Thank you.
Quick update: Since my initial post I found someone who would blank a high quality scan.
Glad to hear it, even the people in #artist-colony didn’t have one so I was starting to run out of people to ask!
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Well it’s happened. It’s midday (here at least) and Jnet has deployed the format changes. Predictably, no warning—at least on any of the platforms I read regularly—and already a couple of issues both in usability and in actual functionality.
- After setting my game type to “Core Experience” people continually blundered in with inappropriate decks, in fact I’d say the “format” selector has been less successful in alerting opponents than simply writing “Standard Core 2019 ONLY” in the game title. I think more could have done from a UX/UI standpoint here.
- I went to update my Smoke deck, discovering it was now “standard illegal.” Fine, but there’s nothing telling me what’s making my deck illegal. If we’re going to have multiple concurrent supported formats, it makes sense to help users understand what they need to do to meet a certain legality.
- Even after replacing the offending Paperclip with a Corroder, my deck was still considered illegal. I went through each card and started to think I was going crazy, but a lifetime spent testing software of various kinds led to me to try the old trick of setting the format selector to something else and then setting it back to Standard. Did the trick.
Can I ask two things:
- When a substantive feature update is going to happen, can Nisei act as the mouthpiece and make every effort to inform users a) what’s coming, b) what we will need to do to adapt, and c) when is it coming. At the very least, an entry on the Jnet announcements ticker would have warned regular users.
- It’s a big update and there’s a lot of functionality that went into it, but you need to put in place some oversight from a user experience perspective. I would suggest doing at very least a public beta for a feature like this, say on the zaroth server, to give users a chance to provide feedback on the design. As a better and even more transparent step, publicly soliciting input earlier in the design process would help produce a better feature. It would have taken me five seconds and I would have said “Okay, what if the user does not know what the format consists of? What are our options here? Could we keep it as simple as linking to the format descriptions from within the Deckbuilder screen, or is more help needed within the interface to help users convert existing decks by highlighting illegal cards?”
Now back to my games… 
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Also, for some reason Jnet is telling me Rebirth is banned, even after creating a new list of the same cards. If so, that’s news to me based on the recent MWL list…
That’s a feature not a bug, if you ask me. 
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Thanks so much for the feedback, nutritionalzero. Not too many folks take the time to write out long-form thoughts, so it’s really helpful when someone like you does. Before I respond at all, I want to make sure I say that up front.
Instead of going point by point, I’ll reply in a more general style. The jnet devs are entirely hobbyists, folks who spend their free-time working on this. We don’t have any dedicated designers or QA folks or even a consistent development group. Because of the nature of the project, devs come and go as they please, so it’s left to whoever is currently active and interested to implement the new things - for example, Nisei’s new formats. I don’t say this to get out of our responsibility to you specifically and to the greater jnet user base, but to ask for some patience as we work through the issues that arise when a big release happens. I personally spent over 16 hours this past weekend and about 20 hours spread out over the rest of last week working on this, because I had hoped to deploy it alongside the announcement. My goal is the same as yours: the best possible experience for everyone playing.
As we don’t have a blog or a twitter or something else, I’ve relied on talking with the folks on slack (#jinteki_net primarily) to get feedback and to test ideas. I’ve teased a couple images, opened some polls, and the reaction has been good. My level of involvement with the greater jnet community could be higher, that’s true; I’ll look to ways I (and the team as a whole) can improve as we move forward. I understand that it can be frustrating to get into a rhythm and then feel taken aback when it changes without warning, and I apologize for not warning folks more.
I agree that the UX of the “formats” label in the game lobby could be better, but I also think that some of the issues you’ve experienced stem from the newness of the label. As people get used to looking for it, behaviors will change. I’m currently in talks with some folks from Nisei about adding icons or coloring to the formats so as to make them “pop” a little in the game lobby, which will hopefully alleviate some of these pains.
The issues of a deck not correctly showing legality by default is unfortunate. We have a fix in the works and it should appear along with fixes for the Alt-Art selector in the card browser.
Regarding your two requests, I’ll reiterate what I said above about us being hobbyists. I work a full-time development job and am preparing for a wedding in January, another dev just had a kid, another is in grad school. Hosting a public beta would be excellent and maybe some day that could happen, but right now it’s impractical for us to do something like that. We used to use the dev server more frequently, but interest in playing tester died down in the greater community and so we gifted the server to Nisei to be their private design and development test server.
However, we can do more to reach out and communicate our goals and our ideas before we implement or even just before we deploy them live to gauge how y’all might feel about them. None of us are really interested in hosting a blog (Programmers, amirite?), but you’re welcome to join us on stimslack where I’ll try to do more to reach out as things develop.
I hope this doesn’t come across as defensive, because I am really grateful for your feedback. It’s good to know y’all care as much as we do, cuz it’s only fun when folks are using it.
EDIT: To help ease the pain of not knowing what’s going on, I started a discussion thread in #Jinteki to highlight and feature development ideas and questions for the public, as Slack is a nebulous and difficult place to use traditionally: Jnet Development Thread
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Rebirth being banned is a mistake and should be updated soon!
That’s an unfortunate mistake on our end. Edit a given deck and change the format, on the drop down on the right side. Even if it’s a Standard-format deck, change it to something else and then change it back, and then save it. It should validate correctly now. We’ll be fixing this soon but currently that’s the best work-around.
