Where is the MWL? - As of August 20th, 2018 - MWL 2.2 is here (effective 2018.09.06)

  1. Yes.
  2. I wouldn’t say they don’t care, but are overburdened supporting all the games they do (see answer 1), that a Netrunner MWL coming out every 6 (or 8 or 10 months) might not be the highest priority. I think they want to do a good job, just don’t have the time to do it. I had experiences in the corporate world (and I’m sure others can concur), where we want to be responsive to our customers, but cannot be because of lack of resources. I think that’s bad business, but if revenue and profit are steady or growing, does it move the needle?
  3. I think in this case they want to give the new lead designer time to get up to speed. And not handcuff him with what a prior lead’s view of the meta should be.

(It’s quite possible that I may have miss your point. I peek in SlimSlack regularly, but I don’t keep up to minute on the thoughts and memes.)

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I completely get it. I understand they have neither the resources nor care to address the game the way people who attend ANR forums do. It’s just sad, really. One person’s hobby is another’s small revenue stream.

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I agree with the overall point, but the part about “competitive players continuing playing through the dark days” seems false. Competitive players are way more sensitive to a sucky meta, whereas kitchen-table players probably aren’t all that perturbed by a card like Sifr (or a trend like asset spam), partly because there are “noncompetitive” solutions such as Shattered Remains, Lab Dog, or a stern smack upside the head, and partly because casual games are less likely to see abusive parasite combos in the first place.

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Netrunner players announce pre-emptive boycott of L5R unless communication starts

:wink:

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I feel like this can’t be stated enough. I don’t think this holds universally among competitive games so much as Netrunner’s entire community (casual + competitive) is smallish.

And this might be a pointless, entirely unverifiable thing to ask but are there really that many “kitchen-table” players in Netrunner? I might be talking wholly from personal anecdote here but the barrier’s of entry are just too steep for a lot of my friends and getting into the game, especially now, feels like a monumental task in terms of time and cost.

My point here is that while I like the idea of separating “competitive” and “casual” Netrunner players, ultimately I think the community is too small to consider with this sort of division; we have to refer to the community as a whole and regardless of how you look at it our numbers are dwindling. FFG doesn’t have the luxury to pander to one group or the other when the numbers of their player base is ultimately limited.

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From listening to the recent interviews from Boggs and Damon, here are a few things that were mentioned in regards to the meta:

  • They are usually a year out in developing the game. Damon also said in earlier interviews that he doesn’t have a great idea on the current meta. People send him reports.
  • They have good playtesters, but they’re all over the place. They don’t always predict the meta. (ex/ didn’t see a Whizzard/CTM meta, but Jess was looking strong).
  • They test both full cycles and up to a certain datapack, but it sounds like more of the testing is done with the full cycle and cards move in and out of certain datapacks. But they can’t tell if there will be a disturbance in supply chain so they don’t necessary know which datapacks will be out in the wild at certain events. It means that the month-to-month meta may be uncertain.

While @spags may be out of good ideas :wink:, I think I may have one. I was thinking of this for a some time while keeping tabs on @Elusive’s ban list efforts (and it looks like @ppang was thinking something similar as well from an earlier post):

While Boggs and playtesters, and FFG OP may be too busy and unaware of the current meta, why not leverage the passion/time of the competitive players and form a Players’ Council. We could fold it under ANRPC or Stimhack (or wherever), nominate a small group (3 to 20-ish) of competitive players (I’d nominate Elusive and @SimonMoon, from their current meta analysis efforts). The Players’ Council will put together a list unbalanced/NPE cards, decklists, and data, after the competitive community had a chance to play in each shift in the meta (datapacks, expansions, MWL, etc.). The rest of us co-sign it if we agree to the Players’ Council recommendations. Boggs can take it to his playtesters and maybe do monthly test sessions in the current meta with some decks/cards to focus on. Then, they can decide how they deal with any problems they find (i.e. they may know that a new card will be released and some of our current problems will be solved in that manner).

There must have been something similar to this proposal done in other games, right?

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There’s not really any barrier to entry for kitchen table net runner. They just buy a core set, and maybe a box or two. As long as they stay in their personal (probably 2-4 person) meta the size of the card pool doesn’t matter.

Edit: These guys pop up and ask questions on Reddit here and there, i.e. “How do I beat my gfs eater cutlery deck, I have 1 core, C&C, O&C” so they do exist.

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If everyone is quitting netrunner maybe this is the year I should be going to Nationals.

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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 :cold_sweat:

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

:wink:

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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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