I don’t know if you’ve not read the descriptions of the starter decks, or whether you’ve just not understood the point.
2 Likes
The starter decks stand against their entire business model of an lcg. The with the printing lead time, it would take months for any deck to be printed, so your deck would be out of date the moment you buy it. Also, you then get the fun experience out buying data packs with cards you already own. One of netrunner’s greatest asset is the LCG format, and they don’t have much to gain by printing decks that aren’t competitive. WotC event decks can barely win an fnm, and their product is more expensive and rotates quicker.ffg doesn’t gain much by chasing the wotc model.
3 Likes
The model that was proposed is essentially a way to supplement pre existing product. It is in almost no way different from their draft sets.
What we are proposing is a set of decks played by those in the world champs. Unlike the wotc and pokemon tcg model, those cards will be legal for sanctioned play. For example we would be releasing a set of decks played by Dan D’Argenio which are DLR Val and HB Foodcoats respectively.
Reasons to do this is that it allows them to start playing competitively with decks that age well as well as giving them time to collect gaps in their collection.
Entry point is obviously one of many problems for attracting new players and this proposal is a very good one. Besides what else are they going to do with their excess back end of draft Elis and Sansans anyway?
I don’t know about lead time. That could be a problem.
If not a starter deck, what about a best of cycle edition (a data pack with the 20 most important cards from a cycle)
I really think the advantage of being able to get new players playing the same game as everyone else at game nights outweighs any lost sales. People who are buying cards once a month won’t really buy old cards regardless. Getting 10 people to buy £100 of cards (and be invested) is way better than having 1 or 2 buy £400 worth. In fact it’s better than 1-2 buying £1000 worth in the long run.
1 Like
Here’s the current cost of playing MtG: The Most Expensive Standard Since Caw Blade
And that’ll let you play for only a few months, assuming you stick with the same deck for that long.
Paying $400 for every A:NR card seems pretty reasonable for this kind of game.
3 Likes
You could build a Monored Deck in Standard and still be fine. But at the rate cards are going in Standard the Red deck is the price of a complete ANR set.
The general pattern is that MtG players are actually more ok with spending $400 at most to buy into ANR because they have already carried an expensive hobby with them going in.
Of course the MtG players who dont buy into ANR have already committed their time and financial investments into MtG.
I will admit that entry was hard for me as well and I did have to sell off half my MtG collection to get started in ANR.
Great ideas. Will they do it? No. They’ll continue to try to force draft, which is OK but somewhat of a waste of resources.
The entry barrier is real. It’s grown from an ICE Wall to Hadrian’s, and it’s approaching Curtain size. Used collections are reasonable, but, if one has to drop $200-300, wouldn’t one put it into MTG, where your cards may hold/grow in value, and the game is easier to learn? The difficult learning curve and entry cost are real concerns for the future of the game, and are out of our hands. As noted, if pack sales remain steady/drop slightly, mission accomplished in FFG’s eyes.
5 Likes
I think MTG is something this article really should have talked more. MTG has been in the market for over 20 years and Wizard has focused their business plan a lot around that. FFG business plan is more about many short term gain games with a strong licenses like Star Wars, Warhammer and Game of Thorones ec. It is quite irrelevant if Netrunnner is “better or more interesting game” than MTG if organized play is not FFGs focus. Netrunner has maybe the biggest potential of all card games to be a big thing with MTG. Sadly this won’t happen with FFG but I hope fans will make organized play better for Netrunner.
I also feel that MTG is very expensive argument is a bit moot. If I would invest my time/money for MTG I could be almost sure that game will be played after 5 years for now. Netrunner I would almost bet otherwise even that I love the game. Issue with MTG is more about what you will get with your money. With MTG you get undying game with many formats and players. So you can get a whole new hobby. I think MTG is actually very outdated and boring but there no good alternatives if you would like to have a long single card game hobby.
5 Likes
an official digital client is the only way I see netrunner becoming an e sport and even then I think the game is too complex for a casual viewer to understand what is going on.
Netrunner by its very nature isn’t a game for casuals. Even people who would claim to be casuals are not in the same way a casual hearthstone, lol or dota2 fan is. I’m a casual netrunner player, I subscribe to 5 podcasts, read BGG,Reddit and stimhack, play 3-5 hours a week, own 2x of every big box and data pack and buy promos off eBay. How is this casual? I don’t play on octgn or jinteki anymore and I can feel the skill difference when playing people who do on a regular basis.
