So I am really trying to have a fun time with the Stimhack League, but I feel that it is too unbalanced. The only people that I have been able to play so far have been in the top 25 and way out of my league. I have yet to see someone with a reasonable rank up there. I hope that something changes for next time to accommodate for the lower tier players, because we just get mowed over.
To be fair, my understanding is that it is a league speficially aimed at being a highly competitve group. So to me part of the appeal of such a group is the oppotunity to play with players that are better than myself and hopefully learn and grow as a player.
That said I have yet to play in SHL as I do my online play over on Jinteki. Looking forward to when we have a jSHL 
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Fair? We donât like being fair =P
Getting mowed over is how you learn how to not get mowed over! Nothingâs better for me than playing a player who is way better. Thatâs how you learn the good stuff =)
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A bit of it probably has to do with the fact that the top 25 or so probably have more games played combined than the bottom 100. They just happen to be the ones online playing all the time so you run into them more often.
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I would challenge that statâŚ
I always believed that losing helps, unless you are getting mowed over again and again. I have only played one match where I walked away wiser because we were somewhat in the rank range.
Youâve played four opponents, including the reigning world champion and another former national champion (I believe).
Play more and youâll notice that not that many players are in the top 25 or soâŚ
I have to say Iâm sort of amazed that youâd complain that you couldnât learn anything from playing @mediohxcore - did you ask for any tips in the chat?
Anyway, tl;dr - keep playing, because your small sample had good opponents (which is what most of us are seeking in the leagueâŚ)
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I saw your game against @mediohxcore on his stream! The Leela game, there wasnât a lot you could do, I guess. He had the kill very quickly, even though you managed to get Plascrete down turn 1. That happens.
The HB game was quite good. I donât know your deck composition, but one thing you could do is go faster against Anarch the next time. Reg-Ass Anarchs have an insane late game and you donât want to rely on Caprice to score 100% of your points. Try rushing some earlier on, instead of building a tower of ICE over RnD, when there hasnât been a run on it yet.
Keep practicing! 
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Hello!
The Stimhack league is a great place to learn and improve, vs either high skill opponent, or like minded opponents looking to improve like yourself⌠or both!
While there are some killers in the league, anyone can beat anyone in 1 game. Even if your games dont go well as far as a win result, theres much more look to look to. Donât be scared, as losses are some of the easiest way to learn more⌠especially if you talk to your opponents post game to discuss.
Dont get discouraged, and use the tool being offered to improve you game. You can do it :3
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Just go in with the mindset that youâll lose every game. I did this when I first started playing ANR. Iâm not assuming you are a beginner, but I think itâs still a good mindset. Until you have several hundreds of games under your belt, ANR is mostly about getting games in. Probably the biggest obstacle in introducing new players to ANR is the fact that you will likely lose scores upon scores of games until you start to have a chance (unless you are playing against another beginner).
Personally I completely disagree with this statement. Sure, RNG can make it difficult for even a veteran to win, but I think the likelihood of beginners/those unfamiliar with the card pool beating veterans is much lower in this game than a game like MTG, for example. Once you understand the basic rules of MTG, you can pick up a T1 deck and definitely beat plenty of people. The same doesnât hold with ANR.
All Iâm trying to say is, you gotta lose a bunch before you win. Thatâs just how this game works. If SHL gets discouraging, take a break and play some normals. You may still lose, but perhaps they wonât be quite as one-sided. The standard level of play on OCTGN tends to be reasonable, because players like the game enough to tackle the interface of OCTGN just to be able to play it from a remote location. That said, some would argue itâs better to throw yourself against the best right out of the gates. Only you can say whether this is true for your own personality or not.
Another thing you can do is make lobbies with the title âlf advancedâ , that way you may get tier 2 players instead of the many tier 1 players that frequent SH and SHL.
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I beat nordrunner in the second game of netrunner I ever played. This was stimhack league 1. anyone can beat anyone Admittedly I had hearthstone/magic experience prior but still anyone can beat anyone with the right accesses (actually that game was won off the back of Siphon into shutdown into score on the remote)
I wouldnât, and your (and mine, from back in the day before jinteki.net. jSHL!) own experience bears it out. Competitive level netrunner (which the SHL is) has a very steep learning curve, and those who play the most tend to be the best. Itâs not a big enough community to have guaranteed low-level matches available all the time (or even very often).
