Tournament will start on Monday, May 29. There will be six rounds of Swiss (each lasting one week) and a top cut based on the size of the field. There are no prizes for this tournament.
Sign up closes on May 28.
Players will choose a faction and ID at the start of the tournament and stick with it throughout, but they may modify their decks between rounds. Cards are legal for the tournament once they have reached their street date and are implemented on Jinteki.net. For this tournament the legal card pool will be:
1 Core Set
1 Big Box
1 Terminal Directive
Flashpoint Cycle cards
Red Sands Cycle cards
The MWL and FFG errata are in effect for this event.
Since the bidding system in the official Cache Refresh format is not implemented on Jinteki, there will be one major change from the official Cache Refresh format. Each round, players will play both Runner and Corp games as in a regular tournament.
Players will have one week to finish each round of the tournament. Rules for dealing with players who do not show up for games or cannot be reached to arrange games will be shared when the tournament begins.
I’m confused as to why the bidding couldn’t be done on Jinteki. You would just enter bids into the chat until someone wins, then adjust your credit pool accordingly, and your hand by shuffling all cards back into the deck and drawing your opening hand, modified by the bid amount.
You’d have to do it in some other chat, or restart the game if it turns out you started it with the wrong side. And someone would have to flip a coin or something. But neither of the things seems hard to deal with.
You probably can get it done with some work, but then: The bidding system doesn’t sound that much fun to me, especially compared to just playing another round of Netrunner. So why bother?
But you don’t get to practice the bidding system, i.e., get a feel for the meta game of bidding. Anyway I see the points against it, but I hope that IRL tournaments keep the bidding as I think that’s an interesting part of the format. Though most people I’ve talked to don’t like it so it probably won’t stick.
I’d certainly try the bidding system in real life if I were organizing an event that way. I think it is worth a shot before throwing it out, but in this online setting, I just think it will work better to not use it.
Well you have 2 weeks to change your mind. If you do go with it, I suggest just having people bid in the pre-game lobby and then restart the game if the sides aren’t correct. It would be nice to just start now with trying out the format as the designers intended.
I think it would also make sense for the TO to do the random selection of who bids first before announcing the pairings. That way it’s guaranteed to be fair, and there’s no hidden or hard–to-verify-online stuff that players have to discuss.
I do think it would be nice to get a feel for how the bidding actually works in practice, but I suspect it won’t be a permanent part of the format, so it’s probably not that critical.
It is important your Cache Refresh rounds are run in a timely manner so that they coincide with your Regional Championship’s double elimination rounds. Rounds are 40 minutes long and consist of one game, making it easy to start both the Cache Refresh and double elimination rounds at the same time.
There’s a whole section at the bottom talking about how to run Cache Refresh simultaneously with the top cut at regionals where the Cache Refresh events are taking place, and how someone eliminated from the top X gets added into Cache Refresh that’s already started.
Skipping the bidding altogether is fine with me because I’d rather play complete matches.
That said, if you wanted to do the bidding thing, I would think the easiest thing to do for the players is to, along with putting out pairings each round, flip a coin for each pairing and release that info along with everything else. Players can then negotiate bidding while they negotiate when they are going to play.
Dealing with reduced handsizes is of course inconvenient, though provided we can trust players to return the appropriate number of leftmost (or rightmost, whatever) cards in their hand to the top of their deck and shuffle, it’s doable.
But all that said, again, I’d just as soon not bother.
I’m not going to do the bidding. Simple reason is that I anticipate enough issues just managing the tournament without needing to create some sort of work around for the bidding games.
So why bother?