Netrunner and Balance Part 2: Our Glorious Future

Well, Batty and Caprice don’t do that, the runner had that (Political Operative, Councilman) before Rumor Mill, and Rumor Mill does far more than deal with those two cards.

Other than that, yeah, entitled.

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Or play Councilman, or PolOp, or run another server, etc.

Anyway, it seems someone really didn’t like psi games. That’s fine - not all of us enjoy all flavors of Netrunner. But the article was about balance, and the fact remains that it isn’t like corps were radically dominant before Rumor Mill.

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Except that we already had the excellent Political Operative for that purpose.

Why do I say excellent? Point 1: Requires an HQ run. You can’t just play it without meeting some other criteria, which means it sets up future turns in most cases (Run HQ, Install PolOp, Run Remote is possible, but unlikely). This provides face-up information and provides a game of cat and mouse between the runner and corp, of the ‘I know you know I know’ variety.

Point 2: Single use, like Caprice/Batty. It doesn’t completely negate all instances of the card, until you deal with it. It allows one run to be more powerful.

Point 3: One influence; It’s more easily played outside its home faction than Rumor Mill would be, which helps because Criminal is the faction that was hit hardest by Caprice/Ash, but the other factions could still get benefit. This is opposed by Rumor Mill being in Anarch, the faction that already cared the least about Caprice/Ash (if I dismantle your Remote ICE, then Caprice and Ash, being multiplicative effects, are greatly reduced) and then being two influence instead, which makes Anarch oppressively powerful without being able to share the effect with other factions.

Final Point: Requires resources to use, it isn’t just a ‘pay the upfront, mediocre cost and forget’.

The only thing is that PolOp doesn’t affect JHow and Batty like Rumor Mill does. This makes me think it was more a way to try and force people to stop using JHow, or at least his ‘abuse’ case of cracking him mid-run to save Archives Agendas. And it just happened to smash Caprice, Ash, and Batty in the face.

All that said, it is a very Anarch way to solve the problem. Criminals deal with the card directly, Shapers don’t care and break ICE, while Anarchs set up the battlefield in their advantage to negate the cards. It’s also appropriate in that Anarchs have pretty much all the usable Currents, which seems to be a Faction thing, like NBN is on the Corp side.

I tend to agree and said as much about Aaron earlier. I do think that, right now, he can be on MWL since we have the non-MWL option of NACH to dodge with, but after rotation if we don’t get another answer he’d need to come off MWL right quick. His problem currently is his ubiquity outside of Criminal, not his presence, period, though. I feel it’s similar to why CI7 is played so much though; we just went through a tag-heavy meta, so Aaron being everywhere is the pendulum swinging the other way.

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It also does feel a bit weird that Rumor Mill came in the same cycle as Interdiction. Which I feel covers the same problem cases as Rumor Mill, but does it a bit more… fair?

If you want stuff to actually protect your servers, better Rez it on your turn or it ain’t doing jack; giving the runner a chance to actually deal with it normally.

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I’m not saying rumor mill is perfect, don’t get me wrong. I’d have preferred a card that just said “blanks caprice and batty”, to be added to the meta, but I’ll cling to rumor mill as long as batty exists.

Counting the number of caprices in the UK nationals and gencon cuts make your point on the necessity of rumor mill seem ridiculous (1 across both tournaments). Clearly Caprice was not running rampant before rumor mill came out, which makes it obvious some sort of counterplay existed and people weren’t just suddenly really afraid of psi games.

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Going by

1 and 3 corp were IG, don’t want to keep runner out.
2 and 4 corp were both purple decks that spent 4 influence getting caprice into their deck, and put 2 archived memories in to get her back if anyone wins the psi game.
5th, 6th, 7th and 8th were EOI decks, don’t want to keep runner out.

I’m not sure “1 caprice” is a fair description of this field. Both decks that wanted to score out behind ice used caprice, even though they had to go to great lengths to do so.

Rumor Mill might have been fine if it even said “Name a unique non-region asset or upgrade. The text box of the named card is blank.”

As is, the egregious part to me isn’t that it blanks Caprice. It is that it blanks Caprice and literally every other card that is also useful for securing a remote with more than cash.

Rumor Mill makes the game a straight money game, which the Runner is better at, or an alternative strategy game. As has alreay been stated, a lot of those alternative strategies are toxic.

