This is actually why I have some interest in a Stimhack OCTGN league or informal testing group. I win the vast majority of my local testing games when trying out tournament decks, but I haven’t made an elimination cut this year in three tries. I’m at least one tier below the people who are placing consistently, and I’m not sure how to get there. (Beyond the obvious ‘play a lot against good players with a wide variety of decks.’)
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Ooooohhhhh - Fancy! (that’s why @Genestealers was talking with @SneakySly during our last OCTGN game…)
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It’s definitely the biggest issue Netrunner has, I think. Between a lack of competitive support and some just genuinely nonsensical rules decisions (like how Pawn can go on Scheherazade but no other Caissa can, because clearly that’s a legitimate rules decision based on card text that all players should be bound by and not a result of seat-of-their-pants design) they’re going to have a hard time maintaining interest.
I know FFG’s no WotC, and by and large I massively prefer Netrunner to Magic… but the rules of Magic are so much clearer and more consistent, and I think FFG really needs to clean their rules up. Might take reprinting or errataing a few things, which sucks, but better to do it and have it done and go forward with structure than to not, and either have more issues doing it later or watch the incomprehensibility pile on.
EDIT: Also, like, the prize support for tourneys is great, but I’m curious how big the game’ll have to grow before cash prizes at the biggest events start to be a thing. Seems like that’d serve as a draw, even if it’s kind of silly to say.
EDIT 2: Not terribly interested in cash prizes myself, I doubt I’d ever be in a position to win 'em. Was more thinking about the draw – but there’s a good point made that that draw might not be of the sort of players we’d like to see being brought in.
To be fair to FFG, it took decades for WoTC to get them to that state.
Until all players can enjoy the “Nationals-level events with winners getting their trip to worlds sponsored” level of support, the world finals won’t be a truly representative measure of player prowess. Just sayin’.
(well, either that or have world finals at varying places all over the world, and not in the very same location each year)
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I think FFG’s OP dudes wear many other hats. Doesn’t help. Plus, either they don’t have a lot of money to spend, or are a bit daft/overwhelmed. All of these things lead to a lack of support in general. Thank the gods the community is so awesome, providing things like forums, tourney software, tokens, etc. that FFG does not. Def. makes my enjoyment of ANR much higher.
Also, major props to @SneakySly. Love this site/forum. You da real MVP.
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FFG is like AEG’s more professional cousin. They produce the same kind of durdly faction-based simulationist card games. They seem to have the same kind of late-product-release issues. They both use people’s hatred of Magic the Gathering as a player-acquistion tool. They both suck really hard at tournament system operation.
They’re incompetent at the same things, but FFG manages to be such in a less grating manner. Likely because they don’t have employees coming into threads to argue with players. 
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As I said, FFG is no WotC. Not saying they should have all of this done already – they simply don’t have the same size of an operation.
BUT it is something that they’re going to need to do, sooner or later, and the sooner they do it the better off they’ll be. It’d also help significantly in netting new players, I think. If it wasn’t for Stimhack and a few podcasts, I’d be nowhere near as interested in the game (or as good, for all that I may not be very), and while the community is great, that’s the sort of thing that FFG should start trying to build upon, so that it’ll stay that way.
Even if they have to call on the community to start with, getting solid card-based judgement calls and rulings and compiling a larger rules document is a good thing to start thinking about.
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I’d love to see FFG’s OP support increase and develop into a more structured environment, but in my opinion, cash prizes are absolutely the wrong direction to take the game in. Yes, it would draw more players to the game, no it’s not the type of players I want to be drawing into the game. People start playing for cash and you pull in all the asshats that you currently see playing Magic competitively (not that all people who play Magic are asshats - I play Magic myself - but the asshat-to-normal-friendly-people ratio is undeniably high w/Magic in my experience). A significant amount of local Netrunner players I know were Magic players that quit playing because they were fed up with the players surrounding the competitive environment for that game. People are astounded at the casual and friendly environment that our Netrunner players provide, even at the Regionals level, and the type of people we have playing is one of the things that make Netrunner so enjoyable for me to play. It was incredible to sit down after games at Worlds last year and have a casual, friendly discussion swapping tales about your decklist and strategies at the highest competitive level in the game. I think you risk losing that environment by introducing cash prizes, and personally, that’s not something I would be willing to give up.
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i was essentially posting the same thing and deleted my post when i saw your post. there are plenty of avenues to explore if you want to make money playing cards. Poker, magic and hearthstone are all good options but leave netrunner out of that lol.
hearthstone is the game you are looking for if you like money. the prize pools are starting to become substantial and its only the tip of the iceberg. i would not be shocked if there is a million dollar prize pool for hearthstone within the next two years. blizzcon is 250k and that number is only going to go up, not down.
I am pretty sure @mediohxcore is the indisputable best Netrunner player right now. I’d put 5:1 odds on him, in any open ranked league setting. I bet @SneakySly would be a marginally distant second, if he played more 
I don’t think anyone else I’ve either watched or actually played against compares. There’s probably 8-12 very excellent Netrunner players (Let’s call them Rank S), a whole bunch of rank A players, but only 1 or 2 rank S+ players. In terms of the CCGs I’ve played, Netrunner has a ridiculous skill disparity between the average-good player and the best player. It is even pronounced at the top levels of play.
I think lots of the discussion of skillful players in Netrunner is confounded by the fact that there are some decks that will always crush average-and-below players, but which are really terrible once people pass a skill threshold. It’s easy to get into situations where you’re like “ohh hey, this dude wins nearly 100% of his games. He must be amazing”.
