Null Signal Questions Thread

Oh cool! We should have a NRDB feature requests thread.

My #1: I believe—and I might be wrong—a user’s card Collection is stored with the browser session. It would be nice to move this server-side so that your Collection follows you across your devices. I’ve always opened NRDB on a new machine and wondered why cards are there or not there. :slight_smile:

Really? Hand-written proxies, in the 21st century? As anything more than a temporary emergency solution for situations like a card lost or damaged?

Out of respect for my opponents, I would never show up to play with anything less than a decent quality color print. Where in the world do you expect NISEI events to happen where even a black-and-white printed proxy is hard to make?

Will there be a different Nisei Art for Card backs corp / runner? Like the curren red & blue, but also a different design?

That is on my list of things I’d like to see already :slight_smile:

You just named the exact situation when this is what we’d do… i.e. emergency replacements for lost or damaged cards.

That said, I don’t know everywhere that Netrunner is played. and I’m not going to tell someone they can’t play because they can’t afford a printer.

Yes, there will be different backs. Exactly what the runner design will look like, I can’t tell you yet.

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What a needlessly aggressive answer. Good for you that you can always print proxies, but as someone who used to move house about every 2-3 months for work I have been in many situations where I couldn’t. I don’t own a printer and I don’t always have access to the one at work (quite apart from the fact that if work found out I was printing Netrunner proxies on their printers, they probably wouldn’t be too happy), and sometimes I just needed to make short-notice changes to my deck.

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I have never owned a color printer, and during most of my time as a Netrunner player, I also haven’t owned a black-and-white one (not that it would matter). If I needed a proxy, I printed one somewhere. If I had no time, I did not use the card. I think it is more important to provide my opponents with good gaming experience by using easy to read cards, than to play with a last-minute deck change I cannot properly make.

I have TOd a lot of Netrunner events spanning about 5 years. During all this time, I had a player need an emergency proxy exactly once. Do we really need to solve such rare cases in the rules? Those can easily be solved by a TO ruling when such case happens.

@hsiale, let’s put it this way.

We’re currently looking for any and all solutions to the question of card availability. If you have one, please let us know.

With regards to providing replacement cards or cards that are copies of FFG’s official ones, we simply can’t for legal reasons. A few fan alts and our own templates/work are probably fine (still technically illegal) but we just can’t start selling their sets/product wholesale because they will likely litigate if we do.

Blank templates that TOs can hand-write on are just one solution to availability. If you run an event and any of these don’t work for you, you can decide not to use them. With any solution we have, it will likely be up to the TO.

Yes, Nisei cannot sell FFG’s sets. But players can print those cards for their own use and I don’t think FFG would try chasing them individually. Also, in many jurisdictions, I think they would not succeed doing this anyway, especially when it is impossible to buy the cards printed by FFG.

So, for me, the solution should be exactly how it was during FFG-Netrunner time. Each player is responsible for having their decks ready to play. Big majority of Netrunner organized play happens in places where it is easy and not very expensive to print things in colour. There are multiple such places in my city (Eastern Europe, about 800,000 inhabitants) including one which is open from 7 am every day, so someone travelling for a tournament from a small village can simply turn up there in the morning and print their decks. Printing 100 nice colour proxies at that place costs about the same money as 100 medium quality card sleeves, so definitely not a prohibitive cost. You just need a bit of research and preparation, to provide your opponents with good gaming experience.

And this should IMO be the default NISEI policy. Each player needs a deck, cards should be FFG originals or look close enough to be easily recognizable from the other side of the table (i.e. colour prints, because art is what most people use to recognize cards). If a player expects they are going to have trouble sticking to this, they should contact the TO and look for a solution. If a TO expects multiple players in their area to have trouble sticking to this, they can introduce local policy (and communicate it clearly each time they organize a tournament).

BTW this is a good rule to follow generally. Global policies should lean to the stricter side, and people should be allowed to introduce local, more relaxed policies. This way someone who had no time to read local policies can simply stick to the global one and be sure they still comply with whatever was agreed in the place they go to.

