What makes you think the landscape has been defined as ‘anything goes’? I think most people are ok with everyone doing things that are impossible to enforce against, such as IDs, 2 for 1s, and telling your friends what decklists other people are on after playing them. This was entirely possible to fix by alerting Alsciende and having him fix it, which makes it very different from those things.
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There’s also a world of difference between claiming that a thing is defendable, and defending a thing. Are you arguing from a theoretical standpoint that someone could argue that this exploit is okay, or are you arguing that this exploit is okay?
Ideologically it is no different; and you’ve made my point. The community is not striving for a non-exploitative landscape if it does not or cannot police these ‘non-enforcable’ exploitations.
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I can’t speak for your meta, but in mine, we unambiguously strive for a non exploitative scene.
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I think you’re creating a false dichotomy here. The community certainly doesn’t have a non-exploitative landscape, but that doesn’t automatically mean it has an “anything goes” landscape.
The landscape is “some things go”, and people are asking for “accessing private decks on netrunnerdb via a security exploit” to not be in the “some things go” category.
I specifically did not say that people shouldn’t lose because of their deck. I agree whole-heartedly on that point.
If you’re okay with people losing because of their decks, you must be okay with people winning because of their decks. If someone loses because they have a purposeful trashcan deck, then someone else has to win that game because they have a purposeful not-trashcan deck. After that’s, it’s just relative gradients of trashcan-ness, which all follow.
I’m speaking specifically of Regionals and above in the States.
@beaushinkle I tend to strive to boil things down to their essences and then extrapolate them. If certain exploitative practices are deemed acceptable, exploitation is an acceptable practice. From this point, how can one argue against any exploitative practice? That’s where I’m coming from. It’s very possible I’m falling prey to fallacious thinking; I am no logician.
Metagaming is built into all customizable games, be it cards, miniature gaming or even choosing which weapons to carry in a video game. Claiming that building a deck to exploit herd mentality is the equivalent of cheating is an asinine assertion. If you want a true comparison of skill based solely on pilots, give everybody the same decks. This isn’t chess. Deck building is an intrinsic part of the game.
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If certain exploitative practices are deemed acceptable, exploitation is an acceptable practice. From this point, how can one argue against any exploitative practice? That’s where I’m coming from.
Gotcha yeah, I see what you’re trying to do. That line of reasoning would be applicable if people were arguing that the exploit was bad because all exploits are bad.
If someone claimed “all exploits are bad. accessing private decks via a security breach is an exploit. thus, accessing private decks are bad”, then providing a counter example of a not-bad-exploit would be a sound rebuttal.
Fortunately, though, no one is trying to do that. Instead, people are claiming “we don’t want people to strive for an edge by exploiting a security breach in a decklist website”.
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This isn’t cheating as defined by the game’s documentation. My point is that if the community is seeking to define cheating as exploitative behavior, they need to admit that competitive ANR is built on cheating.
I think the conversation would turn in a more productive direction if we stopped saying “cheating” and started saying “unsportsmanlike unsporting”.
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I am sure it would be.
But it would be less accurate.
It would not be OK to ferret through an opponent’s bags and dig out their decks to check their contents even if it was “just for a taste of the meta”. That wouldn’t be “unsportsmanlike” . It would be cheating.
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Strictly speaking, this team didn’t cheat. Nor did they steal the decklists, since the account holders of those decks (including me) still have them. They also didn’t lie in Slack chat about having done this.
But I feel exactly the same about what they did as I would if all of those words did strictly apply.
Edit: also, I’d use “unsporting.” Gender inclusive.
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I think you fundamentally don’t understand intellectual property. If I download a copy of a movie, I cannot claim that I didn’t steal it because the studio still has their original, while I only have a copy. Why should they care if they didn’t lose anything?
The reality is that there is value to artistic works. Copyrights and patents are means by which these are enforced in the modern world. A relevant example would be that artist who created the artwork on the ANR card “Door to Door” selling playmats on Inked, before FFG intervened, since they own the rights to that artwork.
Finally, ANR is a game of hidden information. Here you are claiming that one player knowing the contents of other competitors decks before they even arrive at the event is not cheating. It is cheating. They are gaining an unfair advantage over other participants by dishonest means.
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As someone working with the Seattle team deckbuilding and testing, and as someone who has friends in our group who were targeted, I’m extremely disappointed in SF and the crew. It makes me even more disappointed that one of our fellow Seattleites, who is part of the Glass House, denies any wrongdoing of the SF crew’s actions. As, currently, there are many “apologies” being thrown around on stimslack from the accused, I find it disheartening that this denial of wrongdoing might actually reflect the personal feelings of that crew, even as they go to apologize. A red-handed apology is no apology worth accepting. This is the response given to the Seattle Netrunner slack group today, after being confronted with the issue.
“As the representative here from the glass house, I want to make the following clear:
We had discovered a way to gain a competitive advantage that is legal. No different than scouting at a tournament or talking about what lists you played between rounds. By default, the setting to make your deck public is turned off, so every single person we obtained lists from had gone and changed that setting, knowing what they were doing. I personally believe we did nothing wrong, although I understand why people would feel that way. That said, we do have evidence that US east coast players were doing it manually and UK players were doing it automatically like we were, they just have not admitted it yet. Unluckily for us, other people prominent in the netrunner community have portrayed this activity as illigal across the various netrunner platforms. We have always intended on telling people after worlds, if we won or not. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me or just ask here and I will answer to the best of my ability. I’m sorry if anyone feel robbed or mad about what happened. Thank you”
[edited to keep it impersonal]
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Edit: Thank you for the quick response.
Everyone, please be careful to keep the conversation impersonal. Focus on the actions rather than the people involved.
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I think you misunderstood my post, probably because I wasn’t clear enough. While those words don’t technically apply, I consider that objection to be a semantic quibble and am not at all surprised that I and many others feel identically to how we would feel if they did technically apply.
Edit: That is, I was objecting to @bblum’s suggestion that we should use ‘unsporting’ instead of ‘cheating’ – while technically correct, it changes nothing about the merits of what was done or what the response should be, so I think we should just use whatever words come to mind.
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Nah, not really mate. If you read the General Slack channel, several of the people involved have come forward and said “we were wrong, sorry” and in one case, an uninvolved user was asked by them to stop trying to defend their actions.
The people who did it have admitted they were wrong, and some apologised. You can try and defend them if you want, but the guys who did it aren’t even on your side.
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That’s okay; my stances remain the same. I don’t participate in the Stimslack as it’s a bit too toxic for me. An outsider with no stakes in either side is better suited to approach the situation with a clear-head, IMO. Let’s hope this ‘fiasco’ doesn’t create a schism in our community.
For practical steps for those involved to defuse conflict, there’s a scale between not participating in the main event (most others would be placated, but they would lose out on the fun of participation) to straight up winning the tournament (most people would be very mad.) In between are things like bringing jank, publicizing their own decklists beforehand, forfeiting the cut, and other ways of sabotaging their chances of winning. Do note: some might require consent of the TO.
They must now balance the people they care to appease and their desire to enjoy playing at worlds. It is impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.
Don’t agree at all. Every game that spags, dien, Josh, Ben ni, etc in it have 10+spectators and their decks dissected. These players and their teammates deserve to test with the same relative anonymity that is allowed to everyone else.
As to the issue of mining decks it sucks. It’s disruptive to the testing process as it forces everyone to close off their decks, and it’s extremely unsportsmanlike. I love this community because of how inclusive and nice it is. If this game gets cutthroat like MTG then we’re failing as a community
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