Spoilers are bad

Netrunner General
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does anyone know how many cards from o&c ffg spoiled on their own and how many was spoiled by unknown sources?

id love to know the ratio. why? for a few days now i have no joy wandering the forums and nrdb. people dont live in present, playing cards they have, but create virtual reality with spoiled cards that noone have. this is bad for at least a few reasons:

  • we dont give a chance for ffg to do proper marketing for us, we may even kinda ruin what they had prepared
  • time spent on forums/nrdb is not productive anymore as ideas formulated cannot be used on tournament this or next week
  • there is no discussions targeting current meta
  • people ask if they can play with proxy cards from o&c in real life

i feel like those who spoil cards not only violated nda and should be punished for that, but also ruined the game for plenty others due to reasons stated above. its like piracy or stealing. just plain bad.

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I think most of these complaints are silly, but I do agree that there is not enough conversation re: the current meta, and too much about the future cards.

Spoilers in general are good IMO, in the sense that they keep people excited about the game, and talking in general. I know that in Warhammer, Games Workshop completely stopped spoiling or leaking anything, and it is decidedly less interesting month to month, as we’re left entirely to speculate on new releases / army books / core rules.

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there is a huge difference between controlled spoiling from game designer and posting full spoiler by random beta tester.

and yea. i know that asking for making proxies is silly, but it happened :wink:

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The reason you’re not seeing much discussion of the current meta is that we just had a big event, and the next big event (SC season) is going to be played with the spoiled cards most likely. I think you’d be seeing a lot less discussion in general if we didn’t have spoilers since it be a lot harder to evaluate where the Meta might be going without those cards.

If you want to have a discussion about the current card pool because you want input before a tournament this weekend or something, start a topic. People will still be eager to help I’m sure.

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cant you just discuss what released this month, create strategies and try them next day? how this can be less interesting? it should be more interesting due to having real pieces to play with immediately.

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Agree 100%. Whenever there is a tournament coming up, I want to be practicing/playing with something as close to that card pool is possible. There have been times where I felt playing was a waste of time because of lack of spoilers/lack of release date info. I think there is some value to not having things spoiled, but as long as spoilers aren’t coming out really far ahead of time, I don’t think it takes away too much from the excitement. As far as concentration on various metagames, I would rather talk about future metagames and play the current ones.

Discussing the current metagame tends to be less interesting than playing in it. Most of the value in discussing the metagame lies in the way it helps you predict the future metagame anyway.

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I get the OP’s general frustration, though. A lot of times we future trip too hard on what will or will not be good later. I also wish less cards were spoiled so there were more surprises when we actually open up O&C

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It’s even worse for those of us who aren’t in the US. In Australia, Up and Over is only just starting to trickle into our local stores.

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In fairness, there are at least rumors that snow-jax might be a more or less official source. But then, there are rumors we might be getting it along with The Source later this month, so who knows.

I can kind of see the frustration with spoilers that’ve been out for a while (people getting too far ahead of themselves and forgetting the moment), but honestly I don’t think wanting to know all the cards in a given pack ahead of time is unreasonable. Some folks can’t get all the packs, and they should know in advance what they’re getting.

Maybe this is experience with Magic, though. They spoil things in drips and drabs, but by about a week or two out – which is approximately when snow-jax tries to drop spoilers – everything is up to be seen so that people can know what they want to be testing and jump right into things when the release hits.

Now, they do draft/limited as a major selling point, and that requires a deep knowledge of the whole pool, but still. If we had the whole of the SanSan cycle spoiled before The Valley hits I don’t think I’d mind overmuch (though the obvious playtester spoilers are still a serious no-go, I’d say).

That said, do wish there was a way to toggle/warn that on OCTGN. Roomie had a game against Chronos Protocol a couple weeks ago when testing a Leela deck, and it ate him alive because he wasn’t expecting to deal with it. It’s like playing the Collective (neat, and honestly looking less horribly busted by the day), it’s cool to see, but it’s not even out SOON.

EDIT: To clarify my above meaning a little more…

I am not opposed to getting SanSan and/or the next deluxe box (or whatever is done enough to not be tested further) spoilers if FFG releases them.