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I should also note, to everyone, that Jinteki.net is and will continue to be a wholly separate entity from Nisei. I am on the Nisei team as the Jnet rep, but my role doesn’t affect the rest of the jnet team nor does it denote anything special between the two entities.
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This is an unfortunate reality of Casual-level tournaments. Tournament staff are of course prohibited from participating in Competitive-level events that they are running. I’ll talk this over with the OP team and see if we can come up with a better solution 
Likely said solution is simply nixing this rule for Casual events; that rule is just in place to ensure the other proxy rules have been followed, and at Casual events, one can usually trust one’s players, and mistakes are almost certainly honest.
This is something I should have clarified in the document; thanks for bringing it to my attention! My initial reaction is yes, a Tournament Organizer should be allowed to schedule a Casual event that’s specifically not a Store Championship at a 21+ or otherwise restricted venue, provided they advertise that fact clearly in advance, although that could perhaps be discouraged.
Again, I will discuss this with the team, but as long as nobody is precluded from participation in the Store Champ → Regionals → Nationals → etc track of events it should be a non-issue.
The blurb in the Wikipedia article mentioned above is the only bit on it that cursory Google searches have revealed. I remember reading about it in an academic paper on statistics years ago which is how I was initially turned on to it. I am happy to go into more detail; did you have specific questions? Or just general pros and cons?
It is definitely not banned, although it was one of the cards we playtested as banned. I will bring it to the appropriate person’s attention ASAP
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How does this go together with the principle of inclusion?
What I understood from reading Wikipedia is that the advantage of Amalfi is that it increases chances that top players meet in the last round. But this is nice to have in events which are Swiss only (which is most chess events where there is Swiss, they rarely use a top cut), if there is a cut, you don’t care about this because the big game happens during the cut anyway. Does this system do anything to biggest problems of Netrunner Swiss rounds, i.e. does it make IDs and 241s during second part of the tournament less likely to be worth it? What other good things can it bring to a Netrunner event?
As I mentioned, we will likely specifically disallow this for any of the normal tournament track events - meaning Store Championships, Regionals, Nationals, etc. We can’t control what people do with GNKs nor do we have a desire to. I myself am running an event at a pub in the coming weeks; it’s a tradition in my meta.
Right, the idea of this system is that it will often pair people with slightly dissimilar records - this removes all incentive to 241 or ID. In the final round, players will have the closest records, and I understand that’s when the majority of 241s and IDs occur. This appears to be the most effective method to disincentivize these in the short term. We are investigating ways to rework tournament scoring and structure to completely remove these from the equation but that is well in the future; we don’t want to make a sweeping change like that unless we are absolutely confident in it.
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Any plans to update netrunnerdb for Core 2019 and current MWL? The Core 2019 announcement was great, if I had to pick on something, it would be on not syncing it with nrdb update (which would allow to jump in to deckbuilding right away, while still hyped by the announcement).
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Yes, this is being worked on right now and is very close to being ready for deployment.
I totally agree that the jnet and NRDB updates should be synchronised with one another, as well as being more clearly publicised before they go live so everyone knows exactly what is happening and when.
Thanks for your patience while things get organised! 
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Anonymous questions from the void:
A: We keep fielding this one, but the answer is still sadly no. NISEI can’t offer any direct reprints. We may have PODs of SC2019 (or SC2020 if we decide to do one), but those would be with new templates and art. None of FFGs material will be made available by us.
Not at this time. Our supported formats will be listed on www.NISEI.net
Please just email us at ProjectNISEI@gmail.com OR hit us up on the Twitter with @ProjectNISEI OR search NISEI on Facebook and drop a message
We’re still attempting to figure out a distribution model that works, but we will have an option to order NISEI’s cycles. That’s all still in development. Stay tuned.
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If you are able to put out re-designs of existing cards, do you think that starter decks are a good idea? Could it lower the barrier to entry that printing an entire core set involves?
New players could then be told to POD a corp, and a runner, and off you go…?
I hear if you run an randomized algorithm using three factions, folks LOVE it! 
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Why are there still Store Championships? How many stores will make these championships?
Can NISEI them rename to Local Championship?
Local championships can still be hosted in a store, but it doesn’t implicate that they “should be” in a store.
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I cannot and do not speak for NISEI OP, but my understanding is that it is anticipated that the vast majority of 2019 SCs will take place in stores still and therefore maintaining the naming convention makes sense, as well as also being familiar to anyone who has been around for any previous, FFG season.
I for one played SCs in locations other than stores well before NISEI existed, for example a SC in Cheltenham which was in a hotel, so it doesn’t seem like a big problem to me. Just my opinion though, again, I don’t speak for OP on this.
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Probably for @icecoldjazz, but is the QR code in the Q1 QNK letter supposed to take us to the NISEI website or OP page? It just says it’s been disabled.
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Pretty much exactly what @3N1GM4 said - this naming convention is still familiar to players, the vast majority of events will still occur in stores, and we didn’t want to cause any unnecessary confusion by renaming them at this time. When the kits go up for sale it’ll be very clear that they don’t have to be run at a store.
Yep, it pointed to the OP resources page. The service we were using falsely claimed that static QR codes were good forever, so I went ahead and used one. Not until someone scanned it did we discover that 1) they only work for a set number of days without a subscription, and 2) the subscription was outrageously expensive for what it is and can only be paid yearly. No more QR codes!
Edit: spelling
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