[motherboard] What Will it Take For Netrunner to Be Played Like Professional Esports?

Netrunner General
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I think that something that would certainly help draw more players would be creating something like ‘must-have’ packs or ‘Alternate Core Sets’ (call it whatever you want), which feature different playstyles and include all the essential cards released in packs for that certain playstyle.

  • Do you play glacier? Ash, Caprice, NAPD Contract, Eli 1.0, Jackson Howard, Cyberdex Virus Suite, Global Food Initiative, Crisium Grid, Interns, Restructure, Assassin, Executive Boot Camp, Celebrity Gift, Breaker Bay Grid, Eve Campaign, Blue Sun, Replicating Perfection.

  • Are you into fast advance? Fast Track, Eli 1.0, Jackson Howard, Cyberdex Virus Suite, Architect, SanSan City Grid, Shipment From SanSan, Daily Business Show, Wraparound, Pop-Up Window, NEH, Titan.

  • Are you into denial? Account Siphon, Vamp, Vigil, Crescentus, Power Shutdown, Xanadu, Clone chip, Keyhole, Eater, Knight, Same Old Thing, Xanadu, Faust, Drug Dealer, Dirty Laundry, Desperado, Kati Jones, Reina Roja.

  • Are you into shaper good stuff? Self Modifying Code, Clone Chip, Lucky Find, Prepaid Voicepad, Dirty Laundry, Cache, Aesop’s Pawnshop, Atman, Chameleon, Astrolabe, R&D interface, Clot, Film Critic, Symmetrical Visage, Professional Contacts, Daily Casts, Same Old Thing, Indexing, Legwork, Cyber Cypher, Lady, Refractor, Switchblade, Dagger, Lockpick, Cloak, Silencer, Ghost Runner, Kati Jones, Technical Writer, Personal Workshop, LLDS Processor, Astrolabe, Levy, Quality Time, Zule, Inti, Hyperdryver, Personal Workshop. Kit, Hayley, Nasir,

The last section probably is too large and should be divided according to different playstyles (e.g., stealth, etc) Must be noted, this is meant for people who already own a core set, but (!) a single core set (or maybe two), so that explains Desperado and SSCG. For each archetype (there is obviously more, like tagging, kill, net dmg, noise, rush, etc) there are two factions who perform best at this area picked. Also, should be noted, they provide a good basis for a deck, you buy one and can build multiple ones without buying any extra stuff, apart from the Core. With time, people may get more interested and willing to dive deeper. I think something like this would’ve been pretty nice when I started, but it (obviously) has draws. What happens when people just buy all the packs? Then they, unfortunately, have a lot of spares (however, they are staples and can be used in multiple decks - I’m always short of NAPD proxies). Well, that’s a problem that can be tackled in various ways.

Another way is (what I believe has been mentioned upthread) by making a list of suggested datapacks that require necessary cards and ranking them in order or creating lists for certain archetypes. I can attest to this, it works. I own only half of the data packs (I have 5 from genesis, 3 packs from spin, 2 from Lunar (though I really need to buy First Contact and Up And Over too), 2 from SanSan and all of the Deluxes). And, when I buy a new one, I think really hard whether or not I need it, so I’ve developed a method for ranking cards in necessity and therefore assigning ‘value’ for that pack. I think lists like these (I know there was one in Reddit but got discontinued, or, at least, it was a Data Pack analysis) should be had for newer players who may not be willing to go broke while picking up a new hobby.

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@spags All that was missing was some super hype, Team Spooky style commentators. :grin:

BIOTIC LABOOOOOOOOOOOOR

4:45 for the legendary final round

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Thing is about fighting games is that because rounds are so short the technical aspects are usually summarised as such. When they arent being technical they are hyping the situation at hand.

I have always felt like ANR would be closer to chess. Because games take a long time the commentators just take a break from commentary and just crack jokes at each other. Nothing else was more fun to hear than when Nigel Short and Vladimir Kramnik were doing commentary together at one of the London Chess Classic tournaments. Their round got done pretty quickly so they decided that because they were going to do chess commentary of all thing, Short would be calling Kramnik a coffeehouse and Kramnik retorted that somebody had to counquer their neighborhood cafe.

Which might explain why I love Teamworkcast.

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on a related note, this is why I love Peter Svidler the occasional times he comments on games.

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I like the idea of ranking the importance of data packs. I haven’t seen a good resource for that anywhere (I haven’t looked very hard because I have all the cards). Maybe it’s something we could work on and add to stimhack.

The world shortage of Opening Moves (and Future Proof, and C&C) isn’t helping anyone though. I don’t think I’ve seen any half decent runner lists since C&C without cards from that pack.

