap between the two definitions (and there maybe more definitions of “save” that have been in the chat); however, we could argue that building a local base of players is connected to someone “carrying the banner” of the game and consistently having meet-ups.

Let’s say not another card was produced. In theory, that shouldn’t stop people from coming out to play the game (actually, if the game got killed right now, I’d say it would end in a pretty decent place, except for Dyper Oragami Wu. Eff that deck.)

On the other hand, let’s say there was not a single other meet-up, but FFG kept producing content for the kitchen tables around the world. That also would mean the game is still alive.

waves hand to indicate transition

I think if we had a few data points (as posted above. And above above.), we could get closer to a formal answer for whichever question of whichever definition we are asking.

Even more, let’s say Boggs hopped onto this thread this afternoon and said, “Hey folks. The game’s good. We sell 5000 global data packs on average per data pack release. And on average, there’s between 12 to 30 players at events based on the event type. Except in England. Holy crow, you English love some Netrunner. We’ve also got the next six cycles of data packs queued up for initial playtesting.”

I wonder if that would satisfy. My hunch is no because we think in terms of our own playing wants and needs. For those who want a bigger play group at a local game store, then I’m not sure if those metrics matter. Especially if our impression of what “good turnout” means is something like 16 to 18 players. Or some other number that we place in our mind under the category of “good.”

A friend of mine (@Waltzard–I think that’s his name on here? If I @ed the wrong person, sorry) once pointed out a while back: If we have a meetup with four people, then we’re good. Giving each of the possible pairs an hour per match, it’s not like we’re going to spend more than 3 hours on a Tuesday night at the game store. I always thought that was a reasonable thought.

That said, emotionally, it feels good to see your favorite indie band be successful. And it feels good to see your favorite game get 10 to 12 people together for a game night on Thursday evening.

[dr00]

@nutritionalzero

Tabletop gaming overall experienced a renaissance between 2012–2015. Netrunner’s arguable peak during this era—perhaps correlated to increased prominence of tabletop blogs, review sites, YouTube channels etc., and this is supported by the Google Trends data btw—has nothing to do with the design of the cycles or whether it was better or worse for which elements of the Netrunner player base. FFG, to paraphrase Zuckerberg, is a clown car that fell into a gold mine. Hipsters were all of a sudden playing boardgames, there was an article in the Guardian, and maybe people of a certain age were feeling nostalgic (either for cyberpunk, for card games, or who knows). It was an accident, and one FFG had no idea how to manage.

i’m honestly not sure why you quoted me, or maybe i don’t exactly understand your point?

SanSan released from April - September 2015, during the height of ANR competitive attendance at store champs, regionals, nationals, and weeklies. also this hipster interest in tabletop that you mentioned

Mumbad released January - June 2016, which coincided with a drastically noticeable lack of SC/regional/weekly/national attendance worldwide. but Damon has gone on the record as saying that it sold ‘way more than SanSan’

so from our perspective as players of the game who actually have discussions like this, the game seemed like it was dying. from FFG’s point of view, it’s doing just fine in sales, low OP attendance, and most of the players of the game probably have no concept of ‘a netrunner player’ as someone who plays it competitvely or whatever. they probably just bought the game and just play with friends at home like any other tabletop game (or don’t play it, as is often the case with tabletop games <_<)

[tvaduva]

@PizzatimePlayer

Do we have data that there are massive numbers of “kitchen table players” who only buy a core set and play in small groups? Or is this just an assumption? Are there so many more that the fact that these casuals are just buying core sets while ‘competitive players’ are buying every single box and pack all year outweigh their demographic’s profitability?

@Anthony_Pearson

I think if we had a few data points (as posted above. And above above.), we could get closer to a formal answer for whichever question of whichever definition we are asking.

Unfortunately, as much as we’d all love to see the data, FFG does not release it as far as I’ve heard. The closest they come is to compare their products; like 3-4 years back they’ve said that Netrunner is their most popular LCG. But, in early 2017 (after the conclusion of Mumbad and Flashpoint), then Lead Designer, Damon, said on the Run Last Click podcast that the casual playerbase is greater than 90%. I believe that was in to response to the competitive scene dwindling in many areas around the world. I think this is the episode:

Run Last Click - Podcast

In this episode we are joined by former lead designer of Netrunner Damon Stone. We chat about his thoughts on games design, how he approached the Flashpoint cycle, as well as what he thinks makes a well made card. TLDR: We talk about design and that.

