The ruling was about using str-pump even when there’s no ICE to break. It gets even weirder because while you can do that, you cannot pay to break a non-existent sub. So, if all you have is a Darwin, for instance, you’re hosed.
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I don’t think that’s that weird (suppose they were to print a paid ability that cares about the strength of an icebreaker…), but I am still interested in being linked to the ruling.
The FAQ, page 12:
Can I spend credits to boost the strength of an icebreaker, or break a subroutine on a piece of ice, if I am about to encounter a Tollbooth during step 2.3 of a run?
You cannot break subroutines outside of an encounter with a piece of ice, but you can boost the strength of an icebreaker.
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Maybe not weird, but most definitely counter-intuitive. Ask a new player when he’s expecting to be able to use an icebreaker, and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts he says “when I need to break ICE”.
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I understand the critic about live feed and commentators were quite lost sometime. Of course it would be cool to have players commenting, better coverage etc. But comparing to last year I think this was huge improvement and was done great overall. It was very exciting to follow the matches and I feel the coverage will be better next year. I was just missing to see the brackets (commentators don’t have to read the confusing results, you can just show the bracket during downtime). TheFallGuys did a better job with Canadian nationals.
It’s the overall too busy and too many games Worlds in “middle of nowhere” I am not too excited about. it still feels a bit too much like a big local tournament.
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I bet that most newbies will use deus x vs snare without hesitation. 
Speaking of prize support, not related to worlds in particular, but just in case FFG is listening here… I would love to see GNK promos of more of the 1-of cards from the core set. Especially sansan and desperado. (But you can skip zaibatsu loyalty.)
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TIME. Elimination rounds should either be longer or not be timed in my opinion. Hey…& if they are, give the people notice of how much time they have left rather than suddenly walking up to them saying “this is their last turn”.
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That was some horseshite. T16 of Worlds, and not a clock in sight.
Another Slop I forgot to add to my report.
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Yeah, but at least there were score keepers with dry erase board keeping track of agenda points.
You know, in case there was any confusion
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Yeah, thank goodness that 20th century tech was involved.
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Having read @mediohxcore’s report and watched various of the videos I’ve a few thoughts. Most of these come from my L5R experience. I’ve only been to one meatspace Netrunner tournament and real life means it’s unlikely I’ll get to many more.
This is going to be a bit long, so if you want to save yourself time my suggestions come down to: per player time limits, fairer cuts, scrap double-elim and a focus on incentives by both FFG and organisers.
First up, time limits. Honestly, there’s only ever been one fair solution to this problem and that’s chess clocks with a time limit that applies to players individually. And it would work much better in Netrunner, where turns are still fairly self-contained, than in a game like Magic or L5R where interrupts are a regular fact of life. Five years ago, the expense of chess clocks might have been an excuse not to do this. These days, when pretty much everyone owns a tablet or a smartphone or a laptop? There’s no reason not to do it for a tournament above store championship level.
Secondly, cut-offs. I think everyone agrees that cut to top 16 out of over 250 players is insane. Either limit the numbers on the first day through a qualification system or have enough time to run a bigger cut.
Thirdly, double elimination. I’ve never played in it, but it seems bad. Corp and Runner will never be totally balanced. That’s totally fine if you have a tournament system that respects this. Chess doesn’t suffer from white and black being un-even. But if, as I understand it, double elim allows you to play much more of one side than the other, which seems highly unfair. Straight knock-out or split into poules followed by semis and a final seems fairer.
Fourthly, rewards. AEG’s core prize support was notoriously lousy given L5R’s popularity and it was still tonnes better than Netrunner’s. A lot of that came from tournament organisers being amazing people and sorting it themselves. And those organisers were rewarded with much higher turn-outs and with players willing to pay higher entry fees to cover the costs.
The best organisers also paid experienced people’s expenses to come and judge and gave them a little something at the end. Switching analogies to fencing, where impartial, qualified referees are something you just don’t see outside the finals of a major competition (in the UK at least) because there is no incentive at all to do it. And that puts players off hugely, because why go if you can just end up going out because of a random rules dispute that gets called wrong? But if you get good judges it adds a degree of professionalism that makes everything run much smoother.
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Priority actually passes back and forth a lot in this game, chess clocks would be pretty unreasonable Imo.
Also black and white do have issues at the top level of chess. Despite the game being symmetrical, white gets to move first.
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Chess, like Netrunner, is ~55-45% balanced.
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On reflection, I guess I was thinking of it too much from the perspective of the corp player more than the runner. There’s relatively little the runner does on the corp’s turn, and it’s the corp’s turn that seems to have been generating the debate. On the runner’s turn yeah, you’re right. You’d be creating an incentive for the corp to take decisions like rezing ICE slowly. In theory you could go back and forward but it would could become a pain for both players.
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@aandries and I are thoroughly convinced this is untrue. In the next month or so, we were planning on filming some games with a chess clock, to show that it’s both feasible and a good idea.
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Chess clocks have two big problems, especially with the current elimination format.
- The game is not symmetrical. Watch fast players play against RP or PE and they will slow down dramatically as they try and choose between what many times seems like only bad lines of play. On the other side of the table a deck like RP has a pretty linear strategy and can play pretty quickly towards it.
- Players at all levels seem to have difficulty tracking game state, a chess clock is one more thing to slow them down, and mess them up.
I don’t know what the solution is honestly, but I don’t think it’s Chess clocks. Maybe it’s moving away from double elim? There are balance problems, cut-off problems, and timing problems all relating to the double elim format.
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The numbers are going to vary for netrunner but let’s stipulate some approximate balance along those lines at any point in time. Chess doesn’t have single-game elimination rounds in tournaments precisely because of this imbalance :).
Chess clocks create all kinds of pressures that might not be wanted or be discouraging to newer players. I’d like to hear more, though.
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Chess clocks would be pretty much impossible in a game that passes priority so many times. The way in which a chess clock would slog down the process by making ubiquitous shortcuts impossible would make it so uneconomical that you might as well just make each round 50% longer, which would almost eliminate the time problem entirely. Obviously, we don’t want to sit around all day, but I think the only real solution is to increase the time limit, a little bit for swiss rounds, (I think 70 min would be fine), and more for elimination rounds (45 min). Despite the fact that elimination rounds are only one game, they tend to go longer for a few reasons: (1) the players are usually at a high skill level and nearly evenly matched, (2) there is only one game, so there is no chance of a fast second game giving you “banked” time for the current game, and (3) when you’re close to winning the tournament, you want to be more deliberate and calculated in your play.
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While I think I could play with a chess clock (played chess for many years), I expect a lot of players not to.
Also I have some concern about personal time in general since it’s often the runner that uses up alot of the time in a given round (I know there might be some exceptions but…).
On the other hand banning The Future Perfect would probably go a long way if you want to decrease the amount of games going to time.