limiting their own game’s design space due to terrible tournament rules, classic ffg
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I think we need to make the distinction between decks that take a long time and decks which take a lot of turns to enact their gameplan. I think there is a definite issue that one player can end up monopolising the round time. If you play a deck that plays a lot of quick turns, it is likely that your opponent will play slower and end up spending 80% of the time (and indeed tempo, more importantly) on doing their stuff. Then the round is over and you never get to use that tempo that you have been carefully saving yourself.
I am not sure what a practical solution to this issue would look like, but it does need to be taken into account in thinking about what gets played in tournaments. Winning decks are probably not the best decks often, but rather the decks that are tuned to be most tempo-selfish in relation to the very particular restriction of a given round time.
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You will always see good players piloting good decks trying to force their opponent onto their back foot. Aside from tilt, which is a powerful means of getting your opponent to defeat themselves, players on both sides want to force their opponent to choose between two bad options.
Is that naked Mushin’d card a Cerebral Overwriter or a game-winning TFP? Do I purge viruses now, or install ICE over vulnerable servers?
Pushing your advantage and leaving your opponent in a bad situation with little way out is the best way to win netrunner, but it can be leveraged from either side of the board, and has little to do with your deck type.
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This is exactly what should happen. By the way it is the player not the deck which is slow - and its always the runner that is the cause of the drag, not the corp. Corp turns are always quick - draw, install, take a credit etc. Two control corps facing each other could feasibly go to time (although this should be the only case it ever happens) and to deal with this increasing time to 70mins would be a big help (or switching to single 40 minute rounds).
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Judges should encourage players to play at a pace that allows the game
to finish in the allotted time limit.
Has anyone literally ever seen this happen at a tournament? I remember only one situation where I have, once, in a game that I was playing, and that caused a huge kerfuffle because there were accusations that the judge was deliberately needling and unfairly targeting a certain player (the player was glacially slow but, who knows if that has anything to do with it). I understand that this is getting a little off-topic but as someone who likes very slow control decks but can’t take them to tournaments because of this very poorly enforced rule I’m wondering what this situation is like for other people (and whether this has been helped by the floor rules)
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the main constraint on tournaments is that they need to be conducted over the course of one day. with that in mind what is the best way to administer the tournament?
currently we do 5-6 rounds of swiss which takes around 6-7 hours and a double elimination which can take anything from 2-5 hours.
both swiss & elim suffer from games going to time (although it is rare I think it would be more of an issue if people felt they could bring the full scope of control decks) - simply moving to single rounds 40 mins or double rounds 70 or 75mins would help alleviate it.
the elim part is particularly bad because of uncertainty over finish time constrains the whole tournament. much better would be single elim 40min rounds with ties decided by swiss ranking.
I know this idea gets routinely mocked around here, but if there’s real concern over timed wins being caused by imbalanced play, chess clocks are a viable answer. Add a rule saying a timed win gets full prestige if the loser’s playtime was ~20% greater than the winner’s. Or something, I’ve never played in a real tournament. My point is, it’s a solvable problem.
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This idea is mocked for a reason - chess clocks don’t fit Netrunner. There’s a lot more passing priority in Netrunner than in chess. In a chess game you pass priority to your opponent (on average) 40 times. In a Netrunner game, if runner and corp take 10 turns each, it’s 70 priority passes even counting only paid ability windows after each click (and any run on a server with 2-3 pieces of ice and an upgrade can easily add 10 more).
Also chess is a well known sport and chess clubs get public funding they can spend on clocks. The cheapest chess clocks I found cost $15ish. You’d need at least 10 of them to run small tournaments. That’s quite a big initial investment which would take a lot of time for a shop/TO to return.
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I’m happy to see a suggestion, but I think chess clocks are a really bad idea. There is already a lot to keep track of in netrunner, and a great number of priority passes that are routinely ignored. Having to tap control over to your opponent at each of them would be a pain.
If the runner tapped over, but then realizes they meant to install before their run, it quickly becomes unreasonable for the runner to ask for a take-back. This now means each player must be absolutely certain before they tap the clock, which will make the game play even more slowly.
Furthermore, as someone who has played timed chess, I can tell you that even experienced players sometimes forget to tap the clock, and accidentally burn their time while their opponent waits quietly to win by running down the clock. This is adding a new win condition that has nothing to do with actually playing netrunner.
