Android: Netrunner (not even Scott cares)

Board Games
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Original Thread:

Today FFG made the announcement we have all been waiting for. There is going to be a new core set for Netrunner.

What does this mean?

For a new player who wants to just play Netrunner as a 2-player board game instead of being tournament serious, it means you get what seems to be a better product. They have a lot less ridiculous cards in there.

For a new player that does want to be competitive, it means that the meta is going to explode. Nothing we know from old Netrunner is true anymore. You can get in and compete against people who have been playing a long time because all competitive decks should be new. We will see what the meta is by November with the world championships.

For an old player it means less. None of the cards in the box are cards which never been printed before. There are zero cards in the box I don’t already have. I can buy zero copies. However, they are upgrading the art on a lot of the cards, so I might buy 1x just to have a deck with some spicier, and better, artwork.

Lastly, the biggest deal, is that rotation is happening. The Genesis and Spin Cycle cards are rotating out. They will not be tournament legal. Also, cards that were in the orignial core set, but are not included in the new core set, will no longer be tournament legal. However, many of the staple cards that happened to be in the Gensis and Spin cycles are going to be included in the new core set. That means you don’t have to throw away ALL of your old cards, just most of them. Basically going to just go through the collection and remove all the core 1.0, gensis, and spin cards that aren’t legal anymore.

Here is the new core set list:

Here is the old one:

All the cards that do not appear on the new list are now illegal. All the cards that appear on the new list, but were not on the old list, are cards that were printed in genesis and spin cycles, so existing players already have 3x copies.

Lastly, they announced the first pack of the new cycle.

Will this be enough to “save” Netrunner? A game that has been on the downswing for awhile needs a big upswing. The downswing is largely because we all knew this announcement was coming, but it took too long. If it had come 6 months ago, there wouldn’t have been a problem.

EDIT: They posted a FAQ about rotation

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It will definitely be interesting to see if this will “save” Netrunner, especially in light of the fact that the Legend of the Five Rings core set is going to be released in just a couple of weeks, and who knows how many Netrunner players are going to jump to that game instead.

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Knee-jerk reaction time.

Good riddance: Parasite, Desperado, ABT, Astro, Breaking News.

WTF: Scorch?! Punitive Counterstrike is definitely not Scorch. Weyland simply can’t have nice things.

Interesting that they chose to pull Reina out of the Spin cycle to save her for posterity. I found Reina control decks pretty annoying.

Edit: oh, bye EtF. Won’t miss you too much. (but lol Stronger Together)

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L5R looks like a bad game. Maybe not the worst game, but a typical FFG game not worth investing in.

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Why do you say that? L5R looks pretty interesting, especially with forcing your characters to go away after a while, making the game more competitive, and preventing a snowball effect from occurring.

I don’t want to get into an argument about this, but I don’t consider Netrunner to be any better or worse than any of the other FFG games. It’s just different.

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For a person like me who invested initially, but couldn’t keep up, it’s a pretty big bummer to see those cards going to toilet. I didn’t play the game frequently enough to merit the release schedule. While enjoyable, playing the game required a significant amount of bandwidth in a combination of meta/pokerface, social/political, tactical/strategic areas. Subsequent releases felt designed for short-term impact, designed obsolescence. The meta barely stabilizes before new cards are released.
OTOH, if they decide to release the occasional LTR stable expansion, I might get back into the game.

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I’m really excited that we’re getting a new core. They are removing a few cards in the core set that really warped the design space around them, either by being wildly effective economy engines over the course of the game(Kate, ETF), Cards that heavily constrained your deck building because you would likely be facing it(Astro, San San, Yog), or both(tag me Account Siphon). That said, I will be sad to see Scorched Earth leaving the game. I have many fond memories of the space laser that I will cherish. Hopefully this will allow for a greater degree of diversity in deck building going forward.

Unfortunately, the price point for entry to the competitive level is still well over $500, which is prohibitively expensive. Since the game doesn’t currently have a well supported casual scene, this mean that to play the game you have shell out an absurd amount up front or accept that you will get the stuffing kicked out of you until you buy your way up to the price point. This makes the game very unattractive for new players, which adds to the death spiral I’ve been seeing in the game. I’m really excited to see this new spike of life in the game, but until they figure out how to create viable entry points to the game for new players and a reasonable price curve to get them up to a competitive level, I can only foresee a slow decline for netrunner going forward.

As for the new L5R game, I’ve been watching the tabletop simulator videos for the game and I’m really excited for it. However it looks like it will have a similar issue to other card games, as it appears that good cards are only printed in the developer’s pet factions(phoenix, crane, scorpion), whereas other factions entire stick means that they will be consistently underpowered based on the core mechanics of the game(Dragon, Unicorn).

My biggest concern about L5R has actually been the community. I have heard exclusively bad things about the community organizers associated with this game previously and my interactions with the L5R fandom online have been, outside of one very positive exception, worrisome. While I hope I am wrong, I don’t think that the same caliber of community will form around the new L5R game.

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I was pretty salty about scorch going to the great big rotation list in the sky too. Apparently they made a hostile asset version of it, but it’s much less threatening.

700Ă—584 814 KB

I am excited if this is the direction Boggs will be taking for Weyland threat going forward(run my scary servers or die in a fire), but this needs to be much scarier for that kind of a wind up. Three turn windup should get me a free BOOM!, not a telegraphed scorch from 12 clicks away.

