How FFG killed the Netrunner fanbase

Counterpoint to all that pump-and-dump talk: they’ve had aGoT LCG continuously in print for 7 years, then they launched a second edition. And they ran it as a CCG for 6 years before that, they’ve continually printed, developed and supported that game for 15 years now.

That doesn’t really paint a picture of a company that churns through games no matter how successful they are. They’ll eventually discontinue weak lines like the first Cthulhu game, but that’s due to sales, it’s not planned.

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This is like football, 11 players and 80 Million coaches (in Germany).

Some questions:

  • Do you really think they are stupid?
  • Do you really think they don’t want to have success?
  • Do you really think you would do a better job?

Think about your own world and how things are changing, influenced, …

And second, don’t take it so serious!

When I listen to all this rant, I stop enjoying the game. Going to German Nats tomorrow and really looking forward to it. It’s not perfect, but still I’ll enjoy it!

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ANRPC attempted a severe outreach. We started in 2015, ran numerous successful circuits that brought players to Worlds, and tried to communicate with OP that year at Worlds. We basically offered to help ANR OP to the point of taking it over. Lots of deaf ears. I have never had any successful outreach with them, including a well detailed proposal to run KOS at the FFG Centre this year.

There’s isn’t enough of a concentrated player base outside of the U.K. to support a player’s union. I will continue to run events in the name of the ANRPC, because it is a known name. Any one who wishes to I will support, and help with prize support at cost. I will even continue to explore options for other large events (Vegas?). We can hold our heads high in that perhaps we achieved our initial goal, getting FFG to give Gencon the credence it deserved, top prize-wise, and send the winner to Worlds. As far as working with FFG, or on a micro level, that isn’t happening with me anymore.

(On a side note, ANRPC is running a 5 v 5 US Charity stream this weekend. Come on out!)

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AHLCG is fantastic and the new cycle looks great. The lead designer is also really outspoken and just generally a really inventive dude.

I have nothing but good things to say about AHLCG, save for its distribution model sucks and look forward to seeing where it goes.

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I love Netrunner, and I wish FFG would pay more attention to it, but hyping the game you got compared to rebooting L5R is obviously the wrong business decision. The L5R tournament at Gencon was bigger than any Netrunner tournament ever. With one core, of a game that’d just come out.

We as a community need to get over the fact that L5R exists and probably saps resources from Netrunner. It’s not a winning battle and does literally nothing to help our cause.

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I think the majority of Netrunner fans would agree that picking up L5R was a good business decision for FFG. We just want FFG to realize that not all Netrunner fans will make the switch if they stop supporting ANR, because:

  1. Netrunner is a very unique game, and a portion of its fans don’t play other card games.
  2. While L5R is going to start very popular, FFG hasn’t fixed any of the issues that led to Netrunner’s decline, so there’s good reasons to think the same issues will happen to it.

I wanna drill down on this, but first:

L5R most certainly did not ‘just come out’.

  1. L5R has been run by AEG for 20 years (dates I can find are 1995-2015. I could be wrong.) That sort of legacy builds a presence.
  2. I’m unable to find tournament numbers for L5R for 2015 GenCon, the first thing I found is “L5R was next to us and had their usual notable (loud) morning presence, no clue on numbers. Their area didn’t seem packed all the time but AEG was running lots of different games.” So I’d wager they were of decent size pre-reboot.
  3. This was literally the first place you could get and play L5R. And it was at GenCon, a huge event by every standard. With those facts I would’ve been super surprised if they didn’t rival the Magic tournament in size.

Ok, so, back to the ‘good business decision’. Disclaimer: A lot of this is guesswork and the actual numbers will matter a huge amount.

First point of order: IP and the licensing thereof. Acquiring the L5R license was Not Free, and I’d wager it was Not Cheap, too. Whereas Android is in-house, they own that IP. True, they license Netrunner from WotC, but here’s the point: They can create more things in the Android universe without having to pay a dime. If they want to make tie-in boardgames or spin-off games for L5R, they very likely have to pay a larger licensing fee. (This is possibly untrue; depends on how desperate AEG was to offload L5R.)

This is not a small effect. How many people would’ve taken a second look at Mainframe if not for Netrunner? New Angeles definitely got more traction because of Netrunner. The tie-in novels and the world-building book also enjoy more success because of Netrunner. Thus, if you were to focus on improving the Netrunner playerbase, you could enjoy more ripple effects throughout your Android universe products.

