I think that statement was an attempt at damage control. Cat is out of the bag now however.
My play group and I have stopped buying cards now. There were 5 of us that started around creation and control, have bought everything since and used to play on Friday nights against each other.
Game just isn’t fun anymore, there are many other games around we can play together instead so that’s what we do.
Only one of us has ever played at a game night or store champ (we live out of major city), so I guess we would be in the ‘kitchen table’ category. We did however all monitor netrunnerdb, stimhack and reddit so people would pick up strong decks and play them.
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Our meta here has halved and gone bi-weekly. Quorum was a really low point for myself. Decided at that point to just skip the Red Sands Cycle and see if rotation helps the game out.
But now I’m not even sure rotation will help; most of the problem cards were released in Mumbad and Flashpoint, with an honourable mention to Faust in SanSan. Cards like Aaron, Rumour Mill and Sifr are just so inelegantly designed. Their power level, lack of interactivity and the resulting invalidation of so much of the corps’ card pool is depressing.
I read somewhere once, that what made Netrunner such a good game, was (unlike other card games) it was inherently anti-snowball. That to advance your score, you had to weaken your resources/board position. There was this back and forth, you’ve a window, I’ve a window type of thing. I think the way we play the game has moved away from that dynamic. Asset spam is a pure snowball dynamic. Dumbleforks is the same.
I suspect that an updated MWL by itself can’t bring back the dynamics I enjoy about this game and that more drastic measures are required. If that is so it will take a lot of work to get right and therefore a lot of time. Time I’m not sure the game has. 
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You could get a reasonable measurement indirectly based on core set/box sales vs. pack sales. Something like:
Kitchen Table Players = Core Sales - Average Data Pack Sales * 2
Assumptions being that kitchen table players don’t buy packs and that competitive players buy 2 cores. Its certainly not a perfect way of doing it, but I bet it’s in the ballpark.
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I’ve been pushing this narrative for a while, so possibly it was me! All of the inherently sucky things about the game (right from Andy-sucker to asset spam) has been snowball effects, and all of the interesting stuff people love has been the opposite. It’s a principle that shores up game balance in a world full of complicated interactions, and deviating from it has proven considerably harmful.
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Too many mistakes were made from FFG, from printing bad cards to not balancing horizontal corp strategies. don’t think this game can be saved anymore
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Hey it may have been me vehemently agreeing with you. Positive feedback creates instability.
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I disagree with this entirely. This game feels as fun to me as ever, if not more fun. This could be catharsis from the Mumba Asset prison era. My play group went from 3 to 9. I know that the playgroup size thing is small sample size and all, but I think the game is fun. More corps are viable to play, instead of the days where it was RP or NEH. I think there are more than 5 corp IDs that are similarly viable.
I also find that I win more corp games than runner games, I’m not sure what corp decks everyone is playing that they’re getting smashed, but on 2 store champs i dropped 3 games as corp and 5 as runner, making it to 2nd and 3rd in both, meaning I played more than swiss.
Theres even diversity among corps as PU and RP have had viable archetypes emerge, where palana and Sol and CtM and Sync are all choices as well. Anarch runners are dropping 2 or 4 inf on mirron, why not negate their influence by playing the counters to mirron? Temujin can be stuffed pretty well with ice, so AAL HB, or Sol with lots of ice are good options, and they do, despite what people claim, still beat whatever ‘other decks’ exist in the meta.
I think that a new MWL is welcome, but to say the game is stagnant while 168 cards from a big box are coming and 30 more in Station One are coming, and we’ve not finished exploring Jemison stuff, this is pretty detached from reality IMO.
We are on the cusp of a major problem, and that is the rotation of whizzard. When whizz rotates, unless the alluded to hard counters do get printed, we’re going to see corp assets even more out of control. This is where the mwl update is welcome.
Downvote away.
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How can you ‘disagree entirely’ with the fact that the majority of players aren’t having much fun in the current meta and are extremely worried about the lack of response from FFG? That is a straight-up fact.
I mean, I can understand that an individual here or there might personally still be enjoying things and having fun but that doesn’t address the concerns that have been articulated by the community. I’d go so far to say that it doesn’t even feel relevant to the discussion, since the existence of consensus already implies the existence of outliers. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you are disagreeing with, but I’ve tried to parse your claim of disagreement a few different ways and none of them make much sense.
Also, where is the downvote button? (j/k)
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UPDATE: TWA released an episode with Boggs today and they had a pretty long discussion on MWL. He said there will be one “relatively soon”. He also said that he’s looking to review the MWL every 3-4 months. The panelist suggested to have a fixed schedule to announce MWL updates (even if the update is “no change”) and he thought it was a good idea. He said he decides the cards on the MWL, but how it’s communicated (FFG OP) is out of his control. He will talk to them about making these changes to the schedule.
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I’m disagreeing that the meta is stagnant because of the lack of MWL, and updates. I disagree that the game isn’t fun. I concede in my post that the MWL is wanted and welcomed. I also can’t speak for others on why they don’t find the game fun, I just disagree with the reasons they find the game not fun, and the claims that the meta is stagnant because of the factors listed.
If people are unhappy, then its status quo - TagNbag, HBFA, NBN FA, Siphon spam, PPVP Kate, asset spam, CtM HHN, Temujin runner…theres always the same number of shit to bitch about.
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This is pretty much a given for a card game but I think the thing people are really taking issue with here is the lack of communication and responses from FFG around what are seen as repeated issues; the MWL is a step in the right direction but without regular scheduled updates or input from devs the community is left in the dark. Whether that is an issue for you is an entirely different story than if you find the game still fun.
The latest interview that @tvaduva mentioned points to things moving forward in a good way however, so maybe it’s not all doom and gloom.
