TheRealLeo said:

I expect them to continue with the 60 card packs. Each pack will have a mix of cards for each corp and runner.

TheRealLeo said:

No thank you. Keep the drip slow. There is no reason to accelerate beyond their normal rate. If they oversaturate the market then it will just be a repeat of the first time, and that's not a good idea.

Further, they'll lose fans if they try to sell too much too fast. $15 * 12 is already $180 year (MSRP, can get discounts online, blah blah blah). Going above that takes this out of the realm of 'sure I"ll buy that pack for $15 to "$30? That's a whole game!"

All I want in the expansion:

byronczimmer said:

$180 for a whole year is hardly a big deal. And I'm not suggesting doing that for the whole year; just the first three or four months, especially October and hopefully early November to make the Championship tourney a little more interesting.

Also, it wouldn't be $30 if there was even distribution amongst the factions. If you ran the typical 60 cards for the corp expansion, 4 new cards per faction (including generic) x 3 each = 60, while 4 new cards per runner faction (again including generic) x 3 each = 48. So unless FFG decides to get greedy, the runner expansion would realistically need to be a little less, maybe $12. So the total would be $27. It's only a difference of $3, but it's still something.

Surely a distribution model like that for only a few months would not be a deal-breaker, or even a game-breaker.

kpyke said:

I hope that doesn't end up in an expansion. If you can pay the cost (A click and 3 Agenda Points?) then that's pretty much an auto win unless some serious meat damage absorption gets added along with it.

At the moment I'm hoping for more cards to further explore the themes of each faction. Like Weyland seems good at making money and the News corp has a lot to do with tag manipulation and getting agendas up.

For runners, I'd like to see more about utilising bad publicity and more programmes (Maybe something like an emergency escape when you reveal a piece of ICE? That would be quite useful, even if it's just a one-shot.)

Note that back in the day, Tag n' Bag could be brutally efficient but also a double edged sword- builds where you either won in the first couple of turns or it's over. The fact that I Got A Rock requires at least one agenda to be scored could potentially cost the Corp vital momentum allowing the Runner time to get up some tag prevention.

The reason why the Corp needed to act fast is the meta aspect- the second a Corp rezzed something killer like City Surveillance (for tag generation), then they've pretty much signalled their intentions to flatline the Runner. Even an unaware Runner should suspect something's amiss if the Corp hadn't delivered the goods upon a single tag ( IGAR requiring at least two). The main killer is that there there were hard counters to Tag n' Bag in addition to all of the meat damage and tag prevention, such as Emergency Self Construct or Arasaka Owns You . A Runner doesn't care about meat damage if his consciousness has been uploaded onto the net, or a corporation can rebuild them.

As it stands, IGAR would be hugely imbalanced in Android Netrunner, but back then it was balanced by actually being slower than the conventional Tag n Bag builds, allowing the Runner to pull some hefty counters. Give it time, and we may see some fun cards in the future.

Plus it's dropping a freaking moon rock on a hacker, who doesn't want the power to do that?? In this setting it wouldn't actually be that out of place either.

TheRealLeo said:

Your impatience is wonderfully exciting, but…

No other LCG has 'accelerated' expansion packs early in the cycle and there is absolutely no reason to do it now either.

I don't give a fly about the experience at Worlds. Per FFG tournament rules, unless the Expansion packs were available at least 30 days before the event, they would not be tournament legal anyway. People still don't have the CORE SET yet and won't until mid-September. Folks are going to be discovering various combinations and ways to do things within the core for a while. I think it would speak pretty poorly of FFG's faith in their product if they released Expansions so rapidly after release as to make the Core set obsolete or to get out of a slow-drip model.

$180 may not be a big deal to you, but for those who were complaining about 'having' to purchase two (or three) core sets to be tournament competitive, anything MORE than $180 per year (for one game) is a bank breaker. If product rolls too fast, people will choose to quit the rat race.

Further, by having focused pack, if the meta game is to play Jinteki, why will people purchase packs dedicated to HB, NBN or Weyland? It is far better to release themed packs where each faction gets a part of the theme in some way, and over time (6-7 or so expansions), a complete story arc is told.

So don't worry about this year's 'worlds' in 2012, it's still too new, and they should limit to just core sets anyway.

Think forward to how awesome next year's world's will be.

TheRealLeo said:

The problem would be logistics more than play balance. You need there to be time for FFG to properly vet the cards, get the manufacturing rolling, submit the ordering info, get quantities from retailers, and then ship on a timetable. If you don't give the retailers enough time to gauge support for the game and understand what kind of product stocking numbers they need to keep, then this will all collapse in on itself.

I'm in support of a slow drip of material for the first year, small packs once every other month with a large pack just before they start organized play would be optimal in my mind for business.

I'd like to see some greater variation in icebreakers and ice. to me, one of the biggest weaknesses of the old game. I would also love to see a return of the stealth/noisy mechanic, only it should effect a lot of different ice, not just barriers and fracters.

I had a wild idea about icebreakers. they are "allergic", they are fairly strong or cheap, but if you encounter ice of a certain type, you have to pay extra or trash them.

Janus said:

You have to keep in mind that if they're playing by the typical CCG model (despite the fact that this isn't a true CCG), they've already got a large repertoire of playtested and ready-to-go cards, much more than what was actually released in the base set, so the only potential trouble would be dipping into their "reserves" a bit. If they have good, diligent playtesters though (and judging by the cards we've seen thus far, I'd say that's highly probable), there's not much to worry about there.

