Whether a game action is done through explicit or implicit communication is irrelevant. If my turn starts as PE and I have a Gila scored and a draw a card, look at it, and dump 4 credits from the bank on my ID and say “pass turn” no one has a problem with it. That doesn’t mean I can’t explicitly use the ability instead, or that there’s a special timer on how long I can decide whether to spend two clicks on the ability. Just because implicit communication is used doesn’t mean that a rule isn’t 100%, precisely defined. Activated ability passes are 100%, precisely defined.
Floor rules already address the situation. The only reason you would think they don’t address the situation is if you for some reason thought abilities were magical and special and spending clicks were not. They are both times when exactly one player is 100% in the driver’s seat of the game until they select an action (-no action- just happens to be an option for activated abilities, but it is by no means a default). You have unlimited time to agonize over a decision when you have that driver’s seat, and if you get caught abusing that time, the channel of recourse is for a judge to be called for slow play and assess that the amount of time you’re stalling doesn’t match the significance of the play or the number of choices available.
Quoting the Floor rules here, the very first two examples regarding Slow Play mix and swap between spending click and activating abilities. It’s abundantly clear that they are both considered equivalent, and both fall under the Slow Play infraction:
"1. The Runner makes a run on a server with all ice rezzed and takes multiple minutes to
think before encountering each piece of ice.
2. The Corporation starts the turn with no cards in HQ. After the mandatory draw, the
Corporation takes several minutes to think before spending any clicks. "
For both of these, the JUDGE is supposed to determine that too much time was taken and warn for slow play. Even when the slow play has definitely occured in the judge’s assessment, the judge is not instructed to force a player to pass priority with no action. He is just supposed to warn. (in an extreme situation where the slow play repeatedly occured right in front of the judge, the warnings would stack and get upgraded to game losses and match losses. Yet there would never be a point where the judge says “things keep happening because no one yelled UNO in time”)
For a player to make an assessment of slow play on his own and assign the penalty of controlling his opponent’s game actions to be “no action” is absurd in my opinion, but more importantly not supported by any of the documents FFG has written up.
I agree it shouldn’t be played like that and I am happy to hear that judges punished this behaviours. On the other hand, as remarked by @Dragar, I have never seen either on OCTGN, Jnet or IRL somebody consistently asking “any reaction?” after taking a click. This would solve most of the problems, but the game would probably be bogged down.
As the rules do not state explicitly the duration of such windows, it is not unconceivable that a player who wants to win at all costs might try to take advantage from this ambiguous ‘reaction window’ definition. Furthermore, even without any ill intention, if you are a fast player you might regard as ‘healthy’ or ‘reasonable’ a window that is far too narrow for your opponent.
This being said, to me it really boils down to a matter of mentality: even if take-backs where allowed by the rules, corp players could still rush to rez their ICE to commit the runner to fatal runs.
The only ambiguity in the floor rules is how to handle a player that disregards the priority window of their opponent, with or without ill intention. It’s not ambiguous that players do have as much time as they want to think and consider how they use their priority windows, and the abundance of 1 millisecond mutually understood implicit priority passes doesn’t mean the priority windows don’t exist.
Most players in my playgroup, and myself when I play on jinteki even with randoms, ask “any reaction?” when there is the possibility of a meaningful activated ability, be that Paparazzi under a Street Peddler after a Sea Source, Clot underneath Clone Chip, or anything else. You can skip asking “any reaction” when no meaningful abilities are available and finish a game just fine.
Do you mean you’ve never seen someone asking “any reaction” after every click, or after some clicks where it matters? If it’s the former, I agree, and I understand the usefulness of the thought exercise about why implicit priority passes are needed. If it’s the latter, you’re mistaken: I guarantee you you’ve at least faced Jnet players that ask whether they can fire subroutines on their ICE or whether you still want to activate some abilities that might break the ICE: That is them asking if you’re going to pass priority with no reaction instead of activating abilities on your SMC or Icebreaker. Clone chip and Clot are activated abilities too, but some players treat the priority passes on that differently than priority passes on an ICE encounter for reasons I can’t quite understand.
I also agree with you that people are more keen on asking “fire?” than “any reaction?”, perhaps some sort of reaction is expected during a run much more than in other stages of the turn?
\begin{OT}
Magic workstation, back in the days, had a sort of progress bar that would track where the game was in the turn sequence. Perhaps if something like that was implemented in OCTGN or Jnet players could pass each other the priority simply by pushing spacebar or something.
\end{OT}
I think that’s actually rather on-topic, actually, because you’re touching on how physical signifiers of priority passes can be more clear to people than one’s talked about in the rules with no physical representation. If we had a token called “the priority con token”, and players passed it back and forth after each step, and that token represented your priority to activate abilities, then players would be more likely to understand that’s an actual turnbased process and not a window of N seconds where N is nebulous. And they’d probably still understand that even when they stopped physically moving the token a lot of the time to save time. The same way people understand the click tracker card represents an opponent’s control over their clicks, and if they go into the tank on how to spend a click, you can’t reach over and push their click tracker chip and hand them a credit.
If the core set contained clot, we probably would have more in the way of physical artifacts or symbology to represent priority, but it wasn’t initially such a big part of the game, as was the case with Magic’s core set (both mostly used prevention windows, which don’t actually use priority)
Today, in another example of Why You Should Call A Judge When Your Opponent Does Something You Feel Is Fishy:
No, it doesn’t comply with the rules, as said later by @popsofctown.
Netrunner is not a ‘Gotcha!’ game where you can claim your opponent intentionally did nothing just by waiting in silence. (And neither is MtG…) And in fact! If you’re playing against someone like this, you should call a judge so that they stop playing like this. You’re not the bad guy for calling a judge when someone is trying to rules lawyer you. You’re getting the ACTUAL Rules Lawyer to get to whatever is supposed to happen.
Later on in that discussion, it was brought up that it’s in the shortcut section:
Shortcuts and Out of Order Sequencing:
Some players will take an action with a shorter method than the game rules allow or take multiple actions in the incorrect order. Oftentimes, this is merely a method of playing the game in the fastest way possible or to avoid forgetting a trigger that would resolve after a number of other effects. Shortcuts are allowed as long as players have agreed upon the shortcut and the end result is the same as if each action were taken individually. Out of order sequencing is highly discouraged, but it is legal as long as the player performing the out of order actions explains the actions before he or she performs them and the end result is the same as if the actions were performed in order.
(p. 25)
Moral of the story is communicate before you use them. Otherwise, a proper judge, which I don’t believe there are any yet (besides Lukas), will try their best to rewind the action and likely rule against the person that used a shortcut without consent.
