This is true. I can’t even imagine what it would be like even a year from now for a new player to buy into the game. It’s already, what, $300? I would hate to see the longevity of the game suffer because buy-in becomes too expensive.
My opinion is that balancing a game is very very very difficult. I have personal issues and large disagreements with some of the things they have said publicly both in these interviews and in the past through other mediums, but it is what it is, I really enjoy the game they make, just in a completely different way then Damon intends.
One thing that I found funny is that we are apparently not scientific enough. The way I go around deciding what deck I want to play and how I finalize my 45/49 for every tournament I take seriously, using data available to me is very scientific :).
If they really are being conservative, I would like to see them stop. I feel like they purposefully held back runner cards and printed clear attacks on the runner meta(lotus field and sealed vault, etc.) since last years worlds, and I feel like that hurt the runner metagame more than helped. If they had instead printed other strong runner options that encouraged various styles of play I feel like they might have had better results with what we are seeing today. One thing that worries me is that 1 year from now, the next cycle is going to have a bunch of mediocre corp cards, and runner cards that directly target (NEH, SanSan City Grid, Astroscript Future Perfect… etc) and a bunch of strong runner cards and the pack releases will be mostly unexciting for corp decks just like they are now as competitive runners.
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I think we need to take Damon’s interview with a big grain of salt. My main take away from the interview is that he seemed very uncomfortable talking about the game and was very vague about it. It could be that he’s being cryptic for the sake of not tipping his hand as to future possibilities in the game, or some super-duper-powerful undiscovered interactions in the current card pool, but frankly I don’t buy it. Lukas was in the same position and his interview was laser direct, no hesitation, talked about his game in both broad and narrow terms, high level, low level, past and future, no sense of evasion or obfuscation.
I think it is quite possible that Damon isn’t doing very much development on Netrunner and is probably working on mostly on other things. It is possible that the Netrunner portion of his interview wasn’t super well considered by him. It is also possible he’s trying to play some weird 13 dimensional chess in his chiding of the player base for not being open enough or “scientific” enough but it is just as likely that he’s less involved with the design of the game than he was before and that the easiest way to get through those questions about apparent problems with the game was simply to say to the the players “its your problem.”
The Lukas interview was more interesting. He straight up said that they’ve been conservative with the design of the game post-core set, and provided an excellent rationale as to why they’ve been that way. The logical outcome of this conservatism is that the cards played skew toward certain staples from core. He provided reasons why this is not entirely a bad thing.
I find Lukas’ assessment of the intentional conservatism of the game’s design post core far more more relevant to why the game is as it is now than this weird idea that the the reason there isn’t more diversity of play being that the genius design of the game is somehow above the heads of the collective wisdom of the people playing it.
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I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s far easier to say “There is a solution, you guys just need to find it” than “We didn’t see this coming, we’re going to have to find a way to fix it”.
Damon wasn’t being cryptic on purpose. Nor was he trying to censor himself to avoid giving spoilers.
He was simply going for the easiest solution - us as players figuring it out (if it exists) and making him look smart.
I actually started writing the rant because Damon seemed so condescending and I was legitimately irritated. I wanted to write about how wrong I thought he was, but then was like, he’s arrogant, cryrptic, condescending, AND has given the community a lot to consider! To write him off as ignorant seems perhaps more ignorant. I guess it’s possible he doesn’t know what to say and is pawning it off to the players, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I think he is just trying to get us to think about the game more deeply in his own unique Damon way.
For the record i enjoyed Lukas’ interview much more. A lot more content rooted in substantial statements. Just not as many loose ends to discuss with it IMO and it didn’t quite invoke the emotional response Damon’s did.
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I don’t think any such interaction exists - or at least if it does Damon doesn’t know about it any more than the rest of us. If the play testers had found something it would have leaked into the community by now - especially if the designers are relying on it to shape the meta that they are testing next year’s cards in.
Absolutely. There is almost certainly some truth that he is probably not as closely involved in Netrunner now. Case in point was when he debuted the GRNDL ID at the Plugged In Tour but didn’t know how much influence the final version had.
This time last year he was saying that people need to get over their “crutch” of relying on “End The Run” ICE, but the game state (and tournament rules) at the time wasn’t at all conducive of that. Perhaps he was portending the recent game state in which we have a seen a lot of taxing builds like HB Glacier and Jinteki RP, with cards like Caprice and NAPD Contract.
