Well yeah, because AFAOS was poorly designed and playtested. That’s the fault of its designers, not of its players or medium the game was played.
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You’re absolutely right, but the change of the medium from cardboard to digital made the design flaw obvious. Had people played it only in RL, maybe nobody would’ve noticed. I’m not saying it’s good or bad either, but changing the medium sometimes changes how the game is seen by its players.
I’ve seen multiple people discover the gamebreaking strategy on their very first play. I’m not arguing that online play can encourage people to discover degenerate combos, I just don’t think that’s the fault of the online medium or players.
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This comparison is very unfair and misleading because Dominion itself used online play as a playtesting platform, whereas to the best of our knowledge the FFG dev team is strictly using paper for their playtesting. Which in some ways is a good thing, a card could be more fun in paper than online (but like, how the hell did MoH slip by, sigh…), but it means it’s harder for them to break their meta as fast as we can with jnet. Since Dominion was playtested on a fast online platform often with the involvement of playtesters that were at the top of the leaderboard most OP things were broken then discarded before seeing print (except Rebuild, pretty much the only total misstep)
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I think you bring up valid points @StashAugustine - Dominion is often brought up as a paragon of design (love it myself, was gutted when isotropic went down), but how many games of this level of complexity would stand up to that standard of being sufficiently well designed? (@popsofctown beat me to the rebuttal of Dominion)
How many games get played competitively online, with a decent player-base and that are sufficiently well balanced and designed that they don’t need patching at all? I would hazard a guess that very very few would live up to that Gold Standard - so few as to effectively make it a moot point I’m afraid. To say that all games that need patching/changing at some point are not sufficiently well designed is really bold. Hell even chess has been patched over the years (you may consider the ‘development’ phase but then where is the line drawn?) and simple sports like football still get rule changes too.
Edit: btw, what do you mean by it’s not ‘proper’? The criticism is misplaced? or genuinely indecent? 
CCGs are actually much more self correcting than a lot of other genres. If a purple card is too strong, the playerbase sleeves up more of the cards that say “destroy target purple card”, more than the developer intended to get sleeved, then the mistake gets mitigated. It’s harder for that to help out in MOBAs where a powerful character can buy an item to boost his weakest stat to deal with a weakness getting exploited, or in a shooter where there is not much countering relationships between the weapons.
That’s not to say balancing a cgg is trivial, by all means no, but for crossgenre comparisons I think you should keep in mind the difficulty level varies.
Notably a lot of the cards on MWL do not allow cards to counter them, insulating them from the counter relationships that help balance most CCGs. Film Critic does not affect NAPD if you have a Mopus in play, and most decks don’t have a Mopus in play because they have something better than a Mopus in play. Astro can’t be interacted with except for by Turntable and it’s RNG to hit it with that. Sansan has to be trashed before it is rezzed, so even Imp does not actually counter it. Pancake Breakfast requires the runner to take a tag willingly, or gives the runner a bad pub which is a bit too much compensation.
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Yeah for sure there’s different challenges and smooth sailing in each, I suppose I was trying to think of something was a comparable amount of moving parts, edge cases and special rules as most board games won’t compare well to L/CCGs in that regard, even the big heavy weights. Any comparison will have its differences though, as otherwise it would just be the same thing!
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The comparison is still valid, it was just a comment I wanted to make. A lot of people aren’t aware of it when it’s actually a really important aspect of how CCGs work.
I think I was being a little too forward there. Dominion is basically the gold standard, although in addition to the amount of playtesting it goes through it has certain advantages in its design. To be fair, I think FFG has generally been decent about this sort of thing across their games (contrast Games Workshop, admittedly the lowest of bars.) I got a little carried away with attacking the point that “JNet & Stimhack [are] a victim of their own success”- I believe that if a game can’t at least mostly hold up to study it’s just not very good. Netrunner has actually been pretty decent about it, albeit less so in the last cycles.
You moved a keyword from my quote and totally changed the meaning!! Ha ha, classic - sneaky! I was posing the question for discussion not making a statement, hence ‘are’ being at the beginning. At worst I was being polemic, but never mind, whatever.
Anyway, yeah, Dominion is helped by its design (e.g. everyone has equal access to the cards) but sometimes that’s a factor of game design/balance too. It can be kind of like writing yourself into a corner - you can set yourself up for a fall by creating elements and mechanics that are will present balance problems. Adding cards forever like a CCG is one, it’s massively risk prone, but it’s done for both fun reasons and financial reasons. Dominion has far fewer cards and comes out in discrete, balanced sets - each set is comparable in size to 1 (one!) datapack 20 vs 25. Imagine if 1 Dominion box came out every month - crazy! Netrunner apparently balances as a cycle, but releases as packs too - no wonder it can feel janky midway through a cycle.
So yeah, I by no means think that Netrunner is a flawlessly designed game - any CCG makes a real design blunder on its very premise as far as I’m concerned (so many cards and things like deliberately adjusting power levels), and I really do want to be able to hold games up to the same gold standard as Dominion (Neuroshima Hex gives it a good go apparently), however if think if you’re seriously looking for that, then, well you’re gonna be pretty disappointed… a lot. Perhaps so much so that it has limited use in a discussion as an argument. (sad times…but we can hope!)
I basically agree with you on this, just wanted to apologize for misediting your quote- didn’t intend to make you look bad, just grabbed it in a hurry.
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I just wanted to be clear that I think that jinteki.net and the open, sharing nature of the netrunner community are massively positive things. I’ll gladly take an occasional salty net deck experience if it means I get to play with cool people halfway around the world and iterate on my dumb ideas until they are halfway playable without infuriating the people at my flgs
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