Yeah that’s what I had interpreted your point to be. Not about the decks themselves but the goofy write ups that get people lots of votes. A great deck with no write up wouldn’t make it to the deck of the week for example. People do a lot of grandstanding and making odd claims about their deck in the write up and that was the facet you were trying to satirize rather than janky decks themselves, if I understand correctly.
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That’s great dude you have that right. Utilize that shit. But consider how someone who also loves this game must feel when they’re told they need improvement.
They may like this game for different reasons. Have different goals associated with anr, and may disagree with you. NRDB is different that stimhack. To disagree would be fooling yourself. Let them do their thing. Post a troll deck on NRDB, but don’t fabricate it’s competitive validity, and insinuate someone needs improvement because they like it.
To add on to this, it seems like Fuzzor WAS interested in improving and was looking to NRDB to do so. His complaint was that the troll decks are impossible to separate from a serious one for a brand new player.
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The notion that these oddball NRDB typical decks declare themselves to be tier 1 seems to be part of the animating desire to send them up a bit (I can understand that. It’s sort of self-aggrandizing and that’s a classic target for humor) but the closest I can find for that novelist list is here:
This is my attempt at making a Tier 1 Hayley deck. In the hands of a good pilot, I think that it’s very close to that.
The general tone there wasn’t “This is the best deck!” but rather “I’ve been trying to make Haley work consistently and I think this is pretty good!” However, over here and in @Chill84’s NRDB review the tone felt very much more like “Look at this guy who thinks his whacko Haley build compares to PPVP Kate” and I think it’s naive to say there isn’t a derisory intent behind those criticisms. The Novelist’s creator was ambitious but not arrogant, I think, and that’s why the satire here (though I must say the satire doesn’t feel like striking at the powerful) comes off as elitist.
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@Chill84’s posts are a separate issue. They’re a direct confrontation of the deck and they are exactly what you imply they are, a criticism of the deck. I’m not saying that the roots for his posts aren’t akin to the roots for some of the troll decks that have been posted, but his approach is very different (and I’ll admit something I’m not 100% comfortable with), but I recognize he’s allowed an opinion and the ability to express it even if I disagree with the degree he goes to.
Even if you don’t like them, they are direct and honest and its very clear what the intent behind them is. I don’t think that’s the case when you look at the more satirical deck list (and deck list descriptions) that popped up momentarily.
The author also opened himself up for Tier 1 comparisons when he said “I think this is very close to that.”
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Sure, and I think @mendax’s comment on the decklist was a perfectly worded response to that claim, by pointing out one of the glaring weaknesses that deck had against the corp metagame. Yours felt a bit harsher but not beyond reason and I’m sure The Novelist’s creator didn’t need the kid gloves. However, I fail to understand the humor content of the troll decks outside of the context of “Isn’t it silly how these upstart deckbuilders think they’ve found something good?” I’m not saying that joke is beyond the pale or without humor, but I feel like the context of elitism is required for the joke to exist at all.
As I said, I don’t know that I think it’s bad to post joking decklists and I certainly don’t think people need to be censored or anything (I’m not sure if you’re worried about that, but your references to people having a right to say what they want implies you’re concerned about some censorship? Otherwise I don’t know why rights are relevant to the quality/desirability of things said) but it’s worth thinking about how these troll decks fit into the context of the existing tension between “competitive” and “non-competitive” players.
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I don’t think that any of those who have posted troll decks meant to specifically tell others to change or improve.
On the Novelist deck, I do not think that was a bad case. There have been others that the troll-ish decks were kind-of directed at, I didn’t in fact have too much problems with the description of the Novelist - it didn’t come across as arrogant, he genuinely thought he had made a deck that was as near to Tier 1 as possible. Now, that claim is very tricky, but at least that deck didn’t make its way to the Front page because it only made witty remarks.
I get that, but it seems a bit pedantic to think @Secret_Ox was actually referring to natural rights rather than using the language of the phrasing “what gives you the right” to highlight the fact that he thought you were being elitist.
EDIT: I was also referring to:
I’m not above occasionally having opinions. Anyone accusing me of being elitist doesn’t know me or my jank well enough.
As far as @Chill84, you bringing him up felt like a non-sequitur. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with “troll decks.” And you bringing up his posts or even my joke/satire decks implies you think you’re better than me and that I need to improve.
You see. It cuts both ways.
I inferred that the troll decks were at a criticism of decks like the Novelist and that doesn’t seem far off (given repeated reference to bad decks claiming to be tier 1 has referred to that deck a lot). In that light, I think @Chill84’s comments were of a kind with the troll decks and discussing the troll decks’ impact on the tensions about elitism/competitiveness in netrunner is linked to the harsh criticism of The Novelist. However, I grant that they are different things and you can enjoy posting troll decks without signing on to the kinds of criticism Andrew was using.
You are indeed a monolithic icon in the field of jank deckery.
I think we’ll let the game decide which of us is the better!
Ah, crap.
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To be clear my intention has not been to accuse individuals of being elitist. I simply want to express the fact that things we do can be seen that way, and that I believe troll decks do play into the ‘competitive player’ trope.
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You’ve been watching closely. But, have you been paying attention? Of course not, because you don’t really want to see.
The Prestige - Imagine, a deck of jank proportions. Truly enjoyed by an author. And a community so elite that it can’t accept jank. It is deriding the very decks that we are imagining a singleton of. And a person in that community is masquarading and owns that deck and convinces that community to upvote it, in the end giving more attention to a jank deck than it would have recieved otherwise. Is this deck a troll deck? Is it satire? Or… is it beautiful invention wrapped in an enigma which as fooled those who would have ignored it previously and instead convinces them to give unto that which they would have previously denied.
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I still would’ve hearted Replicating the Hub. And Stimhack does appreciate the jank, I’m sure.
It depends on which “Stimhack” you’re referring to.
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This community is fine with jank, as long as that jank is 1) honest and 2) coherant.
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It is not fine with jank; and its something I love about it. Its about trying hard and finding the best deck and believing in the data. Or, those are the principles it was founded on. It was founded entirely on elitist sentiment. That you must play the best and be the best to win tournaments and that noise was the antithesis to that. The sentiment was so strong at one point that the “non-competitive” deck lists thread was created to contain the jank and clean up the site. Maybe that’s not what Stimhack is today, but that is what it was and while I never was good enough to be “elite” I appreciated that there were those out there that were.
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Idk - people seemed to really like aandries BABW, for example. Notorious BAG has a few fans around also. Both of those are fundamentally fairly janky.
And fundamentally able to win games in a competitive setting… and are more successful/liked because a decent well respected pilot suggested playing them. This isn’t a conversation I really want to get into. I’m going to be done now; but I’ve never met a more elitist hive of players before playing netrunner; and I don’t necessarily mean that as the insult it comes out to be.
I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve
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I think we’re headed into the “define jank, is that jank or is this jank, no that’s not jank!” territory. Stimhack is big enough to have a ton of different opinions and that’s what this site basically is, It’s just that the vocal majority here is people who attend a lot of tournaments and aim for the higher end. I think the important part of the mega thread you mentioned is “untested”, because a deck, janky or competitive, should still be tested by the author or somebody else to prove that it does work in the way it’s supposed to.