Crapdoodle. Try them now.
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This is what I fundamentally disagree with. This would simply demonstrate that a good player playing a deck with which they are familiar consistently does well in a tournament environment. You cannot infer from this that this performance was due to âYomiâ any more than it was due to a disparity in the general skill level of the players with respect to Netrunner fundamentals, or experience (e.g. players not knowing the high percentage lines against an unfamiliar deck type), or match-ups, or the various other sources of variance present in Netrunner games.
I suppose the immediate counterpoint here is that given enough data points, you can start to draw conclusions. I disagree that a single tournament, even a large one (even a few large tournaments!) is going to give you anywhere near enough data points to reasonably pull out âYomiâ as the factor that is pulling up the average wins.
Cool. Finding the core of disagreement is extremely useful, iâll try to adress this a bit more in detail.
Thus what i have to prove here (and that you disagree with) seems to be that consistenly winning with Mushin for example requires predicting opponents patterns, while you state that this is a matter of good base-EV play and general variance, correct?
I play a lot with my PE kill deck that I use a lot of Mushin tactics with. I donât consider the deck to capitalize on âmind gamesâ to win (however if you play predicably I will capitalize on that for the kill). Rather, my deck builds high threat board situations that create hard choices for the runner. Itâs even better if I can create win-win for myself. A Mushin-ed Fetal AI is a great example. Itâs valuable to me whether you run it or not. The situation is much like an agenda and Midseasons/Sea Source threat. This isnât winning by mindgames, itâs creating a situation I can take advantage of regardless of what the runner does.
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I think the terms mind-games is a bit of an exaggeration. The term means âto exploit opponents play patternsâ.
What you describe is creating a âforkâ, a set of two bad choices. That definitely is a part of the game when playing any mushin-PE deck as well.
However whenever you are weighing in what you think your opponent will do when you make high-variance plays (Mushining a Philotic is a good example) you try to Yomi. The thing that separates this type of move is that you leave yourself vulnerable in some way to achieve a result you would not otherwise be able to.
Simply blank-installing cards that benefit you anyway is definitely not Yomi. Some people do think this, and there is truth in what both Xenasis and Epimer says above in that players often overestimate their ability to predict opponents post-fact.
Blank-installing a vitruvius is Yomi however, as that has more severe consequences than simply losing a click and a card if your opponent checks your bluff.
Do you perform these types of moves often when you play, or do you try to find ways around having to make them? The answer to that question is what i would consider the decider on if you Yomi or not.[quote=âCynchwyrm, post:24, topic:8732â]
(however if you play predicably I will capitalize on that for the kill)
[/quote]
This seems to imply that you do.
Not really. I think consistently winning with Mushin (for example) involves setting up situations where your Mushin is going to be impactful. I donât think that setup is a Yomi skill as itâs been defined in this thread.
In any case, I donât think thereâs anything we can reasonably do to prove the impact of Yomi as you postulate (and I promise Iâm not trying to shut down discussion here as a means to take my toys and go home), because what would be convince me would be i) experiments that we canât do because we canât control our variables, or ii) a statistical treatment that I donât believe we have good enough data for.
Then, since you are arguing a case that you do not think is falsifiable by any means we simply have to agree to disagree. Good discussion so far.
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I didnât mean to imply that I donât use Yomi with my deck. What I was trying to say is the deckâs primary strength is those tough choices that might be all bad.
When I win there is often some successful Yomi play, but I donât think that is unusual for a Corp deck. FA and Prison are types that minimize risk to the Corp, whereas my deck works to maximize the risk to the Runner. The risk/reward for running my face down advanced cards takes a similar Runner calculation as running a remote with a face down card and unknown ice. The Runner has to decide what the worst case scenario could be and how that impacts the game state.
This is the essence of Netrunner to me and why I keep coming back to my PE deck. I like the Yomi play but when I lose I can generally see where I misplayed and my opponents used sound decisions to minimize or mitigate my threats. It almost never comes down to a binary choice of Mushin one card over another, or the Runner choosing to run a single particular card.
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Fully agree with this. It is why i play PE as well.
Itâs turn 12, you are both on game point. You have a Mushin, a Future Perfect, and a Cerebral Overwriter in your hand. The runner already has 3 brain damage.
Some people believe that in this situation there is genuine skill to selecting the card that you Mushin. They think that you can have a âreadâ on your opponent or get âin their headâ. Others think that this choice is random, since on the runnerâs turn they can choose to just pick at random whether to run or not.
To really understand this situation and the forces and skills at play, you have to consider the payoff matrix of your decision. With either choice you have a 50% chance to win the game (the runner runs the trap or doesnât run the TFP), but if you Mushin the trap and it is not run, you are actually still in the game, whereas if you Mushin the TFP and it is, then you have lost. This means that there is actually quite a bit more reason for you to Mushin the trap. Knowing this, there is a reason for runners to believe that running Mushins in such situations is a bad idea, since the Corp has a big incentive to choose the trap.