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I agree with @Taurean; I think y’all Worlds players are missing the forest for the trees.

You don’t want a T16 with no Terran, and you don’t want a T16 with no Weyland. If your game has factions, the factions have fans, and you want 'em to have someone to root for in T16, and you don’t want 11/16 of any one faction.

That said, I don’t think Netrunner will ever be a very popular spectator game. I watch (but don’t play) SC2 because I wanna watch Marines shoot up some Mutalisks. I love 40k, but I don’t watch Conquest, because figuring this out is way too much effort for me to understand Dark Eldar shooting up Tyranids. I expect Netrunner spectators to be almost exclusively players for the foreseeable future.

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We should be getting Peter Svidler into Netrunner

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Maybe this is defeatist but I just don’t think that Netrunner will ever be played like an e-sport because it’s just not as visually engaging.

MOBAs in particular are so popular with spectators because the game itself is easy to follow, brightly coloured and aesthetically appealing. The problem card games will always have is that you need to be really engaged and passionate about the game itself to find footage of people moving cards around a table interesting to watch. Card games lack that visual element. Hearthstone solved this by only existing as essentially a video game, with engaging animations and simplified gameplay.

I feel like right now the most realistic thing for Netrunner to aim for in terms of audience engagement and tournament scene are TCGs like Magic The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh.

It’s a bit odd to get engaged in a debate and then start telling your opponent that their opinion doesn’t matter.

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I think you’re being a little hard on Netrunner here. ANR is probably most similar to baseball in that the sides play offense and defense in turns, and you could sum up baseball as “Score more points” or “get more runners around than the other side”. So you could equally abstract ANR as “Score more points/agendas” As for complexity that’s the commentators’ job. They’re there to make whatever is on the screen accessible for the audience.

I also don’t think it’s a matter of visual interest. People watch F1, darts, and dressage for goodness sake! (Though imagine this: a virtualization of ANR, like in the Yu-Gi-Oh show, maybe through pre-rendered graphics of a Lady chewing through an Ice Wall, Val grimacing in pain as she accesses a Snare!, etc… I dream…)

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I don’t think @Taurean was dismissing opposing opinions. She/he was only pointing out that we are on the inside looking out.

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F1, darts and dressage are still more visually engaging than two people sitting at a table pointing at cards.

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Haha my wife does dressage…if that sport can get the following it can get then any sport can. Six years watching dressage now and I still don’t understand what I’m watching.

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When I told my MtG friends that I quit MtG to play ANR my MtG friends would ask me how the game worked.

I told them that it played out like a point and click adventure game mixed with Mastermind and Quidditch (I cant fucking spell fictitious sports to save my life). I proceeded to explain to them that a very basic way of looking at the game is that it is much akin to that of the dynamics of a ball game like basketball, soccer and hockey and so on. The idea behind that idea is that if you have control of the agenda you cannot lose. For runners it is stealing agendas before they can scored, usually from HQ, R&D or even a scoring server. For corp it depends on the archetype. It appears to be HQ in the case of RP and NEH for the sake of an example.

When a friend who played ANR walked by he asked what the Golden Snitch was after I had mentioned Quidditch. I told him that it would either be Government Takeover or The Future Perfect. It was a laugh.

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Clearly Astro.

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the other thing netrunner has working against it is the age of the player base. I’d peg the demographic of netrunner between 25 and 40. i can count on one hand the number of people under the age of 21 I’ve met who played netrunner in 3 years on two fingers. The entry age of netrunner is simply too old to attract a massive following.

I did get some of fnm kids to demo netrunner and while they liked the game and understood it just fine its a pretty hard sell when all their friends play magic and they are driven by dreams - albeit far fetched ones- of Grand Prix and pro tours.

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About making the game easier for the new players to come in, what do you think about allowing proxies on a local scene? This way, the new players can enjoy the game while buying slowly what they need. OTOH, maybe this will cause that the players will get used to play “for free” and never actually acquire what they need to play (actual cards, of course)

Would that be a good or a bad move?

Edit: Maybe allowing proxies when the player, at least, purchased the core?

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I think allowing players to proxy hard to find cards like Jackson is okay, but not any from packs on the wall of the store.

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IMO, I think you should allow, like, up to 30 proxies, virtually as many as you want, as long as they are not good imitations: cards that look as good as the originals or almost as good. I really doubt someone who shows up week after week playing with their ugly proxies will spend tons of their disposable income on things other than those cards they need (if they are in stock, which is another ugly problem you’ve got going on with netrunner). Sometimes an exploitable loophole can exist, but there isn’t actually a need to be concerned about people using it. For instance, I can pay to eat lunch at an all you can eat buffet, and stick around long enough to eat dinner without paying more. Or I can pay for a movie and reveal my ticket at the cinema, but if I stay in my seat after the movie runs once and wait and watch it again, it doesn’t cost me anything. Human behavior just suggests there is not enough upside to exploiting the loophole for a human to actually do it.

