humans naturally remember and lament over the bad beats and don’t net those off the lucky wins in our own mental accounting. its how we learn to avoid mistakes in future (by associating negative emotion with bad experiences). now in a card game, those bad beats will happen, just as a stock market trader will lose money as often as he will make money, all things being equal. its how you deal with it after that counts
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That’s my strategy! Some games I just wait all game, install two RDIs, hit R&D twice, and pull out all the agendas the turn before the corp wins!
i would say that there is some luck. what cards you draw and when based on the factor of shuffling your deck and the probability of drawing a particular card in your opening hand, etc.
also, when people do the math, you need 17 accesses to win (or whatever it is)
but some can win on, say, 3 accesses, or after 20 or more, still haven’t won.
it all boils down to not all games are the same, not all decks are the same, and some people don’t understand that 3 cards in hand when you are accessing 2 means there’s a VERY high chance you’ll access the winning agenda
also, welcome to stimhack!
This hits a bit close to home for me; I won a game in a store champ when my opponent was about to hit 5 points by running R&D with 1 RDI, stealing 4 points, installing a second RDI, and running again to hit another 4 points right off the top (making the install of the second RDI meaningless).
My opponent was surprised and a bit disappointed but took it in stride.
I’d say when I played seriously about 80% of my NEH wins were near pure luck.
Right now I have a decent record with HB Eff com Fast advance, and those wins are Definitely mostly luck based.
Similarly steven wooleys win here was due to variance Finals, Game 2 | Netrunner | ANRPC - HAC Division | Mason Hans - Steven Wooley - YouTube
Access luck plays a major factor, though any other form of luck doesn’t really.
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Any game where luck isn’t a factor ends up boring. Nash Equilibrium is barely fun, in poker it results in a bunch of people just guessing if other people are full of shit lol.
An element of randomness is what makes the game interesting. The thing about luck is that it’s short sighted. When you play poker you might lose $100’s and still be objectively happy because you got your cash into the middle in a dominating position, but the cards fell wrong. You know that if that same spot came up 100 times, you’d do exactly the same time, because you’re playing 1 life long session, not 1 individual session. Thats what it means to be a competitive game player.
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Agreed. And this is what I find baffling about the saltiness I’ve been encountering lately. It seems like j.net has had a serious uptick in sore losers over the last month or two. I play on j.net exclusively for “practice,” so this whole mindset is utterly alien to me: there is literally nothing at stake here apart from learning how to play better (and losing is at least as useful in that regard as winning).
I was at a store champs a couple of months ago where one of the favored players took a round 1 loss to a turn 2 or 3 takeover/punitive play. In that scenario, I would have a little more empathy for being upset about the bad beat*, because that one nut draw from your opponent means you’re playing at a disadvantage for the next 4-6 hours of swiss. In a j.net game, it’s just “gg” and back to the lobby – if you’re more emotionally mature than a 12 year old, you should be able to handle that without complaint.
*Note: The player in question didn’t appear (outwardly) salty at all, because he is an affable, mature human being. I’m just saying I would get it if he were.
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I always try to check for my own mistakes instead of blaming about luck, at least in a second thought. This happened in a recent SC:
Playing against Adam, I play fastro. He’s on 4 points, I score an astro to be on 6, so next turn I win. I have a Tollbooth in RD, so feel pretty secured. He goes all in, goes to RD with RDI installed, he got exactly the 3 credits to pass Tollbooth (he was playing Endless Hunger), see 2 cards… 2 agendas, and win.
You can blame luck there, of course. In fact, my opponent quickly said “I’m sorry about this”. The point is, instead of scoring the astro from my hand, I could have used the fast track to score anything else, knowing that my opponent will usually go to RD for the last chance to win. So, even that he got some luck, I could have played around it. So, my mistake.
I always tell this to my players around, check always your own mistakes, rather than blaming luck, because there’s no other way to improve.
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I complaint of Luck (and yeah is a big part of this game, when i Win, and when i lose, maybe because in my cultural enviroment is common for us to comment the game, and i think is part of the fun. I remember a lose in the national against a foreign Player. I lose 4 batty gold Psys in a row (and was the second game i start With 3 agendas in hand in a 8/54 Deck) and i comment that and i remember Player Take like i was disrespecting his playing.
It’s not some set in stone number of access, rather there’s a probability of winning after some number of access. After some number of access the probability is high enough that you would be unlucky to have not won. However that never takes into account the corps actions mucking with the content of R&D.
I had drawn out some graphs of this at one point for different agenda compositions and found that the low agenda GT set was actually a very bad composition to have. On the other end of the spectrum, compositions with 2-3 GFI’s were just better. Without GFI, 10 2-pointers was your best bet. Playing 7 3-pointers wasn’t so good. So not only are 5/3s harder to score, they make it easier for a runner to grab the win out of R&D. I had done all of this when D&D had just come out and was thinking at that point that GFI was going to be the strongest card in the set because of how much it can shift the curve of how many random access the runner needs and that’s generally been the case.
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It’s odd how Psi games go though. One time I literally had 5 Agendas in hand (the last 5 in the deck) and a Caprice on HQ. I won something like 9 or 10 psi games in a row before I lost 1. Sure enough, the other day, against the same guy, I didn’t win a single Psi game when playing 6-7 Cerebral Casts. No tags, no brain damage. 
