I wasn’t commenting on whether the game is in a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ state, only that it is very different from the Core Netrunner experience.
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I’d really hate it if an LCG would be so stale as to remain the same as with a core only for so many years.
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I dunno… Hate Bear is a siphon deck, CTM is a tagging deck, doesn’t that sound a lot like core Gabe and Making News?
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We’re pretty far removed from core set days, so I don’t blame you, but… really? There wasn’t the card pool for anything like siphon spam or tax tags. There’s really no comparison at all.
Edit: I do blame you a little.
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I think Team Covenant summed it up best when they said the Netrunner that we know and love is a game of hide and seek. If the runner isn’t seeking, or the corp isn’t hiding things, it becomes less enjoyable.
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Was foodcoats hiding something?
I guess there wasn’t siphon spam to today’s extent because Same Old Thing didn’t exist back then, but siphon was definitely one of the most powerful cards out of the core set. And Data Raven is a core set card - how is that not a tax tag?
Uh, because you were only able to siphon three times, at most? And Data Raven isn’t enough to … ugh, whatever, this is just making me long for the pre-Mumbad days.
Jafargo’s paraphrase of TC’s explanation of what we love about Netrunner really resonates with me. I feel like competitive netrunner is pretty far away from that (has been for a while though). Get off my lawn and all that jazz.
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Yes. Moreso than other glacier decks, even.
There was some developer commentary, or article, back when Team Fortress 2 was shiny and new that had a comment that stuck with me. They specifically mentioned they tried to avoid making weapons that provided hard Crowd Control effects (that is, stuns/silences, that sort of thing) because they found that if players felt like their deaths were out of their control (ie. they get stunned/frozen then merc’d) then they felt bad about their loss or that it was somehow unfair. If they felt like they could have some control over the immediate outcome then they were fine and would play to get better.
I’d argue cards like DLR and Blackmail, as well as Power Shutdown Accelerated Diagnostic combos, feel like that hard CC where you can, arguably, play perfectly but they will still combo garbage you to victory and there’s nothing you can do about it. I think Rumour Mill is the epitome of NPE because it basically says “You had a victory strategy using unique cards? I just win, then”. The ultimate hard CC. Those are the kinds of decks and kinds of cards I think generate NPEs and I generally feel bad/anti-fun playing against them.
I’d like to make an honorable mention to the BN/EoI combo, which is borderline but I think feels a lot like an NPE for most players, if only because EoI is 0 credits to play like wut.
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Data Leak Reversal should have never been printed. Not only is it a boring, uninteractive win condition but also one that works best in the most boring, uninteractive decks around and props even worse, even more boring combinations like DDoS into Account Siphon or Citadel Starlight junk. I cringe everytime I see someone play this deck and it was one of the decks that almost made me quit the game back in September.
Bio-Ethics Commitee is also a stupid card that enables stupid, unfun, uninteresting decks and hence shouldn’t have been printed. People already found Genomics a fairly negative experience, which I think was greatly compensated by the need to score (Including Vanity Project!) and the difficulty of playing it well. Now it’s dumb, easy, oppresive and has no need to score. Again, it’s a slot-machine deck in which the best the Runner can do is hope to draw enough agendas to win.
Another massive negative play experience of mine are Valencia decks playing both Rumor Mill and Blackmail. It’s a completely stupid, easy combination that prevents dozen of decks from existing, massively punishes newbies and forces you into slow, boring, influence-consuming Executive Bootcamp plays. It completely nullifies ICE, upgrades and even ambushes, leaving only the “fun” stategies of fast-advance, asset spam and putting a bunch of Prisecs together. Ugh.
CtM is dumb no matter the incarnation because it de facto increases the cost of trashing assets by 3 credits and allows stupidly oppresive decks like Door to Door variants to exist. Seriously, a deck whose odus operandi is to make the Runner lose 3-4 credits per turn should not exist, much less if it builds up by turn 6.
People have blasted Cerebral Imaging enough, but what really bothers me is that…well, CI doesn’t need to be like this. The identitity is fun to play on a pure mechanical level and it has the potential to create remotes and play as twist on the normal HB themes. But alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
If the designers were serious, these deck wouldn’t have been allowed to exist or would have seen key cards banned. The political cycle was a massive mistake and both Bio-Ethics and Sensie would have been banned in any other game. I really wish FFG’s mantra of not banning cards were not into place.
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Make it 6 and you’re correct. Also corp econ was shit and the agendas could not be recycled making even one or two landed siphons quite devastating.