Not sure how that figure was calculated, but, if anything, a company should be able to model their broad customer categories. My guess is probably something like the Core set sales is more than 10X the average sales of any data pack.

[Waltzard]

Ben and I were driving to Gen Con and we came up with an interesting question, that I wonder about folk’s reaction to:

“What percentage of all Netrunner games are played on Jinteki?”

[Anthony_Pearson]

Oooh, interesting question. Maybe 50% 60%? I have no idea. I play on Jinteki nearly every night, but can only get to events (these days especially) every so often.

Even when I was “carrying the banner” over at Raven’s Nest, that’s still only 3 to 5 games a week in person. If playing against fast players on Jnet and I don’t have any connectivity issues, I could do 3 to 5 games in an hour and a half, I’d bet.

My reaction to it though is: I’m not sure if it’s a good thing, but I’m glad it’s there. Many of us are in a particular bandwidth of age that makes time a greater commodity than anything else.

Further, as long as I play, I’ve promised myself to buy the data packs–even if I can’t use them as much as the digital cards that are “free”

(please support the Jnet team! Give 'em some cash for their time and effort!).

[Waltzard]

It is a super hard question. Like, if we took your experiences as typical we’d say Jinteki > 90%. It certainly is for me. But if there are, in fact, ‘kitchen table netrunners’ out there, they may not even know that Jinteki is a thing. They’d be 100~ not on it.

It came up in the context of 'to what degree is FF in charge of their customer’s experience, if we accept that they don’t own the platform that the (vast?) majority of it is played on.

Phrased dif, could the teki mods have ‘saved’ netrunner by unilaterally hitting mumbad cards with the nerf bat till they stopped twitching? They presumably have a much better data pool than anything FF has access to.

[Anthony_Pearson]

@Waltzard

Phrased dif, could the teki mods have ‘saved’ netrunner by unilaterally hitting mumbad cards with the nerf bat till they stopped twitching? They presumably have a much better data pool than anything FF has access to.

I think the general philosophy is the Jnet mods will echo the IRL game as close as humanly possible. Even if they spot “bad cards,” I would assume it’s not their responsibility to make any adjustments.

I think the “rabbit hole” question that has been discussed on Team Covenant (and most likely here somewhere in the Archived Memories) is: Has JNet been good or bad for Netrunner? Or, to stay on topic: to what extent as Jnet saved Netrunner communities or hurt Jnet communities?

We’re doing our Spring League all online (as almost all of them have been). I would LOVE for us to do League in person, but at this juncture for me, I can’t guarantee I could make those matches each week. But for a FACT, I know I can do it every week online.

So in that sense, Jnet has been helpful. Or has it been?

[jdc_wolfpack]

@h1tm4n

At that price, you may as well play Magic.

I’d agree that the cost of entry being “cheaper than a MtG meta deck” is a kind of flawed argument considering Magic has very good aftermarket while you’ll basically never get anything back from netrunner. You may be lucky enough sell a complete Netrunner collection at $250-300 when you get out, but other than that it’s a sunk cost. Further if you’re a good player and have a solid deck in MtG you can routinely win new packs so your initial investment generally holds a decent value, but can also continue to earn value through packs won.

[jdc_wolfpack]

@Anthony_Pearson

Especially if our impression of what “good turnout” means is something like 16 to 18 players.

I would say this is generally thought of as a good tournament because GNK’s usually have ~16-18 participation prizes, yet (at least locally) it seems like you always walk away with a play set of the participation prize just for showing up.

[h1tm4n]

I don’t want to compare Netrunner and Magic too closely because they’re very different. However, when talking about drawing in new players, one of the major questions is the cost of entry. When the cost of entry pretty closely mirrors Magic and your model is more akin to a subscription model, you’ve got a problem. That’s not an easy sell. I consider that problem the major hurdle to the future of Netrunner success. When the game was smaller, I had a much easier time getting people into the game because the initial cost was much smaller. As the game continues to grow in volume, the LCG model becomes less attractive unless it’s kept at manageable levels, both for cost of entry and management of mechanics.

[1002am]

FFG should considering repacking older cycles somehow. Release cycles initially, like they currently do, but then once a cycle gets half or two-thirds of the way in, maybe break up the previous cycle into faction packs. it would be the 15 cards for that faction, plus 1-2 of the more synergistic neutrals, sold for $10.

