I truly think the faction being loaded with unbalanced cards that support a non-interactive fast-advance strategy is more than an “If you don’t like it, don’t let them do it to you” situation though, and right out the gate, it’s such an uphill battle to play against.
Maybe you have a deck with some answers, and yeah I have a deck with some answers. I’m not saying I lose every time. I’m just saying it’s no fun to play against, yet it’s damned near all I see anymore and has been for a long time.
Just logically think about it. You need to find a way through ice early game to get to the sansan for the privilege of paying 5 to trash it before the corp even has to pay to activate it – so the corp doesn’t score an agenda that scores the next agenda. You have to check every remote to make sure you’re not letting sansans get by, which makes it super easy to run into news teams that will make you fall farther behind the lightning-fast NBN FA deck.
Now imagine you’re a criminal and the NBN deck is at 4 points with an astro counter. The deck surely has 3x breaking news and 1x 15 minutes along with 4 more 3/2s. So, basically, if the NBN deck even draws 2 more agendas, you lose. To top it off, they gave NBN some new uber taxing ice to throw on R&D to make it almost impossible to establish any semblance of an R&D lock.
That really doesn’t seem healthy to me – particularly now that FFG has given NBN so many alternative ways to deckbuild and paths to victory. There are glacier NBN decks that are winning tournaments right now (although every NBN deck with astros is a FA deck). The faction has all manner of tag ability and tag punishment. It’s better at flatlining than Weyland by a wide margin. NBN has a bunch of interesting and powerful defensive upgrades. But we’re stuck with this dominant FA archetype that’s no fun to play against.
That’s me on my soapbox and my contribution to the thread about what’s not fun to play against
I’m afraid you rather missed (or chose to ignore) the part where I said I wasn’t worried about MoH being strong or unbalanced, I just find many of the archetypes which are trying to make use of it tremendously un-fun to play against (which is the topic of this thread).
In my experience, what people often perceive to be “Negative Player Experiences” are often the result of, well, a game being well-made and interesting. Dying in Counter-strike, being backstabbed in Diplomacy, plunging into a debt spiral in Steam, being grinded down or instakilled in Netrunner…sure, none of that stuff seems “positive” at first glance but they are part of a much bigger whole.
It promotes such scintillating corporation counter-plays as “install agenda, hope they don’t have Blackmail (make them pay for being soooooooo clever and cutting the third Blackmail - YOMI)”, “install bluff, hope they do have Blackmail, but no recursion (YOMI)”, “Fast Advance”, “draw furiously for a 1-of silver bullet that may or may not be in your deck (<3 Lizzie Mills)”, and, everybody’s favorite, “draw furiously for Caprice, and hope you can win psi games and make Nisei counters (alternatively: Beta Test ice) faster than they can make Blackmails”.
Every time I see Val, I’m like, I have a pretty good chance at winning this game, and it has a 100% chance of being stupid.
In marked contrast to the above-mentioned stupidity are well-designed cards like Inside Job and comparatively well-designed cards like DDoS (yes, the Blackmail / Val interaction makes DDoS look well-designed by comparison), which admit plenty of counter-play if you open money, ice, and agenda, but (god forbid) haven’t drawn into a scoring upgrade.
People who complain about my strategy after the game (win or lose), or people who are very slow for no discernible reason. Also any card that commonly requires actions in windows where netrunner is not designed to truly have actions, specifically utopia shard and clot - the fact that there is a legitimate reason to use utopia shard after the Corp takes ANY ACTION AT ALL slows things down significantly.
I kind of disagree here. There hasn’t always been that many actions to take on your opponent’s turn, but Netrunner has almost always had some sort of interactivity on opponent’s turns. That’s why the game has built in action windows after every click: so your opponent can do stuff. People that take forever to decide what to do in those windows are the issue here.
Actually I think paid ability windows are responsible for a relatively small fraction of slow play. I think “icebreaker math” and “I have 1 credit and 6 cards, do I discard Plascrete Carapace, R&D Interface, or The Toolbox” are the main culprits.
despite my earlier post, I’m gonna chime in with some more thoughts. I will clarify by saying that no deck has ever ruined a game of netrunner for me;
however
there are certainly some decks that are more fun for me to play against as others. I definitely have more fun playing against decks that are actively trying to win from the first turn. I really enjoy playing against NBN FA; it’s probably the most fun for me as Runner, because neither of us waste any time durdling. it’s down to business from turn 1. in my experience, both players play this match-up relatively quickly, and i think fast play complements the bluffing aspects of netrunner. being able to make a bluff play in a fraction of a second is a real skill, as is being able to quickly make decisions in your head as runner.
if i’m being honest, corps that lean heavily on psi games aren’t my favorite to play against. i’m not in the camp that thinks psi games are totally random, but playing 10+ psi games within a few turns gets old. i’m fine with traditional RP glacier where you play a handful of high impact psi games.
