Jnet as a standalone game has two major practical problems, I think:
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Players expect standalone computer games to have rules enforcement. We already see regular questions from new players about “is x allowed? I thought it was against the rules, but Jnet let me do it.” Without the explanation that Jnet’s just a tool for the players to use to follow Netrunner’s rules, that problem would get much, much worse. And it’s my understanding that Jnet’s architecture is really not conducive to adding rules enforcement, as that was never one of its goals.
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Jnet has historically gotten very slow when there were more than 50-100 simultaneous games. I know they’ve done work on the performance, but I suspect it’s still going to struggle if you have several hundred games at once. I could be wrong, though.
That’s ignoring smaller but still important issues like chat moderation and paying for the increased server costs.
This started getting underway on the Tuesday after the announcement and I slept six hours that week, mostly from stress.
People’s patience is valued on this. I can’t imagine how other Jako/Orb are feeling, as well as others who are all putting in so much work just so we can keep playing after MOpus.
Given that FFG regularly left us with no news for months with no explanation, I think we can afford to be patient.
My only thought is that the project will live or die on transparency. It has to be seen as open and done by fans of the game for fans of the game, not as a niche extra for the elite. I’m optimistic that they’ll get this and do a much better job involving the community in game’s decisions (including design).
Those two groups are not mutually exclusive…
Without intimate knowledge of their internal workings I cannot say for certain, but this strikes me purely as an affordability issue, that can be solved by just throwing more money at it, for a better/faster webhost.
It’s possible that their current codebase spirals out of control no matter how powerful the servers driving it are, but since it’s a fan-run project, I’m not expecting top of the line back-end supporting it right now. I easily see that changing if NISEI gets off the ground…
/puts on acting president hat
@nutritionalzero thank you for your thoughts! I am not entirely sure how feasible that will be, but we have and will continue to build relationships with jinteki.net, NRDB, ABR, and ANCUR so as to both preserve those resources moving forward as well as see what further collaboration can be accomplished.
Just as a reminder to all, our google drive directory is open for viewing by anyone who wants to know what we are up to. If you are at all curious what’s being worked on, that’s a great place to start. Transparency is one of our founding principles, so it’s very important to us to get that right. We are doing what we can to involve community members through this process, and are laying foundations for how the organization can continue to do so (and improve upon!) once the Board is selected (which shouldn’t be too far away!).
/puts on acting PR hat
You may also ask any questions by sending an email to projectnisei@gmail.com, sending a tweet to @projectnisei, or (and this is the least efficient way, unfortunately) joining the #future channel on Stimhack Slack. I, personally, am trying to answer as much as I can.
That all said, let me be real honest: Not a lot is solidified to the point where we can say anything other than “the leadership will decide.” We’ll have more to say soon, I am sure, but until then just bear with us as we sort out how this will all work.
Personally, I wouldn’t want Netrunner to become a purely online game. For one thing, I much prefer in person games, and I think a lot of other people do too. There are already plenty of computer games and the social aspect of Netrunner and the physicality of cards are essential parts of the experience for me. I can already play Hearthstone if I really want to. Jinteki is great but (to me, at least) the point here is to keep Netrunner going, not to turn it into something else.
The calls for patience are well taken, of course. Lots of time to figure stuff out. And thanks to the folks behind NISEI for being so open and clear about what’s happening and where this is going. I speak for a lot of people when I say that I’m much happier about where we’re going now.
Throwing money at it would probably work. The drawback is that it would cost money.
Also, the matchmaking system would get annoying, since open games move around as other open games are created, but I suspect that completely reworking the matchmaking system would at least be less work than adding rules enforcement.
Disclaimer: I am not a Jnet contributor. All statements by me about what would be easy or difficult to change about Jnet are at least 85% speculation.
Any serious A:NR player now has a spare $15 per month that was previously earmarked for FFG’s coffers. 
I hope that those dedicated people behind Jnet, NRDB and many other Netrunner related systems and content are able to continue to do the great work they have been doing, possibly with more financial backing from the community in the future.
Inclusiveness as one of NISEI’s mission statements to me means but certainly is not limited to making sure people new to Netrunner have the chance to come to love the game the way many people have, myself included, through the actual physical card game and the great people in the Netrunner community. So while I greatly appreciate the efforts being put into content and systems supporting Netrunner, successfully continuing Netrunner in any form will IMHO heavily, if not entirely, depend on what can be physically done for the game, among the most important dependencies being the availability of core or base sets and going forward the availability of new cards.
Just my $0.02
An interesting point you make (intentionally or otherwise) is how physical card games are for many with disabilities (or disorders etc.) an escape, which many videogames don’t provide. They’re a way people (like how I used to be) can interact with strangers in a safe way, where we can help to manage our anxieties through the game itself.
The game becoming purely JNet based is definitely something I would be against, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that view.
Conversely, some people with disabilities see videogames played from the comfort of their home to be superior to physically manipulating cardboard. On balance, I don’t think it favors physical or digital one way or the other.
(I know someone with a disability that makes it difficult for her to shuffle cards. For that reason, she avoids deckbuilders. But has no problem playing online.)
This is… More true than I want it to be…
It really depends on how well the codebase is designed for scaling, though. Horizontal scaling (the “throw money at screen” option, tldr run more servers via the cloud) only works if the code has been written, basically from the start, with that eventuality in mind. Given that Jnet gets slow with more folks online, we can probably safely say that it isn’t scaling automatically, at least.
That said, I just noticed that the code is up on GitHub, so I might at least take a poke around while I wait for uni to start again.
Yeah, this is why I speculate that it may still be a problem, based only on the fact that I know it used to be one. It’s possible that they refactored at a deep enough level to fix this, but that would be a lot of work, and it would be 100% reasonable of them to have decided to kick that can down the road.
It’s also possible that I’m mis-estimating how much of the slowness was ever on the server side. I know one cause of slowness that they fixed was that they were sending way too much data to the browser to be handled client side, which seems like the sort of fix that may scale pretty well.
Plus, I haven’t played online enough recently to know whether slowness is actually a current problem. Perhaps I’m just completely wrong, and scaling would be easy and effective.
That would still leave it without rules enforcement, though.
Worst case scenario, couldn’t we just create new and completely separate servers? I assume this would be terribly inefficient, and finding opponents wouldn’t work as well, and updates would be a real pain, and it’s possible that I’m only asking this because I like the idea of weyland.net, nbn.net, and haas-bioroid.net
But the point was about continuing to support the physical game and not JUST the online component. If we were discussing the other way I’d’ve made that point.