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

If CI is banned (which I would support), this seems unnecessary. If CI is not banned or restricted, I don’t think this goes far enough.

I think trying to play VLC out of other IDs is kind of interesting (Asa maybe could pull it off, but they like Ultraviolet better).

My only caveat would be that maybe with Jinja shenanigans it’s too powerful. But maybe not. Presumably they want to do most of their Jinjing on a scoring remote, in which case R&D is soft and you can just trash the VLCs. Jinja on R&D itself is kind of interesting, but I’m not sure it’s actually good.

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SPOILERS: Oh, I think Hippo is pretty much fine. A very fixed and fair version of Parasite. It’s non-recurring, non-instant install, multiples can’t be “primed” with spare clicks due to uniqueness, and, most importantly, requires you to actually pay to break the ice (instead of letting you skip payment, like Parasite did). It’s good, maybe even great, but not even close to OP, imo.

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Dunno if u answered me, bit this aumakua/zamba/gpi/turning wheel thing sucks alot and the virus-infection of tjis cycle is still not done i fear

Yeah…this is more of a prediction that I tacked on to my list.

I don’t know…I think unless the Corp has a big econ advantage over the runner, it doesn’t make any sense to rez an expensive outter ICE if the Runner only has to break it once. Almost All ICE get their return over multiple runs. I think you’re going to see Hippo as a mando include as it effectively serves to replace all the cutlery in a single card that has a constant paid ability threat unlike events. In other words I think it’s gonna play a lot more like DDoS than Parasite did. But could be wrong:) .

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A big econ advantage over the runner?
You mean like what’s required for Tapwrm to be a playable card?

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Thanks for the mea culpa on totally cherry picking my quote earlier to make it appear I was arguing the opposite of what I actually was.

I gather from this rhetorical question that you’re trying to show that my view on the spoiled hardware is inconsistent with my view on Tapwrm (that it should not be restricted).

Firstly, to answer the question at face value…no, Tapwrm doesnt require the Corp to have a big econ advantage over the runner to be playable. It requires the Corp to have more than 5 credits to be playable.

Secondly, the big econ advantage i was referring to was to influence Corp rezzing. In other words a state compareable to DDoS even without using it. If the Corp does have a big econ advantage and can rez, then they probably won’t after the paid ability triggers. This card is strong either way!

Thirdly, while dependency on the opponent’s economy does weaken a card, Tapwrm’s purgability and succeptibility to best defense weakens it much more. AlsoTapwrm requires a MU and has an install condition.

Finally, the spoiled hardware’s ability has attack value that Tapwrm doesn’t offer and can create more structural change on the Corp’s board.

To imply that I’m being inconsistent just because I reached different conclusions about two cards that loosely share one attribute is silly. Please stop cherrypicking me.

Here’s what I’d expect as a minimal level of customer support:

  1. “Day One” errata/FAQ (whatever you want to call “clarifying cards”) on the first day of release. Produce a blog post outlining the design intent in more general terms in addition to ruling on specific interactions. (Knowing design intent can help set precedent for deobfuscation of rules issues later on.) Must be released on the first day the cards are available. These cards have been in the works for a year or more so you have time to use playtest and community feedback to spoilers as a way of preemptively managing both cases. There’s no excuse for cases like Standoff.
  2. MWL/Ban/Restricted list updated upon the first pack of a new cycle, the last pack of a cycle, or both. Just do it. Or, optionally, an update based on the organized play schedule (“based on the data accumulated during Store Championships, here is our response.”) Or optionally quarterly, which they’ve blown.

I don’t understand why everything is so complicated. I feel gaslighted by FFG whenever I want suggest it’s healthy and normal to set a routine and stick to it, to communicate to your loved ones what your expected goals are, and to allow your loved ones to provide feedback to you based on their observations of how you set goals for yourself.

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Can we at least wait until Q1 has ended before complaining about how FFG has failed us all with its lack of quarterly updates?

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But…the last mwl release was in Q3 2017? So they already failed the “quarterly” release regardless of whether you use three months or quarters as a rule?

So, eh, no.

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It went into effect on the first day of Q4. True, it was announced four whole days before then, so I won’t stop you from dying on the hill of them owing us an extra update if that’s really how you feel, but it does seem kind of weird to hold a view that entails that the Q3 and Q4 updates could have happened on the same day.

If 1st October was start of q4 then we are now at 4 and a half months later.

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Yes, and if they had promised us an update each month, and it was now mid-November, they would still have two weeks left.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely share y’all’s impatience, but expressing our eagerness for the quickest and perhaps least necessary MWL update in Netrunner history does not require that we overlook how calendars work.

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I completely agree with everything you say. I would personally go with MWL updates based on competitive schedule, because some people have busy lives and might not have time to throw out the deck they’ve been practicing and start testing matchups with something completely different in the middle of their store championship season, but either would be fine.

As to why they won’t do it either of the things you suggest? from looking at everything else they do, probably because they can’t. This year they couldn’t even get store championship prizes to the stores in time, let alone relese an MWL update before store championships. We went LITERALLY SIX MONTHS without a single card being released from the game, and 4 months without even knowing if there would ever even be another card for the game, during which time probably around half hte playerbase evaporated!

