in my humble opinion its purely down to mass market appeal. I have a loads of mates who play Heathstone but cringe and joke about the idea of playing a card game in real life. No matter how much i argue about how much better Netrunner is than hearthstone they consider the idea of a real card game a step to far. so basically we need an offical Netrunner video game much like hearthstone. Lots of people say “THIS CANT BE DONE” (im citing no one here, just my general opinion on the general consensus). I actually think that yes, it would be difficult but as a game designer ive thought about this (and have even started a little prototype in Unity) and i think its certainly doable.
The basis of an E-Sport is it has to be fun to watch and what’s going on needs to be understandable at a glance. When i first starting watching youtube videos i didnt really have an idea of wtf was going on. “Oh parasite on an ice, thats cool. What is that doing? its getting some sort of counter on it every turn, huh?” its a very confusing game to watch without extremely detailed explanations and here is the problem. Hearthstone is not, you smash the enemy hero in the face and that’s how you win the game.
So for netrunner to really hit critical mass it needs an officially licensed video game version of netrunner, i don’t think this could be a carbon copy of the physical version but you could certainly distil down the essence of netrunner into a video game format that is easily understood and fantastic to watch.
Netrunner lite makes me nervous, but is probably necessary if we’re ever to achieve a game that’s playable in the way Hearthstone is.
I am (and most people here are) definitely inside the bubble. I know Netrunner is small, but I’m not sure how small compared to similar activities? How many Collectable (in any sense of the word) Card Games have more active players?
I think Blizzard hit a pretty tiny window of accessibility and depth with Hearthstone. Netrunner is way deeper, but also waaaaaay less accessible.
Yeah, I think a really good exercise to appreciate what videos look like to those outside the game is to watch videos for an LCG you don’t play. I tried this with Star Wars (I was interested in whether to buy it) and it was absolutely impenetrable - but from speaking to those who do play it, that should be a simpler game to follow than Netrunner.
Even Conquest, which I know the rules to and have played casually a fair few times, is hard to follow because I don’t know what every card does nor how strong it is, and that knowledge is assumed by the commentators.
Your point was that sports are massively popular because the average person can watch and enjoy them. I was saying that sports enjoy this in no small part because they’ve found a way into school systems, giving the general population some first-hand experience with these games. Historicizing their place in schools would be/could be useful, but it doesn’t completely invalidate the point. Surely there’s something to learn from sports, but if the lesson is “ingratiate yourself into basic education,” these activities have a long way to go.
This is now a point tangential to your point tangential to your original point. These don’t really add up to an argument for creating strategic variety as a means of promoting the game’s growth. For the casual observer of football, strategic variety is low on the list of appealing features. Big plays that swing the game or displays of talent are more appealing than the push and pull of the run game and the throw. Many viewers don’t even watch for the game but for the social occasion. Promoting the game in this way can help promote the game to an uninitiated audience, and this may not require a change to the game but in the way it’s casted.
I think you have a tonal issue in your responses that you might want to address. I actually have thought about my response to your comments, abd implying that I haven’t is pretty rude.
To make an hearthstone-esq game you’ll really need to reduce the number of interaction windows on the other players turn to improve flow. Maybe just give the corp a YES/NO screen on rezzing ice or firing traps as the runner progresses through their turn. Change upgrades and assets to only be rezzable on the corps turn (rejiggering how start-of-turn effects are templated) would go a long way to that IMO. You’d also want to make things like plascrete and other prevention effects autofire to stop cascading options screens.
After that its mainly jazzing up the interface - the cartoon nature of Hearthstone was a clever aesthetic choice to make card interactions be more palatable; the abstract trippiness of ANR’s cyberspace will take more graphics work.
Well this is an interesting discussion (I imagine, I’ll admit to skimming some bits).
Here’s some observations:
While a small cadre of the UK Massive was bravely battling to retake the Colonies against overwhelming odds, across the pond bastions of support were having Streaming Parties. From Bristol to Edinburgh and Norwich to Cardiff, fans were gathering together with booze and big screens to watch all the exciting action of the day (and also boo and throw things at the TV when Imperial Assault came on instead of Netrunner).