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No matter how fast or slow you release new cards in such a game, it will be too fast for some and too slow for others. People who play a lot get bored and need shakeups. Their meta can stabilize in a matter of days, or even hours. People who don’t play often get left behind when too many new cards are printed. I kept up for a long time, but not I’m way way behind.

The thing is that Netrunner is more viable as a non-competitive game. You can just treat it like the other two player board games on the shelf. Keeping up with the joneses only matters if you go to tournaments or play with strangers. If you never plan to do that, then just get whatever cards you want and do whatever you want. Who cares? Just one core set has a ton of fun to be had in this manner, and the new core set seems to be even better than the first since it eliminates all the oppressive cards.

Also, they did just release a non-rotating expansion. It’s Terminal Directive. It actually includes a Legacy™-style scenario. I haven’t tried it, but I heard that it’s bleh. It still contains a bunch of regular tournament-legal cards even if you don’t play the scenario. Between most cycles they seem to release a “big box” expansion that does not rotate. Only the data pack cycles rotate.

To be competitive you don’t even need to buy every data pack. You can build a deck online and figure out which data packs have the cards you need. There are some packs that have few, or no, cards that are really worth playing. That’s one major player complaint is that a lot of recent packs were mostly full of crap. They didn’t shake the meta because the cards in them weren’t worth playing.

Also, as people quit the game you can load up on cards for cheap if you buy their set.

Lastly, even if you do spend $500, that’s cheaper than just one deck in some M:tG formats. Yet, that $500 got you 3 copies+ of every single card. Hell, that’s cheaper than some individual M:tG cards. It’s also even cheaper than digital card games like Hearthstone. To be competitive at that, you can spend hundreds per year, and still not have every card. And those cards are just bits in a database! You get cardboard for your money with Netrunner!

This new core and rotation does seem good on paper, so I’m into it. For the first time I’ll be able to see what the game is like with no evil or hated cards to be seen. Theoretically people will actually have to play real Netrunner. No crazy combos. No Vamps and Siphons. No Blackmail. No insane econ engines. Just good old running. Exciting!

Still, I just don’t have time to play Netrunner as much as I used to. If I stop playing, no regrets. Thanks to this game I met a lot of great peoples, played a lot of great games, and had good times. Well worth the price of admission. But hey, I won’t complain if it lasts a little longer either.

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The leaks were true.

We will, for a time at least, have a Netrunner game where there are no bullshit decks. At least none that I have seen as of yet. The decisions made during the playing of the game will matter more than the decisions made during the deck building of the game.

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Some hilarious shit is going on right now.

After the big card shakeup, all the top players (I don’t want to say pros because nobody gets paid to play Netrunner), have been keeping their decks secret. They believe they can gain a competitive advantage this way. I don’t believe this because with the current card pool deck building matters less than ever. Instead, decision making during the game, and luck, is what determines victory. That is why Netrunner is really great right now.

Anyway, there is a site called netrunnerdb.com. The way this site works is counter-intuitive, If your account is private, your decks are not visible to the public. Otherwise, your decks are visible to the public. By visible to the public, I mean unlisted like a video on YouTube. You need the link to see the deck. It will only be publicly listed and shared if you actually publish that deck by hand.

So the URLs of decks contain the primary key in the database, and are easily guessable. Someone just scraped all the decks by incrementing the integer. Private decks on private accounts were still private, but they accessed the deck lists of many top players who didn’t understand how the site worked. LOL!

Basically this is the equivalent of stealing signals. It’s playing to win the game. It’s spygate or deflategate. You may not like it, but you can just shut your mouth and kiss Bill Belichick’s rings. And this is coming from a Giants fan.

Of course, this is hilarious to me, but what is more hilarious is how serious the community is taking it. They are so butter! They want these players to be banned from the world championships. LOL. I think they should be given a medal.

But actually, the players that did it are all apologizing and cowing. Probably because the community is bullying them. They shouldn’t even have admitted any wrongdoing. Go the Usain Bolt path and never get caught. That is the way of the champion.

Apparently this is the first time in a long time where I am the toxic/troll bad guy for actually promoting fierce competition in a game.

The same people who played the most evil and unfun Netrunner decks like Moons, IG, 24/7 EoI/Boom are suddenly the ones saying it’s not ok to do everything you can to compete to win. Bunch of hypocrites.

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That story is fantastic. You are certainly in the right.

I finally traded in my original core set yesterday. My greatest accomplishment was playing the game once and actually getting the rules right.

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I’m the only one. The whole community hates me now. /shrug

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I mean, they have an int-based ID that’s part of the URL. That ain’t security. Get upset at NetrunnerDB (or don’t put your SECRET TECH on NetrunnerDB?)

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That’s like putting your secret beta episodes at an easy-to-guess URL.

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Isn’t there an OWASP proscription against doing that?

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At what point does it stop being cool to do this then? Would it be okay to guess passwords and get the lists that way?

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These weren’t credentials. They were unlisted URLs. The people in question just didn’t understand what “unlisted” means. They made them semi-public and didn’t understand the ramifications of doing so.

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Don’t use consecutive numbers for anything even remotely private, unlisted or secure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gocwRvLhDf8

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Also they are super super super mad that somebody looked at their deck list for a card game. And although the card game is competitive, there are no meaningful prizes. It’s not like someone looted their bank account or deleted all their email history. Taking this so seriously is really really bad form for a gamer. Are you going to get this mad if someone betrays you in a game of Diplomacy? It’s part of the game!

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