Alternatively, they could just repackage, unedited, the previous cycle’s cellophaned card sets into a single box and sell that for a lower price point than buying each pack upon release. It would probably still have to cost $70-75, but you call it something like Red Sand Cycle: Download Complete and it might help newer players feel like they can catch up quickly. Maybe throw some draft rules in there.

[ovamod7]

That strikes me as a ton of overhead, grumpy retailers, and self-undercutting for extremely little benefit. I do sometimes wonder whether it’d be better (whatever “better” means) if the data packs weren’t quite so uniform by faction, though

[Absotively]

I really think faster rotation is the best answer to the buy-in problem. If I were FFG, I would move towards two formats something along the lines of:

Cache Refresh Refreshed: Core 2.0 (one copy), the latest all-faction deluxe, and the current cycle.

Would Be Called Standard If It Had A Name, Which It Probably Wouldn’t: Core 2.0, the last two all-faction deluxes, the last three to five cycles, and maybe the mini-faction cards from D&D (which would need to be repackaged as a separate product)

Ideally they’d move towards this in stages, with lots of advance warning. Rotating an extra cycle and two deluxes in each of the next two rotations would basically get us there.

Since I’m not FFG, the best I can do is support unofficial formats that have smaller cardpools. I do like Modded.

[Labbes]

@tvaduva

Not sure how that figure was calculated, but, if anything, a company should be able to model their broad customer categories.

I’m going to say I have very, very little faith in FFG’s ability to count numbers and their ability to interpret those numbers. (and then also verbalise those numbers properly)

[CryofFrustration]

Oh man, what I wouldn’t give for an easy multiquote function on here!

I do agree that the initial buy-in is too steep. We don’t KNOW how many kitchen meta players are out there (people who basically treat it as a boardgame and only play it with 1-2 other people, and stick to core-only or at most buy a handful of expansions) but considering that most game stores I’ve ever walked into seem to have a copy of the core set even if they don’t carry ANY other Netrunner products, it must be substantial. More than the active community who go to regular casual meets and the occasional tournament? I don’t know, but probably. That community must be a few thousand people globally, and I don’t think that’s enough to be profitable considering the number of people working on Netrunner, even if everyone spends $15/month on it. (Not talking just about Boggs, obviously, but all the production, editing, proofing, testing, art and design, etc.)

I believe FFG have themselves acknowledged that 5-7 cycles is too many. Shortening it to 4-5 cycles might be better. I suspect that the big kitchen meta players also favour big boxes over datapacks (for obvious reasons), which may have affected their decision to do another deluxe. But if that’s gonna happen regularly, I would favour big box rotation too.

Getting the supercasual players to attend competitive meets is crucial for the health of any game. I’ve met a lot of people who spent months and months playing nothing but core-set-only netrunner in a small friends-only meta, actually got really good at it, but never went to a single meet outside their homes because they were poor studetns so buying a full collection was never an option for them.

[yluras]

I have just read the article about X-Wing 2nd Edition. The biggest change I saw is moving to an app-based roster builder: turns out upgrades and other elements of the game won’t have printed values for army composition. That is, they will be able to vary them on the fly for even specific events.
What if we saw something like this on A:N? Cards without printed influence costs, so everything could we revisited and adjusted on demand. Or even IDs, with their abilities and deckbuilding constrains!

[Bifurcator]

@yluras

What if we saw something like this on A:N? Cards without printed influence costs, so everything could we revisited and adjusted on demand. Or even IDs, with their abilities and deckbuilding constrains!

While I like the idea for X-Wing, it will be more difficult in Netrunner. Influence (or anything else, really) in Netrunner is not just a pre-game deck building restriction, since we have hidden information. For example, you would not be able to easily count influence anymore without knowing all the latest updates. (Correct me if I am wrong, but in X-Wing you have full information about opponents squad and upgrades when the match starts, don’t you?)

Maybe something like this could work more easily when you get to see your opponents decklist before the match? On topic though, this would likely make it MORE difficult for new players to get into (competitive) Netrunner.

I also think that the MWL does a good (enough) job for now and on-the-fly adjusted influence values are not necessary. Given this and the frequency of MWL updates, I would rather FFG focus on one thing and do it right than try to do too much.