I think the game is very much alive and well, especially if Lukas is speaking genuinely and that the designers have been overly conservative. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with remaining open to the possibility of a restricted / banned list - it would be arrogant for them to assume that they can design a game indefinitely (or to its natural conclusion) without making a single mistake. They’ve already opened the door to errata (having screwed up the wording on Caissa) so I would just be a little bit bolder and design slightly more aggressively, with the expectation that some cards might break along the way and require intervention.
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In the interview Damon is asked why certain Archetypes keep showing up and dominating play. So he says “Players are not being scientific enough!” and “Figure out how to counter those ‘best’ decks and knock them out!”.
Flash cut to a couple days later. El-Ad wins Canadian Nationals. Post victory interview he’s talking about how they played test match after test match, constructing a Whizzard deck specifically to test the limits of NEH and failing to dent it. He and his play group are clearly being creative, testing out of the box counters, being scientifically rigorous in their testing, and winning!
So Damon is right, right? Well, no, because the result of being creative and scientifically rigorous is to bring Siphon Andy and Astrobiotic NEH, which were the two least left field archetypes to bring to that tournament. Being Creative, Scientific and trying to counter those ‘best’ decks is exactly what is happening already, leading to the exact opposite result that Damon says it should.
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I don’t think Whizzard is necessarily the best choice to put NEH through its paces. Whizzard is good at trashing remotes for sure, but NEH isn’t really winning through bananas card draw, it’s good because it has 17 influence and is yellow. NBN is strong in general because it has top notch agendas and SanSan; if NEH hadn’t been printed we’d still be seeing Making News and TWIY* sharing the honours.
Taking anti-meta decks is a really risky move. If you get drawn against a non-meta deck in round one and lose you’ll spend the whole day at the bottom of the draw playing all the other non-meta decks that yours is sub-optimal against. Why gamble on that when you can play a consistent ID like Andromeda and rely on skill to outplay the close matchups?
What would be interesting would be if multi-day events had a deck building caveat which said you couldn’t play the same ID twice - i.e. a different ID for different days. That way players would have to decide which decks to take: some would gamble on day one in order to take a consistent deck to day two if they qualified, whereas others would aim to ensure qualification with a solid day one deck and then mix things up the next day.
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I agree. What I am saying is that you can build those anti-meta decks and see how they operate in testing. If they aren’t operating well against the dominant decks in testing, and they aren’t, then you don’t take them to the tournaments, so again people aren’t.
Damon’s suggestion that an answer to the dominant archetypes is to bring meta-call decks to tournaments doesn’t pass muster if the “meta-call” decks don’t even work against their intended targets, their intended targets being just that dominant.
Oh yeah, I agree with you 
But I disagree with El-Ad that Whizzard is the best challenge for NEH. I think I’d ignore the remotes and batter the centrals as hard as I can with multi-access - probably Keyhole actually.
El-Ad did not say that Whizzard was the best challenge for NEH. He said the Andy deck he won with was.
The point is that they experimented attacking NEH from “every angle” including less-obvious ones like Whizzard. This is what Damon said to do in his interview. Challenge the top decks from non-obvious angles and be scientific about it.
This is exactly what El-Ad did in testing and he still brought an Andy Siphon and an NEH Astrobiotic.
Yes, players are “mathematical” when analyzing cards before they see print, but they are also highly scientifically experimental. I very often see people bring out of the box deck ideas to game nights and get continually smacked around by the dominant archetypes.
The more I think about it, the more repulsed I am by what Damon said. He essentially insulted the player base and call us un-creative and unwilling to try new things. I think that this is demonstrably untrue, and that Damon should maybe be a little more “scientific” and investigative before he offhand assumes otherwise.
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I haven’t seen what he said, but I can’t believe that an Andy deck is the best thing to specifically test NEH - if that is the purpose of the exercise. I can believe it is still the most consistent overall against all other possible, viable Corp archetypes but I’m pretty sure there are better options than Whizzard and Andy if you’re just trying to put NEH through its paces.
