This thread is mostly for people involved in the SOCR8 tournament.
I’d like to solicit thoughts on Hired Help, particularly whether you would like to see an intervention regarding banning or restricting the card Hired Help, or if you would especially NOT like to see such an intervention (you are excited or interested in keeping Hired Help untouched). We are talking about this in a few places, here, the tournament slack channel, and also I’m happy to hear thoughts via direct messages and such.
Here’s the plan for sure:
Hired Help will be untouched for the rest of round 1 and round 2. Let’s talk about it during that time, and if we can reach a good consensus of what to do, we’ll implement that plan for round 3.
Related: when we started this tournament I told people that we wouldn’t be making MWL changes after the tournament started, so I apologize to people who made decisions on ID and big box selection based on that information. As a remedy to this (and also to help out people who have deep regrets about their ID or big box choices, if you want to switch IDs or big boxes between either round 1 and round 2, or between round 2 and round 3, just let me know and we can make that happen. That offer is on the table regardless of what we do with Hired Help.
Personally I enjoy having it in the format. While it is a powerful card I don’t feel like it is too big of a problem and I really enjoy the challenge when playing against it (Even from T1).
I’m not going to shed any tears if they are removed, but it might be nice to have one tournament where they get a chance to shine.
I agree with a ban - I didn’t think that including Hired Help was a good idea from the start - it’s a pretty NPE card that makes the running experience quite miserable.
That’s a fair point and a concern. I’ll certainly do everything I can to let people know about what is happening.
If someone has an illegal deck because they didn’t get the memo I would hope for their opponent to be understanding, and I would remind people that this is not a premier level event. I would suggest some combination of:
Restarting the game if appropriate (not much has happened or been revealed)
Playing as if the card is blank if appropriate
If both players fail to notice that Hired Help is a banned card during the course of the game, just going with whatever result was reached during the game.
That’ll certainly help, but there’s still an okay chance that someone misses it.
Speaking of “it”:
I’ve reached a decision: Starting Round 3, Hired Help is banned
I appreciate everyone who chimed in to help me make the decision. My chief priority was making a decision in line with what people wanted for this tournament, and I could not have done it without hearing from people.
While I don’t think we reached unanimity of opinion in the sense that we had people who wanted the card banned and people who were fine with it remaining legal, what I did not hear was people telling me that their excitement with the card pool would go down significantly with the card banned. In other words, while quite a few people were fine with the card remaining, it didn’t seem to have any defenders.
That said, I’m sure some of you were more excited about the card than others (I know I personally, as a player, I could care less about runners being able to run and I just want corps to crush them) so if you are less excited about this change, you have my sympathy.
A reminder, that anyone who wants to change their ID and/or big box between round 2 and 3 (for any reason) is welcome to. Just send me a message.
