So I brought this up on the Jnet “chat” screen, but figured I’d want to get some other thoughts on “The State of the Game.”
It seems recently that I often see at least 50 active games on Jinteki.Net–something I haven’t seen in a long time; maybe ever?
Since I can’t calculate for confirmation bias, my thinking is:
It just looks like more games are being played because I’m paying attention to that
There ARE more games being played because more people are coming back/learning to play ANR
Worlds is right around the corner so there is more testing on Jnet.
Most likely it’s probably a convergence of a couple of things–though it also seems like I see a lot more folks on the chat screen saying things like, “I’m a new player looking for a game” or “noob here, I need some help with [xyz].”
All this to say, hopefully it’s not me just having wishful thinking–if an increase of activity on ANR is an indicator for more interest in the game, then I’m pretty happy about that.
I’d add that the card pool has seen the single largest change ever on October 1, and there have been no major tournaments to test this new meta yet. Nobody knows what is good yet, but the top players with strong test groups are getting an idea.
I’m sure that whenever minh/other devs want to take a break from the incredible string of updates they’ve been delivering recently, it will be an interesting data dump to look through.
edit: though maybe best to wait until post-worlds in case people are worried about players getting an edge through this data. After the scraping kerfuffle I’d rather just stay well clear of that issue for a minute