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There is a consensus on this thread to be sure, but still it is welcome to hear from outliers.
I got into the game late–roughly early 2014 I think, it’s been too long to recall clearly–and at the time the oppressive card that was causing people to leave the game was Account Siphon. I remember chatting with former players, who patiently explained to me how AndySucker and Siphon had ruined their fun, and I shouldn’t bother starting up with Netrunner.
In the years since, I have watched from afar as one cycle after another of meta situations has caused The End of Netrunner. So I’m a bit skeptical about that–it has played out so many times.
Still. It must be admitted that the arc is headed down. There will always be players leaving the game. The excuse that gets hung on that phenomenon is often “The Current Meta Sucks,” but honestly I think that often that is just French for “I have had a great run with this lifestyle game, but now I’m moving on. All good things…”
Games like this are always going to bleed players no matter what. No matter what. The thing is that the replacement rate for that bleed is dropping off the cliff. The elephant in the room is the oppressively large buy-in cost at this point. Netrunner had an incredible, robust following 3-4 years ago, with a tiny fraction of the card pool. I wish rotation had been much sooner and much more aggressive.
So there’s two more cents from what I think most of you would call a kitchen-table gamer (more than a thousand face-to-face plays in my private kitchen meta, plus a sprinkling of appearances at local store events).
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I think this is a good post, and I agree with it in a lot of ways. There is always going to some amount of people who are going to quit and say it’s because of the meta independent of the actual metas state.
However, that does not mean all complaints are invalid, and that there aren’t metas that are actually worse than usual. I think the current situation is that case, and the nearly universal agreement on the current state of things is evidence we are currently in such a state.
Anyone, it’s partially a judgement call but I think in this case the judgement call that we have major issues is correct.
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My suspicion is that Netrunner was never imagined to have a card pool as large as it has.
The fundamental underlying problem with the game, the reason why we’re all on this thread today, is because of a) the corp ability to spend one click to install a card creating a new server, and b) the need to keep designing and printing assets.
Once a critical mass of decent assets was reached, the game evolved into something it was never imagined it would be. It was only a matter of time before one or two of them were too strong, or interacted abusively with each other.
You only have to look at the long horizontal line of assets to see there’s a game underneath not doing what it’s supposed to. If I walked into a game shop to buy my first core set and saw someone playing RP prison I’d probably say to myself “that game doesn’t look good.”
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To say nothing of OP kit sales…
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Here’s an idea. For once in the history of the entire internet, let’s try to resist the temptation to walk back specific, well-articulated criticism into the toothless and uncritical ‘welp nothing is ever perfect’ attitude. That literally goes without saying (or, at least it should go without saying). At best this is a coping mechanism and even at its best such a banal platitude can’t avoid insulting a reader’s intelligence. We aren’t trying to make things perfect. We’re trying to make things better.
The problems with the meta are real and need to be substantively addressed. I realize that there are some folks who, for whatever reason, simply don’t care about power-sprint or pay-to-win, who aren’t distressed by the marked shift away from core game mechanics and interactions, and who accept having 40 auto-includes in a 45-card deck. It stands to reason that folks in that camp won’t have much to contribute to a discussion being held by people who ARE concerned about those things.
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Yes, there are a lot of people who got into netrunner from board games who play with a much more limited card pool. I had a group of about 5 or 6 friends I could play ANR with when I was on core-only for about a year. I played with a few other people at various board game groups as well. I never sleeved my cards and just played on bare tables with food and drinks around.
We played about 1-2 games per month on average (I was playing 6-8 across the whole pool). Eventually I bought out someone else’s set (Spin, Genesis, H&P, C&C) and expanded our card pool. It took a little while to learn, but my group still played for about another 6-8 months on just that pool of cards.
I eventually took the plunge to buy into the full set (mid-San San cycle), but when I did that the card pool was just too large for these friends to keep up with. They no longer wanted to play because there were too many weird cards with abilities that warped the old conventions on rules (e.g. Faust breaking without credits, many mid-run effects and installs). To play competitive I had to seek out dedicated competitive players and lose a lot of games.
People who post here are way more likely to show up a tournaments than kitchen table players. I like SmallWorld a lot, but I’ve never considered attending a SmallWorld tournament, much less 10+ tournaments in a year. I would never confuse people who attend SmallWorld tournaments with all people who play SmallWorld. Similarly in Netrunner there is a large population of people who own and play the game who do not own all of the sets, but do play the game and buy packs only when they see a couple of cards that they want in the box.
Many of us here do not see these kitchen table players because this is an echo chamber for competitive players.
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I think most of us actually acknowledge that kitchen sink players exist and that they’re far more numerous than competitive players. I just think that the vast majority of them are not going to buy the latest packs, so they’re kind of irrelevant to almost anything FFG does to the game besides making sure the Core is always well stocked at game stores.
The difference between Smallworld and Netrunner is that Smallworld probably only has kitchen sink players and people who are die hard and go to tournaments, whereas Netrunner has a large number of casual players who go to game stores to meet people to play it. And those are the people who really quickly drop the game when the meta sucks.
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I was responding to a post that asked ‘are there really that many kitchen table players?’ to which I wanted to point out: yes, there are. I agree that most people here acknowledge that group exists.
These kitchen table players certainly do not buy each pack when it comes out. They buy Core sets and certain data packs for cards they want/need (Jackson Howard and Plascrete are the first two).
There are a lot of players in this group who do not go to tournaments, and aren’t aware of when/where they are held.
But I think we agree that when we do get these players to go to a tournament (or even just stop by to watch a few games), it would be best to show a game that is as interesting and diverse as possible. MWL updates, errata, banned/restricted lists are what we are looking for to help ensure the game remains diverse by addressing problem cards/combinations.
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