I had my weekly meet up last night. As I was driving home, I was reminded that it is the joy I have playing this game with actual people, who I enjoy spending time with, that keeps me in it.
Online games feel like a necessary evil to me. They are a good way to practice, but I just don’t tend to have as much fun. (I will say that now the the Online Cache Refresh tournament is in its fourth round, that does have a lot of the feeling like a local meta thanks to Slack and lots of fun people playing.)
I have to drive an hour each week to play my face-to-face games. I’ve thought of not doing that from time-to-time, but I’m pretty sure I’d quit playing this game if I could not play face-to-face on a regular basis.
So here is a thank you to everyone who works hard to keep their local metas alive and meeting. They are more important to the health of this game than you know.
I barely play online, i just don’t enjoy the experience all that much, and so if it wasn’t for my local meta i wouldn’t be playing Netrunner at all.
Like tvaduva, i’m the T/O in my area and I’ve put a lot of work in since taking over as T/O about 18 months ago. In that time the number of people playing ANR has shrunk overall but my local meta has grown, simply because of the effort we put in locally in having face to face games and running regular events.
Online play is a necessary evil (to me) and it facilitates people to get games when they either don’t have a local meta, can’t get to local meet-ups because life gets in the way or just want to improve but I don’t think it can replace the importance of a local community, especially for bringing in new players. I don’t know a single player who got into the game after trying it out on Jinteki, but I know several who came down to the store, had demo games and bought into the game completely.
My meta is dead. We used to have 12 people in every tournament years ago, when people drove here from neighboring countries, but other games (mostly AGOT and Destiny), adult obligations and a lack of general enthusiasm has sapped players like mad, to the point I’m lucky if we have 4 players that incidentally play ANR besides other games. No future tournaments are really planned.