I let my Mum know when I was playing on Twitch, because frankly she likes just looking at my visage (my face being one only a mother could love). She did not, and will never have, any clue what was going on. If my most ardent and unconditional supporter only watches because it’s me playing, what hope have we for the masses? None really…
I like the Team Covenant stuff and tried to watch the Game of Thrones final they recently released. I’m quite good at games generally and don’t find mechanics or picking things up too arduous normally, but I’ll admit that going in cold meant the game was fairly impenetrable to me and I got bored after a bit and went to do something else. That’s no reflection on the game itself, the players, production values, commentary or any other factor, I simply didn’t get what was going on.
Most people can play poker a bit, or at least understand what’s going on with some help from the commentators and glass-topped tables. People will watch this when returning home drunk from the pub. Netrunner and other such games are simply too complex for casual observation. The people who’ll watch will be people who play, or want to learn how to play. It’s not a spectator sport for others.
I find the MtG channels hilarious. It’s years since I played any of that stuff and I sold my collection ages ago, but I still understand some of it. I do however love the way it’s presented like an American Football event, with two blokes in blazers, headphones on, chatting away about the game and switching anchors to the stats guy who has graphs and goes into averages and play conversions and other nonsense. Great fun. I can something like that coming out of Netrunner.
We should get Steve Wooley and a couple of other dudes to do some live-sports action commentary of Worlds next year. We could do with more than one Twitch channel (to make the most of all the games being run). I definitely think we can recruit from players who didn’t make the Top 16 to do commentary on the day of finals.
Big up jungelist massive to Dodgepong who did a great job on the KoS stuff, but blimey guv’nor if he didn’t have a load of hardware with him on the day. I got the link to tell the folks back home about it and we got a bunch of loyal fans in Blighty following the stream. We can definitely build up streams and events broadcast live, but it requires some dedicated volunteers to set all that shizzle up.
I can’t see Netrunner ever being at the point where people are paid to play it - but there is definitely scope for cash money prizes, live streaming, more commentary and a bunch of other ideas. As long as folk are willing to step up and do things! The more fan-based stuff we have, the more if gives people a change to run one event and then get the love back in terms of turning up to everyone else’s events later in the season.
I just want to add in a word that I think this is kind of important if you want Netrunner to be taken seriously as a competition and grow an actual audience. American sports broadcasts generally have it right, you have 2 main broadcasters, commentator play-by-play guy, in-depth analysis guy (typically a former player), and sideline reporter guy (who is kinda useless in NR, so “stats guy” like in MtG would be fine). They dress professionally, they talk professionally, they know what they’re talking about and don’t sound like they’re going off-the-cuff with it, except for the occasional joke or ad-lib here and there.
You start streaming with a couple people sitting around in jeans and a t-shirt, and it doesn’t look like anything seriously competitive. It won’t look serious, and people won’t take it serious. I might’ve mentioned this before at some point, I can’t recall now.
Otherwise liking the conversation for the most part, please carry on.
Again, what sport or esports that are easily comparable to Netrunner are you using an example for why balance is needed for Netrunner to grow? Its important to talk about what level of balance is needed at a high level (and if its possible). Most fighting games I’ve payed attention to have 3-4 characters dominate at a high level, with 1-2 others occasionally sneaking into the top 8.
There were 7 Runner decks in the top 16 (Kate, DRL Val, Regular Val, Whizz, Noise, Maxx, and Leela).
(Yes the difference between DLR Val in Reg Val is massive that anyone with any level of interest in the game enough to care about diversity will recognize them as different). That’s… really good as far as I’m aware for top level games that are similar (Hearthstone, MtG).
On the corp side, there were 5 decks in the top 16 (ETF Glacier, ETF FA, NEH Fastro, Timmy NEH and RP). This was less good, especially since 10/16 were Foodcoats. However, this sort of thing is naturally going to happen, and is really hard to prevent. Every deck and ID being viable is not a reasonable expectation. There is basically no precedent for something like this happening in a similar game. It should be better but outside of the person who pointed out people have favorite factions (Weyland) and people like to see a diversity of games (which you did on the runner side for the top 16), I don’t think this diversity is the biggest problem facing netrunner as a spectator sport (that would probably be lack of access and consistency, cutting your top 16 broadcast for 3 games is a complete disaster, and having 1 FFG stream a year is also).
