Yeah, that totally makes sense. I guess I’m really just wondering how many of those people are out there (which we may never know.)
YES!!! First step is to get this list implemented as a deck-building format on NRDB and Jnet.
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I don’t have better data, but what Damon said on Run Last Click is greater than 90% is casual. Have you listened to the last episode? Maybe you would interpret differently. My best guess is that it’s based on sales figures, but I’m not sure how they distinguish the type of customer.
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I’ve heard that data packs are the minority of netrunner sales, but I don’t have any solid info to support that with.
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I guess all this shows is that I have poor impulse control and want to gobble up every piece of content I can get my hands on 
I have stopped playing competitive netrunner for now, I just find Corp deck building super frustrating in the current meta. I have not stopped organizing meetups or tournaments though. Instead, I have shifted focus to casual play and cube draft.
Cube draft allows me to control the cards in the pool (and limits them automatically). I run my cube every 3rd Monday at my local store and have two Cube Draft Tournaments planned for March and April on the weekends so folks with different schedules can come out and play.
I am playing casual games at meetups. I am building decks that are interesting to me and seeing what the card pool has to offer beyond Whizzard, Sifr, Aaron, and Temüjin Contract. I have also started to theorycraft decks without the first two Data Pack cycles to see what kind of decks I can build.
We have seen an uptick of new players here and if I am going to run a competitive tournament it will be something along the lines of 1.1.1.1 or some type of other limiting factor so that newer players without the full card pool have a fighting chance.
I am not sure what a new MWL is going to do for us. I am not even sure some of the cards we are grumbling about would even qualify for listing since they haven’t been out for more than 6 months.
With that all said, I am also playing the hell out of Arkham Horror: The Card Game right now. Then again, it has it’s own problems (not enough product to go around)…
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If you play on your kitchen table, why on earth would you own Sifr? Does anyone really play so many games with their roommate or girlfriend that they need $500+ of new cards? That seems unlikely to me.
There’s an area between competitive and kitchen table, which are the people who show up to casual play nights and the occasional GNK, but don’t really care about SCs and regionals unless one is happening at their local store. These are the people who are happy to stop playing when the meta sucks, because Netrunner is just one of many games they play and not a large part of their identity the way it is for tournament players.
Not sure if you meant to reply to me.
Nope, that was an accident.
I would count as casual, but part of what attracted me to ANR was the interesting, asymmetrical, but reportedly balanced gameplay. With the probable exception of Terminal Directive, and without a miraculous turn around in the game, i’ve decided to stop buying ANR releases as of the end of the Flashpoint cycle.
As others have said, I think FFG should have dealt with the game’s early problem cards. I would have begrudgingly accepted bans. I would happily have accepted future card releases that were obvious replacements for banned cards. I would have been happy to buy ‘errata packs’ or even updated copies of packs i already have. Instead, for what i suspect are ‘business plan’ and internal political reasons, FFG have released more, even more problematic cards. And here we are.
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DON’T JUDGE ME
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Rotation is still very far. We need full 6 packs + TD to be released. And the meta imbalances are here and now, not after rotation. If they wait, we are likely to have further 6 months of current problems. And those 6 months will be the full Regionals season, Nationals in several countries including USA, continental championships both in Europe and USA. Having all those events with a highly unhealth meta would definitely do a lot of harm to the game and community.
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So I think there are a couple of things I want to talk about, but the first and most important thing is the sheer universal level of agreements on these complaints. This thread has 34 likes which is more likes than any other thread in the last year. Basically no one disagrees the current meta is terrible, despite the fact stuff like this usually draws every single contrarian out of the woodwork. FFG, if you’re reading this, the current meta problems are universal and should not be ignored. The only people who disagreed at all said “Well, its not as bad as when IG54, the most hated deck in all of Netrunner was good” or that “Yeah, its terrible right now but we should be doing something instead of complaining to FFG”. I disagree with both of these, but I don’t think that’s important relative to the fact that everyone agrees the current state of the game is terrible, and the lack of communication and action on the part of FFG is resulting in real destruction of Netrunner communities. Something needs to be done, and done soon, and its gotta be big (more than just putting a few more problem cards on the MWL).
Beyond that, I think its worth talking briefly about the Casual / Competitive divide or whatever. I think its important to define these terms if you’re going to talk about them, because various people use them to mean various things, and its extremely confusing when people mean them in different ways (as well as various people having positive / negative connotations to either one). I’m going to talk about it in terms of the people who attend FFG organized play events, and people who don’t (anything from GNK on up).
- I don’t know the relative sizes, but I do know that the people who go to meetups and GNKs matter. Otherwise what exactly is the point of having FFGOP? On top of that, the most successful card game of all time, MtG believes that organized play was instrumental to its success, and supports it heavily.
- Insofar as the people who don’t go to any sort of Organized Play don’t care about the state of the meta (which I believe is likely incorrect, people watch vods, read Netrunnerdb, etc), don’t care about the MWL, why do we care about them when having this discussion? This is not to say they don’t matter (They do!) just if they don’t care about the meta, why are we bringing them up as a reason not to update the MWL? If they’re really isolated, the MWL does not effect them!