The above leads to a general paradigm of not running Mushins, since this matrix also applies (although less strongly) to non-game-point situations. Many players notice this trend and feel themselves exploiting it. It makes them feel smart and perceptive as they score agendas through this new mysterious skill of âyomiâ. This feeling of accomplishment makes them insist that âyomiâ is really some kind of hidden complexity under the surface of Netrunner, how else can they be successful with their mushins more than 50% of the time?
Of course itâs all bullshit. Yomi is bullshit. Just run all the Mushins until they realize you arenât taking them seriously and they switch to a real deck out of boredom.
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Please, act predictably and run all my Mushins. I wonât be the one changing my play out of boredom.
I donât understand the question. Yomi has a place in games with perfect information, why wouldnât it in netrunner?
I find it fascinating that this opinion or attitude is so broadly held. To me few things in games are more obvious than that opponents do not play perfectly, and that it is possible to pick up on and play around that.
It seems to be a somewhat emotional argument as well, since opinions are always very strongly stated with not a little hyperbole. It feels like the proponents do not like losing to this sort of situation and especially since they believe that the loss is undeserved, or that their opponent thinks they âmind-readâ them which both makes them feel vulnerable but at the same time they correctly observe that this is not what is happening.
Yomi is never about certainties, anyone who claims so (or thinks they are a master mind-reader) is wrong. It is about tendencies. Exactly the same way that strategy in probability-games is about tendencies (if youmake the statistically correct decision you will win more on average) Yomi is a response to the non-perfect-strategy behaviours of your opponent, and functions in exactly the same way.
Any move made with information about anything external to the gamestate is Yomi. Did the opponent look at the card to the right when you ran? Yomi. Did he pause while looking at a card from R&D to trick you into that it was an agenda? Yomi. Did he never run your blank-installed card, then chances are he will not runyour next. Yomi.
Itâs really quite simple.
Anyone denying that players do not play games using information external to the boardstate,or is affected by their emotions and that that can be exploited is clearly in the wrong.
Iâm gonna roll with this definition of yomi since I think itâs the useful way to understand it.
Weâre defining yomi as taking advantage of non-game theory optimal strategies in payoff matrix scenarios. This is a reasonable definition, and I think is a skill that exists to a certain degree in netrunner.
There are two important considerations from here:
- How important is yomi at the moment?
- How important should yomi be?
The main place Iâm familiar with yomi being used (and validly) is in fighting games, where choosing options in a payoff matrix happens at reaction time in highly iterated scenarios. Both of these aspects are key, as the reaction time means itâs hard to calculate what the gto of a unique situation is in zero time, and youâre picking strategy based on a mix of pattern recognition and on the fly strategy. Since most gto strategies in situations like these are mixed, itâs extremely likely that people are not calculating semi unique gto optimal strategies on the fly and people are also incapable of proper randomization on their own. What this means is that in fighting games abusable non game theory optimal strategies are without a doubt present. The other half of this is that fighting games are highly iterative games, where it takes a whole bunch of interactions and payoff matrices before you win. This is very important because it means you get to observe your opponents strategy over time and figure out how it is deviating from the optimal strategy. Both of this things are required for yomi to be an important thing in a game, because you need to have a situation where no one can play gto and where deviations from said strategy can be learned recognized and abused which requires it to be iterative so there is data.
So we look at netrunner, and to a certain extent it fails at both of these things. Unlike fighting games, we have the time to figure out what the optimal mixed strategy is and properly randomize. You can figure out the game theory optimal mix of psi games in basically all situations and then properly randomize with dice. I will say not everyone does this, and it can be abused. However, in tournament situations youâre going against people who you likely havenât played before. Which means all your information on behavior is from a single game. Then we look at the sort of stuff where youâre having iterations on a similar situation that you can put in a payoff matrix, and you end up with just a couple that work: Caprice psi games, PE non advancable traps, and na games. In all of these I think the importance of yomi is dwarfed by being able to correctly analyze the situation and understand what the basic gto strategy is for either side.
Itâs important to note I donât list mushin here, as I think mushin is a good example of how yomi is not important in netrunner. You look at it, and youâre playing 3 mushin in a game which is not enough to get data on to form any coherent vision of your opponents strategy. This is basically stastically non arguable imo. Secondly the time you donât have multiple choices on what to mushin, and itâs correct to just mushin whatever trap you have, so itâs not like you can even implement your strategy based on observed behavior since waiting to draw the correct trap/agenda is always going to be worse than just trying for whatever you drew.
