I think that is exactly why players and designers often seem to have these “disagreements”. I saw it in L5R all the time. Fact is 1) players don’t have the time designers do and 2) players have to play in a real world where you consistency is at least as important as beating the current hotness. It’s not problem until either the players or the designers start telling each other that they are rubbish for not seeing things their way. That’s when the nastiness starts.
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I agree with this thread 100%. Stimhack may not have the highest activity, but man it is probably the most quality discussions on Netrunner online. Damon seemed out of touch, delivered a couple good statements, but otherwise his interview could have been about ANY card game. On the subject of Tarmagoyfs and blah blah blah…
Lukas’ interview was invigorating, however. My only prior experience with him was people giving him shit about his twitter rulings. But after hearing him give grounded statements backed up with logical reasoning, it made me continue to feel good about a game I very much so like.
I have a suspicion that Sealed Vault will work with a low-credit corp card. I have a suspicion that there will be a card that removes agenda counters, maybe upon stealing your own agenda. A current, perhaps?
Overall, despite Damon’s vague words, I feel great about this GenCon. NBN has been extremely strong for a few months now, and it’s not surprising to see that ported to the first new NBN ID.
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@bayushi_david: Spot on. And I think that, although I doubt that was his intention, in that interview Damon appeared a bit condescending and as @whatisthistreachery said “out of touch”. I am not going to hold it against him, but most players expect sth better than “work harder/smarter”.
Damon has said in other interviews that the core was mostly done by Lukas, and the game was in development already when he (Stone) was brought in. He’s also said in other videos (and in this one, a little bit) that Netrunner is not what he spends most of his time on. Lukas is and was the main FFG employee on Netrunner.
I feel like people are assuming that Damon has a larger role in this game than he himself claimed he does. He’s out of touch with the current meta because it’s not his job to be in touch with it. He’s also said in other interviews that he doesn’t even get to play the game very often, and when he does it’s playtesting. I wish he was more direct about saying that stuff. But in the end, I don’t think we can draw many conclusions about the direction of the game, positive or negative, from Stone’s interview.
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I stand by my original assertion that he is out of touch with the current game but has a very good “Birds eye view” of the game. This is why I highlighted his big picture comments and was irritated by his comments on the current meta. Not sure it’s wise to disregard everything he says. He is still a designer at one of the top game companies in the world and has had a hand in shaping the game we all love so much. Put those credentials in a vacuum and I am inclined to think he knows SOMETHING.
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I’m sure at some point we’ll see an operation that puts credits on a card (probably a rezzed asset) that already has credits on it. This would add longevity to the various campaigns as well as being direct economy for Sealed Vault.
I think based on the world building he discusses doing in the recent Terminal 7 podcast, you’re certainly correct. He is very much involved with that aspect of the game. If anyone hasn’t listened to this, they should, because it is pretty great:
Doesn’t change the fact that his understanding of the player base was way off base, and one of the things he mentions in the podcast is is that his job is dependent on understanding the psychology of players. If he’s telling players to re-examine their assumptions about how his game is played, he might want to take a second look at some of his own assumptions about how people play it.
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Red Queen’s Faithful. He trashtalked the hell of it in a interview. It went on to be the key cog of the Bara KotHH army recusion deck at European Championships in 2013 and ended up getting restricted…
Ah ha, yes I remember it now.
Damon’s viewpoint will be influenced largely by what he intended particular cards to do and what his play test meta looked like 6 months to a year ago - but neither of those factors have any bearing on the real world. From a point of view of logic and statistics he must surely realise that he can’t possibly know the player base better than we know ourselves unless either:
- He really does have some kind of god-like intelligence.
- His play testers are more numerous and of a generally higher standard than the whole of the rest of the world.
We simply have way more statistics (games logged) than the play testers could ever possibly have and the very fact that the community in general have so many questions about specific wordings / interactions within hours of cards being spoiled suggests that they haven’t been tested to death. I find it extremely hard to believe that the design team have arrived at a different meta to the rest of the world, unless it is a significantly inferior one.
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I think it’s likely that (1) the design team isn’t quite as skilled as the best players in the world, and (2) the design team was more concerned with trying out different things and making sure they weren’t totally busted than just trying their best to win or trying their best to beat what they knew were tier one decks.
I don’t think they missed too much, save for Atman, (and that isn’t a huge issue compared to other things). I just think they saw that the best decks could be beat, and thought that was fine, rather than making sure that it was often smart to play something else in a tournament that you actually wanted to win, (NBN/Andy has been a pretty smart go-to choice for a while now, and at no point in the past year could you have picked those decks and have been making a bad meta call).