They won’t do these things because they are unable to. They don’t know how to set a schedule and stick to it, they don’t know how to manage a supply line, they won’t take advantage of printing on demand so as not to upset relationships with their existing suppliers, and the executives won’t bring anyone on who knows how to do these things because they still think they’re a 15-person mom-and-pop shop and don’t want to change the company’s “culture”. Working there must be like banging your head against the wall for 8 hours a day, and people like Boggs are honestly doing a public service by doing so.

I’ll stop, cause I’m rambling, and off-topic, and making more typos the angrier I get.

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My mind starts to argue with itself when I think about the “mom-and-pop” analogy. It goes something like this:

A: It doesn’t matter how much money Netrunner (or other LCGs generate), if the company knows that there is an active community of players that care, they should treat those customers with respect.
B: Sure, but how much money does Netrunner really generate? Just like in life, people tend to focus on the things that are important and valuable and focus less on things that take up a smaller part of the Pie Chart of Life. You and your community just happen to enjoy this thing that falls in that sliver.
A: NO YOU SHUT UP. It doesn’t matter where it falls in the Pie Chart of Life; if you are going to produce a product for a consumer, then you need to tend to it with the same level of care as any of your bigger products.
B: At some point, there’s probably someone who is just saying, "We don’t get paid enough to stay on the ball with all of these products. Hell, Fred in Organized Play just got here and he doesn’t even play games!"
A: Which goes to my point. Magic the Gathering has an active Organized Play team because they care about the community and see OP as a long term investment.
B: EXACTLY MY POINT. Magic the Gathering makes more money than FFG LCGs (probably, most likely, definitely) combined. Which means they can spend more money on OP and therefore continue to care for it as a long term investment.
A: We’re talking about rolling out a 4 page PDF file every few months!
B: NOOOOO, we’re talking about having a document rolled out every few months that has to be so technically sound because it becomes the defacto truth of how the game is played and any error will cause the community to pull their hair out. And this has to be done with EVERY GAME they produce.
A: Your mom produces games.
B: My MOM is your MOM.

and this continues Infinite Ad Absurdim (or some other smart sounding fake latin term).

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If fewer people play you have less to lose so you care less about quality

Vs

The more quality you put in, the more people will play

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Yep. Nice. My “dialogue” involves more anger toward Star Wars.

The question is whether those games WOULD generate more money if they were given better tournament support though, rather than pulling everyone off them to work on a brand new LCG every 6 months.

It does look like they’re making more of an effort with Destiny and L5R, but it remains to be seen if that’s because they’re just doing their typical “this is new so let’s heap some love on it” thing which they then forget about after a year.

Tapwrm is the most inefficient and least-reliable way to get 1 credit a turn in the game. At 2 credits a turn, it’s about average. 3 credits/turn it’s actually good. Oh hey look, the Corp has at least 15 credits, in which case, they have a big econ advantage.

That’s weird because you totally said Clot was the problem (of those three) and I replied that Clone Chip is the problem, already restricted, and restricting Clot too is a misidentification of what’s wrong in the meta. If you have to pick one of the three, SacCon is the appropriate target, not Clot. It’s the enabler.

Also this argument is separate: “Out of Tapwrm/SacCon/Clot, Clot is the problem.”
“New hardware is only good as long as Corp doesn’t have a big econ advantage.”
Those certainly look different.
And pointing out that Tapwrm is playable is contradicting the premise of the second argument, and doesn’t have anything to do with the first unless you were being extremely defensive about your arguments being fundamentally flawed.

And, here’s another counter-indication for Hippo: Let’s assume you rez a Tollbooth on the outside.
You’re down 8 credits. They break it with, lets say David because that’s probably the best breaker for this.
They’re down 3 credits from encounter, 3 credits from David install, 2 credits from Hopper install. Hey,
that’s 8 credits, too. And you’re both down a card (Tollbooth, Hippo). Seems like an equivalent exchange,
instead of Tollbooth’s normal use-case of being a constant economy drain. Hippo is honestly well-positioned to fight a meta that’s built around FC3.0 being a very good piece of ice and specifically counters it, forcing the Corp to actually put a second ICE on the outside of the server if they want to continue to benefit from FC3.
So, trying to restrict it is a misidentification of what’s wrong with the meta.
There, happy? Now I’ve spent a bunch of words to say the exact same thing that was said with fewer words and a more focused argument.

  1. I appreciate and like your actual non-condescending argument in the last paragraph. If you had said that rather than posing a “gotcha” rhetorical question then maybe I could have responded to it differently. I still think the effect is stronger than this because it’s impact goes beyond the immediate economic tradeoff and into disrupting the Corps long term value of cards and its scoring plans. But I totally concede that I’m wrong to think any of the new cards should be placed on MWL. They need to be played first…it’s too hard to predict how the whole thing will shake out.

[EDIT] I took out my middle issue cause it was beside the point.

  1. Regarding what I said about Clot, you seem persistent on this:

So let me go back to the context in which I discussed Clot. I replied to Kopiok who posted this.

Here is the part of my response that discussed Clot as a better restriction target than Saccon:

Here is what you quoted from my argument:

Then here is how you used that quote:

Notice that my original argument was for the same point you were making. I was just trying to be polite by entertaining Kopioks idea that the Tapwrm-Saccon-Clot interaction is too strong. Immediately next, I suggested that Corps should be more willing to adjust to Runner tech (which if it isn’t clear is an argument against restricting):

This is arguing for the same position as you. In other words, I think we actually agree on this and none of those cards should be restricted. I don’t think anyone likes being made out as a strawman for the thing they’re actually trying to dispute. Hope we can put this misunderstanding away.