My point is for something like Psi games it’s just a matter of fact that you win some and you lose some. Just like flipping a coin, over time it will approach the distribution you expect. But if you take a snippet (which 1 game is really just a very small fraction of the number of Psi games a player can theoretically play) it looks like a total shit. You can blame poor luck, but it’s not a fair blame.
If you are able to identify this kind of thing this early in your Netrunner career, you are going to be just fine. I’m two years in and still figuring out how to correctly identify what mistakes I make.
And I agree with other people, your opponent was frustrated, as we have all been before. It takes a lot of humility to admit you were outplayed or out-deck-built.
When I lose, I try to make a point to debrief with my opponent about what I could have done differently. This happens much better in real life than online. If you ever see me on JNet, I’m happy to play a game with you.
PS. Adam is rad.
Well you lose and then we can’t cry a little. What Will be the next Ban the complain about faust and Dlr?
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that was really my point. every time someone ‘does the math’ on what you need to do to win (x accesses in R&D, a 1 in x chance to find an agenda in HQ if x agendas and x cards…), it’s always in a vacuum and irrespective of any actual pragmatic game context. the numbers are good to have as a baseline reference, but if you rely on them too heavily and don’t see how the game drastically changes those probabilities, it’s not really luck anymore that’s causing a problem
I think the interesting thing with your example is that it was luck. The opponent did not choose to legwork because of what you said. He just played legwork because he could. Depending on the hand of that player, a more experienced pilot may not have legworked (though of course that depends on a lot of things).
So luck becomes something more, becomes variance, when the player or players play at a high enough level to make plays in accordance with the idea of variance, and go for as many accesses as possible in the most likely places for agendas to be.
That being said luck and variance exist in netrunner as they do in other card games. And that’s a good thing. This will also get you people being salty after losing to what they might, at the instant they lost, considered bad luck. And that’s also fine. I know I’ve been salty as hell after a loss…win on board, opponent goes for a single R&D accesses…24 cards left in R&D and only 1 agenda he can score because he can’t afford to steal the NAPD that is the other agenda in the deck…and he gets there. And I know in those situations I’ve reacted with salt, then left the game and thought about why I lost. Maybe the wraparound should have gone onto R&D instead of the scoring server. Maybe I did everything more or less right and you win some, you lose some.
But that’s just part of netrunner. When someone says their opponent’s are always lucky, it’s just Murphey’s law. You notice when your opponent is lucky/you are unlucky far more readily than luck was on your side, especially as runner, since information is hidden.
This is an article that just went up about X-Wing. A lot of the smaller details don’t apply to ANR, but both games have random chance. This is about the healthiest view you can have of RNG in a game, and is probably essential to anyone who wants to take this game seriously for any extended period of time. (You don’t have to know much about X-Wing, other than combat is dice-based with attackers rolling 1 die per attack stat and defenders rolling 1 die per agility stat.)
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While we’re posting articles this whole thread reminded me of this fantastic article by national treasure Matt Giles about Magic. (No gatherer knowledge necessary!)
http://gasmtg.com/act-like-a-baby-feel-like-a-man-theros-pre-release-edition/
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For me the main reasons to run big agendas are:
- Additional deck slots. You get 2-3 of them, which can be two more Battys or a Scorched Earth package. That’s huge and probably the biggest reason to run them.
- Agendas take less space on HQ. Scoring is needed to prevent agenda flood so if you take too long, HQ will be full of agendas. Running few of them lets you stall for longer and takes pressure off Jackson.
- Fewer scoring windows are needed to win. It’s much easier to score 2 agendas (Vanity+The Future Perfect) with Caprice/Batty than it is to score 3-4.
- Allows the Corp to close the game faster. In the above example the Corp will score in 4 turns and a facedown install. Scoring 3 agendas would take 6 turns. You can lose the game in those two turns, specially against Noise and the like.
For me the main drawbacks are:
- Reduced number of scored agendas to win: With Vanity you lose in 2 steals. With 5/3s, you lose in 3. “Leaks” and “random accesess” will lose you the game so you must either lock down R&D completely or lose.
- You require a remote, upgrades or a bigger bluff investment to score them. I think this is why Goverment Takeover doesn’t really work. If it were a Jinteki card, you could jam it in Genomics and score it. But scoring it in Weyland? Extremely difficult.
- Poor abilities: Most big agendas have weak abilities (Goverment Contracts) or don’t have any meaningful abilities at all (Vanity Project). If you could play Corporate Coup in Android: Netrunner this wouldn’t matter much, but you can’t.
- Lack of card choice creates poor spreads: Most “big agenda” spreads are not workable even if you could score them. Weyland can’t run big agendas without losing Public Support, Corporate Town and Archer so why not run Global Food instead?
TL;DR: Reprint Corporate Coup. Make 5/3s great again.
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I always thought Govt Contracts was one of the few 5/3s that didn’t have a weak post-score ability. In general I think they decided to give only Weyland good post-score 5/3s because Weyland didn’t have any traps to play Always Advance with them.
The thing is that post-score abilities are positive feedback so they’re easy to get wrong - if they’re too powerful then the game can be decided by a first turn paper wall, if they’re too weak then no one plays them. It’s easier to make strong 4/2s because they can be balanced around the corp scoring three of them before winning instead of two, so each individual one doesn’t need to pull as much weight.
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