How FFG killed the Netrunner fanbase

Netrunner General
82

Glad to read your voice again, even if just for one post.

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83

People don’t ignore that, we just think that, as head designer, he is still responsible of not putting them on the MWL in a proper and timely manner. Worse, he was dimissive towards players and blamed them for not “playing the solutions that were there” like multi-sub ICE for Faust because we were “listening to groupthink by dimissive competitive players”.

This is not demonization, just fair criticism.

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84

Re: Damon

I loved some of his designs. I hate some of his OP shite. Other cards were beyond useless.

Damon is more of a visionary than an implementer. If he had an engaged, quality developer, we could’ve had some Golden Era cards. Instead, we have a lot of MWL targets.

FWIW, I recently had a number of testers tell me Damon nearly drove them from testing/the game. That was not only shocking to hear, but also sad.

Food for thought.

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Damon’s designs would get you to buy a pack, though, right? He created some crazily buyable packs. I hated some heavy-handed designs on the corp side but man I never wanna fall behind if Damon is designing. The absurdity of some of his cards are some of my best moments in gaming.

It feels like the designer should create broken cards, the developer should balance them, and OP should listen and re-belance. It’s a tripartite structure.

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86

I disagree with this for two reasons:

  1. There’s really only 2 bonkers packs that Damon designed - the Rumor Mill / Temujin pack and the Sifr / Aaron Marron pack. It’s just that those 4 cards had such a huge effect on the game, we associate Damon with crazy OP cards.

  2. I think for most people still buying packs, the actual contents of the pack have almost no bearing on whether we buy them. If Netrunner is still fun for you, you buy the packs as they come out. If Netrunner stops being fun, you stop buying packs. I’ve never met anyone who buys some packs and not others based on their cards. The most important thing to get people to buy packs is a healthy metagame, a good schedule of events, and clear communication with the fanbase, not the specific contents of a particular pack.

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I don’t agree, I think every single pack in that cycle was bonkers. We were seeing a new metagame per month and each one was more oppresive than the last:

23 Seconds had CtM, Hard-Hitting News and Sandburg
Blood Money had Rumor Mill and Temujin
Escalation had Obelus and Boom!
Intervention had En Passant
Martial Law had Friends in High Places
Quorum had Sifr, Aaron and Bryan Stinson to boot

Back then people complained that we saw a new meta with each pack. The impact of CtM was massive and there was nothing to minimally curb it until Citadel Sanctuary came out.

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Lukas and Damon respectively have been the faces of Netrunner, but I can’t help but wonder who else at FFG is influencing the design and has had a hand in broken cards making it through testing. Hasn’t Damon hinted that Sifr made it through his objections due to someone higher up insisting on it?

I may be wrong, but that’s certainly the impression I got from a bunch of the broken card situations, from Wireless Net Pavilion onward. To me, it’s less the concern of who’s the face of Netrunner, but that whatever balancing processes are in place behind closed doors don’t work sufficiently. And switching out the lead designer is only a publicity move, if the situation behind the scenes remains unchanged,

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89

Pretty much heard this is untrue.

Damon left of his own accord. His wife got a job in the Bay Area, and they moved.

I will agree that there has been micromanagement in the past, and CTPetersen has been the main suspect. I believe having Andrew Navarro in charge will help on that front.

Now, if we could only do something about OP and marketing…

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A lot of the discussion contains the unspoken assumption that it’s possible - for a complex game like Netrunner - to create a card pool of 1200 cards without any cards being unbroken or unbalanced. Think about the number of potential interactions. I just think it’s an impossible task to balance two sides and 7 factions over such a time span and card pool, broken cards are inevitable.

The only question is how you remedy the situation when an unbalanced (i.e. makes the game less fun overall) card makes it through development. There’s room for argument there. Would Netrunner fans have been outraged if Sifr was banned or somehow nerfed soon after landing?

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91

I can’t speak for everyone, but I think we would have gotten the same amount of “how the heck did this make it through playtest!!!” but then also “I’m glad they did something about it quickly”. And you’re definitely right–nobody should expect perfection, but we also have to expect that the playerbase will always grumble about balance… which means there needs to be good communication.

I think the main thing this thread has established is that FFG simply doesn’t communicate effectively with the Netrunner player base. There’s a basic maxim from one of my city’s wise men: “never let a one-day story become a two-day story”. FFG seems committed to a system which lets one-day stories linger for weeks.

The good news is that communication can be fixed without a major investment! The bad news is that they’d have to want to fix it.

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Honestly just some veteran players theorycrafting can usually spot the worst offenders when they’re spoiled. Of course some cards are above power curve and others below, but finding the ones that deviate the most (and too much!) doesn’t seem to be that hard. But then, I also don’t want to buy packs, play the cards a few months and then get all the best ones banned. MWL is a good way to nerf stuff, though.