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Video game development is an interesting comparison. Time and again they underestimate the player base and their encounters or mechanics get torn up against the collective intelligence of their players. This is a challenge for all types of games but imbalance only becomes something that must be addressed in multiplayer games. These games also face a much higher collective intelligence because of the communities they form. In an MMO where it’s players against a static system with repeatable results imbalance can be undeniable when it occurs. In other games like DOTA or Counterstrike problems can be harder to spot but it has to be severe to upset rock-paper-scissors balance (like Netrunner has) and the devs are armed with a fantastic amount of data feedback.
This might add up to a bit of denial for Damon; he’s probably underestimated our collective intelligence compared to the test team (like most devs), isn’t confronted with statistical results (unlike an online game) and it is more difficult to spot imbalance in a game of this type. Lukas seems like he’s on it though, to me his interview seemed to indicate he would be taking action? I’d have to listen again but something like ‘We’ll see what the results are here.’ The results there were pretty conclusive.
A little imbalance is a reality and Netrunner can absorb quite a bit. The preferred solution is in new cards of course but as @mediohxcore was saying, at a certain point the game can be better than packs full of narrow counters and overcosted cards.
@Nordrunner you’ve got a great point that the kind of ‘deep testing’ you do is what we really need to expand the meta. A hundred games with an ID and it’s amazing what someone can make work as they build their skill with the deck and tune. I think the community is highly experimental but it’s usually onto the next after 10 games with a deck. Knowing that a deck took down a tournament is often the thing that makes people stick with it and push through those 10 games towards mastery; which does constrain the meta. Chris Hinkes (PE and Kit) is a great example of ‘deep testing’, his decks are so unique but his mastery of them has really been paying off with tournament results lately.
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I’ve talked to some top Thrones players. When they heard he was going to work on ANR, they quoted the esteemed film ‘Taken’: “Good luck.”
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Maybe he was not talking about you in that interview and instead is talking about the portion of the playerbase that netdecks and takes everything they hear from the top tier players as gospel rather than trying to find solutions for their situations and play styles.
I always enjoyed Damon’s interviews, except for this one. I wasn’t really insulted, but Lukas stole the show in the previous interview from Team Covenant.
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Damon is of the opinion that basically no one should ever copy a deck off the internet. Personally, I think that the best way to get good enough at building your own (good) decks quickly is to do exactly that. Netrunner is such a unique/complicated game that you can spin your wheels for a long time playing junky decks without coming to understand what you’re doing wrong.
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I’m not saying we invented it, but I’d like to think the Kate PPVP discussion here fostered its evolution and success. That may be a form of net decking, and def. encouraged it after its success. However, I call that community. I’m sure Damon hates a site like this. Hard to recognize we plebs from his higher plane of existence.
Honestly, I wish he’d move out of the competitive realm and into something like board games. Smart guy, but, not a community guy, which LCGs need. There’s a reason he was hidden away during Worlds last year.
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I’m saying we invented it. 
Also, I don’t think Damon lives in MN. I see a lot of the other people who work on ANR at the FFG EC pretty often.
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Damon has a problem with Netdecking? I thought I heard him mention once in an interview something along the lines of “when you learn to play a deck, it becomes your deck”. Which is a principle I whole heatedly agree with. I have no issue with Netdecking. As a teacher, I often times do not have the time to throw together something from scratch, so instead I refine decks to taste.
I also highly doubt Damon HATES sites like Stimhack. I think any designer would be pretty pleased to have their game discussed as much (and as highly) as they are on this site. Instead, he probably is disappointed that some cards are examined in a vacuum, which seems to be a design principle that he has brought up again and again. I really got the impression he was talking about the tendency for card reviewers to examine cards based solely on the false “click” dichotomy of a card or directly comparing an icebreaker to corroder. To directly quote the interview “they are different because they were designed to do things differently”.
He has also said pretty openly a few times that he does not even know where in the current cycle they are as he doesn’t even know what is released until it arrives at his desk. He probably is speaking from a position far removed from the current card pool.
I haven’t met the guy so I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don’t know how much of the game he has had a hand in, but I am willing to bet he had a big hand in elements of the game going forth from the core.
The few bits of the game I do know he has had a hand in I really enjoy. While the cards I know he has created are maybe not the most competitive right now, they have solid design principles behind them and three of them are very widely played right now out of their home faction.
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