If you were a realist you wouldn't have said something as unfathomably stupid as "Netrunner already died." Please take your petty cynicism and keep it and you far, far, far away from my favorite game which is alive and doing better than ever, thank you very much.

How well is Netrunner doing?

It's pretty dead in the store I visit. Down from about 14 at Leuge nights to about 2-4

You might want to expand your sample set?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/pdxnetrunner/

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We are very active. We have meetups every day except Tuesday and Sunday. --Bryan Blumklotz

Neither of these really comment on the actual health of the game. Active or semi-active player base numbers and recent sales figures would be a better indicator than saying there's a dead scene or a facebook group with X members.

If TylerTTT is going to judge the health of the game based on his one personal game store, it's entirely sufficient to refute that data point with evidence of a large and active community in the area listed on his profile.

And yet my question remains unanswered. While I can see that 300+ people are in the group, I can see nothing of the activity on the page nor gain a true picture of actual players in the area. If we're using facebook groups as a viable data point I could look to the facebook groups for LCGs in my area which show page activity from about 20% of members and do not reflect close to the actual number of players. All you really did was show evidence of a large-ish collection of people in the Pacific Northwest who are in a group with Netrunner in the title.

I don't care one way or the other about your internet quarrel. I just want to get an idea how healthy Netrunner actually is.

Nobody outside FFG has that information, Q. The number of members or the activity in the group is not the point so much as they are meeting up to play five nights per week. That says, at least in the Portland area, that the game is doing pretty well, and it falsifies TylerTT's basis for thinking the game's dead.

On 06/06/2017 at 0:51 AM, TylerTT said:

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14 hours ago, Grimwalker said:

Nobody outside FFG has that information, Q. The number of members or the activity in the group is not the point so much as they are meeting up to play five nights per week. That says, at least in the Portland area, that the game is doing pretty well, and it falsifies TylerTT's basis for thinking the game's dead.

FFG France just announce the end of the French edition of the game because the sell were no longer good. They only had 28 players at the last championship of France.

That's unfortunate. But, FFG's LCGs are published by a different company in France, Edge Entertainment. It adds another layer to the WOTC -> FFG -> Edge -> Distributor -> Retailer chain of profitability, so if the margin is getting squeezed by poor sales, it could be worse in France than it is in North America. (But it still underscores the point that there isn't capacity to arbitrarily reduce profit margins in order to put more material in the box.)

I'm certainly not arguing that Netrunner sales haven't fallen, I just think with the new core set, rotation, and better metagame management, there's every reason to be optimistic.

I was probably a little too hyperbolic to say it's doing "better than ever," we surely haven't set any new high-water marks. I hear reports from all over that people are coming back to the game, NR at Worlds is sold out, and hopefully we'll see an upswing in attendance to Store Championships and Regionals.

This whole thread is about how the LCG format could use a change. I think the new core shows FFG is responding to the need for things to change.

Things like the new core set are what I was trying to ask for.

They already knew endless cycles of packs were unsustainable thanks to AGOT 1st dying.

The new core shows some of their plans to change the LCG model. A way to help replace players that naturally burn out and leave.

Magic the gathering is strong because it can constantly replace the players it loses. FFG needs to solve the back end of that puzzle.

*sigh*

AGOT didn't DIE. The decline of AGOT didn't prompt rotation, you've got it exactly backwards. Sales were still strong, but they recognized that the advent of rotation would break the card pool, so they rebooted it, and took the opportunity to fix a few rules issues. It's largely the same game-- If you knew how to play the first edition, then you'd need next to no instruction in order to play the new one.

The new core is still partially 3x, partially 2x, and four times as many 1x cards, so unless you've changed your mind since the start of this thread, I wouldn't declare victory. The LCG model remains unchanged, and based on the comments that the designer has made in interviews, the need for a Revised Netrunner Core set was a one-off thing to solve specific problems with that game, not an indication that LCG have anything like rotating base sets now.

The core sets and deluxe sets are great products. The packs are not that great. FFG says as much in their advice to new players with the new netrunner core.