A casual hearthstone fan might log on once a week do an arena run, climb to 20 for his monthly card back and have his favorite streamer on in the background while folding laundry. This same person will tune into the tournaments and world championships and be able to follow along with the pros. The time and money needed to be a casual hearthstone fan is as little as an hour a week whereas I need 5-10 hours plus to be a casual try hard at netrunner.
7 Likes
You’re absolutely right. So is @spags. ANR is the least casual card game I’ve ever encountered, possibly with the exception of VTES. The game itself is the biggest barrier to its own growth. That’s what I meant by a game needing to sell itself being the #1. ANR certainly can sell itself, but it will never sell itself like HS or MTG. Those are pleb games. This is not meant to offend those who plays those games; it is just a fact. They are both intended in their current form to appeal to as large an audience as possible and everything about them reflects this–their design, their distribution, their organized play, everything. Nothing about ANR is ‘easy to love’ despite the fact that many of us fell in love at first run.
6 Likes
I play HS daily, but agree that it’s a pleb game. However, it has the best card game interface I’ve ever used. So easy to use, and fun. ANR could use that, but it’ll never happen.
As a result, can we concede that ANR’s growth, for this and many other reasons?
ANR has a large skill and knowledge gap between players, but even new players can brick agendas off of rnd. Netrunner is a game of maximizing your odds, but you can still win games by taking “incorrect” line of play.
1 Like
ANR can seem esoteric and obtuse to the uninitiated. But, we are initiated, aren’t we, Bruce?
Really, though, as exciting as ANR can be to view to those in the know, it will never have the ease and accessibility of something like this.
https://www.facebook.com/djreminisemusic/videos/10152644975783869/
6 Likes
True, but it gets more impressive once you know that he’s parrying every hot but blocking. It also becomes more impressive if you ever tried doing it.
They should at least start selling a tournament pack, which contains the 1 and 2-offs from the core set. That is beyond stupid money grabbing.
2 Likes
Personally, I wouldn’t mind see a little more money grabbing from FFG if it meant reinvesting in the product, (though I have doubts that it would). I feel like the thing that keeps the developers working hard on growing games like HS and MtG is that they stand to make more and more money by growing the player base at the same time as they hold what they have. The more time their players spend playing the game, the more money they make, and the more money they make, the more they can spend on things like R&D and organized play, because it becomes justified.
On the other side, FFG makes money by releasing new games, because under their model, it’s way easier to get people into a game that’s fresh because both the financial and time investments are lower to get to the same place relative to everyone else. Furthermore, the core sets are standalone games, so even if you don’t go balls deep into 40KC or whatever but you bought the core, you still have a shitty standalone board game to play. FFG’s shortsighted business model is maybe an even bigger hurdle to overcome that the fact that Netrunner is just a complicated game.
12 Likes
This game needs more popularity overall. The style in which it is played is no big deal as long as the game has enough warm bodies playing it. Super Smash Bros has everything going against it, a factory suggested ruleset that is anticompetitive, no online play (for the version that spawned its scene), and 0 support from the creator. It has a much bigger tournament scene than Netrunner.
Overall popularity is the reason there is no 100k netrunner tournament, not FFG’s behavior. It just matters how good and/or appealing the game itself is and if enough warm bodies are gonna play it.
There’s no game out there with tons and tons of people playing it that doesn’t have great, sportslike, set of high stakes tournament. You can’t name a game and say, “Man, it seems like tons and tons of people play X, isn’t it surprising there’s no high stakes tournaments for that?”
This article is really missing the point, and I think I’ve seen a lot of people miss the point when they say they want Netrunner to be bigger, and they talk about organizing their own cash tournaments, changing the way tournaments are run, or so forth. It’s like trying to get a house of cards built out of one pack to reach a higher overall height by stacking them more cleverly. That’s not the best answer. The best answer is to buy another pack of cards.
