Online Gaming

Netrunner General
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From another thread I consumed the following information:
“in December there were 56527 games played on Jinteki and 3884 on OCTGN”

This, if accurate was very interesting to me. I made the switch some time ago and having a bespoke tool for Netrunner has clear advantages (in my eyes) to a more generic card game emulator with a Netrunner module. I enjoyed OCTGN and appreciated all the work that went into it, but it was a bit of an investment in time.

Arguably a challenge with Jinteki is the low barrier to entry - as much as this is an enabler for many people to game online, it also means the quality of games can be more… variable.

Looking at various Facebook groups it seems some people are very keen on online games, to the extent of not buying any cards from FFG, which seems a bit… rubbish? They also have lots of opinions about a game they don’t buy, which is a but odd, but everyone is entitled to an opinion no matter how wrong they are. :wink:

This is just one facet of online gaming though - one part of myriad gamers who come online to play Netrunner. Would it be useful to have a set of categories or virtual “rooms” or some other streaming? We seem to diverse in our wants and needs, just having one big pool of Netrunners seems like setting ourselves up for finding a needle in a haystack.

At simplest terms there are folk looking for a fun game and those trying to be competitive. Trolls who want a reaction and people who come online more for a chat than anything else. People wanting to test a new deck in the current meta and those who want to see if a 90 card deck is the way forward. Sometimes I want to just try out a Tier 2 deck and have some fun and others I’m doing last minute stress testing of tournament deck.

I see a lot of frustration online and have experienced it myself (and probably been the cause of a lot). Would streaming different game types by a step forward in getting everyone the game experience they wanted? What would those groupings look like?

e.g.
Newer players
Competitive decks
MWL compliant
Fast play
Lolz

I’ve no idea what shape a categorised play area would look like ultimately, but it feels like we could do with being a bit more sensible on the approach to games we take.

I think of necessity there should be a central pool people can jump into, but subcategories my work - if there’s enough volume of players?

Currently we rely on messages in the titles of games, but we all know how often they’re read I think…

Any thoughts?

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Completely unrelated, but I actually read this as ‘Faust play’ at first.

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  1. There should be a Stimhack subforum only for online Netrunner.

  2. Making groups on Jinteki would make the online gaming a lot better. New players, casual games, advanced games (including deck testing and restricted games, such as no Nexus Kate or only for Noise etc.) and SHL.

Personally I don’t have much problems with casual players, as I play SHL mostly.

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Reading game titles on Jinteki is hard (especially when some else takes the slot whilst you’re still reading them).

What I’d like to see from the Jinteki.net devs:

  1. Option to tag games when you create them (from a list of tags like #beginner, #league, #NoMWL etc)
  2. Visual difference in the game box based on tag (colour/badges/icons) that is really close to the join game option)
  3. User account settings to show/hide different tags (if they’re hidden then you can still see the game box but it’s darkened and trying to join them fails with a message to change your tag settigns)
  4. Maybe some automatic tagging like the first game an account makes has a #NewToJinteki tag.

I think segregating the games into differing rooms isn’t a good idea as it’ll make things seem emptier than they actually are, as well as obscure the other sorts of games going on.

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Yes, part of it by design. OCTGN and my implementation of it did try to stay within the soft-guidelines set by FFG for online gaming (and OCTGN made it a bit more tricky to install “non-official” games to avoid legal troubles). As much as I’m sad to see most people have changed, it’s totally understandable given the difference in manpower between the two implementations :smiley:

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A form of this feature was actually proposed several months ago. I am strongly in favor, so the more voices heard in support of it, the better.

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That option is on by default post-MWL

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i guess similar effect would be to pair by elo. just single switch: ‘pair by elo’ and then u cant join games if rank is too high or too low. every descriptive way of doing that will fail, due to a lot of people do not read game titles at all.

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Dream would be like video game lobbies where the game tries to pair you with someone close to your elo.
Just request a ranked game as corp/runner/any.

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There’s a difference?

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Dividing the players of a platform with not that large of a playerbase would harm it for various reasons. Numerous reasons actually.

Although I understand your arguments regarding online gaming and the problems that ease of access is bringing to a previously more “deluxe” space for the more accustomed players, you have to also take into account that judging as a person who is in that position may also seem wrong.

Looking down upon the 90 cards player isn’t the way to go. I will agree with you, some people do believe that and you end up wasting your time beating them, making a very good example for them as to why what they made is not good, but at the same time not honing your skills in any way since you didn’t have an adequate (for your skills) challenge.

If we divide it into rooms though, best case would be that everyone will want to be in the “cool group” or the people that actually need to test things against actually good decks will not have a place to go to do that.

Unfortunately, the best you can do in this case (in my opinion), is write “tier 1 decks only” and look like an asshole, “uninviting” anyone else but the players that will only play a competitive deck against you.

There are many problems with online gaming and the ease of access causing an influx of people with low (or messed up) standards. I would suggest you don’t dig further into it, it’s a sad topic.

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The brute-force solution, which I’ve mentioned previously, is to set up your own clone of Jinteki.net (using the freely-available source code). This way, you only play with people you tell about it.