i guess my tl;dr is that i most enjoy games of netrunner with very exciting early and mid-games. late games in netrunner tend to be very oppressive from one side of the board. i also prefer very gutsy decks from both sides. i enjoy losing/winning as weyland rush by turn 10 more than i do by winning as IG on turn 40. durdle decks aren’t for me, but i try my absolute hardest to avoid letting my feelings about the deck across from me come through in a negative way
I play decks that take a long time to complete, even if I personally play them fast, I prefer attrition as a win condition, because every runner deck runs out of cards eventually, and when the runner has no tricks is when the patient Corp wins. I think the tournament rules should allow for concessions, it’s basically like reaching the end game with 7 points if the runner decides to give up and go home. Security was just too colossal for the intrusion to be worth it to them. Same for the Corp, if you were being harassed by computer viruses that copied files, deleted the originals, complied then stored the files in the various easy to access archival storage every day the business was open, you’d just want to reopen the company/quit your cybersecurity job. I’ve been pretty annoyed recently with the state of the Faust…I mean game as Weyland, and I can’t stand playing nearly any tier one decks without using a deck that is designed to take a long time to play. I like playing decks that can win against any opponent, which is hard to accomplish. If you play a deck that has obvious terrible match ups, it’s easier to dismiss the state of the game as being unbalanced, but when you play a deck that is designed to have the best chance at all around survivability, and it makes for drawn out games, perhaps there is an inherent design flaw?
I’m not really picking on anything you said, I’m just responding to the general them off your post, you make a ton of good points, and make me want to play faster decks. Almost, haha
Decks/cards that I (or the other player) respond poorly too. That’s my serious, not glib answer.
Negative player experience is just experiencing players being negative.
If I come at a game experience with a negative attitude, well obviously, it’s going to be a negative experience. If someone else gets negative, well probably, it’s going to be a negative experience.
The best fix for negative player experiences is just being friendly and considerate, and part of being friendly and considerate is not looking at a card or deck someone else is playing and working yourself into a negative mindset about it and trying to justify it.
If there was a reasonably efficient Museum deck doing the rounds I’d be happier, but regrettably most of my experiences have been poor. These include ones where I’ve tested Museum in Blue Sun. I won most of my games with it, but it wasn’t much fun for me and I doubt I was doing the runner any favours.
I’ve shamefully walked out of some online games, but they are ones where I’ll be 6-2 up or something like that within the first few minutes and then we get to the 45-60 minute mark and the score hasn’t changed. The Corp doesn’t seem to be on the point of scoring, I’m largely clicking for credits waiting for something to happen or working out where my LARLA has got to, and I’m really bored…
My issue with the prominence of these decks really stems from wanting to test tournament timed rounds with my games and they all take too long. Perhaps I’m not getting the right opponents, or I’m accidentally prolonging the game myself as Runner somehow, but largely the deck seems to be about “not losing” rather than “winning”.
I value my free time and spend a fair amount of it playing Netrunner, the Museum decks have made the number of games I can get in significantly fewer and the ones I do get are less fun.
For this reason if I’m j-net with you and (virtually) walk out after three-quarters of an hour without saying anything - it’s probably me valuing my free time too much and being unable to truthfully say “gg” when the game is not good (for me).
As a regular IG player, I don’t take playing the ID lightly. You have to play IG a lot to be fast at it, and I think that’s necessary to having a good player experience against the deck.
From my games as IG, I find it’s difficult for runners to make correct decisions simply because they’re not used to playing against this type of deck. I think that makes the design of this ID interesting and meaningful to play (similar to how Leela’s ability nearly forces the Corp to play differently).
That being said, it’s usually the runner forcing these games to go >30min many times. I’m not gonna slow it down, I’ll eventually score a False Lead; I’ll eventually advance a Ronin or two; I think patience is probably a trait in Netrunner that we don’t see enough of. “Something in remote, Inside Job remote!”
When I play against IG, I plan my moves carefully but deliberately. Check archives when you can take the hit, trash stuff, and focus on R&D.
BTW, hope to see you in Toledo tomorrow. Hacking Illuminati will be difficult without you.
This smacks of blame-shifting – if a particular phenomenon regularly and predictably evokes a certain kind of reaction, I find it a bit difficult to swallow the notion that the individual doing the reacting is the one at fault. If a deck can’t win in 30 minutes (and this is much different than ‘not losing’ in 30 minutes) on a regular basis, the fault lies at least as much (I’m being generous here) with the player who brought that deck as it does with its opponents.
Yep. It’s pretty painful to play against even if you know what the winning gameplan is, and sometimes you just don’t draw well enough to keep pace and you can see that you’re probably going to lose in about 15 turns unless your opponent screws up and you wonder what life choices you have made to get to this place
Sadly, I’m hors de combat for another SC weekend. The Illuminati are safe from my crap for another week, but DEMOLITION MAN will return on 3/5 for another run at stealing a playmat with some dubious (but fast-playing ) synergy.
Sure. It’s like blaming only the runner for playing Plascrete every time they play against a Weyland deck. Yes, the Corp is “at fault” for nearly “forcing” the runner to play Plascrete. Similarly, IG is a series of instances “forcing” a certain play style from the runner, just not a play style runners are used to playing a lot. I guess that’s why we build decks anyway, to force our opponents to play to our strategies, not theirs.
It can (and does) certainly win in 30 minutes or less. You’re not wrong. These decks do often cause >30 minute games, but I’m not certain it’s always solely the Corp’s. fault if they are playing to proactively score or flatline, even if it’s a regular occurrence. I shouldn’t have to not play a “slower” deck because no one runs well against it, which is what it boils down to imo. But I may be wrong. Definitely interesting to discuss.
) synergy.