More on point, I think this whole conversation is kind of a diversion from the main thing. The majority of fans of all spectator sports involve (including the major sports) involve people who have played the game. A lot more people play Soccer and Basketball than play Netrunner. However, its important to recognize that the professional scene of most sports not only feeds of the mass participation of the game but build the mass participation. People engaging in basketball partially do so as childs with the dreams of becoming like their star player, or becoming famous. The two are mutually beneficial. So talking about whether or not Netrunner can appeal to people who don’t play is kinda silly IMO. The main goal is to build something that people who enjoy playing Netrunner on several levels (on a range of casual->competetive) can enjoy. This builds and sustains interest in Netrunner by people who partake in it and represents something that can be shown to outsiders as a representation for the health of the game.
[quote=“TheRedArmy, post:129, topic:6081, full:true”]I just want to add in a word that I think this is kind of important if you want Netrunner to be taken seriously as a competition and grow an actual audience. American sports broadcasts generally have it right, you have 2 main broadcasters, commentator play-by-play guy, in-depth analysis guy (typically a former player), and sideline reporter guy (who is kinda useless in NR, so “stats guy” like in MtG would be fine). They dress professionally, they talk professionally, they know what they’re talking about and don’t sound like they’re going off-the-cuff with it, except for the occasional joke or ad-lib here and there.
You start streaming with a couple people sitting around in jeans and a t-shirt, and it doesn’t look like anything seriously competitive. It won’t look serious, and people won’t take it serious. I might’ve mentioned this before at some point, I can’t recall now.
Otherwise liking the conversation for the most part, please carry on.
[/quote]
How seriously sports commentators are taken is up for debate and sartorial elegance I don’t think is necessarily as important as you describe, although you don’t want scruffs. The FFG guys all had corporate gear on for the Twitch channel at Worlds - but their commentary was (from all accounts) pretty poor. Getting the right, knowledgeable folk is the most important thing. Even then, the brightest minds in Netrunner aren’t necessarily going to make the game any more transparent or accessible.
Although the style of my previous post may have been somewhat tongue in cheek, I’m not advocating unprofessional commentating, but we have to be realistic about where the game is now and how it will progress as a spectator sport (if at all). Comparing our little card game with an entirely different thing like American Football (or proper Football) isn’t going to have too many relevant parallels.
I think it’s better to compare it to something like chess than computer games or physical sports. Which might not be what people want to hear. I’ve never sat down and thought, “Oooh, there’s a livestreamed chess tournament!” - and I like chess.
I’m just going to jump in to point out a few things about magic, because that’s what I know about, and I think it’s probably a more reasonable comparison than esports in general:
Magic was a popular fad way before anyone watched it on a computer, and people did not get into it because they saw people playing it on a computer and learned from a broadcast, but because they saw their friends playing it.
Competitive Magic was spawned by the game developer for the purpose of long-term sustainability. Almost every modern game that people play for a long time after its release is sustained to this day in no small part because of their respective competitive communities, (and to some degree because casual players like to watch or aspire to competitive play).
Magic broadcasts were largely unpopular for a long time. Prerecorded videos on ChannelFireball.com, I believe, were much more popular than live streams for a long time, and maybe still are to this day. These videos are pretty much as simple as Kiv’s OCTGN videos: someone’s voice as they play the game online, and visuals of nothing but the game.
Because competitive Magic is so big, and to some degree, open to players of a lot of different skill levels, there is a huge base of players who actually know what they’re doing enough to understand and enjoy a Magic video. One thing I think Netrunner suffers from is the fact that the game is so hard that even strong commentator/players miss important things going on in a game, and the casual players are left largely in the dark about why people do the things they do. In one sense this is awesome for competitive players because it means that skill is highly rewarded, but in another sense it’s bad for competitive play because many mid-tier players legitimately might feel like they don’t have a shot of winning.
