I played ANR a lot in 2015, mostly using OCTGN. On OCTGN I used to play people and add the good sports to my friends list. After a month or so I would have 20-30 friends, and could play them repeatedly (someone would generally be online at all times).
Over hundreds of games played, 99.9% were very enjoyable experiences, generally with chatting throughout.
Yesterday I started on Jinteki.net, playing I think thee games. One game was fine but in the other two I encountered some issues:
(i) I beat one player with Valencia, he the made a comment along the lines of, āI hate Valencia, sheās so cheap, just spamming Blackmails to winā before leaving the game.
(ii) Playing as MaxX I screwed up and lost my recursion. I had Faust on the table, three cards left in my hand and none in my deck. My opponent (HB) had two ice on all servers, the outermost one rezzed, something like Heimdall 2.0. I conceded (<1% chance to win) and he got annoyed. Seems he wanted me to watch while he slowly found his agendas and scored them one by one. I would have offered to play a rematch but the feature seems not to be available.
It seems to me that Jinteki.net is like Magic Online, i.e. with zero social aspect. You canāt chat with friends, only in the main chat room. This makes arranging games with them much more difficult. Games tend to be against an unknown opponent with little to zero chatting. And as a result you may encounter issues such as the above with more frequency than on OCTGN.
You may want to check out the Jankteki extension. I think itās got some type of friends list functionality for Jinteki.net.
As for the culture, what you encountered was definitely not the worst, but obviously also not the best either. I feel thereās plenty of pleasant people around (at least in the comp room, but I dabble in casual as well). Usually comp players donāt have a problem with the deck theyāre playing against, as theyāre practicing to win even āunfairā decks like Val Blackmail spam or IG lock. This makes me guess that you were playing in the casual room, is that correct?
Donāt expect to hop into comp and never find an unpleasant player though. Also donāt expect everyone to chat, some people just want to play. Youāre probably experienced enough to hold your own skill wise.
The friend plugin allows you to add friends, and shows when they are playing, if you are in the game lobby. but it doesnāt show them in the chat lobby AFAIK and nor does it allow separate chats.
What I am after is a way to make online friends and then arrange games with them when I see them online by ābuzzingā them somehow. I am not a big fan of playing random opponents.
For instance, do people use the Discord channel to plan games? Or some other software outside of Jinteki?
PS I was indeed in the casual lobby. In the Valencia game I played a princely ONE Blackmail
Hi, the only thing I can suggest is that you keep a spreadsheet where you record who you played and how he/she behaved. I guess that sooner or later they will implement on Jnet a friend list and everything will be like in the good old OCTGN days.
In my experience I encountered players which pretty much behaved like robots and players that just want to play fast. I am not judging here but on Jnet, like in real life, I like to chat and have fun while having my game. I guess it is simply a different approach to netrunner.
Thereās at least a Stimhack slack which, I think, could be useful for arranging games. Havenāt used it in a while so Iām not sure what itās like atm. Thereās also the discord server as you mentioned, do see if that maybe solves this for you.
Oh, also SHL is underway, pretty much everyone I play there is very friendly/chats etc. Be prepared to get whooped tho, because thereās no mercy shown in those games and the decks and players are generally brutally good.
The Stimhack Slack also has a #lfg channel. It doesnāt look like it gets a lot of use, but I donāt know of sure, since I donāt use it very often; itās an option. Otherwise, join the SHL or stick to the competitive room, probably 90+% of the time youāll avoid experiences like you described. Also, use Jankteki for some of the features you want and wait for Jinteki.net to implement the social aspects. It keeps getting better, but the development team, mostly focused on implementing the cardpool first, which I think itās the right call. The other stuff will come.
In general, I would not expect bad experiences like you described to be the majority. Iād estimate it to less than 20% even in the casual room. The thing to keep in mind with Jinteki.net, is that it has very low barrier of entry. You get all kinds of people, so the experience is very uneven, compared to OCTGN, which seemed to attract the more dedicated players.
Itās more complicated to install/use than Jinteki.net which is āGo to website. Play.ā so it doesnāt see as much use recently. Itās still there, to my knowledge.
Iām just going to take this as an opportunity to say sorry if Iāve been a sore loser to anyone out there. I think Jnet makes it easy to be pissy when you lose and maybe even take it out on the other person because youāll probably never see them again. I donāt make a habit of doing this but I know I have (a few months ago I was really pissy at a guy who ran IG for example). Maybe we can all take this thread as a reminder to be friendly on the Internet.
As @zogstrip shows in a much more visual manner, yes. My impression is that (from my own experience and comments on various Netrunner Internets), is that new and casual players tried and stuck with Jnet first. Then, more dedicated OCTGN players gave it a shot (and used both) after hearing that it was getting much better and probably only used it where only Jnet could be used (work, tablets, Mac, etc.) or used both on the same Windows machine. Wait times for games on OCTGN became increasingly long as there were fewer players available to play. Eventually there was a tipping point and there was no point to get on OCTGN at all, since it would take so long to get a game. db0 saw the trend and didnāt prioritize getting new packs implemented as quickly, since the userbase was so much smaller. I still think he updates it, but there was definitely longer delays.
Did you mention why you were conceding? That seems like a reasonable reason to concede, but maybe he didnāt realize you had lost your recursion and thought you were being a premature quitter. Thatās a big problem on Jinteki (ie people quitting after a single account siphon) so I can see why someone would jump to being mad at you.
Yeah I told him! I said I have 3 cards in hand and made a mistake on my recursion. His reply was that he has Bioroid ice so I can click throughā¦even if conceding I will explain why, because for the other player a ārashā concession is not fun at all.
Indeed, I played on OCTGN in 2015 leading up to the SGP nationals. After that, the exodus to Jnet was one of the reasons I stopped playing (lack of social interaction there). Because I live in Sri Lanka, I can only play online except if I go overseas for nationals. So the social part is more important for me due to lack of local players.
Ooh, I hope that I was the āfineā game, it was nice chatting with you and a fun game (haarp EOI/kill vs. val, I screwed up a midseasons and missed the kill, you decked me a few turns later). The notes that I took on the decklist I was working on say āvs. Hayati (seems like a real nice person!)ā
Jankteki is one way to go, before that was available I just kept a spreadsheet. I divided it into ācool peopleā ādicksā and ānoobsā (not because I donāt want to play against them, but so that I can pick a not-cruel deck to play and expect games to go longer).
A couple of other things that seem to help the experience:
Give your games a fun name, which will attract fun people
At the deck selection screen, when a player joins your game donāt immediately start the game or chat. Impatient/pissy players will normally just leave if you donāt start the game within a few seconds.
Play people with avatars. Itās not a guarantee that they are going to be decent, but they have at least put in a modicum of effort to set it up so they have some commitment to the site.
The other thing to do in the longer-term is to contribute development effort or credits to the site, depending on your interests/skills/credit pool. I was hoping to work on bug fixes/features, but just havenāt had the time.
Itās been over 3 months now since the last commit in his Github. I think he commented on Reddit awhile back that the dwindling usage was a factor, combined with the fact that heād moved on to other games and wasnāt as in tune with the scene.