- If we talk about the people who go to meetups, my observation is that more laidback less competetive minded players are the ones who have been effected the most by meta changes. People I’ve talked to who used to go to GNK’s and meetups to play the decks they wanted felt that they’re just getting crushed and have no chance, and that the way in which they have no chance means they don’t even get to play in a way they enjoy.
- Finally, on this idea that somehow because cards are coming out at some inderterminate time that might counter some of the hated cards in the meta, that does not actually solve the issues most of the people who have quit are complaining about. Just because Hunter Seeker might make a deck that is good against Sifr (it won’t fwiw), doesn’t mean that its somehow gonna make all the decks people want to play playable. Most of the people’s issues I’ve talked to is that all the stuff they like to play isn’t just bad, but everything they enjoy playing with is so bad they can’t win at all and every game is miserable. Saying you have to play one archetype or you lose miserably is what I’ve found to be the thing people hate the most (was the case for IG54, where you play Whizzard or lose miserably), and just because a single deck exists that can beat it does not make it okay if everything else has no chance and isn’t fun to play.
Anyone, I added what I believe is the correct email to the OP: organizedplay@fantasyflightgames.com. Email them to let them know if your local community is struggling due to people dropping out from meta issues.
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My email has been sent.
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I feel like the current state of the Netrunner meta is as per the below:
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Hyper-activity: New powerful cards seem to be released with regularly, see-sawing the community in ways in which we lurch from one side of the boat to the other, making it hard for us to find our footing.
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Frantic rushy play: Both corps and runners now are hyper-aggressive. Asset spam from Jinteki and CTM, in which the runner is forced to charge in and start destroying assets, before they are overwhelmed. Runners are cashed up and don’t care about ice (sifr/parasite/temujin); forcing the corp to be rushy, jamming agendas behind gear check ice early, and hoping to score out by either oppressing a runner (CTM), or hurting them enough their game plan falls apart (bio-ethics).
These two play styles, frankly, are exhausting. And in the end, when you lose to one, you often see it coming from a mile away, and sort of like when half way through a monopoly game where you can’t compete, you just start to shrug your shoulders and give up. Great when you win, but sucks when you loose. I don’t mind, I even like, loosing when there’s parries and thrusts, or when sudden and unexpected lines of play burst forth; but when you lose because you didn’t rush hard enough, because you didn’t have the money to kill off assets in CTM/RP asset spam; or as a corp you your curtain wall gets taken down as soon as you rez it, it’s debilitating.
I really don’t like that these decks are the dominant ones, because you can’t relax or strategise. For experience players, you know you have to rush in either way from a corp or runner pespective. As a beginner, or someone who doesn’t know, prepare to be crushed.
I’d really like the game to slow down, to provide more options.
When you’r hacking into a corporation, being sneaky and in the shadows, you don’t always bring out the heavy artillery; you don’t always do a ram raid. Sure sometimes, but sometimes you wanna be Mr. Robot, setting up your rig, injecting viruses, being unpredictable. Being cool.
I dunno, I don’t feel like Mr. Robot could survive right now, and that’s a shame.
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Mail sent.
Someone should call Richard Garfield. He surely knows how to fix his game.
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I’ve been playing since O&C and I started going to tournaments about 18 months ago, so it’s kind of hard for me to weigh in, as I don’t really feel like I’ve been “good” at the game for very long (if ever hurr-durr).
My experience for this conversation mostly comes from this so-called “kitchen table” play which is what me and my partner used to do on a regular basis. She always said she just played decks she liked whereas I was always trying to keep my eye on what was good so that I could put in a good showing at events.
Up until about 9 months ago, these two styles of play melded fine. She played Shaper/HB pretty much consistently and this suited me fine as they were the “real decks” that would make up the base level testing of the decks I wanted to play.
In recent months though, the match-ups were getting more and more obviously skewed. A shaper with money and clot would win 80% against something. HB with Next/Friends could easily lock out something that wasn’t playing a critical mass of red cards.
I have this joke that people who’ve met me irl have probably heard me say which is that the game is getting to the point where you don’t need to play. You turn up at an event, do pairings, sit down, and then share decklists with your opponent. “Oh, you’ve got Employee Strike, Slums and Aaron? ggwp. Table 1 reporting runner split.”
This is probably slightly more pronounced for my partner and I as she is staunchly Shaper/HB, two factions being wrecked by the current meta of Sifr and asset spam, but I think that is ultimately the point, the meta is driving people away because the extreme changes brought to it by the last 2 cycles of cards has introduced play-styles people massively don’t enjoy.
This goes way beyond a simple dismissal of “adapt” (something that I think possibly could be said about the CTM ID in a vacuum). It’s not adapting, it’s tearing down the game that people fell in love with, handing them a pile of 45 cards and saying “play these or you will have a bad time.”
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Competitive playerbase single digits? Locally? I don’t really understand what’s meant here.
Last time I checked we had the biggest competitive playerbase of all FFG LCGs. (European Championships are at 199 ANR, 94 AGOT, 75 SW:Destiny, 14 SWLCG tickets sold right now)
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I think he meant single digits in percentage of all ANR customers. What I am asking myself here is: How do they know this? I never found a questionnaire in any packs asking me “are you a causual or competitive player? Please send your answer to FFG”.
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