Growing the general popularity of Netrunner needs to be looked at from the angle of adding more players to the game. Magic had the whole fad thing going when it came out, which is impossible to replicate, but I believe that the game continues to be popular for a few reasons, including, but not limited to:
A consistent stream of casual/open events, (friday night magic, pro tour qualifiers), funded by the developer in the interest of keeping the game alive on a competitive level.
Design geared towards the long-term health of the competitive environment.
New player materials, such as Duels of the Planeswalkers and Starter Decks.
Widespread aspirations to get better and play at the top level by mid-level competitive players.
Simon, if you believe that Netrunner is sufficiently diverse to encourage mass viewership, then that’s great. I just don’t happen to believe that.
ETF and Kate were overrepresented in the top 16 at Worlds. You can say that it’s no big deal, you can say that it’s unavoidable, you can say that it’s a good thing, and you can say that it’s unreasonable to expect anything different. We’ll just agree to disagree.
What you can’t say, while maintaining any credibility whatsoever, is that the over-representation is not there, when it’s mathematically certain that it is. And I happen to believe that this is one of the issues that Netrunner would have to deal with if it wanted to have broader appeal.
I know it’s not possible for live streams, but I really like what some channels do (especially Teamworkcast) where they will annotate the misplays in the video overlay. When I was still learning the game, a lot of time I’d see something in a video and think I missed a rule or card interaction, when it turns out the players are just mentally exhausted and forgot to track a click.
What do you feel is a reasonable level of competitive diversity and give me examples of games that have it. Third! Time I’m asking this.
The evidence I gave was that the two closest equivalents (mtg and hearthstone) have lower or similar levels of top tier diversity. I even brought up te example of fighting games which I think are roughly similar (a character corresponds to a deck roughly, the fact you aren’t locked in is different). The one example you give Starcraft is so hard to compare I don’t think it’s a good example.
Anyways, I even half agreed with you (etf glacier being so dominant is a problem for viewers). I also think etf and Kate pushing everything else out in their faction wise is a problem on a non-competive level. However I do think you’re very wrong about runner side and I will not agree to disagree.
This is so sick! Killer point, @simonmoon knocking it out of the park.
The takeaway, as I see it, is that there isn’t a strong enough link between mass participation and the competitive scene. These two camps definitely exist; the mass participation is everyone you know who plays for low to zero stakes, and the competitive scene is every bit of strategy on this website up to the players who place at large tournaments.
I don’t get a sense that these two camps are communicating very well.
A basketball fan probably (a) played basketball when he was young, and had remote aspirations of being a pro someday, (b) still plays pick up games and talks about the game with his friends, thus creating social bonds through the game, and (c) watches the game for entertainment.
If you transpose this image of the complete basketball fan to netrunner, than I think the deficits of how the mass population interacts with the game become clear.
Point (a) is covered, the Netrunner fan presumably plays Netrunner. I think this is mandatory, and I believe the assertion that any person off the street should be able to turn on a stream and immediately understand the value of the game is unreasonable. Everyone knows the rules to the game they watch, that’s not asking too much of people.
Sure, video games are more visually interesting, but we can’t change that this is a card game, so for now lets move on.
(b) is where we’re lacking. If people can’t watch tournaments like Worlds and have what is going on explained to them, how are they supposed to talk about it? I think the Team Covenant videos that come out after major tournaments are the best way for a player to connect with a tournament they didn’t go to, but those videos take a month or so to come out, and by then the excitement has passed. Twitch stream is productive, but the tournament should have a dedicated stream with player interviews between rounds, talk about strategy, and talk about deck choices. I think it’s imperative that the player at home be able to connect with his favorite competitor despite not being at the tournament.
This is how people will find common ground throughout every tier of the game, even if they are not playing at the highest levels themselves. Everyone should be able to go to their first GNK or LCG night after Worlds and be able to talk about everything that happened in excruciating detail, because that investment in the event itself and the players that participated will foster a sense of connectedness to the game as a whole.
