Where is the MWL? - As of August 20th, 2018 - MWL 2.2 is here (effective 2018.09.06)

Netrunner General
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And another thing, ‘trying to make things better’ is only valid as long as there is a ‘better’. What’s better than the current meta? The last one with CtM/Whizz domination? The one before that with WyldCakes domination? The one before that with PPVP Kate domination? How about AndySucker?

I don’t feel that there has been a well-articulated End Goal for this ‘better’ that we’re aiming for. I could’ve missed it, though… Anyone got a good one handy?

I really dislike this “all metas are equally bad” argument. I don’t really get how someone who played through those metagames can believe it. Yes, there is a “better.” The wyldcakes meta was better than this one, and the PPVP one was better than that. When I was losing game after game to Andy on octgn it still made me want to play more netrunner. It’s a really big leap from “there were always some decks that were better than some other decks,” to “I guess card games just remain equally unfun over time.”

The recent TBB article is one answer to your question. I’d also still say it’s reasonable to use raw attendance numbers as a proxy for how good the meta is. Even if no one cites the state of the game, if it was good it would be drawing people. When people are excited they make time. A couple years ago I was working rotating shifts and got up early to be able to go to netrunner night before work. Now I can’t be bothered to log on jinteki. A better metagame is one that results in something other than “attendance dropped by 50%, but everyone was nice about it.”

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People do just get bored with a game too. After four+ years, maybe you’ve played so much Netrunner in general that it isn’t as exciting anymore as the novelty has worn off? That’s probably one of the biggest reasons I’m playing less these days and I at least don’t perceive the meta as unfun, so it isn’t really that. Point being, if attendance drops but people dropping are saying it’s not a meta problem, then maybe it isn’t? People have different reasons for playing less and for some it’s always going to be the meta. If a new MWL or whatever makes the meta a problem for less people, that’s great, though. We all want the same thing: more people in, less people out, maximum fun for everyone involved. :slight_smile:

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144

One of the unforeseen consequences of having a good online platform like jinteki.net is how it can burn people out, I think. I hear people talk about grinding hundreds of games with the same deck, and I’d be surprised if under those conditions you don’t end up fed up with it no matter how fun the individual games are.

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I second these thoughts. Netrunner is a large and deep game, it takes a very long time to fully explore and master. But once you get there as a player, what else is there left to achieve? Sure you can get a few trophies and make some friends but inevitably people will move on (Im sure I will at some stage) to other things, challenges, real life stuff. With the buy-in being large both in terms of money and time/complexity I would expect the attrition rate of the player base to be negative until the revenue stream becomes so negligible for FFG that they reboot it.

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Another consequence of jinteki.net + all of the fantastic online tools for sharing/discussing decks (NRDB, this forum, slack, reddit, etc) is that “the competitive meta” can sometimes appear as if it’s the only thing people play. Good decks get discovered quickly, they become popular, then once a critical mass is achieved (say, if 50% of the games you join are against asset spam), they become ingrained relatively quickly.

Then the well gets poisoned as people join games and expect to be angry-- I just finished a game as Whizzard with no DLR, no rumor mill, no faust, no Sifr, and no parasite, but my opponent sounded salty as soon as they saw the ID.

I don’t know how to make the jnet casual tab more like a casual meetup (where people generally avoid NPEs and talk about what to play against each other so that they can both have a fun, tight game). But I think it would be a Good Thing for the game if people felt like jnet could enable them to play the game the way they want to play it, and it doesn’t seem impossible to me.

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If the problem was that people were generically burning out, I don’t think that there would be retro tournaments getting organized. I don’t feel burned out on netrunner, but I do feel burned out on trashing/installing assets and playing econ cards until the game is over. I’d guess that people turning to custom banlists, draft, and straight up old formats feel the same way.