Second: So, about that tournament attendance… It means that 700 people purchased a coreset of L5R. If FFG was smart, they also directly ran the tournament, so entry fees went to them instead of another organizer. (Currently those fees go to the organizer, who pays a relatively small amount to FFG OP for the kit to run the tournament.) Usually, however, FFG doesn’t see much direct income from tournament attendance, only from Data Pack/Core Set sales. (I would speculate that this is why FFG OP seems so disinterested in supporting the tournament community.)

Essentially, FFG is betting that net sales of L5R (that is; after taking into account Licensing Costs) will more than make up for any lost Netrunner sales as disgruntled players leave because FFG appears to be abandoning the game. (I do want to be clear real quick that I don’t believe they HAVE abandoned Netrunner, just that their actions have caused people to believe they have.) It’s not exactly a safe decision, which does not make it a bad decision, just… Questionable.

Also it’s like 3am and I might be missing something big here.

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guys, what’s all this sulking about? We buy a phone and we know that in a few year we won’t be able to update its OS anymore as the phone became too old. Likewise with board/card games: you buy one and you know that it will be supported only for a while. I don’t want to start any polemics but I think that this evolution could be expected especially out of a company such as FFG which pushes every year many new games.

If you like netrunner and want to have a healthy community where you have fun playing just do something about it. Organise your local tournaments, give away store credits or custom alt art cards as a prize and try to keep the things moving without relying on any help external to your local community.

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A little off-topic but what’s your gripe with AHLCG? A few friends of mine are really into it and I liked it well enough too.

The short answer is: it really rubs me the wrong way when you’re forced to buy multiple core sets (4x) for a multiplayer coop card game to get the full freedom in deckbuilding. In addition to that, the mechanics felt pretty clunky, especially leveling your character and the chaos bag, the later seemed nice in the beginning but due to the amount of tests you have to do during gameplay, gets really really tiresome aka dice rolling at the beginning of our later sessions to determine the unlucky “chaos bag guy” for the scenario. Also: auto-fail token, this one is just bad design in my book. What else? The stories are kind of flat, the roleplaying aspect is on the weak side and the attachment to your character and the character building isn’t really there for me.

To that guy who thinks this (AHLCG) doesn’t fit in this discussion: It does, because of the same product management (buying several starter sets) and bad logistics/business strategies by FFG (constantly underprinting their stuff to create an artificial scarcity and fail to deliver reprints in a timely fashion).

Just to reply on a small part of this (maybe I’m reading too much between the lines here): Trust me as a TO; there is not much income to be made from tournaments. Especially if you want to run a welcoming, smooth and properly facilitated event.

Pretty sure the attendance at the last few years of L5R at GC were record low. Lots of players disgruntled with the direction of the lead designer (sound familiar?).

L5R def. had some large tournies in the past. Getting a 200-300+ was common for awhile. The ‘700 person tournament’ was mainly a way for more to get Cores. However, there was a 70+ person waitlist that they only cut through 15 deep, so most showed to get their product, at least.

FFG OP is severely understaffed. They hired a 3rd party to help run their events this year at GC as a result. Prob. a smart move.

I don’t think bemoaning L5R helps. It’s a typical businesss move for them. It’s akin to saying that by halving the US Military budget, you could pay off the mortgages of half the U.S. To is, sounds great. To the govt, those are apples/(non-existent) oranges.

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As I understand it, FFG owns the IP now lock, stock, and barrel. It should be considered to be on the same tier of in-house setting as Android.

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Haven’t posted here in a while, mostly because I havent played in a long time. Whatever ffg does, sometimes you just need a bit of fresh air and enjoy other some other games. There’s so much fun to be had. But when it comes down to it, netrunner is one brilliant game in terms of assymmetry, information play, bluffing and deckbuilding/calculation. There’s nothing quite like it.

As for the OP’s complaints: every cycle people have complained about the meta and it being wrong in some way. It’s just the fact that netrunner is an exhausting game and nobody likes playing the same thing over and over. Yet there have always been multiple t1 decks, t2’s have been competitive to some extent. Major tournaments were only so often won by the percieved top dog.

