New Updated FAQ & Tournament Rules

The Netrunner FAQ has been updated.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4931

Noteworthy:

“In the Tournament Rules, the “weak-side wins” tiebreaker has been removed. This tiebreaker was not breaking many ties, and so strength of schedule is now the primary tiebreaker. We have been pleased with the positive response to the double-elimination brackets, so those remain unchanged.”

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aw yis, goodbye WSW!

Still no weighted SoS, but eh, I’ll live. Unless I end up 33rd at worlds again because two of my opponents dropped to play other games ;).

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No idea why they say this, in my experience it was breaking quite many of them. I’ve been to a 18-player tournament on Saturday, there were 4 Swiss rounds and cutoff to top 4. After the Swiss there were:

  • 2 players at 12 prestige (one 3-3, one 4-2)
  • 4 players at 10 prestige (two 4-1, two 3-2)
  • 1 player at 9 prestige
  • 6 players at 8 prestige (five 3-1, one 2-2)
  • 1 player at 6 prestige
  • 4 players at 4 prestige (two 1-1, two 2-0)

Overall, out of 12 ties available, WSW broke 4, including the most important one (between 4th and 5th), quite decent. And during previous tournaments I remember it being more or less the same.

Some interesting bits in the FAQ. Notably, the Red Herrings ruling that forced unstolen agendas (due to opting not to or being unable to pay additional costs) to be revealed from R&D has been reversed.

I too was surprised at that remark from Lukas. I posted the same thought to my Colorado Netrunner group…without pulling up the spreadsheets (but planning to in the near future), it seems like WSW factored into the cut in most of our tournaments. I know many people have voiced their disdain for the WSW tiebreaker, and this will make things a lot simpler on the TO side of the house for people who weren’t using software/programs designed to track WSW, but “not breaking many ties” doesn’t seem like a great sole reason to blow up the WSW tiebreaker, to me. I think we’ll see a lot more true ties now, and I for one do not look forward to the true tie on a cut where who moves on to double-elim rounds is determined by the flip of a coin.

Goddamnit.

Can I go back to the WI Regional and move from 9th to 3rd, making the cut? PLEEEEEEEEEEEEASE?

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There is are two good reasons to favor SOS over WSW, IMO.

(1) WSW doesn’t really tell you who is the better player in any sense. Who cares what side you’re losing as if a loss is a loss? At least SOS is more likely to favor the better player, despite it being out of your control, (while it may seem like WSW is in your control, everyone is trying to win all of their games anyway, so it feels more like an illusion of control attached to something super arbitrary).

(2) The existence of the super bye is a really cool thing in the game, favoring SOS as the tiebreaker makes the super bye better. What good does the bye being “super” help you in the WSW tiebreak? Not a whole lot, considering everyone in contention for a cut generally has a pretty good record anyway. If you, with a super bye, are tied with someone who didn’t have a bye but 2-0d the first round, it doesn’t do anything at all, (assuming you also would have 2-0d the first round). However, it makes a HUGE difference for SOS, not only giving you a round 1 win, which matches you up against better players, on average, than if you had the same record but didn’t sweep the first round, but making your first round “opponent” have a perfect record, which is extremely unlikely for anyone who didn’t have the bye.

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While I feel those two reasons are indeed good enough to favour SoS over WSW, I think WSW is still way better tiebreaker then the coinflip and simply reversing the order of applying them would be much better.

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I think I would feel a whole lot better about the decision to axe the WSW tiebreaker if Lukas has given some valid points as you have, instead of what he said. I feel like there had to be a better reason other than it was not breaking many ties (which is not the case in my experience), so it seems odd that that’s the aspect they chose to highlight in the article. Weird.

I agree, what he said was a load of shit. He ought to have just said that it often fails to break ties, rather than saying that it doesn’t break many ties. It’s sort of true, nonetheless, though, (depending on your definition of “many” ties). If the cutoff for whatever your cut is is X-3, for example, its only going to break a tie between someone who lost all 3 games with one side and someone who didn’t.

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I think the point of the WSW tie-breaker was so that it penalises players who have one strong deck and one deck that just scrapes by - i.e. you need two solid decks to do well. It does open a philosophical debate though: is it better to have won more with your weaker deck or lost less with your stronger one? The problem is that Netrunner isn’t (and never will be) balanced. The Corp is favoured at the moment, so WSW esentially becomes a bit of a lottery of who got luckiest with the Runner matchups.

SoS has always been preferable in my opinion. It means that the order you win your games in becomes relevant because it dictates who you play all day - i.e. if you’re going to lose, it needs to be at the end of the day.

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Can someone tell me where to read up on (super) bye or explain it, please?

Yeah, sucks that they just now figured it out, at least it should be in place for GenCon and Worlds, though.

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I was curious and ran through the scoresheets and trackers for our last several tournaments in-state. The WSW tiebreaker was a determining factor at a critical position (where some tied players either made the cut and/or got prize support and the people below did not) in four of our past eight tournaments, and different players would have made the cut at Regionals and gotten playmats at Store Championships with SoS as the sole tiebreaker.

On the bright side, this only resulted in one true tie and both players were below the cut, so there would have been no coin flips to determine who makes the cut - my chief concern in the newfound lack of a secondary tiebreaker.

Seeing this right after I went from 9th seed (from sos) to 20th seed (from wsw) at the philly regionals hurts. :frowning:

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Oh well. Super bye helped me tie for 2nd on SOS. I much prefer it as a tiebreak.

I love they are getting rid of WSW, it really was not important as a stat at all. Strength of Schedule is usually a good indicator, and is pretty fair. It’s not fun to lose the tiebreaker based on SoS cause much of it is out of your hands in the early rounds, you might face really good players and get early wins and then your SoS is amazing, or you might face a few weaker players and your SoS is awful. In the end, I don’t think there is much that we can do other than extend tournaments longer, and i don’t think that’s possible. Considering our time restraints, SoS is the best we have.

Happy with the change. :slight_smile:

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Has there actually been a positive response to this? Haven’t we got a really long thread on here where opinion, at the very least, is divided? I would say the reaction here was probably slightly against the format on balance.

People say that FFG lurk in these forums and take note of what is being said, but sometimes I doubt that very much when they make decisions that don’t actually seem to be at all in line with what is being said by the public.

I really can’t agree with you regarding the superbyes.

As someone who tend to have 15-30 participants in the tournaments I’ve found the superbyes to be ridiculusly powerful already. If you get a superbye in a 4-5 round tournament you are pretty much set to make the cut already.

While I wont miss WSW, superbyes is one of the reasons that SOS is not a great tiebreaker.

There were a few people here who didn’t like it, but the response I’ve seen from most people at the tournaments tends to be positive, or at least “it’s better than the tiebreaker thing”

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