How is Gabe running R&D multiple times in the end game to take advantage of this setup? You are talking about no-sucker Gabe above (I totally agree that’s a better Gabe setup) and the big problem of this Gabe is that he runs out of steam in the end game. How would playing cards that require multiple runs help out?
I’ve never had an issue with it. For one thing, in order to be able to play your economy cards through tags, you are playing 3 armitage; spending two turns clearing an armitage gives you plenty enough cash to spend your next turn on indexing + a run. Also, keep in mind that Andy loses out on economy by running R&D every other turn or so in order to maintain the lock. By contrast, Gabe can avoid those runs and only hit R&D when its Indexing time, or when it is practically free to do so. You aren’t actually making more runs on R&D; if anything, you’re making fewer, and that translates to savings. Furthermore, because you’re Gabe, the Corp needs to spend more of its resources defending both HQ and Archives, leaving them more strapped to mount a significant R&D defense. If they do mount such a defense, then it doesn’t actually set you back all that much, either; you can always just not play the indexing and focus on hitting HQ and not letting them score through a remote, whereas for Andy that’s 4 credits wasted playing an RDI. If your opponent is able to put significant defense on Archives, R&D, HQ, and a remote, well then you probably lose, but how the hell did you let that happen?!?
I run Indexing in Andromeda :). I ran 2x Indexing, 1x R&DI in my nats deck and crushed faces all day–players in my local meta adjusted strongly to running a lot of Jackson/Atlas tokens to mess with Indexing, so I swapped to 1xIndexing, 2xR&DI for worlds.
I ended up kinda wishing I had that second Indexing back, even though it wasn’t nearly as effective at worlds as it was at nationals. It was money all day at nats; the second R&DI was rarely useful and the mimic I included with the other influence was literally useless. Ninja was vastly superior against the worlds field.
edit I also run sneakdoor in Andy, at least 1x. Ideally, it is the first program I play to force thin ICE spread (or, often, just winning the game by dragging the agendas that have clogged HQ out).
The truth is that the design of this game makes it nearly impossible to objectively compare identities. The best decks are tailored to highlight the identity’s ability and playing the same deck with two identites will result in compromises for one of the two identities.
Because of that, people’s opinions are simply conjecture; what actually matters is results. There are enough winning decks posted from online matches and tournament results that it’s extremely unlikely that the identity that has won the highest % of played matches is not the best identity.
The results are in and the data speaks for itself. I don’t really think there is any room to debate which identity is the best, all that’s left is to discuss why it is what it is.
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I have a few problems with this line of reasoning. For one, you’re looking at data from meta-games which no longer exist; new data-packs have the power to change what the best faction is. There hasn’t been a major tournament since Second Thoughts came out, nor do we have easy access to OCTGN statistics for just games played post-Second Thoughts. The results, even if we were to take such data as able to settle the matter, are not in at all.
Second, there is massive selection bias with any uncontrolled evaluation of winning percentages. No statistician worth her salt would make such strong conclusions about this data as a result. You have an underlying assumption that the cohorts of people who choose to play each specific identity are each at around the same average skill level, and also with a similar distribution of people at various skill levels. I’ve seen no effort made to justify these assumptions from anyone trying to draw conclusions from OCTGN data and tournament reports, and I have several reasons to doubt them. When we talk about tournament results in particular, you are not even controlling for the massive factor that is corp performance! You can’t make equality assumptions about self-selecting groups.
Third, looking at past performance discounts the ability for new innovations to change things. The statistics on Kate prior to the rise of Katman is a perfect example of this; I’m certain the pre- and post-Katman statistics for Kate are quite different, yet it seems reasonable to infer from what you said that the “results [were] in” on Kate due to her past performance.
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Good points. I think that some of the data you refer to could be extracted from OCTGN match history by separating the matches played into segments representing each data pack (or major metagame milestones by timestamp if possible) and then replaying those matches to apply a ranking (ELO?) to each player. If there are a good number of high-ranking players that have played each other, you could start to make conclusions from that.
OCTGN data is all null and void now we know that @Alexfrog and @Lysander played dozens of games messing about proxying Accelerated Diagnostics combos 
But seriously:
I have seen some quite in depth analyses of OCTGN data. I believe David Sutcliffe has a blog in which he has performed some pretty interesting calculations - I’m not sure what it’s called though, I usually just follow links from the UK Facebook group. He’s done a number of things, including filtering the data with a variety of cuts to eliminate certain groups / situations. He wrote a really nice article which demonstrates excellently why Jinteki relies on runner error and can’t win games for themselves.
I agree that you can’t correct for everything in the data, but the environment isn’t stable for long enough to collect enough data to be meaningful. The best we can do is to look at what has been successful and ask why? If “elite” players are playing an identity that has a genuine edge at the top of the ability spectrum then there would be some data somewhere to demonstrate that - i.e. Gabe would be disproportionately represented at the business end of big tournaments, even if he’s not winning them.
The lack of such evidence, therefore, suggests either that one or both premises are false or that the absence is statistical noise (i.e. the premises are true, but Gabe just keeps getting unlucky on the day).
What I’m saying is that, unless you have the same people playing a lot of Andromeda, and then a lot of Gabe, against the field, you aren’t going to be able to tease out how much of Andromeda’s relative success is a result of her being a strong identity, and how much of it is the result of the people playing her piloting her very well. You could also make inferences about player skill by showing relative parity in corporation results, which would be weaker but still legitimate. I’ve seen efforts to trim games played by 0 influence decks, decks that ran way too many cards, and several other things, but what I haven’t seen specifically, and not for a lack of looking, is an effort to justify the assumption that the people playing Andromeda are, on average, about as good as the people playing Gabe, and that the distribution of skill from very high to average to very low is also similar between the two identities.