I also think blaming jinteki.net or the competitive online community is facile. Magic, Hearthstone, Duelyst, and every successful competitive video game manage to steward their environment enough that they can stay at replacement level as people leave. If the game can’t stand up to people who want to think and talk about it all the time, then it’s something wrong with the game, not those people.

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148

Actually the reason that Magic/Hearthstone/Duelyst can support a competitive online community is because there are systems in those games for a competitive online community. Magic has prized events, supporting getting better at competitive decks, as well as high-prize-value in person tournaments that support people wanting to play several games to make sure they’re at their peak… Hearthstone has both prized events and the Skinner Box of Daily Achievements. I’m unfortunately not as familiar with Duelyst, but I’m fairly certain it at least has the daily achievements? (Duelyst didn’t really grab me.)

With an un-supported Competitive environment, you absolutely can burn out: “Why am I doing this? To win a piece of $10 cardboard? A playmat?” compares unfavorably to “I’m doing this so I can win $1k+ at a Grand Prix/Poker Tournament/etc”

Wyldcakes was, I feel, one of the worst metas in the game because the oppressive (Runner) deck was heavily opening-hand dependent. I do feel that PPVP was probably the ‘best’ meta simply because it highly rewarded Player Skill over any other variable, even though the deck was a fairly high percentage of the meta.

And I actually disliked the AndySucker meta the most of all, as there wasn’t really a way around the deck. There’s a reason it was called “The Deck” for a period. PPVP and WyldCakes had ways around the deck (DLR Val arguably didn’t as well, though.)

I’d agree with that. That said, at what point did we have the highest attendance in tournaments for Netrunner? Are those numbers available…? I know we have Jinteki.net stats available. What do they say?

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149

I think in the other games you mentioned, there’s an easy place to go to escape the competitive meta (i.e. In hearthstone you can always go play arena). On jnet instead of a meta partition we have (ostensibly) a skill level partition.

Example:

I think in an ideal world I’d go play Dumbles vs. RP prison in the competitive tab, or switch over to casual and be able to play Peregrine Kit vs. Tennin or something. But in practice in casual it’s still RP Prison, and the kit deck feels like garbage.

Maybe if we switched the casual tab to something like a ban list tab?

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150

Yeah, I played a game of KoS banlist yesterday and it was the best game of Netrunner I’d had in months. It made me want to play more [KoS banlist] Netrunner again, and the current meta doesn’t really inspire the same sort of feeling. The current meta isn’t the Netrunner I love, and it will take a lot more to make me burned out on the latter.

I encourage more people to put [KoS] in their game titles on Jinteki.net and play with that ban list. It’s way better.

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There are some games - some really fun games - that are all about keeping on top of the latest card that has been put on the table. These games are designed around this aspect, and have plenty of mechanics involved around controlling what cards are on the table, their effects, and what cards will soon be on the table.

Netrunner is not designed around this aspect. There are very few cards that interact with assets, their introduction to the board, or control their effects once on the board. Even those cards are overshadowed by the dull and default strategy of making money and using it to remove those assets by brute force.

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With an un-supported Competitive environment, you absolutely can burn out: “Why am I doing this? To win a piece of $10 cardboard? A playmat?” compares unfavorably to “I’m doing this so I can win $1k+ at a Grand Prix/Poker Tournament/etc”

I didn’t say that people can’t burn out, just that it was a misdiagnosis of why netrunner is shrinking. I traveled to tournaments for the thrill of it, and I think that’s true for most netrunner tournament players. What I want is not a giant prize pool, but an exciting story about something that happened at a top table, and that’s what has been taken away from the game.

Wyldcakes was, I feel, one of the worst metas in the game because the oppressive (Runner) deck was heavily opening-hand dependent. I do feel that PPVP was probably the ‘best’ meta simply because it highly rewarded Player Skill over any other variable, even though the deck was a fairly high percentage of the meta.

We can reasonably disagree about which bad meta was the worst. My point is that there is such a thing as good and bad metagames; we’d both rather be playing in one dominated by PPVP Kate than what we’ve got now. I think that article I linked gives a clear explanation of why. “Meet the new meta, same as the old meta” is just not true.

