The sad thing is that Netrunner is one of their larger product lines, if I’m not mistaken. IRRC, I saw a graph from FFG Worlds showing Netrunner beat out all but one their other OP games for number of participants (X-Wing being the most).
So, if they are aware of player dissent, and they don’t have many larger / higher-priority games, then they’re either spread too thin to be able to grow OP, or they intentionally don’t think they need to foster the competitive player base to maintain good sales figures.
Preach! I agree that there’s a surprising level of diversity, as well as ways to counter the popular strategies. I think it can be hard to deckbuild in new ways, so I think people are quicker to bitch than they are to thoroughly try new deckbuilding approaches.
Rotation is totally going to be a problem with assets. We’ll lose both Whizzard and Scrubber, so we’ll be left with Paricia, Slums, and to a lesser extent Archives Interface and Skulljack. Whizzard is strongest because of his ability to combat 1st turn Sensie in CtM while still being generally good against assets. So without a way to nerf the SenCtM combo, we’ll need an adequate way to kill cheap assets fast or many assets cheaply to come out in Red Sands. fingers crossed
That’s not really a good metric considering how many people just buy them to sell them directly on eBay. I find it hard to believe a player managed to get a full OP kit worth of promos on the week they drop.
It’s not great, but it can still give a decent ballpark figure. After all, Damon’s “in the single digits” estimate suggests that the casual player base outnumbers the competitive by a factor of somewhere between 10.1 and 99. When your range is an order of magnitude, your numbers would still be in pretty good shape even if 10%, 20%…hell, even 50% of OP kits went straight to ebay.
Plus, the error in this metric that results from loss of OP kits to the secondary market means that FFG’s sales numbers would _over_estimate the size of the competitive scene.
The huge runner-corp imbalance has increased diversity. At the time of Worlds, NBN was the one corp that had a decent matchup against everything, so most people played that. Now that runners are so strong, there are no corps that have a decent matchup against everything, which means that a whole bunch of corps are equally ‘viable’ in that they have some chance of winning unless you run into one of your many autolose matchups. And a lot of runners are viable because almost anything in anarch or criminal will win most of its games.
So yeah, the meta is diverse right now, but I don’t think it’s healthy.
FWIW, I’ve always played in ‘kitchen-table’ environment of just @aandries and I, and we’ve done OK.
Guess we have a better table than most.
(on a more serious note, I liked Boggs’ idea of a quarterly-ish review of the MWL. However, the LD’s MWL review and its release by FFG OP/CTP is another matter entirely.)
I don’t think there is a global runner/corp imbalance. It’s probably as close to even as it’s ever been. But, I do agree with most of what you said. There isn’t a clear standard (or fair) Corp deck that can handle all the runners. The strong Corp decks are kind of degenerate (Railgun, CI7, RP Prison, maybe PU Attrition).
As I see it, there are strong standard-ish runner decks (Temu Sifr Whizzard, Aaron Andy) that are relatively easy to play. That’s not to say they don’t have tough match-ups against several of the strong degenerate Corp decks.
The question I have from your post is: should there be decks that have decent (45% or better) match-ups against ALL common decks? And, can you have diversity if those decks exists on both sides?
The reason I’m not a huge fan of the current meta is because a lot of the strongest decks are NPE, not because there isn’t diversity nor that there’s an imbalance between the sides.
You know, I actually wonder if it’s late because they made some last-minute changes and want to do a heavy play test cycle on it.
Like, say, if a higher tier of the MWL could work, where particularly large offenders might cost more influence instead of banning it. As a example, Sifr at -3 influence per copy.
NAPD Most Wanted Repeat Offenders? Just keep ratcheting up the influence until nobody includes them in their deck?
Not sure I like that. We might see a shift toward more mono-color and influence light decks. The best cards will still get played, I think, unless it is impossible to make a competitive deck with them. And if it isn’t, aren’t you just effectively banning the cards anyway?
That’s why I’ve decided I don’t like MWL in the first place – It kills one of my favorite deckbuilding aspects of Netrunner, which is influence spends. It made them a lot more predictable. I’d much rather be told I can’t use a card, or be told I can’t use two or three cards together, and have free reign to include whatever I can fit.
This statement comes closest to capturing my discontent with the current meta. I’m more tolerant of certain forms of NPE than others (I don’t mind combo decks at all, CI7 & Railgun are fine by me) but I really, really dislike prison and asset spam. They feel so far afield from the most fun parts of Netrunner, they’re like a less-fun variation on every other card game where it comes down to board state vs. board state except assets have crazy levels of recursion that don’t exist in most other games. And while I love Anarch, it’s frustrating to have to play Whizzard with multiple Slums to beat half the corps. People putting Scrubber into Whizzard is surely a sign that something’s screwed up in the card pool. As is the sudden proliferation of alternative format tournaments (which I think is great! The community is stepping up here) like 1.1.1.1, legacy, and custom banlist.
Anyways, I bet an MWL is coming soon, but we also shouldn’t grow rely upon it to solve all our problems. If we can keep up the momentum of local play nights and GNKs with alternative formats or friendly agreements to play/not play in certain ways, then we should. This game’s too good to die out due to the slow speed of the adjustments to the competitive card pool.
This is where more communication from FFG is necessary. I think a lot of people would be announcing custom banlists, alt formats, etc. for their local tourneys if it wasn’t for the fact that we’ve been expecting the MWL to drop for the past 3 weeks.
Well, I guess some cards were only arrested due to possession, and some are wanted on murder charges.
I mostly brought it up due to a rumor I heard from someone I trust.
The rumor was:
PPvP and Desperado off.
Temujin and Bio-Ethics on.
New tier of the MWL that was -3 per copy instead of -1. Blackmail, Sensie Actors Union, Sifr, Faust, Rumor Mill
We have talked about the concensus amongst players that something must be done, but I think there’s also a more positive concenus: That the game is perfectly fixable.
idk.i think it could be good for the game. it could encourage runners to pack more copies of things like breakers and consoles which limits their card slots reserved for tech.
In practice though, it’ll probably just make film critic an auto include and nothing much else will change.