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Exactly.

First, MWL announcements should be made regularly even if no changes are made.

Second, when a card is put on the MWL, given errata or the like there should be a post explaining FFG’s reasoning and why it should be done.

Third, they shouldn’t be scared of being aggressive with the MWL. Faust should have been hit way before 6 months and Sifr should have been hit with an emergency ban ala Memory Jar.

Fourth, FFG should understand that whatever nonsensical backlash one can get for these three things it’s much better than pretending everything’s fine. Doing things properly may rattle the BGG nerds but damage will be lower if you aren’t afraid to do what needs to be done.

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You threw me for a loop there Spags, because I assume you’re a lot more on top of things than me. It took me a while to dig it up, but what I’m referring to is The Winning Agenda podcast #84 from May 2016. Here’s the quote (If you’re going to listen to it, it’s about 38 minutes in):

It may well be true that the card in question wasn’t Sifr, which was pretty much the conclusion everyone who had heard the podcast jumped to when they saw the Quorum spoilers, but whatever the case may be, Damon most definitely said that, and it implies the lead designer doesn’t have the final decision on card balancing, and that’s a problem.

If things have changed with the new designer, I’d be happy to hear about it.

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Oh, I am well aware Damon said that. I heard that was a lie.

This!

At least Boggs got rid of the ‘Six Month Rule’, but, the ‘20 card limit’ is dumb. If it’s broke, fix it.

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Damon also defended Sifr as not OP on Run Last Click, so it’s hard to know what to believe :(.

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From what little I know and am allowed to discuss of SWD’s development timeline, this seems implausible

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Was it XCOM? I’m pretty sure he did that while working on Netrunner.

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Sifr is an very strong console that is OP because of only two things : inf 1 & +2MU for 5c (when you can have a +2MU no console/chip for 4c).
It could be a console with +0 MU (asking you to find other MU sources for DS/Parasites for exemple) and inf 3 + maybe MVL T1 with no major issue, other than asking again Anarchs to find inf to use their stuff.

Caprice is OP. Account Syphon is OP. I think Sifr is just above the power level of those card.

A card like Temujin, to me, is not stronger than Account Syphon.

Tempo wise, it’s a lot behind syphon :

  • Temujin : draw + install + 5 runs = 7 clicks for +16c, with a corp warned that nothing else will happen other than 5 runs + at least 2 run costs.
  • Syphon : draw + play + 2 x detag = 4 clicks for +6c, with surprise factor, 1 run cost and a corp at -5c. No acces though.
  • Now Bank Job get +7c for 2 clics. To compare with Temujin, clic money 5 times, and you get 12c for 1x run cost : this is OP compared to temujin.
  • Liberated Account get +10c for 6 clicks and no run : clic money once and you’re -5c + no run cost compared to Temujin.

Nobody complains about Syphon because it costs 4 inf.

As most of recent problems, Temujin is probably low priced in inf. Now we have a MWLed Temujin that asks Criminals “would you rather have Temujin for 1 inf or a superior card for 0” and I’m not sure this is fine.

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I agree with the OP that all the things he lists are bad moves on FFG’s part, and they no doubt helped turn many players away, but I think your point is important to acknowledge too. All games have a natural churn of players, and in most cases their populations decline over time, as they no longer have the allure of the new, and expanding card pools make them harder to get into. In Netrunner’s case, it also had a HUGE explosion around 2014-15 due to a glut of positive press about it, largely from Quinns and Leigh, whose writing gets in much more mainstream places than the places card games normally get covered in. When they stopped writing about the game, a lot of the attention dried up, and we stopped getting as many new players to replace the ones who were leaving (and I’m sure people were ALREADY leaving, even theback then, they were just being replaced and then some).

I don’t think anyone realised why so many extra players suddenly flooded into the game, neither at FFG nor in the community. We weren’t prepared for them and we didn’t succeed in keeping them invested (though a lot of good people tried very hard).

The unfortunate thing is that the game had a second chance to go more mainstream with Terminal Directive, which got a lot of press coverage, and most of it leaned towards the positive. But FFG wasn’t prepared to capitalise on this press. They were busy hyping newer games like Arkham Horror and Destiny, and getting L5R ready, Boggs had just taken over and was taking time to learn the ropes (no fault of his, or Damon’s, just unfortunate timing), and rotation hadn’t happened yet making the cost of entry intimidating (not something they could have predicted when they planned rotation years ago, but if it had been brought forward to coincide with TD’s release that would’ve been great).

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101

That…
is the opposite of reassuring.

I’m going to give the benefit of the doubt to Damon here, no matter what else I think of him, rather than taking your anonymous source for gospel.

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