So do we make a timed loss worth 1 point, a timed win worth 2 points, and a win worth 3 points?
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I find it weird that people think that it’s better to concede to give your opponent a spot in the cut while at the same time denying another person the same place in the cut. If it’s your friend it’s at least understandable (but, oddly enough, probably frowned upon), while it’s fine to choose to give one stranger the spot over another.
You could, like @lpoulter says, just decide that winner of the first round takes all, but isn’t that explicitly collusion?
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I asked CJ this, and apparently the rules say this still falls under collusion.
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I’ve just read the rules and it actually seems quite clear this is collusion.
Definition
Two or more people conspire to alter the results of the tournament.
Examples
- Two players intentionally draw their match to insure that they both make the cut to
elimination rounds. This is legal, so long as one player does not offer the other
compensation for doing so. - A player intentionally loses his match to guarantee his friend makes the cut to elimination
rounds. - A spectator asks a player to lose her match so that his friend will receive a prize.
Sure; I wasn’t doubting CJ. I just hadn’t bothered to read the rules myself!
I guess we still have to play out the full games next time we meet. 
This is pretty awful. Agreeing to ID and agreeing to let the winner of game 1 get game 2 are both agreements made before the first turn is taken in order to maximize each person’s chances to get into the cut, as a selfish desire, without any offer or use of compensation.
Either neither should be allowed or both should be allowed.
Hypothetical example: Players A, B & C all finish on the same points.
In terms of Head to head, Player A beat B, whilst B beat C. A & C didn’t play eachother. Lets also assume that SoS is 1.75 for A, 2 for B and 2.25 for C.
What order would they be ranked in?
I can see a case for A,B,C based upon head to head, but also C didn’t play A, so should be ranked above A based upon SoS creating a bit of a paradox.
How is this resolved in practice?
Agree 100%; if intentional draws are allowed, and concessions are allowed, agreeing that the loser of game one will concede game two is both logically consistent and ethically indistinguishable.
There is a minor tournament structure issue with any of this, and it’s because it lets people who end up at the top lock potential comeback players out. There are plenty of pairing-randomness-related reasons why someone might get shafted out of a favorable schedule and need someone at the top table to get swept to make the cut. If those in the cut at the end of the penultimate round can lock movement out, there’s no reason to play the final round, and this is recursively true. Meritocracy might be possible, but only once there’s a high degree of fully-played-out (i.e. no concessions, IDs) connectedness amongst players, which isn’t true of most mid-sized tournaments.
I don’t think this is necessary to find a rules solution to, though. We should strive to play more games 
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The goal of jamming in more games is why I favor a looser structure where people begin a match with some available player as soon as they finish a match
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Honestly, I’d be happy to just see the cut done away with entirely in favour of one or two more rounds of Swiss. It would avoid nearly all of the issues to do with manufacturing results, stop the regular instances of the cut going on late into the evening even for minor events, let lower-ranked players get more than four games before they’re sent home, and seems generally more reliable at finding the best player on the day.
I don’t really see how the benefits of having a cut outweigh all of that, but I also suspect it’s not going to happen; FFG seem to be moving in the direction of cuts for more events, not less.
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I’m not sure about that. Concessions aren’t freely allowed: rather they are allowed only where they are not part of an agreement with another party that will alter the scoring. They still fall under the collusion rules.
As far as ethics go, manipulated draws are defined as being allowed but with no explanation as to why this type of collusion is ethical while others aren’t, if indeed the collusion rule is an ethical issue. So it’s a little hard to look for ethical consistency given the rules as they stand.
I think it’s maybe more correct to say that if you allow manipulated draws, it makes sense from a point of consistency to allow any and all collusion and chicanery that players care to come up with!
The problem is that you should not overdo with giving those players extra games. From my experience 5 rounds is perfect - I once TOd a Regionals big enough to do 6 rounds Swiss and most casual players told me that the final round was not fun as they were too tired. Since then I aim at 5 rounds Swiss every time as this seems to be the amount of playing people enjoy the most.
