it may mean he was on sick leave that day, right?
either that, or he has more information than you do (which seems to be 0)
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Are you all implying that the future of the game is left in the blur because the 2 project leaders that pushed FFG into Netrunner moved from it ?
I miss the days when FFG were fighting against the spoilers. Less mystery, more game.
L5R will obviously start very well, this may be the final blow to our game (it will survive until someone in FFG compare profits between the two lines of product).
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This is an interesting point. Leigh Alexander tweeting about netrunner was what put it on my map in the first place. It resulted in me mentioning some of her stuff to a friend who turned out to be involved in the local community and he helped me get into the game.
I do wish someone who was a professional writer would put some ink out on the game again, but maybe it was a blue moon.
Do you think we could convince Graham Linehan to write it in as a plot point of a show?
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The asset spam meta killed it for us. Suddenly everyone stopped playing and the weekly meetups disappeared.
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Without a secondary market LCGs need to do something to excite the FLGS community to promote their games and products. I think there needs to be more direct structure to new releases. Instead of the cycles we currently have I think it would be better to have larger data pack/cycle releases that happen at slower intervals. I would say no more than 6 releases a year, though 4 may even be better.
New Core every other year, reprinting necessary cards (all reprints)⌠Good for new players and errata updated on card. Perhaps it comes out at worlds or shortly thereafter.
1 deluxe or campaign expansion per year
No more than 4 data packs per year and lower the number in the cycles.
Learn from the other games you own. Add choices similar to l5r to Netrunner. Somewhat like chronos protocol. And provide some incentive to the stores to run events. Maybe a product cost rebate based on sales to incentivize more FFG salesâŚ
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I got into Netrunner in January of 2016. When playing the game then and playing the game now, my worst experience has always consisted of the same thing: asset spam. In my opinion, runners have never had a good way to deal with â outside of Whizzard but even Whizzard can have issues at times â corps that simply install way too many assets for the runner to deal with.
I started to ask myself the following question: how did Netrunner thrive the way it did with this obvious design flaw? After asking a bunch of players that simply shrugged in response to that question, I decided to do some research. I compiled a card breakdown per cycle and I noticed an alarming bell curve. Notice the simple quantity of assets per cycle:
- Core Set + Genesis Cycle: 19 assets
- Creation and Control + Spin Cycle: 17 assets
- Honor and Profit + Lunar Cycle: 19 assets
- Order and Chaos + SanSan Cycle: 22 assets
- Data and Destiny + Mumbad Cycle: 28 assets
- Flashpoint Cycle: 9 assets
- Red Sand + Terminal Directive: 16 assets
SanSan and Mumbad obviously skew outside the lines of normal card macro totals up until their release. I remember the first time I looked at those numbers on NRDB. I thought Iâd made a mistake in my search. That seemed then and it seems now like a serious design flaw: one that in hindsight has seriously unbalanced the game.
One can also go beyond simply the numbers and look at the power level of those assets to see their unbalancing effect on the game. The Mumbad cycle along has four assets on the MWL that have ridiculous power levels: Sensie Actorâs Union, Mumbad City Hall, Mumba Temple and Bio-Ethics Association.
All those macro totals and all those powerful card effects lead to countless games â for new or less experienced players â where one of the following things usually takes place:
- The runner wins in the first 3-5 turns because they managed to luck into agendas given the corporation canât as easily protect their centrals.
- The corporation quickly engineers a board state that snowballs out of anything the runner can easily control, the runner player shakes their head and concedes.
Neither of those two types of games â especially the second scenario â bring that much enjoyment to anyone much less attract new players to the game.
So, yeah⌠I think asset spam has carried the lionâs share of the blame for killing the Netrunner fan base.
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I said it before, Iâll say it again.
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Iâll all for that.
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I donât think it makes a lot of sense to group deluxes and cycles for this count. It makes it harder to see how rotation might affect this, and it makes Data and Destiny look like an outlier even though it isnât.
Hereâs the same list, without that grouping:
- Core set: 9
- Genesis: 9
- Creation and Control: 7
- Spin: 10
- Honor and Profit: 6
- Lunar:13
- Order and Chaos: 4
- SanSan: 18
- Data and Destiny: 6
- Mumbad: 22
- Flashpoint: 9
- Red Sand: 10
- Terminal Directive: 6
So big boxes havenât seen much change in their asset count. And though there was a bit of a jump in asset count for SanSan, it wasnât a huge departure from the general trend of increasing asset count. Plus the last two cycles saw a sharp drop in asset count, so itâs possible FFG is trying to fix this mistake.
Of course, even without the assets-per-cycle number increasing, the total number of available assets has increased with every release up until now, which doesnât help.
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The problem isnât just that there are more assets. The quality of the assets has gone up considerably. Itâs not surprising as the assets have a very tough job of being costed for trash and Rez appropriately when taking into account the ability. I think it speaks volumes that the best priced assets are economy cards which have clear, discrete game impacts. Obviously assets before the Mumbai cycle were bad. How many people really played stuff like the root? So they tried lower cost, higher trash stuff and it immediately resulted in asset spam. I donât know what he solution is, except that maybe most assets shouldnât have long term game effects. The best asset by a country mile is Jackson Howard, which isnât ridiculous to trash, is free to Rez, and has a click ability and an RFG ability, none of which results in a snowball build up the way bioethics or sensie does.