This is all to say I think yomi is not a very important thing in todayâs cardpool. The game isnât set up for it to be a highly relevant skill at the top tier of play. This is still fine, and I think mushin is a fine card to be in the game since it isnât overly powerful, has various non guessing based counterplay, and the truth is people do enjoy gambling. I think if you want to build the carpool to support yomi play, you need to have stuff more like Na PE where you have more lower impact traps so your opponents strategy can be analyzed.
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most of the time you see how your opponent reacts early and play accordingly. you dont âbluffâ the same way each gameâŚ
Alright, finally got some time to respond to this. First off, well argued. If i summarize your argument a bit i interpret it as this:
For Yomi to be important two factors are dominant:
- Time pressure to take âintuitive decisionsâ instead of calculated ones
- Time to observe behaviour patterns and lots of interactions to even out the inherent variance
Netrunner does not fulfull this because:
- Much less time-pressure to force intuitive decisions
- Less overall finite actions to find and exploit pattens in a game
Adressing point 1 first, i do not think the type of extreme time-pressure present in fighting games is necessary here. What is needed is obfuscation of variables in the strategy. First off, the opponent is unaware of the options avaliable to you (both because of decklist-contents being unknown, and order of draws being unknown). This means that since you know your optimal strategy and they donât (given your options) you can exploit their expected behaviour if you expect them to act as your draws are random (which they are, to them, but not to you as soon as you have drawn).
Further, there is indeed time-pressure in a tournament and even if not forced by this time-pressure people are generally taking decisions at least partly on inuition anyway. One might argue that really good players do not, so for that i will call this a minor point.
From playing a lot of PE in tournaments at top tables my impression is also that players very rarely actually play to base-probabilities. The risk-averseness is generally too great. People are also very unpracticed against the payoff-matrix of PE and take suboptimal decisions, of course.
Adressing point 2, there is indeed much less time to observe patterns in a single game of Netrunner. For three reasons it is enough however. First, when playing a Yomi-deck for a long time you pick up on many more actions as cues to behaviour and learn to bait actions that are low-risk to yourself to test runner-behaviour.
Second, you also get a lot of information purely from the ID the opponent plays and the deck they use hinting at what actions they would like to take at which stage of the game. If you are facing a combo-deck, like Dyper, players are much more reluctant to run. Similarly if you are facing Noise or the like.
Third, you gain a lot of information on a meta-level from many players (not all) if they have a bad pokerface. You also learn people and people are not always all that different. You never start from scratch in a game if you have played your side many many times against various people their actions (if you are lucky) may start making sense quickly enough leading you to interpret a lot more from their actions. Both in-game and from signals/cues.
Mini-fourth, you also learn to actively manipulate opponents. If you are not playing to the base-strategy of information-giving (pokerface) you can try to actively manipulate actions by giving fake tells. I know this can be very effective, depending on how emotionally sensitive your opponent is. If they are tilted it is at its easiest. There is nothing like making a player feel smart, like they are on to you, then you can get them to do things that you want them to do. This doesnât work on everyone, but on many, especially with unfamiliar players in the pressure of a tournament environment. The trick to do this convincingly is o find just the right level of signalling to make them think that they observed something you did not do purposefully. This is different for different people, and much harder if they know you and expect it.
Final notes, Mushin is the epitome of Yomi in Netrunner. It is a single high-impact decision that, if you do have a read, is the most powerful tool to use. If you do not have a read (which you do not always control, and can be really hard to achieve) it is still useful to do base-strategy pokerface random installs. That is not Yomi, and that is what many players do when they start out with a Yomi deck, or just simply installing blank cards as they draw them. I think this is why players feel like âJinteki mindgamesâ is just base-strategy randomization, since that strategy is also very frequently used in combination.
It is the fall-back plan however, for when you feel tilted yourself or do not get a read from your opponents behaviour or actions. Iâve done this for a while now, and people are on average more predictable than they think, and way more than they want to be.
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Just figured out another very useful shorthand definition of Yomi relevant to this discussion:
Moves in a game that punish opponent predictability.
This to me seems like a rather tight criteria that gets to the point. If a game allows moves to capitalize on opponent predictability, then that game has an amount of skill-depth in Yomi.
It also hints at some of the controversy in the subject i think. Certain decks play very predictably, especially combo-decks like Dyper. A deck that can go full-gear vulnerable/offensive like a Mushin deck with Roninâs and agendas is a natural counter to a Dyper player playing predictably.
Note that differing from other decks a full on Yomi-style deck rather than have a single powerful gameplan has to have several, but is balanced by all those plans having a weakness if played predictably itself. Thus the game becomes more about the players than about the decks, which is why i think people find it unfamiliar/unsettling.
Many professional players always play very tight, taking minimal risks unless they absolutely need to. The fact that there is an alternative that is not objectively worse, just different, is strange until you get used to it.
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