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Not arguing with you, per se, but with the rulebook premise that there exists a situation where a concession occurs in the absence of an at least tacit agreement with the other player to alter the round’s scoring. Concession inherently alters the round score, and while I can’t imagine the other player declining a conceded game win it could at least in theory happen, so there is implicitly an agreement to accept the outcome as a conceded game win.
I think we agree on the broad outline, though
Hell, for anyone that doesn’t have a chance to make the cut, anything over four rounds is probably too much :). It’s pretty common to hear folks at tournaments say “we have to play how many rounds?” – Netrunner is a long and pretty mentally tiring game.
The trick is to make sure people can drop freely without that also impacting the final standings–or giving everyone an incentive to want to continue playing games
When they talk about not making agreements to alter the scoring, are they talking about agenda points or prestige points?
If they’re talking about prestige points then I don’t understand why intentional draws are legal… that’s pretty clearly making an agreement to alter how many prestige points you both score.
If they’re talking about agenda points, then it’s basically saying ‘You no longer need to make weird agreements with your opponents like agreeing to let each other score 7 points as the corp so that both players make the cut, you can now intentionally draw or concede’.
Casual players are going to attend a regional if they live very near the event, but I don’t think regionals need to cater to them per se. GNKs are short and should stay that way and will be available to give casual players the experience they need.
I suggested it before in the context of MtG, but I think many many rounds of Swiss and a cut to top 2 is ideal. The only possible intentional draw is if the first seed wants to deliberately let the second seed be in finals or not based on last round, and matchups will probably outweigh friendship in that case so that decision ends up strategic instead of social.
Playing lots of rounds of netrunner can indeed be tiring at times, but really any game worth playing is tiring. Some of the issues with fatigue have more to do with card design mistakes than tournament structure IMO, psi games for half a game of agenda points are emotionally taxing for little good reason.
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I don’t think there is an issue here at all. The set of possible outcomes isn’t changing at all, only the agency involved in those outcomes. There is no effective difference for one of the potentially locked out players if I split my match naturally or intentionally (or if I sweep/get swept intentionally or naturally).
Every decision I make in a tournament is based on choosing the thing that gives me the best chance to finish on top - everything from whether to install an agenda to rezzing an ice to picking corp or runner in the first round of a cut, and each of those has effects for at least one other player. As long as it’s legal, if choosing to ID gives me the best shot at that I don’t think it’s is any different.
Er, I mean yeah, but we’re trying to measure who’s the best at Netrunner, not who’s the best at knowing when to ID. IDing is definitely a necessary evil at best.
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If you actually follow this through, that’s not a very sociable way to run a tournament. Cheating (secretly peeking at your opponents’ cards, or slyly over-drawing, say) would give you a better chance to finish on top. If you make every decision to win, your only reason for not cheating would be if the chance of getting caught outweighs the benefit. The reason for not cheating ought not be for game theoretical reasons, but rather because you try to avoid being a selfish sociopath.
I would suggest instead that every decision ought to be aimed to win Netrunner games, then see how that shakes out with everyone else to determine if you get a prize or not. That’s a far more sociable attitude to approach a tournament with (and with which to frame the rules regarding deliberate abuse of known deficiencies in the scoring system). The tournament rules and scoring system are set up to with the aim of trying to judge who has played the best Netrunner over the course of the day. If these “loophole” situations arise, they are not deliberate features of that system, but rather artefacts of the system not being perfect. To use one of these loopholes to gain unintended advantage is to prioritise yourself over your fellow Netrunners coming along, running some nets and seeing where they end up: that’s fundamentally selfish.
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This sums it up for me. Conceding should be allowed, but also enables intentional draws. Personally, I go to Netrunner tournaments to play Netrunner more than win so IDing is against the point.
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Since it’s a necessary evil, it’s definitely worth looking into and considering if there are feasible solutions to mitigate how often it will actually occur, in terms of tournament structure. Not necessarily true that there’s an easy answer, but the attitude towards it should be, we want as little of this as possible to be inherent to the tournament.
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