Itâs good to learn from losing to really good players, but if you really feel utterly bowled over, or are leaving every game with absolutely no idea of what you did wrong, you might just still be on that learning curve; Iâd want to spend some more time with rando pickup games or some other more casual format until you have a better feel for the game and can start picking up on how people are taking you apart 
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I just ran the numbers, the bottom 100 (not including those who havenât played a game) have played more games than the top 25.
Now, if we are talking overall, that is a different question all together.
That being said, the league falls into a simple flaw when it comes to the ranking system. It uses a modified chess ranking calculation that works because it has a sufficient player base to diversify the standings. Everything normalizes after 20 games or so revealing what your rank should be, but this system for the netrunner league canât do that. Instead, the numbers are continually crunched at a low player count which skews the results.
Now, I should point out that I am not saying this because I think the league sucks. On the contrary, I think it is a great idea and I love that Stimhack continues to do great things for our community. But as the barrier of entry continues to get higher for new players, it will be up to communities like this one to help those who are new and need the extra boost. That means thinking about a system that would be more friendly to all levels of play. That also being said, I donât know the solution and I was hoping we could maybe discuss different ways to apply that.
Maybe we could segregate the league into different groups (like rabbits and turtles for running), where you can only play people in your same group level. At the beginning, everyone is in the same group (a group like, âFew to No Games Played,â until they do 3 or 4 matches) and then the ranking system starts to kick in. Also, having the ability to communicate with people in your league group to let them know when you can play and see when others are playing.
With that in mind, I see how difficult of a job Stimhack has for itself. Therefore, thanks for being awesome Stimhack. And may you continue to get better as time goes by.
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But isnât part of top 25 included in bottom 100? Even so, the number of games doesnât correlate very well with rating. I think itâs pretty clear if you order by # of games. Top 10 most games & ranks:
Rank Games
11 48
45 48
17 46
1 39
13 38
115 36
81 35
8 34
59 30
27 29
(apologies on formatting)
As for the segregation of players into different âskill groupsâ, thatâs not something most people want. I, like many others before in this thread, agree that itâs a good learning experience to play vs players a few tiers above you. Also, there arenât that many players total - finding games would be much harder and itâs hard enough as it is.
When I started playing online (SHL I), I got hammered almost every game. Ended up at rating 1448 at rank 222. But I did learn a lot from those games and Iâve been doing better in the later leagues. It seems that the number of participants and total number of games has been dropping from league to league, though. Not sure why that isâŚperhaps the novelty of it has worn off.
There arenât enough players anyway in my opinion and I often wait ten to fifteen minutes for a game. Why donât you pm some people around your elo and schedule some games?
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I need to mull over the details, but maybe I can do a lil community thing for lower end players to play and discuss, help them see the match a little cleaner. Like me vs new player, in a skype call, and we can talk through the game and help pan out the bad habits or troublesome decisions. Stream it for other lower end players to see, or chat in the chatroom.
Kinda make it a thing.
Would that be a cool idea to help someone like yourself @Redi_Spades improve? Or are you looking to learn in your own way?
I would much rather help lower end players become mid pack players than give you a âbunny slope bracketâ to play on by yourselves.
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I didnât include the top 25 in my quick calculations because that would be counter-productive. It just doesnât make sense to compare the same to data to one another.
I donât know the current solution to this problem. I know that I am a mid-tier player with 1000 games under my belt, but I canât get past anything from the upper-tier players. I am being beat out by those who have just lost 2 games and havenât played anything else because that is how the system rewards those who donât play games (but then again, there is no difference between 5th place and 109th place, because none of them are advancing to the finals).
Is there a way to make the system continually run? I mean, the ELO system is best used over years and years of gathering data. That would more normalize the data that we are getting in.
I understand that my idea about the differing brackets wasnât the best, but I hate stating that there is a problem without having some idea of the solution. I mainly want to see how we can take this league to the next level.