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If this were a hobby where interaction with other people didn’t matter then I would absolutely agree. I have no doubt that the best guitar player in the world is a “bedroom guitarist” somewhere, who has probably never set foot on a stage and unlikely ever to get a record deal. But, as @Chill84 says, one of the key features of a good player is the diversity he has experienced.
Nobody could have “lucked into all the right concepts” unless the people they were playing against were, themselves, playing what would broadly be considered T1 decks (also employing the “right concepts”). What the “right concepts” are entirely depends on what the decks you’re up against are trying to do. If your local community hasn’t converged on what the competitive playing community (read as: internet) has “agreed” is probably best, then the cards you are playing and the decisions you are making are optimal only in that environment.
If you want to think of it mathematically: you could be sitting at a local maximum, comfortably beating everyone around you and staying ahead of their metagame decisions, but there is likely to be a global maximum somewhere else that you haven’t attained. Moreover, you cannot attain the global maximum without making a departure from your current vantage point because, to do so, you have to investigate a larger part of the parameter space against a wider audience. In doing so, however, you actually compromise your position within the local community because some of the ingredients that go into making your decks and gameplay more robust within the wider game will actually weaken you against what your locals are doing - in which case, what is the motivation for making the transition unless you are also active on the organised play scene?
An example: If your local community were all playing a Jinteki net damage Corp then you could construct a Runner deck that would be almost unbeatable by teching against that specific strategy. You would have solutions to net damage; the most efficient breakers against Jinteki’s sentries and you would know not to facecheck. You wouldn’t, however, be prepared for SEA-Scorch or know how to play against Cerebral Imaging, and you might not be routinely leaving yourself $4 on a run in case you find NAPD - all of which would be regarded as standard at the top level. However, in improving your play for the wider game to attain that level, you would be compromising your strategy against your local scene. You’d be dropping useful Deus Xs and Net Shields in favour of useless Plascretes.
Obviously in reality the situation isn’t quite as black and white as that, but the point I’m trying to get at is that you can’t possibly be making top-level decisions if you’re not contending with opponents who are also thinking at that level.
I find it almost impossible to believe that anyone could excel at this game in a vacuum. The best player in the world will, at the very least, be well read (in order to keep up with the current state of the game) and be surrounded by good opposition - either locally or have a network of online contacts with whom to play and share ideas. Given those ingredients though it’s hard to envisage a scenario in which that player isn’t at least relatively well-known and respected within the wider Neturnner community.
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I tend to agree that you’re probably not getting very good if you aren’t playing with very strong players. However, while that might preclude most people in basements, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t small groups of strong players who don’t come out very often to tournaments or play online, and it certainly doesn’t mean that there aren’t strong players who frequently play against well-known strong players who a lot of other people just don’t know about.
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I couldn’t possibly agree with this post more. FFG desperately needs to get their shit together with regards to Organized Play. We need floor rules, better, more clear and well thought out rules and rulings in general, a better tournament structure, both in a match scoring sense, and in the grander scheme of Store Championship -> Regionals -> Nationals -> Worlds. This game is getting popular, and growing, and FFG really needs to take the bull by the horns before it slips from their grasp. As far as prizes go, I do feel there needs to be something better. Cash would be an option, but it does bring in some undesirable people. Also, I know that FFG has said they do not want to go that route.
I agree in general with @hollis assessment that the disparity between skill levels is huge. From what I have seen, 80% of players are pretty bad, 15% are good, 4% are great and then 1% are amazing. The best way to get better is play with people that are good, and analyze games after you play them, win or lose, to see what could have been done differently. But I will take that 5:1 action if you are serious
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I will not that 5:1 against this guy, for the record. If we dont face off in philly it will be an upset. Fuck new york and their zaibatsu loyalty bullshit.
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Also, there are different levels of “good”. I can play, but I don’t build decks. Even though I have been credited places with building certain decks (like the NBN deck at Worlds) I did not build that. That credit goes mostly to @hhooo and also to our other teammate Ben. Niles usually builds the decks, and the three of us tune them. I can build a deck, but I don’t have a mind like Niles does for it. I am far better at tuning and tweaking then the base concept.
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In all seriousness though, this kind of thread is going to turn into either a circlejerk or a pissing contest, and the only way to really find out who’s good is worlds or a stimhack league
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I think any ELO system would need to come from FFG along with stronger organized play, and some kind of online format. Plugged In was great, but it doesn’t seem like FFG really built on that foundation. From my perspective I personally see the Netrunner community shrinking. A lot of top players are less vocal online, there are fewer people showing up at local store nights (myself included), and lately queuing for a match on OCTGN takes 2x-3x times as long as it used to.
For comparison, I’ve been playing a boat load of Hearthstone lately, which is a vastly inferior game, but with a great laddering system. You win until you get to a point where you can’t continue to beat the competition, or have no competition left to beat. This combined with constant tournaments and the power of the Blizzard community has made it a pretty addictive game, even if it’s less skill intensive and rewarding than Netrunner can be. The reason being is that it’s dead simple to play mostly competitive games until you improve (something that is hard to do consistently with Netrunner). A similar ELO based match making tool combined with an online platform from FFG that better mirrors actual gameplay would be really good.
When you look at MtG (and now Hearthstone I guess) the other big thing is that people can actually play it professionally. That doesn’t seem really feasible with the LCG model and we may be stuck living in a world where we have this really fun game, but lack the environment that encourages consistently higher levels of play.
As for telling who is actually good, isn’t it generally pretty obvious?
People give too much credit to “building” a deck. You can take the majority of decks posted online and plug them into various deck building sites to find countless variations by other less vocal players. Being able to identify weaknesses and tune a deck goes hand in hand with good play in my experience, and many times takes more work than just putting together the base concept.