What -maybe- (huge maybe) could be more feasible than a chess clock is a sand timer that caps each instance of priority to a max time limit. If you start to take a while on something, either player can flip the sand timer on the other and tell them they need to use up their priority. If the last grain of sand falls without them using their priority in some way (I’d be cool with them fetching Refractor, then spending another sand-timer considering whether to use a Ghost Runner credit or real credit to break, since it’s reflective of a complex game state), then they either pass priority with no action, or if they were going into the tank on a click, they take a draw action as runner or click for a credit as corp (draw actions as runner because seeing new cards will help lots of newbie players encounter new options so that they don’t quadruple sand timer their turn on the same conundrum. Clicking for a credit as corp because forcing corp to add agendas to HQ is kinda brutal.)
If you sand time out on a trace, you spend no credits to boost the trace.
If you time out on a psi game (really man?) you bid 0.
Capping the big tank moments of the game might be enough to get games finishing faster. Maybe not, but since you only need to invoke it on priority passes where it matters, where you notice a lot of time is starting to be taken, or when you rez an Archer and just know right away the runner is gonna get sent into the tank, it is much more feasible then trying to use a chess clock with a pool of total time and try to add up the 8 seconds I spent deciding whether to Imp or triple credit away your Jackson with the 4 seconds I spent deciding which card to trash with Faust and fiddle all those little time expenditures up to a time tracking for the whole game.
You either use chess clocks, or you make slow decks unplayable. Increasing the time limit is a bad idea, that just means a significant amount of players spend more time waiting instead of playing.
I also disagree that time limits are an artificial constraint of tournament netrunner. Sitting down to a game not knowing if it’s going to take 20 minutes or two hours is unacceptable even outside tournaments.
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If the best response everyone comes up with to Faust are mega-low agenda density Museum of History control decks that time 45 minutes to play out before the runner runs out of cards and throws their hands up in despair, we should ban that card before adding chess clocks.
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I think that chess clocks, sand timers or priority buttons just wont work in netrunner. What needs to happen is a clear understanding of both players responsibility to play at a pace commensurate with the time limit. For the most part I see the early turns as quite automatic (much like the opening in chess), and there is a time in the game where there is a crucial moment (figuring out your best outs as runner, doing math on a complicated run etc) where its totally acceptable to think about it for a few minutes – the key is both players playing fast enough to free up the time for those moments.
Many people thought it odd that time limits were enforced in the world finals top 16 tables and I believe Lukas stated that netrunner was supposed to be a game where you are under pressure to make decisions quickly, it is supposed to be quite a frantic, adrenaline fuelled game and the runners need to play faster rather than the corps bring decks which make it easier for the runner to play faster.
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I’m not sure that chess clocks would suit the situation. For one thing the asymmetrical nature of the game tends to have the most complicated bits (the runs) happening in the Runner’s turn. For another thing it “formalises” things a bit more, taking a little of the friendliness out of it. If we can have the management of the gamestate itself be a common endeavour rather than a competition, so much the better.
I think that time limits in tournaments have to dealt with in one of the following ways:
- If they’re felt to be too restrictive on play styles, lengthen the limit.
- Change the way matches that go to time are dealt with in terms of scoring.
- The players as a community change their notion of what an acceptable speed to play entails.
- Accept that some decks, combos and/or cards are stymied by the time limit, and that this skews the game somewhat.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking that the latter option is the best one! But if some decks/cards are artificially excluded from tournament Netrunner, you can’t then moan about other cards that thrive in such an environment, if the reason for them thriving is the unique environment enforced by the tournament structure. You’re going to have to accept that as a trade-off for the good things that the tournament structure brings. Do you value deck diversity, or shorter waiting times between rounds. Take your pick, but you can’t have both (well, it’s more like a sliding scale, but you know what I mean).
You might have a nice, balanced, natural ecosystem in a forest. But then you build a massive wooden hangar in the forest with lots of doorways just too small for buzzards to get through. Don’t be surprised if you get a population explosion of rabbits in the specific environment you’ve created in the hangar!
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I vehemently disagree that the “natural” state of netrunner is one without time limits.
The natural state of netrunner had the time of the game hidden from both players, but largely determined by the order of the Corp players deck. Some games will be lightning fast because 3 Astros, 2 breaking news and a beale are in the top 14 cards and one player find them before the other, done games will feel like purgatory simply because someone is running govt takeover and there are only 4 points on offer until you get to turn 30.
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I wonder what some people’s ideas for this could be with attrition decks. I mean I know my deck doesn’t even try to score. It is a very rare game where I have more points than the runner by the time I get the kill.
the first world final was one of the most boring things I have ever watched, in contrast the last world final (in which timmy was a little bit slow at times) was one of the best. time limits in netrunner are a good thing, but they should be calibrated based upon the card pool and the meta.
if we had a chess style Rybka engine that gave a numerical score to the board position that would be best 
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Wait, chess clocks? I thought this was a thread about how hot (or not) Faust is?*
Has @spags been here ?
* Faust is pretty hot rn
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