I am opposed to people actively breaking their NDA and making things worse for other playtesters, like the person offering/threatening to do that on Reddit was, because that’s just not right.

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I for one am one of the believer of the snow-jax leaks information on a schedule theory. If you look at C&C and H&P both got the IDs articles around the same time the next cycle was announced. This time we still got nothing, only snow-jax spoilers. Upstalk was delayed, everyone was complaining about no news, there comes snow-jx with all of Upstalk to get discussion and hype going. Coincidence? I don’t think so. But I like it. I like to open the pack and know which cards I’ll test in which decks. But that’s me :slight_smile:

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Honestly I play a what I consider a lot. Although I wonder what qualifies as a lot to the x people here. … but I would say. . well over 100 games a month.

I can’t get the feel for a data pack before another pack comes along. So thats not a complaint against spoilers… just either the speed of packs … or my speed learning =P

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The rumours are from a source who provided absolutely no proof of his authenticity.

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Spoilers are great!

Besides what’s been said about preparing for upcoming larger tournaments, the official FFG spoilers are in a way worse than what snow-jax releases since they are generally announced so early that we won’t see the cards for half a year or so. Also a lack of official spoilers close to release combined with no hard release dates makes tournament preparation kinda annoying at times. I feel FFG had dropped the ball on marketing, and am very thankful that there are unofficial spoilers to be found.

The low amount of cards released in a given timeframe (even a big box is only 55 cards) generally don’t shake the metagame that much, so the discussion on the current meta will always be somewhat limited during cycles (for example, it’s not like All That Remains altered decks much if at all). All the discussion about the worlds meta is still very much valid and will be so until O&C arrives.

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I do think things have gone kind of spoiler crazy. It might wreck the hype for some people and make opening a pack less exciting. The only real downside of having spoilers, especially ones really far out, is that by the time the cards arrive you might already be bored with them.

But honestly, I think people are starving for spoilers right now. Worlds just ended and on a competitive level people are kind of exhausted by the cardpool. Another thing is that the dominant competitive meta is something most people want to run away from as fast as possible (and have wanted to run away from for like, two cycles). Spoilers give people a light at the end of the tunnel.

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Has snow-jax been wrong before? She’s been spoiling cards on /tg/ for a long time now, and hasn’t provided misinformation once.

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I believe that there were a few small mistakes before, but nothing major, ie. The Rez cost of Eliza’s Toybox was spoiled as 2, but we know it as 4. I think there were a few small translation issues here and there, so the exact wording on the card text may have been off a little bit - but I don’t have any specific examples off the top of my head.

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I gotta say the spoilers for a lot of Lunar -> O&C -> SanSan have been so constant, along with all the draft cards, that I have had a hard time keeping up with what’s actually out and what’s coming out when. I put a (draft) copy Eden Fragment into one of my decks and almost brought it to a tournament because I didn’t realize the actual card wasn’t released yet because I had all the data packs enabled on netrunnerdb.

I’m not against spoilers as a rule but I do feel like it’s been a bit too much, a bit too far in advance lately. We have full O&C spoilers and we probably won’t see the set until after the new year. I sit down to build Anarch decks for December tournaments and get confused/frustrated that the current discourse isn’t around the existing card pool.

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Maybe the answer is we need a Category for “Current Meta”? That might currently be included in “Netrunner General”, but I think a discussion only on what’s going on currently in the Meta (released cards only) might be a nice thing.

Anyone else agree? @SneakySly?

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I’d say just post a topic about a deck or idea, request you limit to current cardpool (specify which packs since that is country-dependent) or “current meta” as John suggests.

No need to add too many categories. My two cents at least.

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It’s in human nature to get excited and talk about new stuff. I doubt there’s much we could do to control that and I wouldn’t really want to split discussion into two places simply because it’s not like the community is SO HUGE that each section wouldn’t be a bit too sparse.

I really enjoy the official spoilers. Today’s Hayley discussion was a lot of fun. It’s the full set spoilers 2+ months in advance that I see as disruptive.

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