If you think Netrunner is awesome, and you want it to be big, and you want it to have big stakes tournaments someday, do your best to get more people to play it. Doesn’t matter what kind of players, any kind of players. Don’t wait on FFG to do it, because as far as I can tell they have little interest in actually attracting new players rather than milking ol dones, unlike MTG which release newbie friendly products like duel decks constantly, and supports an official tournament format that you can play for only 25$ barrier to entry with no disadvantage (sealed, which got me into it. And I only am in this thread here right now because my local store announced a stimhack cube draft tournament that gave me the hope of trying out a competitive event for less than 200$, so I started getting into ANR)
If you don’t think ANR is so awesome that you can get lots of people to start playing it, or that it’s not for everyone, or whatever, then don’t moan about how it’s FFG’s fault for not putting up cash prizes at World’s or something. If it’s not a worthwhile enough game, it’s not a worthwhile enough game. Even R&D can only ever take partial blame for failure to have a great scene, if the game got too centralized and FFG refused to appropriately ban something you could still ban the thing from fan-organized circuits if necessary.
Me, I don’t really know, I play this game, sometimes it’s pretty fun. I’ve only been playing a month or two, I have some of the cards. Maybe it is on that level of awesome to the point that I would evangelize for it, but if it is I haven’t discovered it quite yet. I just really hate seeing misconceptions about what it takes for a game to have a thriving competitive scene or see the word e-sports tossed around and misused though. It’s not the 8 people that are at the top of a tournament results page and are crazy good at a game that make it huge, it’s the bottom half of the results page full of tons and tons of people that came out, made an effort, did not get any prize at all, and still had fun and felt like their efforts were worth it. Arguing about whether the 8 people at the top should get a playmat or a benjamin is totally missing the point. Legions of players with an interest ranging from casual to moderate is what makes other e-sports big, and from those legions you occasionally get even more of the people that go crazy and became Eathletes at it.
I see very little discussion about how to get new players into the game. I haven’t noticed Netrunner players trying all that hard to get new players into the game. When that is happening in large amounts, and new player acquisition is progressing at some reasonable rate, then and only then will I stop rolling my eyes every time I see an article like this.
This was a wall, maybe someone with mod powers can spoil it or destroy it with prejudice, whatever. I had a lot on my mind.
11 Likes
I’m skeptical about how much of a difference MtG’s money makes. It was good from the beginning, and I think most of us would agree that Netrunner was even better. Here’s an interview with Garfield from 2011 (before A:NR came out) about the original game: - YouTube. Around 3:35, he basically says it always should have been something like an LCG.
The LCG model doesn’t require printing nearly as many cards as the TCG model, so it doesn’t require the same number of designers. Plus, A:NR has one format right now, and maybe one more once rotation starts. I wonder whether they’re even testing that one, though.
Overall, i think it’s great that everyone wants to get more people interested in the game, but we should also recognize that everything isn’t for everyone, especially these days, when niche communities thrive increasingly easily. A lot of the things that make this game great, and a lot of those things make it relatively “inaccessible.” I’ve never let that deter me from loving something. If you’re on here, I doubt you’re more easily deterred than me. Don’t get me wrong, I like having money, and it’ll always draw a crowd, but I’d rather spend my time after work somewhere else.
What about asking the world finalists to have their deck in a box like this…
“Play again the world final”.
At least we could have dup Jacksons 
Ways to improve Netrunner for the mainstream:
-build a subsidiary company which only works on LCG’s and therefore has a more focused company vision around that
-Core Set reboot every two years with more streamlined rules and balanced cards (Yes, I do think it’s totally retarded to exclude Core Sets and BB’s from cycling)
-streamlined rules mean: reduce complexity, keep depth
-you need to establish and SUPPORT two official tournament formats, one for the current card cycle, one for all cards, if not, you get a salty CoC/AGoT community all over again
-slow down the pack release, every two months but with 120 card packs instead
-FLGS can do pack release tournaments and get FREE stuff from FFG (alternate art cards from cards out of this specific pack and other goodies to attract players for the tournament)
-buy OCTGN/Jinteki.net and build on this base an online gaming client for all your LCG’s, charge $8,99 per month, offer leagues and online tournaments
-build a judge program which offers some benefits and heavily revamp your tournament rules and tournament structure
-support your player base with proper prizes for their community tournaments
-don`t neglect the European communities
-look what WotC and Hearthstone is doing to comfort their player base, WotC might be a shitty cash grabbing company but they know how to attract new players and keep the old ones around
1 Like