I don’t believe this is a proper argument, see MtG
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Yeah. When I play a lot of ANR I’m hooked and willing to play even more but if I stop playing for wathever reason (work etc) for a week it’s really difficult to start playing again. Online Netrunner helps me to keep the hype going. 
Out of curiosity I repeated the cardpool analysis by cycle for the Runner side, and a similar theme emerges. i.e. a noticeable drop off in Programs (note: only in non-ICE breakers) and an increase in Resources.
Set – ID – Event – Hardware – Resource – Breaker – Program**
Core – 6% – 26% – 15% – 19% – 21% – 13%
1st – 7% – 20% – 18% – 25% – 15% – 14%
2nd – 5% – 27% – 18% – 18% – 15% – 17%
3rd – 8% – 27% – 13% – 27% – 10% – 16%
4th – 8% – 16% – 14% – 39% – 13% – 10%
5th* – 5% – 31% – 17% – 31% – 12% – 5%
- includes all known and spoiled cards so far
** all non-ICEbreaker programs
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At the minimum, it would be nice if there was a better preview schedule other than the big blast when a pack’s announced and then nothing until it either leaks or hits shelves. There hasn’t been a official preview of new cards since… what, December, when Fear the Masses was announced?
Like, maybe spoil a little less in the initial announcement, and then work out a drip feed spoiling a card or two every week leading up to the pack’s launch. At least it’d be something to talk about and keep hype rolling.
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I can only speak for certain parts of the UK but there has been an increas in the amount of store champs and the people attending them. The first one i ran in aldershot had about 10 players and this year it had over 30.
It can be boring to play against asset spam decks and faust but it just means you need to have a closer look at deck building. Sure it would be better IMHO if both the ofending cards were on MWL but it is a LCG so i would expect FFG to look into this so as to avoid something akin to to affinity/black summer/eldrazi winter that plagued Magic.
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I have heard that the original netrunner game has a cult following in France, long after it died across the pond in the US. Is this now manifesting in UK with the current format, or is it far too early to tell?
Feeling the same. I think my passion for the game has just burned out due to how much I used to play. I really think Jnet has expedited my burnout due to its accessibility and, outside of the IG slog fest, games feel like more of the same thing I’ve been doing the last 3 years, just with slightly more efficient options than before.
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Between your two breakdowns and some games last night, I had an interesting thought. The state of Netrunner right now is very much about board state, more than ever before IMO. The proliferation of Resources and Assets in particular makes many games of ANR akin to games of creature combat CCG. If you abstract many archetypes in ANR right now, they are more about assembling an oppressive board state of “creatures” than anything else.
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I like the description that netrunner is like poker and chess combined.
Chess - is your board state
Poker - your tactics in netrunner revolve around your ability to condense fact from the vapour of nuance
Maybe the game is becoming more about board state (and more boring because of it) - but for those who don’t like board states, there is always apocolypse.
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Someone pointed out to me recently that IG is so boring predominantly because it could play the game with all of its remotes (and most of its ice?) faceup - and it would make very little difference to how the game played out.
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that’s also the sign of a good deck though
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You could say that about RP too. There was almost never a question about which card was a Sundew, MHC, Nisei, or TFP. The biggest questions were usually Nisei/NAPD, or MHC/Jackson.
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RP at least had to play Ice though.
It’s… not though?
Like we say in comparing the game to poker, the hidden information is absolutely a key component of the game. The notion that the runner’s installed cards have to be faceup “aha, they have only a Fracter installed, this Quandry can keep them out!” while the corp’s cards are secret creates a fascinating asymmetry which is a defining feature of the game.
Perhaps you’re thinking “well being able to win despite that means I have a good deck” but we’re not talking about winning necessarily. The reductive exercise when considering the complaints about IG and “doesn’t make a difference” is imagine a Corp ID that just says “flip a coin to see who wins”. We can say the secrecy no longer makes a difference, it constrains runner decisions, but that does NOT make it “a good deck”
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Yes, if there’s no “pokeriness” to the remote servers that’s one thing. But it doesn’t mean that the concept of hidden information is removed from the game. The cards in HQ, R&D (to the extent that the Corp knows what they’ve put to the bottom/shuffled back in) and facedown in Archives are absolutely hidden information that the Corp can leverage.
If you’re visualising central servers as a random slot machine, you’re absolutely forgetting Corp agency!
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Im saying the sign of a good deck (in a competitive sense) is when the runner can know the entire contents of your deck, and all the cards you have on the board and can do jack shit about it. Competitive decks are often like this as they seek to limit interaction which yields consistency (RP Glacier, Andy Siphon Spam, Fastrobiotics, Val DLR mill etc come to mind).
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I play Netrunner in spite of its pokeriness, not because of its pokeriness. I’m aware I coexist with people who are the reverse. Those people probably want more Snare shell games and probably deserve more Snare shell games too.
In general, it’s probably best to stick to whatever genre got initial appeal for your game, “I came for the pop music, but stayed for the country music” is a risky strategy at it’s best. That’s why introducing psi games so late seemed pretty questionable, and cards like Mumbad City Hall, Museum of History, and the failed efforts to make Netrunner more of a “tableau builder” like Khala Ghoda Real TV seem like questionable moves after a game has been doing so well on ice, breakers, and agendas, and had its most recents complaints confined to a deviation from ice, breakers, agendas, (DLR)
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On the original question for me yes. I don’t mind playing against IG or anything really it’s just once I hit passed about the one year mark in a really competitive meta I realized my skill had reached a level that the only way to get better was to play online kind of killed it a bit for me, I really don’t want to play online.from most of the data Ive collected from top players they all seemed at their height of online play to be logging serious hours to get to that level. Also the realization that you really can’t compete well any way with home brew decks kind of sucks but you just deal with it, but I think a lot of new guys come and go because of those reasons.
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Kill decks have been a part of the game from the beginning (Scorched Earth, Project Junebug, Snare!, etc) which relied minimally on ICE as part of their game plan also making breakers a minimal part of that game. Criminals don’t even have a decoder in the core set starting ‘deck.’ The game has deviated from " ice, breakers, and agendas" since inception.
I get not liking an asset spam deck the can infinitely recur cards that are taxing for the runner to trash and allows the corp to just wait until it eventually wins. That’s something that breaks one of the defining elements of the game of the corp must act or it will lose due to being decked. But there’s much more to the game than making a server and having the runner try and get in with breakers.
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I communicated poorly, I don’t think you actually disagree with me as much as you think you do. People who have bought in on Netrunner seem to have bought in on decks like Weyland scorch, so that is something they should maintain to continue to appeal to an existing constituency. I’m not as eloquent as some people are about it and instead oversimplified the difference, but I think DLR and IG asset spam both present a strategy with a very different quality from anything that appears in the core set or very early expansions, while other expansion archetypes, like, as a great example, Haarp’s twist on how a meat damage deck might work, don’t deviate from that as drastically and can be reasonably expected to appeal to the same people who showed up in the first play.
I am definitely not that guy that stamps and spits and says “Public Support isn’t reeeeeeal netrunner, Public Support will never be reeeeeeeal netrunner”.