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.