I would think anyone who doesn’t eventually upgrade all their cards just doesn’t have the disposable income available to do it, and would you prefer that person not play at all?

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[quote=“rumirumirumirumi, post:94, topic:6081, full:true”]
I don’t think sports is a really good comparison because most school systems promote these sports with their school budgets. You’re talking about a level of support that esports would dream of and generally never obtain unless there was a massive change in the prevailing culture. In these cases, the cursory viewer has more direct experience with the sport because it’s been around them over their whole life.[/quote]

Sport is not eternal. It was invented, and promoted, and marketed. Successfully.

Do you truly believe that anyone wishing to see another competitive activity successfully promoted and marketed has nothing to learn from sport?

I’m not sure you’ve really thought that one through.

I’m not comparing the IDs to factions. I was making a general statement regarding e-sports using Starcraft as a reference point.

If I was going to make a comparison I would compare the factions to the factions. I would then compare the different strategies within those factions to the IDs. If Zerg, for example, had only one strategy that worked (or worked so much better than the other strategies that it was the only one used), then watching Zerg games would be very boring and predictable.

[quote=“Therad, post:96, topic:6081”]
Also, you can’t really tweak a card game in the same vein as you do with a digital game. A game tweak in netrunner would be card erratas and banlists. If you do that to much it becomes a mess. You can’t simply apply digital solutions to an analog game.[/quote]

Exactly. Which is why we have balance issues that do not plague successful e-sports, and why this is a real hurdle to Netrunner becoming an e-sport.

[quote=“Therad, post:96, topic:6081”]
Another thing you can’t really capture in netrunner is the action on screen. Seeing a match of starcraft is far flashier than a match of netrunner. You should compare netrunner with more similar things, like MTG, poker, chess etc.[/quote]

I did not chose the e-sport as the target. That was set by the OP and I’ve carried on the discussion within those parameters.

[quote=“thebigunit3000, post:98, topic:6081, full:true”]
Dien is the athlete AND the commentator, and is damned good at both. He was explaining to you why you’re wrong. If you’re not able to accept the facts he’s presenting, that’s on you, and not him. You don’t need to know all of the subtle nuances of the game to grasp that the format is not Kate vs etf. That you assume casual netrunner fans are as ignorant and obstinate as you is laughable.[/quote]

He’s explaining why I’m wrong in the same way that Washington insiders explain to the people in fly-over country why they are wrong to not like politician or policy X. He is too close to the issue to understand the point of view of the average voter/consumer.

And let us be clear, from the perspective of e-sport, the only view that matters at the end of the day is that of the average voter/consumer. Unless the people attending Worlds intend to fund the e-sport entirely on their own, you are asking regular people to do so.

None of the facts he presented rebut my assertion that the top 16 at Worlds was skewed in favour of ETF and Kate. Instead, he has presented his opinion, based on his experiences at Worlds, as to why that apparent skew is not actually an issue. How my perspective is wrong and my understanding flawed.

It does not matter if he is right or wrong. If it takes an expert to explain why an apparent problem is not actually a problem, why the viewer’s perspective is wrong, and their understanding flawed, you have lost the marketing battle before you even started.

Note that it’s not just me. Enough people have been expressing this view that Dien has admitted becoming quite sensitive on the issue.

It doesn’t matter if I’m technically right, or technically wrong, enough people agree with me that it makes the issue real. And that is a serious hurdle to becoming an e-sport.

[quote=“moistloaf, post:99, topic:6081”]
Shaking up the meta is much easier in a video game. You can patch the entire game, readjusting numbers and mechanics. This is obviously impossible with a card game. There is no elegant way to hot fix a LCG. MTG uses an aggressive rotation model and exhaustive playtesting. FFG cannot use the former method; it goes against their philosophy behind the LCG format. They don’t have the resources to do the latter, and even if they did, it is inevitable that certain decks would be above the curve. Metas in tabletop games are not nearly as liquid and dynamic as those in video games. Tabletop games are slower in every way: development, distribution, and practice.[/quote]

Agreed. Which is why the balance issues will probably prevent Netrunner from ever becoming an e-sport.

[quote=“moistloaf, post:112, topic:6081, full:true”]
I don’t think @Taurean was dismissing opposing opinions. She/he was only pointing out that we are on the inside looking out.[/quote]

Whew! It was nice to read that, thank you. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.

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I’m not saying his opinion does not ‘matter’. But ‘mattering’ does not make it representative of the wider population.

I am not really sure why people are struggling to understand this.