This is kind of a “nuclear option”, though, since it completely eliminates contact between, e.g. the Stimhack League and the unwashed masses of JNet, which probably is not desirable. The current wild-west approach honestly seems pretty decent, since it gets Stimhack’s name out there, allows random n00bs the dubious pleasure of a @anon50033301 pub-stomping, and we Stimhackers all still seem to manage to schedule games with one another, randos joining lobby notwithstanding.

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I hear where you’re coming from on the size of the pool - arguably there aren’t enough games going off for it to be worth splitting up into smaller streams.

You seem to be taking a very lopsided view here though that there’s just two groups - an “us and them” approach and that people with be in one or the other. Which isn’t the case.

I like fun games as much as the next person, but also sometimes like more competitive ones. Of course, what people consider fun varies. If we take the 90-card-deck guy, my experience is jumping on jnet for a “quick” game turning into over an hour of grind trying to find those lost little agendas in the massive deck. Neither of could find them. That’s not my idea of fun. Maybe the other person enjoyed it a lot more? What might have made the experience better was if there was a Room for “anything goes” - and if you’re not interested in such things then you go for a SHL game or whatever else you want. It’s about getting people the sort of experience they’re after (as much as that’s even possible).

I disagree there will be a cool group - SHL could be seen that way by some - or elitist - or a mysterious cabal. I certainly had no idea what the hell it was when I first started trying to find virtual games, it’s only after stumbling upon this forum some time late it became apparent.

If folk are looking for competitive games though, that should have it’s own area. If people what casual, same, etc. I have a feeling that if there was a Jank area, it’d see loads of action as people never tire of trying our crazy shizzle.

It’s all #firstworldproblems, but it seems the current state of affairs is people often end up getting at crossed purposes and ditching games or feeling social obligation to finish a game they have no interest in - which could possibly be avoided.

The size of the player pool may restrict this of course.

If someone wants to test Teir 1 decks, I don’t think they’re an asshole for asking for that. Similarly is someone wants to specify Janky McJank decks or Core Set Only or anything else, that’s not a problem. It’s just helping them get the type of experience they’re interested in.

We’re all doing this for fun. Accept for Team Turing. They’re in it for the cold, hard cash.

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Cmon…you read the same Stimhack Slack that I do–hasn’t this been demonstrated to be very desirable? :neutral_face:

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Is there a minimum password character requirement? Why not just have all SHL games be private with a password of SHL? Yes, a public password won’t keep out everyone, but I feel like erecting the tiniest barrier to entry will keep out 99% of people who probably just clicked on the first available game.

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As the entire source of Jinteki is available, couldn’t those of us who are more competitive build and host our own copies for invite-only matches arranged here/Reddit/Facebook?

Surely the bandwidth of hosting a match or three at a time isn’t going to bring most home servers to their knees, right?

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Well, yes, people on Stimslack certainly desire it. :stuck_out_tongue:

But, you know, 2 of the top 4 from the Jnet league aren’t on Stimslack, and @Sumodo I’ve seen, like, once on the forums. It’s possible that one or both of them found their way into the league just by seeing it in game titles on JNet. And this is the top 4, where you’d expect Stimhack regulars to be overrepresented, if anything. The visibility Stimhack gets from forcing people to play on public JNet is probably a good thing for the community as a whole, all the pissing and moaning notwithstanding.

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In Japan, they have built a jinteki.net clone that is solely in Japanese

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Agreed. I didn’t want to sound like I was coming from a point of view that only sees it as something impossible. It would most certainly help all kinds of players if done correctly.

What I am most concerned about is generally any kind of division. You are indeed not enjoying yourself the same way some other person does, but tier 1 decks don’t really exist when you go into testing. They do for the opposition, but you can’t know if your deck is tier 1 until you try it out against certain archetypes and certain good players. So you are basically prohibiting those people of ever getting that done. Because, if there was a “jank” corner as you said, it would be filled with jank vs jank. It’s like a bunch of lab mice thrown to fight each other in a shadowy corner of a laboratory while the scientists are working in the other corner on something that will make them rich and famous.

Maybe I exaggerated a little bit there with my example.

Nonetheless, I would be very interested in seeing something like this initiative and then see how it plays out.

I am more of the guy that expects some kind of reward as a motive too though, and generally video games rely on those a lot. A game has no replayability at all sometimes if it’s not offering something to the player that keeps returning. The promise of getting better at the game isn’t always enough. That is why I really want FFG to do an official Netrunner software thing. It could add all kinds of weird reward shenanigans in it that wouldn’t mean anything in the real world but still’d be fun to have to show off when you play online.

That of course is a much longer conversation, since as you said, it really scares me how a lot of people don’t even bother buying the physical game and just go with the online counterpart. I find it scary and sad since I don’t to lose the face-to-face experience. As much as I love games, if that is gone, we might as well just wear freakin Virtual Reality goggles all day and pretend to be doing something less time-consuming than getting out of our rooms.

Sorry, bit too much there again. It’s just scary either way. I honestly don’t really like Jinteki.net all that much for those reasons either.

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Wow, do you have a link?

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