As far as the money issue, I find it hard to believe that an extra $12/mo. for a few months is really a big concern. A lot of what I've been hearing is that players of other FFG LCGs are the ones really interested in this, as well as old Netrunner fans. Neither party is likely to have very many individuals who would shy away from paying an extra $12. If $15 is really the maximum a person is able to budget towards any kind of entertainment for a whole month due to financial constraints, then I'd say they really should be saving that $15 and instead be devoting their time to building a better personal economy, and just rely on friends who play the game to get their Netrunner kicks for a while.

If the issue is a matter of people only willing to devote $15 a month from their "fun" budget to this, then my advice to them is to cut 3 cups of Starbucks from their monthly budget and put it toward this. Caffeine is bad for you in the long run anyway, and Starbucks itself is now claiming they make coffee that contains cancer-inducing substances, so you'll do yourself a world of good by buying something that will give you more lasting enjoyment rather than a shorter life.

I should add that I myself, as a full-time college student and near-full-time worker at a low pay rate job, am also dealing with personal financial constraints. I've actually been considering giving up on LotR LCG to focus more on A:NR, though not just for financial reasons. However, I can reasonably afford $30 a month despite all that, and if I were to really work hard at sticking to a better budget, I could probably even afford to keep up with LotR too, so I really don't think it's all that difficult to accomplish.

Treguard said:

Plus it's dropping a freaking moon rock on a hacker, who doesn't want the power to do that?? In this setting it wouldn't actually be that out of place either.

After reading Freefall I can imagine it more being Wayland dropping a satellite or beanstalk pod on the Runner.

Looking at the board game material again, I stopped for a moment to think about the labor union faction listed there. They were a source of street level activity in the Android game, but they certainly weren't the sort of group that fits as a hacker organization. So if they were introduced into the game, could they give a new look and feel to "Corp" faction play? Or should they be the basis for a sort of "Activist" hacker faction?

(Not looking to make this an advocacy for an immediate release for a new faction, but more theorizing on what a group like that might be like)

Labor might be more akin to a neutral Runner faction like the Brotherhood in AGOT.

Aren't Anarchs the "Activists" already? I mean they run for ideological reasons: the corps are rotten and they want to expose that rot.

Anarchs want to tear everything down, demolishing power structures no matter if they are beneficial or corrupt. The "Human First" labor union from the board game was on par with the Corps on having it's own status quo to preserve and power to wield.

Janus said:

Common misconception. However, in the rules it states:

" Anarchs
Anarchs have strong
contempt for the corporate
oligarchs, the whole corrupt
system, and often for society in general.
Whatever the exact target of their rage,
their unifying characteristic is their anger.
At their worst, Anarchs just want to watch
the world burn. At their best, Anarchs are
tireless champions for the downtrodden and
oppressed . They’re very good at breaking
things, spreading viruses, and trashing
Corporation assets and programs."

They are against the system because it is corrupt, like actually and unambiguously corrupt. They are against society not just because it is there, but because the society they exist within supports that corrupt regime. It's not that they're against any and all regimes.

The noisy/stealthy breakers, as mentioned, would be great.

The idea was a "noisy" icebreaker was stronger - cost less bits to use, but the stealthy breakers had complimentary cards - typically pieces of hardware that provided bits a turn that could only be used for stealth breakers. In fact, if you used a noisy breaker, you would lose bits from the stealth generating cards.

Very cool mechanic.

I'm also looking forward to more corp bit generation. Bank job really hurts the asset heavy, rather weak bit gen cards. There used to be an advanceable asset that scored 4 bits per advancement - information laundering I think.

Anarchosyn said:

Knew I should have double-checked the rules text… ah well, I stand corrected.

Anarchosyn said:

You skipped the sentence before. I highlighted the other relevant part of this quote.

This doesn't change the fact that the corporations are indeed corrupt, and so is the rest of society (since the corps control it).

Had an idea for how stealth and noise could work

Icebreakers themselves, rather than recurring credit cards, would have the stealth trait. stealth breakers require time to be prepared and changing conditions make them less effective. criminal would be especially focused on stealth breakers. the stealth cards wouldn't use credits, but thier own stealth counters, which take clicks to add to the card(but at a much better rate than 1 per click). the corp rezzing ice would automatically trash a few stealth counters in play, representing changing conditions and the plans going out the window. certain ice or other corp cards could trash stealth counters, thematiclly being adaptive and unpredicable. I see HB as being especially good at this, and in a different fashion, NBN as well. also runner cards could exist to accelerate stealth counter generation. Noisy breakers also inherently trash stealth counters as they work.

Noisy breakers would be very cheap to use. they all would have a function of something like "X credits to break all subroutines on one ice". but as a consaquence of that, they generate noise counters(and trash some or all stealth counters). they obliterate an ice, but raise the alarm while doing so. each noise counter in play would raise the strength of all ice encountered by 1. At the end of each run, all noise counters would be trashed. Noisy breakers are quite obviously an Anarch specialty, and their strength-lowering effects make for good combos too. certain corp cards can generate bonus noise counters, or allow corp to gain other bonuses from noise, such as strengthening traces, dealing bonus damage, or even gaining credits. No corp would specialize in anti-noise and each corp have their own style of punishing it.

I want Black Dahlia.

If we get new factions in a big box expansion, then I want the runner to be a corporate spy. Maybe an ability like "x recurring credits. X is the amount of agendas points you have stolen" to fit the idea of a corporation buying info you steal.

And I want the new corp to be the government! With abilities that let you get rid of bad publicity. Maybe exactly like the runner anti tag, 2 credits and a click.

Smilingknight said:

I don't see the government (Or the 'Feds' as they're called in Android) becoming a faction. If you've read Freefall you'd probably get why that's unlikely, but cut a long story short, they have little public power but their secret power is being able to manipulate Corps themselves. You would be more likely to find them as a Runner faction, to be honest.