Summarized their advice was "Buy the boxes first because they are actually good products. Buy the packs when you realize there is one or two cards you need in a pack and hope to god they are still available.

I'm much less against the 1 of 2 of and 3 of in core sets than I used to be. As the ability to sell 3 of a thing makes the thing much cheaper to everyone involved. Economies of scale and all that.

I think FFG's best release lately was the destiny 2 player set. Everything is a 1 of. Just buy two if you want two. I only bought one and I'm tempted to buy another.

for that matter I think requiring decks larger than 30 cards is poor design. 2 copy max with 30 card decks is my new favorite thing. Hearthstone and destiny are great examples of how you can avoid so many variance reducing cards and deck shuffling simply by reducing the cards needed to play.

I see the revised core of Netrunner more as a way to keep the remaining players, by removing problematic core cards, than attracting new ones.

3 hours ago, vilainn6 said:

I see the revised core of Netrunner more as a way to keep the remaining players, by removing problematic core cards, than attracting new ones.

Many of the changes were driven explicitly by their effect on new players, according to designer interviews. Account Siphon and Accelerated Beta Test were two cards highlighted as having a highly impactful experience for players seeing them for the first time, whether they get hit by the upside or the downside of those cards.

Respect for FFG for realizing their mistakes after 5 years.

2 hours ago, kempy said:

Respect for FFG for realizing their mistakes after 5 years.

If you listen to Damon's interviews he said the decision was made in early 2015.

On 9/22/2017 at 6:13 AM, Grimwalker said:

If you knew how to play the first edition, then you'd need next to no instruction in order to play the new one.

Actually, if you knew how to play first edition, you'd need to unlearn a few thing in order to play the new one. The timing will trip you up every time.

Yes, I said they streamlined some rules. Don't say "actually" when I cited it in the previous sentence. The point I was making is that there is a lot less daylight between AGOT's editions than between pretty much any other reboot of any game you care to name. It can't be said to have "died" and then brought back. FFG decided to change an extant game and the changes necessitated a clean break.

While I agree that AGoT didn't die, I still see old players getting hung up on the differences, even though the core concept of the game is the same. To be honest, I think Netrunner is also pretty close to its predecessor, if not quite as close as AGoT.

Well, one had a sixteen year hiatus and a change of publisher, the other had a planned-well-in-advance, seamless transition.

that L5R announcement is pretty sick!

6 packs in six weeks! I love it.

Im looking forward to seeing how this change of format plays out!

On 6.6.2017 at 7:51 AM, TylerTT said:

Sorry I don't mean to be negative. (I was about out the only person who is optimistic about the ANA Alliance deal)

I'm very interested in L5R and AGOT 2nd but I don't like how LCG's work. I played net runner for a long time but I burnt out on buying all these packs when I maybe played once a month.

LCG's are currently an all or nothing deal. They get massive audiences when they launch and then as the environment gets stale players leave but by that point the cost of entry is too high and there are no new players to replace the old ones.

magic the gathering understands how to deal with player churn. LCG's are very bad at it so they have a limited life cycle.

also I have been really enjoying Star Wars destiny and that Brings the flaws of LCG's into sharp relief (while also reminding me of the flaws of collectible models) I can play with not much product, there is a healthy singles market and trading to fill my wants, and the game stays exciting!

Lcg needs much faster rotation. So the new player does not have to buy so Many cards to be competative and the meta would change much faster. Both Are good things. I don`t mind if some old sets will be rereleased so you sometimes don`t have to buy new things. What I hope is that reused old release Are not together with other releases From the same time. So you have completely new situation when those holden oldies come back and you have to find out new tricks and combinations to use them.

So maybe the last core. And two cycles at maximum. And even that can be quite amlot new players. But They can start with smaller card pool and catch upp while older releases rotates out.

I think 4 cycles is enough. That is 2 years of packs, which is what Magic does. It has a cardpool of about (200 Core+330-440 Delux+240-480 Cycle=770-1120 total cards. That is pretty much equivalent to Magic in most ways.