Netrunner Online

by Malhavoc

Like many good things, it happened by chance.

I was once introduced to Netrunner by a friend at university and immediately liked the game. I had only this friend to play the game with, but since I was quite fond of Magic: The Gathering at the time and was getting into Magic Workstation (a program to play Magic online), I decided to try and modify Magic Workstation (MWS) in order to get a chance to play Netrunner online with other players.

At that time, I did not know of CCG Workshop, and even though it was partially shut down by Wizards of the Coast after a little while, I kept working on my project. I managed to get pictures for all cards, as well as spoilers; in a matter of some weeks, the first Game Pack for Netrunner under Windows was ready! And recently, people have managed to have MWS run on Linux, too!

MWS is in fact a general CCG engine, despite being designed mainly with Magic in mind: The developers simply created a program not tied to any particular game (or copyright!), leaving game packs on different sites and often in the hands of fans. During the years, packs for Lord of the Rings, VS Systems, and a few other games have been made. Maybe even the fact that there is no pay-per-play fee like it was with CCG Workshop helped this program survive through the years, together with the fact that everything is hosted in Russia. However, even if Wizards tried to shut it down, they would not really be able to stop it: The program allows P2P connections, and even the optional server can be downloaded and run by any single user, so once you have downloaded the program, there is nothing which prevents you from playing with it forever. And after all, if during all these years, Wizards have never stopped the Magic module, would they ever care enough about our beloved (but old) game to shoot it down?

To cut a long story short, after some time, I opened up www.runners-net.com, put all the download links and installation instructions on the site (the installation is not hard to do at all and takes very little time), and opened a forum and a java chat (#netrunner on SolidIRC).

After I had sent some messages around the Net, people started to come, and we managed to organize some tournaments. As the months came and went, people joined and left, too, as expected. Today, we have a handful of dedicated players who never would miss a tournament, some players who usually play isolated matches just for fun and sometimes join tournaments, and a number of weefles who come and join a tournament, play a round and just get flatlined to death, which makes them drop out of the tourney; fortunately, some of these weefles seem to survive the brain vulcanization and stay to play in further tournaments, too.

Recently, things have been running pretty smoothly: since most of the players have jobs, families, and such, we just give them the time needed to play, and usually it takes a couple of weeks at most to finish a round—this is quite nice, since it lets everyone play their favorite game without too much commitment. New players may have to wait a bit for the current tournament to finish (unless they want to make late entries resulting in lower scores), but since we do tournament after tournament, this is not so bad. Most new people, however, prefer to get in  touch with the most experienced player and play a friendly single match first, either to understand the game better or to get used to the MWS game interface.

We have tried and are still playing many formats: Unlimited, 1/15, Sealed ... and it seems that the latter is the one preferred by most players. To make Sealed more easily played, I have developed the program NetSeal, which (based on a given seed) generates a MWS card pool for each player to pick cards from. And even though players have always been fair and nice, it also supports encryption and hash mechanisms to ensure that people are going to play only with the cards they were given.

Tournaments are going well: We have two or three very good players who often make it to the finals, proving that Netrunner is not just a game of luck, and many others who have almost started to play “seriously” since the time I put up the site. Despite these differences in player expertise, the games are always very friendly, and people really enjoy them and learn more about the game.

In the most recent tournaments, we even tried to play with some of the so-called “Virtual Sets” (which I have entered into the MWS database): These are sets designed by famous Netrunner players over the years: Chrysalid Matrix by Skipper Pickle, Repeat Intrusion Patterns by Argi Flack, Dangerous Allies by Neal F. Guye, and Winterdawn. Some sets try to revisit old mechanisms like generic ice and generic icebreakers or Stealth, others come up with brand-new ones, such as Justice tokens. Playing with new sets is getting very exciting; it makes the game feel alive and causes a shifting metagame. Naturally, there are some needs for bans or errata for some new cards (and sometimes even for old cards which end up just being too powerful together with new ones). That is why we are taking our time with this and are still testing Chrysalid Matrix and Repeat Intrusion Patterns only.

In the end, I really cannot say that I am a very good player at all, but I like this game, and I am doing my best to keep it alive. The forum has become quite active (much more so than the old Netrunner mailing list these days), and sometimes we also talk about strategy in general, so it is not only about the tournaments. I am quite satisfied with the results we have achieved, even if finding some more players would really be nice! So, if you have not given it a try yet or you know someone who could be interested, have a look! And if you have any technical problems or need a test run, feel free to post to our forum, as we are eager to help newcomers.