I guess the good news is that a lot of these are rotating. I also don’t think bio-ethics is such an issue any more, but FIHP may have changed things and I was unhappy about the card when it was printed. For what it’s worth, the only game i’ve played against prison ctm it just folded to a strong econ start (from Yaga Smoke) and some conservative play.
Hopefully Damon will be true to form and the next pack will pack some alternative asset spam counters that keep it pressed down, and maybe fit in some different decks. For now though, I’m just sticking with money.
I think that adressing balance by releasing more counters instead of getting rid of problematic cards exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.
Counters are inelegant and often uninteresting from a gameplay perspective because they bypass the game’s mechanics and are, by definition, binary. They also have serious side-effects and limit variety, for example, the release of Rumor Mill had the side-effect of killing Glacier which has made the game much worse.
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I agree in principle, however counters can be done well, and can both increase and limit variety. I would cite the example of film critic (and other cards) vs silver bullet Blue Sun now that we have consulting visit. Toolbox decks are incerdibly fun and interesting and rely on packing a variety of ‘counter cards’ to deal with different threats. Without these cards, the Toolbox decks (see also ppk) would be unplayable, and decks like Government Takeover Blue Sun would be both too strong and lead to one dimensional games.
I will admit that a lot of counters in the game are or have been inelegant, and there is definitely no excuse for rumour mill.
An example of what I’d like to see is this:
Cool Program Name - 2c - 2mu
The first time you trash an installed asset each turn you may trash any number of additional rezzed copies of the same card, ignoring all costs.
Shaper - 2 inf
The idea being that its at its best once they’ve set up and you are behind, it stretches your mu for breakers, and it doesn’t accidentally wreck the person who’s just running Adonis or the odd pad campaign. I can dream.
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I think that’s fair. I think what I’m trying to get across is not so much that counters are bad, but that if you need to add counters to adress game balance, you are already in a bad place!
Like that card, by the way, I like seeing cards like that even if they don’t see play, it’s a cool design.
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I think you hit the nail on the head as far as the worst offenders are concerned.
I really find the reluctance of (segments of the) Netrunner community to explore solutions independently of FFG to be pretty discouraging. There’s a kind of “put up or shut up” mentality among the elitist, microcelebrity-driven elements of the fanbase, I think, that drives off people like me who simply don’t have time to play “25 hours of Netrunner a week,” as one microcelebrity claimed to do on a recent podcast.
So I’ll ask again, what would a sort of “MWL for casual players” look like? My chances of remaining in the hobby would increase significantly if I only ever played other players who also agreed that DLR and Blackmail spam etc. are not respectful of your opponent’s time. I’m thinking of a kind of ANRPC-style player-driven movement, but for those of us who get maybe five hours a week to play, not 25.
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I don’t think what you’re looking for is best addressed by a new set of rules/restrictions (deck building or otherwise). Instead, if I were you I would focus on finding/cultivating a community with a particular set of attitudes about the game.
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The format I’ve heard of that’s gained some traction is 1.1.1.1. That is, you limit your cardpool to 1 core, 1 big box, 1 datapack and 1 full playset of a given card. I haven’t played it, but I understand it’s effective at limiting degenerate strategies while maintaining a solid core experience.
The other option was @TheBigBoy (or maybe the big unit’s, I get them mixed up) 45 card banned list, which aims to do the same thing by taking ‘problem cards’ out of the pool to broaden and balance the game experience. I’m not sure how recently it’s been updated though.
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I don’t think this is exactly fair, maybe it is the case that there’s a slightly elitist bent to a big part of the netrunner community as far as the competitive/casual divide is concerned and that’s a separate issue but I don’t think it should be conflated with unwillingness to push alternative formats to the FFG “standard” with the MWL. Netrunner is a pretty small game and a lot of people don’t want alternative formats to pop up everywhere because it’s already a pretty thin spread player base.
Onesies seems to be picking up some steam and I think that’s a good thing but the fact that a lot of players don’t want to play anything non-standard because they can only just squeeze in a few practice games a week and the odd SC/GNK (which will remain standard forever because they’re official events) face to face as it is isn’t particularly anything to do with elitism. Pushing alternative formats that are aimed exclusively at the more casual end of the player base, rather than just playing “normal netrunner” but going into games saying “I’d rather not play against DLR or Museum IG if that’s what you’re on because I find it extremely unenjoyable”, if anything, just feels like it makes it ever harder for anyone to bridge that gap between the two groups of players.
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