Yes, and it is definitely in a continous state of flux on the scale of good-bad. However i would say that flux is better than fixation, a changing meta counteracts the possibility to find the ‘optimal’ decks as the meta shifts, and that has not happened in a long time.
Second, i would argue that the nature of the decks matter. Playing versus Fastro was unbalanced, but if you played well the bad part was like a lottery. People like lotteries. They are exciting.
Playing any asset-deck however is not like a lottery, it is like slowly drowning after someone cut your arms off.
This is definitely true, i agree with you. But i think this can exist on a scale. If matchups decide 30/70% of your win-percentage that’s kind of normal, and totally OK with me (although i prefer 40/60). When it is 10/90% however the ‘game’ itself (actually playing Netrunner) becomes so much less important than the matchup.
I’m in this to actually play Netrunner however, so in that kind of meta i’m out.
(and people can have their Dyper’s and recurring Blackmails to their sorry selves)
I don’t believe this, and I think that’s our fundamental disconnect.
The exact same game progression occurs with Fastrobiotics as Asset-spam. It’s a back-and-forth until a critical junction, for Fastro that was the first Astrobiotics score, (Or sticking a SSCG for more than one Agenda score) and for Asset-spam, that’s a Sensie firing a second time. (Or landing HHN at less than 8 Runner credits.) As soon as that happens, the game is tilted wildly in the Corp’s favor, with only very specific things to pull it back into Runner favor. (Turntable the Astro, or Medium dig better than 2 deep. Kill the Sensie without going low on econ; Apocalypse.) Notably, the game didn’t end immediately, which at least CI7 and Meat-Kill has going for it.
I’m pretty sure that’s why I’ve always been numb to people claiming Asset Spam is somehow unpleasant to play against. You can see the same play pattern in Fastrobiotics and, sure, people complained about it, but the same people who complain about Asset Spam hold up Fastro as an example of a ‘fun’ way to lose, when it’s the exact same method.
Heck, you can argue Foodcoats and other Glaciers get the same thing, except their critical junction is harder to nail down; Usually it’s when they get to 5 points, or they IAA on 4 points. As soon as they can force runs every turn through their scoring remote, the game is essentially over barring some miracle from the Runner.
This is just bollocks. Take the Order&Chaos / early SanSan Fastro meta. You have 3 factions all being able to hold their own against the deck with their own specific tools.
Shaper: Clot-lock the remote and go for HQ-RnD when you get to your multi-access events.
Anarch: suppress the econ and lure them to going low when they go Sansan into Astro. Afterwards, punish with Medium and Turntable.
Criminal: econ denial them. Siphon-lock into accesses with Desperado and RDI / Medium gets you there a lot of the time.
At the same time, the Fastro player has outs against all these strategies, not only by chaining Astros, but gear-checking at opportune times, trashing key resources via Breaking News or getting a key Architect triggers when you force the opponent to meet your tempo.
Playing with and against Fastro was very skill-intensive and skill-rewarding. Anyone claiming otherwise has not played or understood the matchup enough.
Fastro was both broken and dumb. It won extremely fast (Turn 7 wasn’t uncommon), its ICE was extremely efficient (Eli, Architect) and it barely needed money to win. Yeah, Medium helped, except against the 3x NAPD Contracts these deck played and you better not get too low yourself because half of these decks played Scorched. A lot of the time, they scored an Astro with Sweeps Week money and you lost the game because you couldn’t get past their Pop-Ups, Architects and Wraparounds fast enough to win with Medium. It was quite literally a lotery.
Even worse, the deck had positively stupid win rates and was extremely easy to play meaning that it was extremely easy to get “unlucky” and lose 2-3 games to “I couldn’t do anything about it”. It was also around the same time RP was a menace and what was good against one was bad against the other.
I remember when I first played Genomics at a tournament I won every single game both as Runner and Corp just to lose to Biotic->Astro with 2 Elis on R&D twice in a row.
A quick note on side balance. At 2014 worlds corp won 75% of the games in the cut. Octgn data showed roughly even side balance. Which one of these is correct? Was is one of the all time most unequal metas? Or a normal 50/50 one.