(c) I think, above all else, coverage surrounding the games tournament scene needs to be twice as good. Dodgepong, Team Covenant, and all the major content producers do a great job, but I adamantly believe that every region and every city needs to have a content producer of the same magnitude in order for the mass population to feel compelled and interested in the game on an international level.
[quote=“SimonMoon, post:140, topic:6081, full:true”]
What do you feel is a reasonable level of competitive diversity and give me examples of games that have it. Third! Time I’m asking this.[/quote]
I do not owe you a response, especially if you are asking for an example already provided by my earlier posts. However, I am in an indulgent mood.
If you care to take the time to read my posts in this thread, you will see that I have raised Starcraft as a game that self-evidently had sufficient diversity of strategies to maintain the interest of an audience, at least for a time.
I am willing to further expand on that by noting that most sports that involve one-on-one direct competitions between athletes (which seems the most apt comparison for Netrunner, which is not a team game), such as boxing, fencing, and tennis, go out of their way to ensure that I will not have to watch two particular athletes face off against each other more than once in the ordinary course of the tournament.
And because people on this thread seem keen to willfully misunderstand me, I point out that I have not claimed that Netrunner needs to ensure that no two matchups are same. Rather, this illustrates the principle widely recognized in viewer sports that viewers want to see different matchups rather than the same matchups multiple times in the course of a short period.
I don’t particularly care if you take me seriously, which is just as well as well as you clearly have no intention of doing so. I notice you glossed over the part of my post where I pointed out that your question had already been answered in my earlier posts.
I don’t care if you don’t buy the Starcraft example. I knew when you asked the question that all you wanted to do was shift the argument. Since you know you can’t disprove my assertion that ETF and Kate were overrepresented in the top 16 of Worlds, you thought that if we started talking about another game you might have more luck.
If you want to hold up Starcraft as a shining example of how what people really want is a lack of diverse strategies, I’m certainly not going to stop you. Good luck selling that to the networks and their online equivalents.
I agree that complete balance is an unreasonable expectation. I have not tried to argue otherwise. I just believe that there is a point at which a lack of balance hurts the wider popularity of the game, and that, from an e-sport perspective, Netrunner is on the wrong side of that line.
I hope we can agreed that if EVERY matchup in competitive play was Kate v ETF, very few people would be interested in following Netrunner. At the other end of that spectrum is perfect balance with each ID represented proportionally, subject to standard variance. I hope, too, that we can agreed that this would be a very good thing.
As you travel from the good end of the spectrum to the bad end of the spectrum you lose potentially interested consumers. At some point you have lost enough potential consumers that the game is not able to attract broad appeal. We may all have a different view of where that tipping point occurs, but I hope we can all agree that such a tipping point does exist.
I believe, based on the results of Worlds top 16, that we have passed that tipping point. Other people in this thread seem to believe, quite passionately, that we have not.
I doubt either of us are going to convince the other, and that’s fine.
I believe that many of the posters in this thread are so elite that they have a hard time objectively considering the appeal of Netrunner, and the balance issue, from the perspective of the broader audience.
And I hope I do not misrepresent them when I say that they believe that I am insufficiently informed and experienced to properly judge the appeal of Netrunner, and the balance issue, from the perspective of the broader audience.
That, really, is the sum total of my argument, and the counter argument. Everything else, is window dressing really, as we each attempt to articulate our point.
The refusal to consider the balance issue seriously is unfortunate, in my view, as it has prevented a serious discussion about how balance can be improved. Erratas and re-printings are the obvious, and expensive choice, but if we look at real world sport for inspiration (although I am reliably informed by rumirumirumirumi that there is no merit in this whatsoever) you will see that there are a variety of different options that have already been applied in the real world.
Why could we not have a handicap system (such as in golf) attached to IDs?
Why could we not have weight classes (such as in combat sports) attached to IDs?
Why could we not move to a tournament scoring system that rewarded more than just technical expertise (such as in performance sports like gymnastics and figure skating)?
I’m not saying that all, or any, of these ideas are workable in practice. But it seems that if we moved from saying ‘balance is fine’ to ‘balance can be improved; how can we do that?’ we might be surprised by the options available.
