I think one needs to be mindful about all the good Damon did with his designs in any conversation like this.
While i was genuinely surprised when reding his stance in that BGG thread (which made me accept that his take on balancing did not work) he still innovated and produced a lot of high-power cards that were just perfect, and greatly improves the game going forward.
As a designer he fixed a lot of latent problems (tags, ICE, possibly jackson…) and attemped to fix several more (Rumor mill, Friends). His heart was in a good place, but his fault seems to be to lean on his gut more than aggregate playtester opinion.
I’ve worked with competitive game balancing. It is psychologically difficult. Especially so since every player thinks they have it right. They rarely do, making you have to take a lot of criticism, but you have to walk a fine line between trusting your own neutral but imperfect gut and the opinions of individuals who are more skilled but also way more subjective and invested than you are.
The idea people have of the ‘lone genius’ approach to competitive game balancing does not work. It needs to be a team effort with playtesters, filtered through the developer/designer.
Then, when the product hits the streets there will inevitably be dominant strategies that are missed. As a game-balancer then you have to do aftertweaks, or stick your head in the sand. With a physical card game it is of course much more difficult, and Damon should be credited with the MWL, i’d argue his major achievement.
I think this is important to be mindful of, even among my own criticism. Damon has, indeed, designed some wonderfully good, fun, and balanced cards. His designs are, in fact, the ones being used in this currently great meta that has resulted from the most recent MWL. His attitude toward the playerbase has long been troubling, but he has done good along with the bad.
Later designs have certainly addressed some problems. Better ice to deal with the Fausf D4v1d meta do now exist, thanks to Damon! Terminal operations are inspired! Weyland finally has good, balanced ice options! MCA Informant, in particular, is an incredibly well designed card that checks the power of connection resources! But, with them come Rumor Mill… And Rumor Mill isn’t the fault of the competitive scene.
Indeed, i forgot to mention what he did with making resources and their counterplay a relevant interaction in the game.
I think reiterating on the suggested mwl additions in the list above i would leave both Beth and Mercur off.
I disagree with this. I wonder which you think is superior?
SEA, Midseasons and HHN are imo a perfect triangle of options. Each with clear up and downsides, and non-tech (in-game) options to play around. They also have the historic play-record to show this.
The reason they are not equally used in their various strategies currently is that some of these strategies have powerful counters in the meta. And these counters, being mostly resources, have been very hard for these decks to countertech against.
Edit: up until Aaron was printed i also saw these strategies returning post-rotation. Now? well that depends if Aaron gets treatment.
Aaron is a very broken card, so let’s not even bring him into this!
Midseasons has had a long criticism of making tags binary - this was first apparent with Scorch, but Midseasons played into it by landing so many tags.
HHN is much, much more interesting. It’s terminal, demanding tempo rather than combo usage. It’s only four tags, which is a number that can and is often cleared. But four tags is a lot, and in the right circumstances can lead to a tagged runner for the rest of the game.
HHN is a very contextual card - its power level depends hugely on the board state. Midseasons is almost the opposite.
I think the initial assumption may have been you meant Midseasons was the superior one! I agree completely, HHN is an extremely well designed card, in my mind. It gets a bad rap because of how effective it is with Asset Spam given the nature of Netrunner’ econ war, but as a terminal that leaves you just enough clicks to deal with it without help (if you have the money) it creates so many interesting decision points.
Do you have time to drop all the tags? If you don’t, what’s the worst that can happen? Do you pay the trace (if able) or save your money and just click to remove them?
It also interacts really well with things like Misdirection (another frantastically designed card, in my mind), NACH, On the Lam (gonna be big once NACH rotates!) and, yes, Aaron. Few enough tags that you can answer them, enough tags that you may just have to float one. It is one that makes you ask the question “can my deck deal with having to remove tags or the consequences of floating them for a turn or two?” vs. just making you go tag-me the moment it is played like Midseasons does.
I think I might like it even better in a world without Closed Accounts, which is kind of a blunt way to punish taking tags, but the balance seems to be ok given the options that currently exist to interact with tags.
Agree completely regarding HHN, but regarding midseasons it is surprisingly difficult to kill a tagged runner nowadays i’d say. it puts them on a clock, sure, but it cost the corp plenty to tag them.
The best cards are those that feel OP when the opponent plays them, but do not when you play them. I’d argue midseasons is one such card.
My impression of Damon vs Lukas (which is imperfect, given that Damon also worked under Lukas) is that Lukas was much more careful, while Damon pushed the design space more. Damon’s hits are cards like HHN, while it’s harder to point out Lukas’ best designs.
But Damon’s misses are things like Rumour Mill and Aaron, while Lukas gave us Leviathan. I’ve always disliked the cries of “binder fodder!” simply because it’s a price worth paying to avoid the first kind.
Damon is, de facto, the reason why Netrunner is about to die in Madrid.
Back when the game was dominated by CtM, Bio-Ethics locks, Whizzard and Rumor Mill Val tons of people quit. Guys that played for years saw what the game had turned into and stuck for a while, but eventually decided it wasn’t worth it. I remember trying to talk them out of it, trying to dowplay 6th turn Door to Door locks or 80% Whizzard attendance but it simply wasn’t possible. They thought the game had turned into crap and quitted.
It wasn’t something that happened over the course of a day, either. Week after week, pack after pack they held on the hope that a new series of MWL bans would get rid of Sensies, Blackmail locks or Dyper abuses. But instead all they got were new, even more broken cards like Aaron or Sifr.
Boggs has done well, but he came too late. Most players haven’t played it months and many have sold their collections. Out of the 3-4 groups active in Madrid there are only two left: One that has been almost wiped out and another that will quit the second L5R is released. Attendance has dropped massively and there’s no longer a support structure to draw more people in.