Also, I never suggested that elite players are choosing Gabe due to a genuine edge at the top of the spectrum; that seemed to be Kingsley’s position. My position is that Gabe and Andromeda are close enough in strength, and doing different enough things, that the best choice from a competitive perspective is dependent on what types of corp decks you can expect to face. If you want some really illegitimate data to back that up, I guess I can mention that I’m doing about as well with Gabe in the current BGG league as I did with Andromeda in the last one.
Seriously people!
Complaints about the environment not being stable and things like that are BS. People are just making up excuses at this point. Stop making excuses. Learn to actually change your mind. Learn to actually have your beliefs reflect reality. Learn to actually update your beliefs in the face of empirical data.
I initially thought NBN:TWIY was bad. Data showed that it wasnt. I changed my mind. You can change your mind too!
The data and numbers that we had were for certain metagames. I stored numbers for different time frames and then calculated win rates for each individual set’s playtime. Andromeda beats Gabe in all of them.
Unless there is a good reason to believe that some new card massively helps Gabe over Andy, then these excuses are just excuses.
If you want to claim: “Now that Mala Tempora is out, Gabe is going to be better than Andromeda”, I guess you can claim that. And in a month we’ll have data to help us see if that is correct. But you cant just throw out “oh a new set has come out”, and expect that to counteract tens of thousands of games of empirical data.
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What are we making excuses for? If Gabe is better than Andy, I want to believe that Gabe is better than Andy; if Andy is better than Gabe, I want to believe that Andy is better than Gabe. I’m not particularly biased one way or the other-- I don’t even play Criminal-- but I think it’s more of an open question than you might think.
I think the testimony of some of the best players I know is more reliable evidence than OCTGN, and that selection effects make it very difficult to evaluate tournament results without information on what the field was comprised of. This seems like a fairly straightforward objection to me, and I don’t appreciate having it called an excuse.
I’ve put forward multiple examples of data that I would find convincing, like tournament rosters indicating that Gabe is being played as much as Andy, OCTGN data from only top players, and so on. Right now, that information just isn’t there, and the data we are seeing doesn’t seem very convincing.
Andy has data. Gabe has hunches and anecdotes.
Realistically speaking, the opinions of good players are data, and often better data than the standard sources.
I will admit that this response frustrates me, because this is actually data that supports Andromeda!
There is a correlation between winning tournaments and being a good player. There is also a correlation between playing Andromeda and winning tournaments.
To abstract it a little bit: I know absolutely nothing about the metagame of Street Fighter for example. But if I looked at a bunch of Street Fighter tournaments and saw that Ryu was showing a dominating performance in tournaments that would be evidence that Ryu is strong and evidence that good players are playing Ryu. If I was tasked with trying to hunt down the better Street Fighter players, going after tournament winners would probably be one of the best ways of doing so.
If one the biggest Chess tournaments happens and showed 7/8 of the top 8 using one particular strategy that would be strong evidence of the superiority of that strategy don’t you think? Why is Netrunner different?
You have an anecdote that strong players prefer Gabe. I also have an anecdote that strong players (I think probably some of the best in the game) think that Andromeda is better. But Andromeda also has objective data.
We know that this is not the case, and it would be weird. I expect the stronger identities to see more tournament play if players actually know what they are doing. The better players are, the more likely this is to be the case. We only expect the best decks to be hidden if knowledge/skill is poor or if there is some new unexpected thing that takes the meta by storm. (Gabe is obviously nowhere near this, and in fact has had players playing him longer than Andromeda.)
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You still haven’t addressed my main point, which is that you’re assuming that the cohorts of Gabe players and Andromeda players are of approximately equal skill, and with similar skill distributions. Until you justify those assumptions, your data does not support the point you’re trying to make, because the connection you’re making relies on those assumptions. Again, you CANNOT make equality assumptions about self-selecting groups.
EDIT: I also resent the implication that I’m proceeding dogmatically, considering that I was a proponent of Andromeda for quite some time and played her almost exclusively for several months. My more recent games with Gabe led me to believe that, rather than being weaker, he was just better at some things and worse at others.
The idea that the people playing Andromeda are about as good as the players playing Gabe is just as much of a hunch as anything I’ve said, and despite bringing it up multiple times I still haven’t heard a word justifying that assumption.
I think knowledge and skill are definitely poor! In general, I would describe there as being multiple factions, much less identities, that are underexplored as a whole. The community has found a few decks that work (Andy, Katman), but has little understanding of other styles, and tends to gravitate towards a few obvious moves as a result.
I don’t think this is very true at all, those styles are just the current best. Consider that Gabe is more well known than Andy is, and an incredibly explored deck space.
The idea that the people playing Andromeda are about as good as the players playing Gabe is just as much of a hunch as anything I’ve said, and despite bringing it up multiple times I still haven’t heard a word justifying that assumption.
Andromeda has all the data on her side.
I think its up to anyone who wants to dispute the results to justify their objections. If you want to use the excuse “it doesnt count, because the Andromeda players were stronger than the Gabe players”, then you are the one who needs to justify that.
The claim that we arent all experienced with Gabe is silly.
Everyone had tons of experience with Gabe, for months and months.
We all know the Jopejope Gabe deck. Prior to Andromeda, that was the strongest deck.
People switched from it to Andromeda because Andromeda is better.
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that’s not how argumentation works. You are begging the question when you say that, because the data is on Andy’s side, you don’t need to justify your assumption; the data is only on Andy’s side if the assumption is true.