The truth of the matter is it’s the former, it was a horribly corp favored meta. The truth is skill disparity in netrunner still overshadows matchups when you look across all the games played on jinteki. The issue then is when you play with people of roughly the same skill level, what should be the most fun matches (where players of even skill have close games decided on a knifes edge) turn into the favored side crushing. In turn the games that are now closer between more skill disparate opponents tend to leave everyone frustrated because they rely more on power cards than on play.
If you want to collect data on side balance, there are basically 3 ways I think are acceptable.
Top cut winrates for gencon, euros, UK nats, worlds
Finding winrates of games between people in the top 10% of elo on jinteki.
Simply surveying a bunch of world class players.
You need to isolate for skill imo, and the only easy way to do this is cut for the top class of players, and for most of the year there simply aren’t tournaments where you have enough skilled players at the same thing to look at side balance. (The UK probably has some more tournaments where you could).
Store championships are useless, and jinteki wide winrates are pretty limited. Regionals are okay in aggregate, but the skill disparity in the cut is usually too great to pull good data from. Asking Dyer or Dan what side balance atm is a gajillion times more useful than all the SC data.
Worlds 2014 Corps were the most dominant I saw. Fastro before Clot was dominant, RP was wrecking, and even BS’s arrival provided another threat to deal with.
I’ve heard sky-is-falling doomsaying since 2013, being part of the chorus myself off and on since then. The meta has more issues now due to the bloated card pool, than anything. Granted, some recent design choices haven’t helped.
FFG has the tools to deal with this, in the MWL/banning/erratas and rotation. They’re dragging their feet on both. I believe they welcome player-run initiatives, as it makes their lives easier. I’m really intrigued to see the best meta in the game, the equality-forced KOS meta, with a banlist. @daine recently pushed a banlist on the Chicago meta, and I can see this happening more and more, esp. if players enjoy it. The game is supposed to be about having fun, right?
For those saying the meta will always have problems: I thought the meta after the second MWL (after regionals) last year was pretty good. Then Blood Money came out right after Gencon and contained so many bonkers runner cards that the game has been wacky ever since, with corps either being bad or at least constrained ever since.
MWL updates can improve the game, but can easily be undone by crazy cards. To me, that suggests they should both update the MWL more often, and also try to spread out ‘power cards’ more evenly rather than releasing a ton in one pack. I don’t think it takes a genius to tell that Temujin, Rumor Mill, Paperclip, and Beth Kilrain-Chang are all really good runner cards - couldn’t these have been spread across several packs?
Found on BGG News about boardgamer fatigue as a general topic - and maybe we experience this especially in Netrunner right now? No new folks, a game grown too quick for the fast-living LCG model, players who played too excessively on jnet and got fatigued in the end?
[In] terms of pure buying power, it’s the people new to the hobby who are driving the industry’s growth. As long as we have more people entering this “honeymoon” period than leaving it, we will see industry revenue grow.
If, for some reason, the flow of new gamers slows, we’ll see it in the bottom line. We’ll see convention attendance level out […].
Or is it really just a couple of wrong design decisions that kill our beloved game?
I feel like the 3 reasons you mention, “no new folks”, “a game grown too quick” and “players who…got fatigued in the end” don’t exist in a vacuum in a realm outside of game design decisions. Yes they’re things that happen to almost all games to an extent, but because of that they have to be something you keep in mind as a designer, and something you design against. The reasons there are “no new folks” are almost all design issues: slow rotation, bloating cardpool, lack of support and learning resources etc. Ditto for growing too fast and player fatigue. These things may be somehwat inevitable, but the extent to which they occur is definitely something FFG and the design team have a part in, so they don’t completely absolve FFG from all responsibility. I don’t think the dichotomy you present between those reasons and the design problems people are bemoaning exists, and I don’t think painting the two as mutually exclusive is particularly helpful to the discussion.
Looks like that list I posted earlier got updated, and by a different source (now it’s by the person who basically leaked all of SanSan back in the day).
Since apparently I can’t quote myself with a spoiler…
The old leaked list was:
PPvP and Desperado off, Temujin and Bio-Ethics on.
Tier 3 of the MWL that was -3 per copy. Blackmail, Sensie Actors Union, Sifr, Faust, Rumor Mill
The new leak also adds:
Mumbad City Hall to Tier 1, DDOS to Tier 3.
And Power Shutdown is getting a errata so that you can’t choose a higher number of cards to trash than that’s printed as a cost on a installed runner program or hardware
Eli 1.0 also comes off the list.
