I’ve never had a good experience playing on Jinteki. Some of it was from a year or so ago, and perhaps those attempts with the interface are no longer relevant due to the improvements the site has gotten in the last year, but I still find that the interface really bugs me. (I still find OCTGN to be much better looking, the layout more intuitive, and, as most people point out, the reversibility is nice.) As such, I’ve never really noticed a difference in player ability between the platforms - every time I’ve played on it, it’s been with someone I know.
That said, given what I know of players in my meta, and what I know of which online interface they prefer, this observation does not surprise me. I surmise that a lot of players that don’t want to make much of an effort to learn an online interface are also players newer to the game, which means that their skill levels directly correspond to their experience and the effort they put in to getting better. The local players I know that play on OCTGN have simply been playing longer and didn’t use Jinteki because it wasn’t very good when they started playing online.
Seems like OCTGN might become a bit of a relic. Sucks, since the layout of Jinteki is so jarring to me (and so contrary to how I set up my rig/servers in real life) that I’m likely to just quit online Netrunner altogether before moving to Jinteki.
It is certainly one of the side effects of a lower barrier to entry @Zebadiah. No doubt.
In terms of what you’re saying @ijw473 and the Drive By - this is the crux of why I wanted to figure something out. To not have things degenerate. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but I think you get what I mean.
@GwiLo - I had a similar experience with Jinteki when I first tried it. I would suggest checking it out again, and committing to 10 games. Once I got over the hump of my OCTGN habits, I think it’s a step above. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but I think it’s better, quicker, more automated, and cleaner. Oh yeah, it doesn’t crash like OCGTN seemed prone to do for me on a Mac.
@higgs_bozo - can you explain what you mean a little more? I’m not sure I’m following you, and what that would be?
I also want to add to, @mtgred (I believe he is the prime mover on the jinteki.net site?) - it’s great. Really amazing job. I honestly can’t even imagine how much work something like that took, and grateful that you. So I just wanted to say thank you, and you’ve given a real gift to the community. Just wow.
OCTGN was a steep curve at first, and on a Mac, it was pretty annoying, but I certainly got used to it. After a week, I prefer Jinteki already.
This means that I could set up an identical web-site at a different URL (say hamstork.net) if I registered the domain name and paid for hosting.
These web-sites, though identical, would be completely separate (user-names, games etc would not carry over).
The imagined benefit is a better play experience (higher standard of competition and conduct, presumably less lag due to lower overall number of games) due to a more … exclusive player-base. The disadvantage would be fragmenting the community and deepening the competitive / casual divide. I think several league participants found out about out it by seeing it mentioned in game titles (possibly some of them now near the top of the leaderboard). Playing with gen-pop is inconvenient for us, try-hards that we are, but it does help keep the community growing and connected.
I dunno. What do you guys think? Good idea / bad idea?
This would be a fair amount of work, so I don’t want to just do it without first probing the community for interest.
Yeah, I do. Although sometimes the best way to make a change in a meta is hard counter it into the ground until it goes away. But then they go psychic field! The jank war of infinite iteration! Turtles all the way down! (Please note to those that MooshMurder - nothing wrong with it, when done right. But I really think that the constant Moosh.5(vanity).5(junebug/cerebralO) out the gate is high variance tediousness that can be easily played around… Okay I’ll stop.)
Also, to all the developers of Jinteki.net, I love it and you are awesome. These criticisms are not of your system.
As for a separate server for SH folks, all of the negatives you list I think would be real concerns. Fragmentation in particular - we aren’t that big of a community. I believe, at some point, there will be a way on Jinteki to mitigate the current issues (password games, different game lobbies, etc.). I think that there is a real value for the community in mixing experience levels, as annoying as it can be when you really just want to see if you’ve finally figured out a way to get Leela to beat Foodcoats consistently.
Don’t have anything to add re: the community, but I will just reverberate the sentiment that if your low opinion of jinteki is tech based, you probably need to check it out again. Huge leaps and bounds taken in U.I. improvement many times in the last 6 months or so.
