Android: Netrunner Floor Rules

I'm surprised no one has posted any opinions on this yet. It's nice to see the beginnings of the Judges program starting to land.

If a random spectator comes along and suggests a line of play to you, you the player is given a game loss, whether you wanted that advcie or not. This is completely absurd and unfair.

And the person who provided the assistance is ejected from the tournament entirely. Netrunner is a game about hidden information; we can't allow spectators to destroy that aspect of the game state. Divulging whether a piece of ice is dangerous, or whether it's an agenda or a trap in a server, or blurting out that the corp just drew two agendas in a row? Or disclosing that the runner is holding DDOS, Inside Job, or Stimhack? Guess what, you just handed the game to the other player. The only appropriate redress is a game loss, and people need to be on notice that the integrity of the game is paramount.

If a random spectator comes along and suggests a line of play to you, you the player is given a game loss, whether you wanted that advcie or not. This is completely absurd and unfair.

Couldn't agree more. If I'm sitting minding my own business playing a game at a tournament I have no more control over whether or not somebody walks up behind me and suggests I install a card than I do the actual weather. I can protect myself against it as much as possible by keeping my hand hidden, or close to my chest etc, but eventually I would need to look at my cards.

More over, with such a hash penalty applied, what's to stop my opponents friend walking up behind me and suggesting a strategy. I lose and his friend wins. Sure, he would be disqualified but only if I can prove they are friends - until that point I'm still the one going home.

Interesting enough, at a recent GNK event I was watching a friends game against an opponent and for what ever reason both players missed that my friend played Hedge Fund, paid the 5 credits and then never took the 9 he was supposed to. As a former gaming club chairman who has judged tournaments before I sat in silence (against my better judgement) until the end of the game. Turns out my friends opponent insisted I should have said something as, in his words, the game condition was not met. Playing Hedge Fund isn't a case of maybe spending 5 credits and gaining 9 credits, you have to take them whether you want them or not, and as a spectator, should have advised both players that the game state was inconsistent at that point.

To that end, what's the difference in that specific example between a Casual event and a Premier. A non-optional game condition has not been met - anyone playing or watching the game from nearby should ensure it has.

_{Well, now at this point everyone is on notice that if you are observing a Netrunner game, keep your goddamn mouth shut.}

Page 3 makes it clear that at the end of the day, situations like this are still up to a judge's discretion. If someone is giving advice to a player who did not want it (and, in fact, actively discouraged it from happening) I would do my absolute best to resolve the situation without a game loss. This would include a thorough investigation, asking anyone nearby for their account of the situation, etc. Certainly, the person giving the unwanted advice would be asked to leave, and anyone who tried to pull this more than once (or even just once, if I was convinced they were doing so intentionally in order to force a game loss) would be banned from the store permanently. This is cheating, and should never, ever be tolerated anywhere. It is the same as any other kind of cheating; a player attempting to manipulate the results of the tournament by subverting the rules. The fact that such a subversion could possibly happen is not a reason to ignore the need for these rules to exist.

All in all, I think the floor rules do a solid job. There's room for improvement in a few areas, but for a first version, I'm rather impressed. One place I'd love to see more clarification is in the area of memory aids. These are generally assumed to fall under the same blanket as outside assistance ("a player cannot refer to notes or other physical/digital information during a match") but isn't nearly as explicit as I would like. For example, say a player accesses 5 cards from R&D. He then separates five of his credit tokens into a pile that is slightly separated from the others. Every time the Corp player draws a card, he moves one of the credits out of that pile and back into his main pile. By my reading of the rules (and keeping with previous rulings), this behavior is forbidden, but the floor rules aren't nearly as explicit as I'd like about how to handle it. I would love to see "notes and memory aids" be separated into a new section, instead of lumping it in with Outside Assistance as it seems to be now. It's really a completely separate issue; Outside Assistance involves a third party influencing the game in some way, while notes and memory aids are entirely in the control of the two players involved in the game. These are very different situations, and should be handled in different ways.

In that same area, are the official game rules considered outside notes? What about the official FAQ? If those two are allowed, what about a reference card with the timing structure of a run, taken from the FAQ? Is this sort of information something that should be available to a player during a game, or can it only be obtained by calling over a judge? These are definitely questions I'd like to see addressed directly in the next update of the floor rules.