Online Play, Stimhack league, Jinteki.net, and more

Longtime reader, not much of a contributor on here. A bit of a barnacle I suppose. Thank you all for the contributions you’ve made and the discussions around this game and specific cards.

I’m posting because I’ve been playing on OCTGN for about a year or so, (ever since most of my playgroup sort of decided they were out on Netrunner going forward) but have switched over to Jinteki.net as it’s just been harder and harder to get games on OCTGN and it seemed like there was a migration. Since playing games on Jinteki, I have found the competition to be significantly lower (I’m not a world beater or anything, I don’t mean to suggest that), and probably more frustrating, are how many quits and disconnects I get:

“personX accessed cerebral overwriter.
personX has left the game.”

“personY lost a psi game
“this is stupid”
personY has left the game.”

My question is this: how are you all, on here, dealing with that? I’m assuming I am not alone in feeling like the level of play of a random person on Jinteki.net is lower than where I’m at, or is not as fun, and have experienced more quits, disconnects, and unfinished games on there than they would like? Correct me if I’m wrong.

I know there is a stimhack league that starts in January, though I’m hoping to avoid commitment. Is there a tag to add to games to signify “decent player”? The “advanced” tag doesn’t seem to work for me (can you be advanced and install SOT with 2 tags from your last siphon, and then get pissed when I trash it the next turn?). I don’t mean to vent - I’m trying to see if there is a network of higher level online players to tap into here. Any help would be greatly appreciated. And my apologies if this thread already exists - all I really found were stimhack leage threads. Maybe I’m missing something.

Thanks in advance.

theParty

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This is one of the results of a lower barrier to entry. Also, you may notice that people don’t read game titles, even if they’re in all caps PRIVATE.

Maybe now is a time to try out that rankade thing? Create games titled [Rankade] so people know what to look for, use the ghost user function for when you’re playing randos? It’s a thought, anyhow…

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AFAIK it’s on the Dev’s radar to implement lobby passwords or some such filtering mechanism; I would imagine though as the whole thing is a labor of love that meta development must take a backseat to getting gameplay implemented. It crtainly would help though even to just have that small barrier to entry where people have to actually read you game title “password SHL” and type it in…

the jinteki SHL is running right now I think? maybe the first one already ended, I haven’t been keeping up, but for a while there it was improving my quality-of-game pretty well.

Part of it is that it’s just so easy to get games, people will just quit whenever and start over in seconds. It’s frustrating to have people ragequit, but I honestly prefer dealing with the occasional idiot to the tedium of opening, finding, and then getting into an OCTGN game…

i suggested blacklist feature (block unwanted usernames to join your games). hope it will be implemented, altho im losing my hope :frowning:

Maybe then I can block you and start winning some games! :wink:

To be fair, the same was true on OCTGN in the early days

But I fully agree if you want a competitve experience without too much hassle, just go to OCTGN and put [adv] or something in you game name. Doing those things on Jinteki just doesn’t work

Alternatively, go on the slack channel and find someone who wants a game.

Sadly, at the moment, playing randoms on Jinteki.net isn’t the most rewarding experience.

I’m on Slack;)

It doesn’t even come close the the OCTGN experience anyway (don’t take my word on it. havn’t been there since the update to .NET 4.0)

My Jinteki.net quality filter is joining games with folks that have gravatar pictures on their profile. Dumb, sure, but it helps. I get relatively few rage-quitters though. In general, I do the above when I feel like I can’t do another training / “you should try this” session. If you are talkative you get a surprising number of those (many folks do want to learn).

I do need to suck it up and join the SHL though. I am seeing games with the tag pretty regularly.

Do you mean avoiding the default gravatars?

Yeah. In my experience, that extra step - filter, if you will - seems to improve the quality of game quite a bit. (He says, without a SH profile picture.) It’s why I finally sucked it up and did it one day.

Well, then, how does one set one’s avatar picture on Jinteki.net? There weren’t any options under my username other than “Log Out.”

That makes sense, it’s almost like an artificially higher barrier to entry. I was asking because your original post said the opposite :wink:

Hah. Yeah, it does. Need lunch…

@Brodie They explain how in the about section I think. You need to match your Jinteki.net name with a gravatar name, if I remember correctly. Then it’ll load automatically (give it a few minutes).

https://en.gravatar.com/

Make an account it gets linked automatically, same email

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I should probably concede after hitting cerebral overwriter more often. I stand more to learn from the games that haven’t gone that far south yet.

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I think it’s more people play vs PE and just run everything that is mushined first time every time. Oh cerebral? GG wp, next game

Those people learn nothing and do not give any information for the player playing the corp

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At the same time, I run into a ludicrous number of those decks on jinteki.net, so sometimes when you see yet another one you just think, “Okay, fine, I’ll run it just to get this over with.” I also had a stage where I played w/3 drive-bys just so I could consistently mulligan for one, shoot their first #)()#$ mooshed, then SOT / DB every. Single. One.

/rant

I’ve never played on OCTGN (because Mac OS X, also the usability sucks) but had the same problems with competitiveness on Jinteki.net. I think SHL is the answer, or joining games with usernames you recognize.

Also, when I do play a new player on jnet, I’ve found they respond well to advice and niceties. If someone isn’t playing well & hits a 3x Overwriter then ragequits, do you really feel you missed out on learning something from the rest of the match? The lower barrier to entry is great, it just means advanced players either have to exercise more patience or more deliberation in selecting their matches. It’s better to have a system that asks experienced people put in effort than one that drives off newcomers, IMO.

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