Agreed 100%. Not that I know all of the improvements, but I certainly think it’s an impressive interface, and deals with very, very complicated card interactions very well automatically.
@higgs_bozo , My hunch is that isn’t the best solution. I think those concerns are real, mostly fragmenting community stuff. I’d be surprised if the work it would take to do that would not be substantially more than implementing a rating/ranking system, or even having a “competitive, casual, and learning” rooms would be in terms of time/energy.
Really, I have ZERO idea of how to implement something like that, so who knows.
If nothing else, I did play a good game against @ijw473 last night. Got a little lucky I think
I have recently been playing on JNET due to using a Chromebook. Many have probably seen my opinions on OCTGN v. JNET posted on Stimhack before, and they remain the same, even after playing with this current version of JNET. IMO all the problems remain of the JNET of 1 year ago. OCTGN remains the superior platform for tryhards and I will definitely be returning to it once I am able. That said, I am grateful towards @mtgred and all those involved with JNET for giving the community an alternative.
I don’t think the ANR community on OCTGN will ever disappear, either.
For the most part, I’m not sure whether the question is whether OCTGN is better (pretty certain it is), but whether it’s enough better to justify the extra faff involved with it. This will vary from person to person and computer to computer, of course.
I don’t think it’s a good idea–no need to further narrow a niche. It would also cause confusion and make it harder to find games anywhere. We’re already split between OCTGN and Jnet.
You’re right. Personally I think the ‘faff’ is exaggerated. If you are on Windows, you can have OCTGN and ANR installed with all the artwork in less than 10 minutes (I’ve done it a number of times on multiple computers). Learning the hotkeys takes a week, at most.
I mean, that if is probably a decent hurdle for a lot of people. I suspect that people who play netrunner are much more likely than most to be people who don’t use windows.
While I’ve encountered a lot of people who play Netrunner that do not use Windows, I’m not sure that that statement really applies to the majority of Netrunner players. To me, it’s like saying that techies are more likely to not use Windows than anyone else. While true, a rather large number use Windows - because that’s what gets the most development and support.
Also, most (but not all) Linux users I know also has either a Windows partition or a separate Windows machine. It tends to be those that use Apple products that stay away from Windows - and isn’t Apple’s appeal mostly towards creative, artsy types and really rich end users?
Eh. I guess I’m just one of those people that doesn’t consider rebooting to play Netrunner too much effort. If I’m playing Netrunner, I’m usually not doing too much else and don’t need anything else running, and the time it takes to reboot isn’t an issue when I consider how OCD I get when I see Jinteki’s backwards layout.
I don’t know how “young” Netrunner’s audience is. Certainly, not very many people past middle age play, but I’ve yet to see anyone play that wasn’t old enough to vote (most countries allow voting at 18 or so, right?). I’d argue that Magic’s audience is much younger and yet they haven’t ported their official online client outside of Windows. If they consider the profits of creating a multiplatform client so negligible, then it’s likely because the target audience isn’t particularly likely to own a Mac when compared to Windows - they’re probably significantly unlikely to own a Mac, actually. If that’s the case, then I doubt a less “young” group of people is more likely to own a Mac, assuming that Apple truly does largely appeal “to the young.”
I guess my point is that a lot of this guessing with regards to a Netrunner player’s likely operating system of choice is a bit too impossible.
That said, there are a number of people playing Netrunner that do not run Windows. It’s wonderful that Jinteki exists for them, since getting OCTGN in those cases is certainly a lot of faff. If they have any kind of Windows machine though, they have it for a reason. Booting up Windows would then be “faff” but usually not enough (just as it’s not enough to stop them from using the other programs on their Windows machine) to deter the normally non-Windows user from using OCTGN.
As an example - I would migrate to Windows from any other system if I have the ability to use Microsoft Office, just because the interface there is better than on other operating systems. The only thing I’ve found to come close is Google Docs.
I think we need a significantly large survey. One that will clearly have too much faff to be of any use, and yet it won’t be of any use if it should not have that faff.