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I know you think you are arguing, but you’re just proving the point. Again, this thread is about balance. While there might be a number of reasons Caprice wasn’t prevalent, the point remains that she obviously wasn’t part of a dominant strategy that was warping the meta.

What you’re actually pointing to is that she was necessary for a ‘score behind ice’ plan, otherwise known as ‘basic Netrunner.’ If she were unbalanced, removing her would increase deck diversity. The opposite, however, happened, as glacier became largely unplayable.

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While I agree, I feel obligated to point out that the meta right before Rumor Mill appearing couldn’t have affected the design of the card since they design a cycle in advance (at least).

That’s the problem. I’m pretty sure Rumor Mill wasn’t designed for Caprice/Batty. Given the concrete effects that happened to the meta as a result, it affected JHow play most significantly. (@SimonMoon’s point about how the meta looked right before the release of Rumor Mill supports this conclusion.)

Also two cards already existed that blanked Caprice/Batty, in the duo of Political Operative and Councilman. (If you have both down, Caprice/Batty don’t do anything.) The only real issue is that they weren’t effective in every matchup, unlike Rumor Mill. Because JHow was played in every deck, and effectively countered by Rumor Mill.

So I’m kinda harping on Rumor Mill > JHow, but seriously, it really does add up. I don’t even particularly dislike JHow, I’m just pretty sure that this hate card was aimed, and then missed. Which is why I dislike the card. :wink:

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I think the article was sound and I really appreciate there’s a willingness to adress the imbalance present in the game.

My main disagreements are:

1) Breaking News should be banned. It’s simply beyond the reasonable level of power tagging the Runner should have. Being able to play cards like All-Seeing I or Boom should require more than playing a card facedown under the backing of Hard-Hitting News.

2) CtM is the broken part of CtM decks. While the political assets are a mistake comparable to the “free” mechanic in Magic, CtM doesn’t need any to break the game. As long as it de facto adds +3 to the cost of trashing assets the card will be broken, it’s simply not fair to see such an increase and eventually another asset will come along to bring it over the line.

3) Bio-Ethics should be banned. Bio-Ethics enables the worst kind of asset spam: No scoring, long, punishes “fair” decks, promotes packing counters over strategy. Following the Magic comparison, this reminds me of Legacy’s Mystical Tutor ban.

The fascinating thing about the aforementioned agreement is that it seemed that the people who were part of the gentleman’s agreement (To not play Mystical Tutor) were having more fun than the people who weren’t. Whether or not they were aware that there was anything special going on, they were experiencing a better variety of decks and a higher quantity of recognizable baseline Magic gameplay—even though they were still playing with nearly every Magic card that has been printed. We saw the world they had made, and we liked it. We liked it so much more than the competitive world that had Mystical Tutor decks that we decided to give that happier world to everyone.

4) Eli is not made fair because Paperclip was printed Here’s my thinking. Is Eli fair without Paperclip? No. Then why is it fair with Paperclip? You should not need any card to make another fair. And, let’s be honest, Paperclip is a huge mistake. It effectively makes bariers with several subroutines as good as barries with only a handful and is more efficient than the already efficient Corroder to boot.

I also don’t think DDoS, Feedback Filter or Blackmail should be banned, but I can’t say I like them enough to care if they do get banned =P

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Unless I misunderstand a fundamental timing structure of the game, Batty is mostly immune to Plop. Rumor Mill is really the only way to neutralize Batty, without playing additional cards like Interdiction/Councilman.

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I propose using the word ‘counter’ instead of ‘hate’.

Apologies, I forgot about Ethan. Anyway the fact the number was 2 and not 1 hardly changes my point. Caprice was not dominant at that juncture. Rumor mill was not needed to allow decks to fight Caprice, but to a large degree Caprice was needed to allow corps to score all their points out if remotes.

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I know I said I was going to stop posting until the meta improved but I was thinking about what my ideal Ban/MWL list would look like. This is going to be different from SimonMoon’s list and I’ll explain why I differed where I differed

Banned:
Faust
Rumor Mill
Sensei Actor’s Union
Parasite

MWL:
Temugjin Contract

Off MWL
Prepaid Voicepad

On banning parasite and not Sifr:
SimonMoon has elaborated in detail above why he thinks that parasite should not be banned. While acknowledging that he is a better player than I am, I think that he is wrong in this specific instance. He makes three arguments why parasite should not be banned, 1) Ice description is an important part of Netrunner. 2) Ice has been balanced around the existence of Parasite. 3) Parasite has not been dominating the meta based on recent decks.