Edit: actually I was thinking about this more after I posted and I realized there is something interesting with regards to Jackson Howard and the other assets that have come out. As Jackson Howard is rotating out the replacement effects for him have largely been events, not assets. I feel like maybe there as a design consensus in FFG that one time powers should be events and not assets and that assets should have more ongoing effects? Not privy to anything but it feels like that was the goal. I think that speaks to my earlier point tho: they wanted assets to be better and spectacularly overshot.
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The problem with this logic is that Bank Job is much more restrictive. If you are up against Sync, they are not going to give you a remote server to get your money and you have a dead card. You also get the flexibility of putting it on archives early game for maximum credits. Or you can put it on R&D/HQ mid to late game to get some money back after doing what would be doing anyway. The last factor is how much money it gives you. If you need X amount of econ for your deck and you can get that money by using 1-2 less cards then you can effectively add those 46th and 47th cards to your deck.
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So just a little rant because the title of this thread kind of got me a little mad. Itâs stating that the fanbase is dead? Seriously?
I donât really care what FFG does as long as they keep printing cards which I can buy. They never realized the potential Netrunner had and never supported it the way they should have.
For me though, Netrunner wonât be dead ever I guess. I play absolutely everything (even Monopoly) and itâs the only thing that still gets my endorphines running. Never gets old, still love playing it all the time on all levels and all formats, even with or against totally broken cards, love the theme and above all, its just a very unique, great game.
What lead to the current situation of discontent is that many expect too much I think. Netrunner isnât Magic or Yugioh. It doesnt generate the same income, isnt playtested as much, doesnt get promoted as much etc. That might be FFGs fault but blaming them doesnât get us anywhere. In the end itâs the community which keeps a game alive.
So, sorry but: If you still like the game, how about instead of whining just create something positive? Try to bring newcomers to the game, organize stuff, play more, whatever. If you donât enjoy the game anymore, well, thatâs fine too. But please leave the living, strong fanbase alone with your negative attitude!
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Along these lines, I think we all owe a bit of gratitude to the streamers and content creators who have kept us entertained while the game may have otherwise floundered.
This includes, but is far from limited to:
@CodeMarvelous
@dodgepong
@beyoken
@spags
@krystman
Andre from Metropole Grid (donât know your handle here, sorry)
All of the podcasts like Winning Agenda, Run Last Click, Terminal 7, The Source, and more that I canât even think of off the top of my head.
All of the above have definitely done their part to keep me invested in the game, even when organized tournaments are in a lull or the meta is absolute cancer. I really canât thank them enough!
Keep up the good work guys! I know A:NR wonât ever pull in numbers streaming like Hearthstone or anything like that, but you guys all put in the effort to make the game that much better.
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The title of this thread was clear, and it interested other people enough to participate in the discussion. You clearly did not want to take part in this discussion - why did you click on it? This kind of reply is as rude as if someone went into a thread on Criminals and said âI donât get why people want to discuss how to play Criminal. Anarchs are clearly better.â Just ignore the thread, please.
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To be fair, itâs as if your hypothetical Criminal thread were titled âWhy Criminal is the only playable factionâ. With such a title, itâs not unreasonable to expect somebody to come in and dispute the premise.
In particular, even if youâre just trying to tell the true story of how the Netrunner community has shrunk, it would still seem pretty useful to also understand the other side of the coin: What kind of players are still playing? Why have they stuck with it?
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I donât think many of the people still playing Netrunner are doing so because they think FFG has handled it well this past couple of years. But if youâre ARE going to argue that, at least come in and state the reasons you think theyâve done well. Just coming in and trying to shut down the discussion isnât helpful.
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Yeah. Asset spam could have worked, but Netrunner was never designed to be such a game. There are plenty of games that are about preventing the opponent from creating a terrifying boardstate but they include effects to deal with it. In Netrunner, it remains one click and a trash cost to deal with every single asset. When Friends In High Places meant the corp was actually gaining clicks from this exchange, I gave up.
Trading clicks at a loss isnât a fun game mechanic. At best itâs grindy whack-a-mole where you can never let the corp get a foothold for fear of the snowball, so you just trash everything until they deck. Other times itâs a corp snowball you canât stop. There are very rare games where itâs balanced and interesting, but this is an unstable equilibrium, so most games donât involve this (or not for long).
Look at how many cards are assets. Where are all the runner cards dealing with them? Where is âRun on HQ - if Successful, return 5 rezzed assets to handâ? Where is âRun on R&D - if successful, access one card per rezzed assetâ? Where is 'Run on Archives - if successful, trash all rezzed copies of assets found in Archives."
And so on. An absolute ton of design space that might have gone some way to opening the game up. But no such cards were ever printed.
Personally I think assets desperately need a scaling cost of installs, like ICE, for all the same reasons ICE has that rule. Failing that, I donât know why a load more âmini-Apocalypseâ cards have not been printed.
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I would also like to add that FFG also printed IDs which upped the power level of said assets at the same time. I think upping the power level of assets by itself isnât too bad, it is in combination with ids like CTM and genomics it gets really bad.
Basically, it kills of a whole slew of runner archtypes. And this is what makes it boring for me at least. Seeing the same or nearly the same whizzard gets boring after a while.
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