The one I am really opposed to is the demonizing of Mr Stone. Looking back at it, I think he’s been amazing. He inherited a succesful game which was stalling. Mr Litzinger designed it wonderfully, but limited by his philosophy that the core set should hold the strongest cards in the game and the packs afterwards should be conservative, problems that existed could not be solved. He didn’t want to design cards that could end up on a ban list.

And that’s perfectly fine and safe, but tendencies in games could never be fixed with it. I think you’ll find very few designers who get a game like that in their hands, a list of problems, and decide to reshape it to address these problems. Mr Stone took risks with a succesful game, which requires some daring and some love, let go of the conservative design philosophy when it had run out, and for the most, has been succesful.

In my opinion, Weyland is in a better position now, as is NBN. There’s way more cost effective taxing ice out there to help glacier decks forming, as well as the incentive of the reenergized crim run economy. The broken combo of ash/caprice was adressed. The passive moneying up wars you had with kill decks are way less common (see: beth). Functional upgrades of icebreakers were printed.

Mr. Stone took risks, and yes these cards were above the power level you’d expect, and this does imply that now and then a strong card becomes a focus, but given with how many cards risks were taken and how many turned out to need to be put on the MWL, he’s been very good about it. And the game has been better for it.

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I agree. Tournaments make very little money for TOs. My understanding of it is that FFG makes the most money from tournaments, and it’s dependent on how many tournaments are run. Further, it’s a low amount per tournament. (On the order of Less than $100, probably more than $10).

The one thing that tournaments do, however, is make you money without having to print new cards. (New promos, maybe, but not new cards.) This saves money/time/effort for Design and Development. It’s one of the reasons I feel that tournaments are where they should be focusing attention. (I think their profit per tournament is near the same as profit per Cycle or Big Box sold, but it’s likely that selling product has a better profit margin. Especially when you take into account that with a tournament, there’s Several People, and they’ve all purchased Cycle… So for each tournament, you naturally have sold multiple Cardboard Products. The weird dichotomy comes when you realize that more people buy Cycles if you have Tournaments for them to play in… It’s not an easy effect to measure or guess at. The best way I think would be to look at AHLCG or LotRLCG (I think that was Co-Op, too, anyway…) vs AGoT2 or ANR.)

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This would be one of those details that changes my world view on this situation. If they fully control the IP instead of Licensing it, then I agree; it’s a smart move. L5R has some good recognition, and also good universe for tie-in products.

Heck, it’s not even a bad game. (When I was burnt out on Magic I looked at it briefly before getting turned off the random pack buying aspect… And then found Netrunner and never looked back.)

I think I agree with your post, that we don’t really have data to back up one way or another.

But for my brother and I, we did stop playing when Sifr came out. We both played in one tournament where it was legal, then we stopped. I played in a few ban-list events, and came back when Sifr came onto MWL-3, but in between I just didn’t play. I didn’t make plans to go to GenCon and I went on a different vacation.

I play now, and I enjoy the meta again. I like a lot of the cool new cards and some of the new ID’s (Los, AgInf). I enjoy the game, but my regular group no longer meets when it used to There were no new players to replace my brother and I, and another player who moved, so the group died. I don’t have regular games to play any more.

My brother just is not interested in coming back. He thinks the meta is too much of a Rock-Paper-Scissors deckbuilding exercise that he is not interested in playing in.

I do enjoy the game now, but I don’t have a lot of opportunities to play any more. It feels hard to justify spending $15/mo when I may not even play at all in a month.

I don’t think the meta is the sole main issue. I think it is normal for metas to change and not everyone will enjoy every meta. It should be fine if a few people stop playing. But it’s not, if a few people stop playing, there are no new players to replace them with. Groups are dwindling and dying because there is a slow trickle of players out of the game, and no influx of new players.

We need to attract and retain new players for the game to survive.

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Here’s the post where they announced that they were buying L5R. They were very clear that they were buying it, not licensing it. I know of nothing since then that contradicts that.

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For sure they bought it. I heard $1MIL+, but, that’s for the entire license. Not bad.

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I really agree on the demonization of Damion. I get that the style of card (very pushed) he is associated with, but people really ignore that some of the most hated cards came out in the Mumbad cycle. Faust, DDoS, bioethics, and sensie all came out under Lucas.

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Latest rumour I heard was that Lukas was already foot-out-the-door come Mumbad, to work on SWD. Some other dude, with little ANR knowledge, wrapped development on it, leading to the fucked up Rez to Trash costs.

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