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I forgot about this, but we do have an official proxy policy already. This will go on our website eventually, but here it is for now: Click Here. You’ll find it within the article, heading is just Proxy Policy.

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If I don’t agree with this policy and plan to change it for any event I run, am I allowed to run Nisei events and order Nisei prize kits?

What part of it do you have such a problem with that you would modify it for events you are running, out of curiosity?

A: You may order GNKs and run those however you wish; there are no requirements. Store Champ, Regional, and National kits will require that you agree to our policies.

@icecoldjazz has said they’ll be on later to explain in more detail their thought process and enforcement policies.

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Grayscale proxies. They can seriously impact opponent’s enjoyment of the game and in my city getting proxies printed in colour is cheap and easy.

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If that is the case, why would you feel the need to alter your rules? It sounds like anyone in your area will have pretty proxies, if they need them.

Beyond that, it seems you are projecting your anecdotal circumstances to apply to everyone. I think NISEI’s goal has been inclusivity, which will be increasingly challenging as time goes on and we get further and further from official FFG print runs. By setting the standards a bit relaxed now, they will hopefully not need revising soon. Not everywhere has cheap, easy access to color printing like you do.

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Because, with the current rules, they will not need them.

Grayscale proxies are an issue because if I have them, my opponents have less fun playing me (they have to put extra effort into recognizing my board) and I get some competitive advantage (it is easier for my opponent to misrecognize my board and make a mistake because of this). So, with those rules, if I go to a tournament trying to win it, the logical thing to do is having a deck where every single card is a grayscale proxy, and copies of the same card are slightly different for further confusion. Of course they will all be clear and readable, so that I am within the rules and no TO can do anything about this. This way, my chances to do well in a tournament go up at the expense of some NPE for my opponents.

Of course, it is important that people can play, and I know there are places where black-and-white proxies are the only possibility. But those places are a minority. They should not be accomodated in the global policy, they should be given right to introduce local, more permissible policies, and encouraged to use this right as needed. Local TOs know what is possible at their place and will be able to make a good decision.

TL;DR Whatever rules are introduced, there will be people who try to use them to their advantage. That’s why you need rules which minimize possibilities for such (ab)use.

I would strongly disagree with this personally. I think minorities of various kinds should be at the forefront of NISEI’s thinking and am glad to see this has been the case so far.

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Ultimately, this is the policy. I’m sorry you don’t like it @hsiale but it’s unlikely to change.

Proxies are at the discretion of the TO, so another reason to possible need blank cards is if someone turns up with a problematic fan made proxy that the TO decides is not acceptable.

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Yeah, not talking about last-minute deck changes, but about making a functional deck at all. You can’t carry a full Netrunner collection if you move back and forth across the Atlantic every few months, but there used to be sufficiently frequent rules changes and card releases that would make decks no longer playable in that timeframe.

As I said, good for you, but I’d rather make sure people can play than exclude them because they have a hand-written proxy in their deck (which I don’t see as necessarily being worse than a printed one, provided you take care to write legibly).

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Sorry, but not wanting to allow grayscale proxies is so over the top that I don’t know what to say. What’s wrong with grayscale; they aren’t any less legible than colour-printed ones. At this point you’re taking only aesthetics; this has nothing to do with useability.
Colour printing is like 10 times more expensive than grayscale in most places, just for your information.

NISEI luckily stands for inclusivity and accessibility. Requiring colour of all things would have nothing to do with that.

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I’m totally happy if my opponent uses grey proxies, as it means I’m playing him instead of not playing him and it lowers the accessibility of the game which is important in it’s current state. It’s important that they are of decent quality. And currently everyone playing has most of the cards, so the proxy guy is very likely a newbie.
What you are saying is very similar as opponents:

  • not using click tracker
  • not having a clear board state

And at the end Nisei need to make rules and they don’t make everyone happy as it was with FFG, so please consider this. I don’t like the Core 2019, but I accept it, as we need people making the rules and they don’t make the rules as I would!

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