My answer to these objections is as follows. Parasite is not the entirety of ice destruction, if it is removed the runner would still be able to destroy ice and might even open up diversity in how they interact with ice. Right now parasite is the single most efficient way to remove ICE because you can use it on anything (excepting architect and magnet) but if you got rid of it, people would still be destroying ice and messing up the corp’s board state.

Additionally, the assertion that all Ice has been balanced around the existence of parasite is deeply troubling. If there is a 3 influnce card in a single faction that every ICE in the game needs be balanced around, that seems like a major balance problem to begin with and a sign that card should be removed for the health of the game. NEXT ice decks weren’t popular historically even when ice destruction wasn’t being run everywhere so worrying that they would dominate seems unnecessary.

SimonMoon points out that most anarch decks don’t run parasite anymore but as the rest of the ban list shows, a card doesn’t need to be run in a majority of decks to have a chilling effect on the meta. Feedback filter has almost never been run for example. Most anarchs I know are talking about cutting their copy of Rumor Mill (since they never see glacier) but that does not make Rumor Mill a problem free card. The existence of unqualified ice destruction that can be used without a breaker is the greatest reason that the netrunner meta has moved away from ice and banning parasite would go a long way towards fixing that.

Parasite is a core card that should never have been printed. Removing it like removing Astroscript will only result in a healthier Meta and allow greater diversity in the runner and corp decks.

Without Parasite and Faust, Sifr is another enabler of fix strength breakers and not any more a problem than datasucker. It’s quite effective against high strength ice but it requires all the other breakers (unless you import Atman) in order to break everything. At 5 cost, that seems balanced as anything else coming out recently.

Why not other cards like Feedback filter, Breaking News, Blackmail, DDoS?
Banning cards is a tricky process. In the other game, there are rarely more than 2-3 bans or unbannings at a time. I would rather ban the most problematic cards and see where the meta shifted to before updating the ban list. I do agree that those cards could be a problem but often problematic cards don’t have a negative effect because the meta isn’t right for them. Will of the Wisp is a totally broken card … in a meta where breakers are actually important and you can’t search your stack. The cards above may not need a ban once things have been shook up a little.

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I think that miss the point. The problem of sifr is not that is make the game impossible for the corp, the problem of sifr is that made many cards are useless or downgraded. Then the corps can’t play that cards, or if play them became a NPE when encounter SIFR what it’s higly possible because is power.

I always like played decks out of meta and i know that decisions make me hard to win any tournament, but the games are fun despite of the final result. Last times in netrunners don’t allow thah IMHO because the most powerful archetypes are so good against plan B decks, and has so many universal solutions.

For example Janus was rarely in the meta, but 2 cycles ago you can play janus and you know that was a card can be troublesome for the most of the competive decks in a certains moments,

And then less people play the game, because this is a game, and it’s suppose that the game should be fun. I think we have less to think about how powerful is a card and more how fun is a card for everybody.

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But is batty really a problem? Batty + Caprice together is a problem, but batty by itself should be fine.

The part of my post that you quoted was about kill decks, not Sifr.

What I said that might apply to Sifr was, “things that invalidate ice aren’t non-core-Netrunner to me, so long as the Corp has ways to fight them, because that’s still essentially the same fight.” (emphasis added)

I also said, in the same post, that “having too few viable strategies is a problem regardless of whether they’re ‘core Netrunner’ strategies or not.” I absolutely agree that if the only viable decks are the few at the top, that’s a problem.

Batty is far far more swingy than Caprice. I think the idea during development must have been that because he is one-time use only, he’s self-limiting and therefore should pose less frustation than Caprice.

In practice, because he can trash your whole rig and lock you out of every server in the process, 1 PSI game can easily determine the outcome of the entire game. That’s far worse than the relatively low stakes ETR on Caprice, where you can just go for another try.

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Caprice is a terribly designed card and I’m happy to see it gone from meta.
To be fair and still useful it should have been similar to Ash to allow trashing on failed PSI game.
With that kind of Caprice I think people would not have issues, while it would be still useful to allow that one turn window to score agenda.
But it would not enable the disgusting RP Caprice Nisei trains, and it would not make the remote untouchable just because of stupid PSI game mechanic.
PSI games are fine for delivering small punishments to the runner, but games should not be lost or won just on them. I can play rock paper scissors for that. Same result, don’t need to bother with shuffling cards…