Today, at the Spanish Nationals people said this might be Netrunner’s last and, sadly, I agree. I don’t think I’ll have anyone to play with next year.
I feel you. We have had a very similar story in my area (Gothenburg, Sweden). Attendance at recent events are down to half and regular group-nights are rare.
There are however hints of it picking up a bit again, the less-toxic meta and TD has seen some new players come in and some old ones come back.
With the last few problems hopefully being fixed by Boggs in the future, and rotation incoming there is reason to stay hopeful and optimistic I’d say. He has shown good knowledge and willingness to act. It will take time to rebuild the confidence they need to draw players back in, but they’re off to a good start. Obviously excepting a couple of recent D-bombs.
If Boggs and FFG realize and accept that they need to go from ‘maintenance’ mode on the game to just barely keep it alive and selling, to ‘active community and health monitoring’ to foster and keep the game around as a stable-selling and growing asset we might see an uptick in the doom-and-gloom.
A problem, i believe, is that we are market-wise riding an expansionary phase in the board/card-game revolution. In such a phase companies make money by releasing lots of new stuff. Letting games fail is less of a problem if players then jump to other of your products.
If we enter into a stagnating phase then assets like stable-selling games become more valuable. This is especially so if people start to spend less, or the market sees more competition. Then suddenly a failing game means you may permanently lose customers.
I’m not sure where we are, and where FFG thinks we are currently, but we saw very similar trends unfold during the 90’s. There was a bust where only a few survived (most notably Magic). They must be aware of this.
I agree with this and get that vibe very strongly from FFG’s releases. (AGoT 2.0, SW: Destiny, L5R…) It’s why I don’t really pay them much attention. I’d rather build a stable game.
Proving once and for all that you can’t fight Broken Cards with more Broken Cards.
(I remain unconvinced that Sifr, alone, is a broken card, though it does expose a very real weakness in ANR design: ICE doesn’t actually do much, and certainly doesn’t do what it’s advertised to do. This is why Asset Spam is actually possible. If what ICE did was so important, why are we seeing decks eschew ICE almost entirely? Sifr attacked that philosophy of ICE being meaningful, but other cards have done it in the past (Security Nexus is the best direct comparison, as it, too, invalidates a piece of ICE each turn. Sifr, however, needed at least one supporting card; it can’t do anything by itself. The other ICE-invalidation cards in the past didn’t need other cards. DDOS, Yog, Blackmail (sortof; it needs Val))
That said, it’s clear to me at least that the design weakness of ICE is something real that A) is bad for the game, and B) Boggs is trying to rectify. You’ll note that all of those ICE-invalidation cards are on the MWL now, (Except SecNexus; I believe because it’s Really Damn Expensive and is also not, technically, guaranteed to work.) and we appear to be favoring ICE-invalidation being on MWL instead of Strong Econ Options.)
Midseasons is one of those cards whose fairness rises and falls with how many broken things you can do with tags and how effective money-making is. Back when the best corp economic engines in the game were, like, Blue Level Clearance and Celebrity Gift, and the most you could do with tags was Psycho or Scorch, it was fine. Traffic Accident was okay, because it filled a design gap created by I’ve Had Worse. But Resistor, Quantum Predictive Model, and Boom! have made going tag-me threatening on multiple levels, and as both sides have gotten broken economy cards, game credit counts have become swingier, making Midseasons either worthless or crippling (or, with Bryan Stinson, potentially both).
Hence, like a lot of old cards given new life by new cards, what we’re suffering from is as much synergy glut as it is innate brokenness. Which is not to say that Damon shouldn’t kindly go truck himself.
So, in the same sense that you take a final farewell of a dear pet i think it is time to bury this thread. Hopefully we will never have to resurrect it again. I Thought however that it would be interesting to have a little retrospective first though. It would be fun to look back to our discussions early this year and look at what we got ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with FFG essentially coming out with their official judgement on which cards were a problem.
I also want to thank everyone a final time for the productive discussions we had in this thread, discussions i’m sure were useful on some level to the FFG team as well. At the very least we did offer a detaield view on player’s view on these cards and the types of problems they create whether they be balance, NPE or other negatives.
Banned for Power-level / Synergy
24/7 News Cycle - Still in - Initially we had Breaking News Banned, and changed after feedback. I still prefer that version, and its what FFG went with =)
Aaron Marron - Banned - Correct
Rumor Mill - Banned - Correct
Sensie Actors Union - Banned - Correct
Hostile Infrastructure - Still in - Initially we had bio-Ethics, changed after feedback. FFG went that route.
Sifr - Banned - Correct
Mumbad City Hall - Banned - Correct
Faust - Banned - Correct
Banned for Monostrategic Play
DDos - Still In - Less opressive with parasite/blackmail out. I did not dare touch Parasite but i applaud the move from FFG =)
Blackmail - Rotation-Banned - Correct
Accelerated Diagnostics - Rotation-Banned - Correct
MWL additions for Corp/Runner balance
Beth-Kilrain Chang - Still In
Net Mercur - Still In
Temujin Contracts - Banned - FFG took this one even more seriously
Mimic - Still In - Seeing the other Anarch nerfs this is reasonable
Deja Vu - Rotation-Banned - FFG took this one even more seriously
Caprice Nisei - Rotation-Banned
Sandburg - Still In
Exchange Of Information - Still In - Breaking News is Core-banned so this is fine now.
Overall i think we can be proud that we did a pretty good job, especially since we had less tools to use to do the fixes we needed to the game. Players as individuals will always have biases, but together we do a pretty good job