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153

Adding some support here. I also see this argument thrown around way too easily.

If it was true there would be no difference between ‘good’ and 'bad’games either.

A meta is a game, after all.

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154

And the real problem is still,where is the MWL?

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155

It’s a matter of degrees.
People seem to be claiming that we have a ‘Risk’ meta and we used to have an ‘Eclipse’, ‘Terra Mystica’, or ‘Caverna’ meta. That it is bad now, but used to be good.

In reality, it’s closer to say that we have an Eclipse meta now and we used to have a Caverna meta. Both are fine, and disliked by different groups of people, but we all generally agree that it’s better than Monopoly.

It’s the difference between comparing two games that are 95 and 96 out of 100, and instead claiming that they’re 25 and 95 out of 100. Is it worse, is it better? Subjective (outside of attendance numbers, anyway, and even then there are other factors that affect attendance than just popularity/quality of game.) and ultimately unimportant to compare when the difference between the two is so small.

The one thing that I’ll concede is that CtM needs something done about it, because it has the same problem WyldCakes did: The game is decided by the presence of a single card in your opening hand. Before, it was ‘Did I start with Wyldside?’ and now, it’s ‘Did I start with Sensie?’

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156

Or now, ‘Did I start with Sensie and did they not find their Aaron?’

I think that is the problem with the current meta, if I have to point out one thing. You have situations where the game is decided not based on solid play, but the draw order of super powerful cards, answers, and counter answers.

Rumor Mill and Aaron are the most egregious, but without Aaron I think CtM needs to die in a fire.

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I ate it. Sorry.

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158

wait what
where?

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159

Good point.

I guess this is difficult to directly adress with anything else than that i’m one of the ‘Risk’ people. I’m in the ‘Risk’ camp.

I do not think the current (high-level, competitive) meta represents a 95/100 anymore, unfortunately. The game is still good, local metas may still be and excepting a few cards-strategies the game is still 95/100.

However since the option of playing risk-with-loaded-dice exist players will use it. This happens in two ways:

  1. Powerful decks with powerful cards without counterplay (loaded dice).
  2. A meta that is sufficiently ‘diverse’ such that a single deck cannot compensate and must choose between being torn to inefficiency due to need for counters (lower power-level) or ignore some matchups when teching (loss by matchup-lottery).
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Hmm. Perhaps.
Let me point this out, though, in reference to point 1.:

Powerful decks with Powerful Cards without Counterplay existed in Core Set (SEA-Scorch Weyland).
It’s existed since Accelerated Diagnostics + Power Shutdown + Jackson. (Shutdown SEA-Scorch Weyland, or Shipment from SanSan CI.)

I think that ‘golden age’ of Corp Netrunner was from Lunar to SanSan cycle. Even then, though, we had NEH Fastrobiotics, a deck that offered very limited counterplay (Turntable/Medium dig was the only thing.) After that, Museum decks, and then the current meta.

(I’m limiting my scope to Corp, here. I feel it’s harder to find parallels in Runner decks as, with a couple exceptions, they never have guaranteed win conditions, simply ways to generate extremely favorable board states that will almost always result in a win. You can still be really unlucky with Medium dig and lose, unlike SEA-Scorch, where you just win, period. There’s never been a viable Mill archetype, which is what Runner would need to have a guaranteed win condition that they can implement.)

Additionally, as far as I can tell, for a game without deck changing during a match, or best-of rounds, point 2 is generally considered a positive for a meta. If there were no ‘loss by matchup-lottery’, then A always beats B and C, so everyone just takes A. In a healthy meta, A beats B beats C beats A, so that reading the current meta of how likely you are to run into A, B, and C determines which deck you bring. (Or you take D which doesn’t necessarily win or lose vs A, B, and C, which is your ‘lower power-level’ option.)

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Noise before Opening Moves.

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