But the point remains though, and I totally agree with you, that yes it is possible to think “outside the box” and create optimised decks to beat the meta (as Damon would have us do), but they are less consistent overall and concede a lot of ground in the non-meta matchups so they lack reliability and everyone gravitates back to Andromeda.
I also play Game of Thrones, so I have a lot of experience of playing with whole sets designed by Damon. Damon is sort of an enigma to me. On the one hand, he does designs very interesting cards that are very challenging to play with , but on the other hand, he’s rather arrogant, obnoxious and has weird ideas about the meta, and is incredibly dismissive of people who don’t’ happen to share his point of view.
His predictions still aren’t great. He has a pretty awful track record of predicting which cards are good (Exploratroy romp, and there was a particularly obnoxious card in Game of Thrones that Damon trash-talked as being bad in an interview, which then went on to win the European Championships, and would dominate the meta until it eventually got restricted.)
Hey, if Cambridge PE ever starts dominating the meta, Romp might even start seeing some play!
I wonder whether the reason for his strange perception is that the FFG playtesters perhaps aren’t quite as strong as they (or he) think they are? Maybe they happen upon the “right” archetypes but their builds aren’t quite as tight as the best players in the world are coming up with. So when Damon says we just have to find the right counters he means that his teams have found answers to their own 80% builds, but perhaps those counters aren’t quite so good when stacked up next to National Championship-winning decks, piloted by expert players.
@tomdidiot: What was the AGoT card you’re talking about?
Just saying I completely agree with this.
Even if it won’t make me any friends here, I somehow agree with Damon here.
I’m a little tired about seing the same decks in netrunner. I don’t mean the same archetypes, but the exact-same-decks.
I think a big part of it is we have very good players and contributors who explain what they build. It should help people think , but instead it gives an impression of “resolved game”.
“If you want to win you need this astrobiotic and this andromeda” why that ? I don’t say contributors on stimhack mean that, I like reading the forum because there is a lot of work building new decks (see the PPVP kate discussion). Just at the end of the day, many people will take the results as a “this deck is so good don’t try to build a better one”.
Those here taking Damon personnally, I don’t think he was adressing to you, building and explaining your amazing decks, but he’s adressing to all the players taking those decks like a finished work.
Long story short, I don’t say you should stop contributing and explaining your builds at all (obviously), but the players who read your work should take that as an incentive to build, not as “this deck is the strongest in this meta”.
No. It’s just ego. Plain and simple.
From what I gather, Damon is/was the lead designer for Netrunner, and when he was hired on he was responsible for getting a large part of the game produced and designed. I think now he is in a much more hands off position, or at least is not directly responsible for much of the design. That seems much more like Lukas’ territory. However, he probably is quite proud of what was created, and that has lead to a large ego.
His “explanations” in this video are him liking the sound of his own voice and being the center of attention. To wit, being one of the original creators of the game, I give him a massive amount of credit for what he’s done. But he also massively underestimates the intelligence of the community.
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I agree that seeing the same decks over and over is a problem, but what bugs me is that it’s not the players’ fault. Our job as players is to break the game and/or do whatever we like. Some people find winning to be fun, so they’re going to try and do what has the best chance of winning. Telling them to play different decks because the meta is stale isn’t fair at all.
The change can only happen on the developer side, by being a bit less conservative/reactionary about every card and actually making other options equally viable (or errataing old cards to be less broken, I guess).
So while I agree he might be talking to the people taking decks as finished end-states, I don’t think those players are as common as he’d be suggesting, and I don’t like the way in which he said it, because it comes across as very secret-keeper/“all of this stagnation has nothing at all to do with us” and I feel that’s a poor way for a designer to behave.
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I loved your “rant”. I like Netrunner, but I don’t have the time to be “scientific” about it. I am actually a scientist IRL and let me tell you, it is fun but it is also a slow, draining process. The idea that I would leave work after a 10h day, go to my LGS and then take out deck #68 and measure how it does against the current top archetypes while taking notes on my lab book… that sounds like a job, not a game.
If the developers through out cards that are obviously (or more or less obviously) much more powerful than the competition, people are going to flock to them. Having a powerful deck that delivers is fun; if you can do that by tweaking the clearly awesome Andromeda/NEH as opposed to spending months on Professor/Tennin, well, the answer is obvious for most people.
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