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Comment by j_4 | Hacker News Reader

Of note here is Null Signal Games - https://nullsignal.games/

Android: Netrunner was a great cyberpunk-themed, asymmetrical card game which ran 2012-2018, and ended because of a licensing disagreement between FFG and WotC.

Null Signal Games is a donation and volunteer-driven organization which has been shepherding the game - designing new sets, commissioning artists, providing prize kits, and organizing big events to let the game continue. For the most part, they've been knocking it out of the park. New cards are freely available as print-and-play files. Proxying is allowed and encouraged.

Just to not give a purely rosy picture, I'll note that they foster a very combative social justice element which drove some heavy-handed choices and sour community interactions, but on the whole it's been a laudable effort, and continues to do great work.

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I'm quite into this space. I played virtually every LCG that FFG published. I still have all of my original Netrunner LCG cards.

I'm very interested in seeing how Null Signal progresses. The LCG community has always had problems with gaining new members. A new game would launch, tons of people pick up the core sets. The games get into their first few cycles, and then no new people start to join. Then another LCG would come out, and people would go play the new hotness. I don't know if Null Signal is trying to overcome this problem though.

I did find it interesting that WotC has seemingly abandoned their Netrunner trademark [0]. I wonder if that means they Null Signal is effectively in the free in clear. They always seemed to be operating in a bit of a grey area. I don't have a lawyer friend who I've been able to ask.

In this same vein, Pinebox Entertainment [1] has been keeping AEG's Doomtown: Reloaded alive in a similar way. Another fantastic "LCG"* that a big company quit supporting but was picked up a by another small group. Neither of these games have a big following, but I'm interested if either of them will make an economically viable competitive LCG game. As it stands, FFG and AEG have abandoned all of their competitive FFGs. And FFG had several. Only their cooperative LCGs remain.

[0]: https://uspto.report/TM/90791419

[1]: https://pineboxentertainment.com/

* I say "LCG" because that was a trademarked term by FFG. AEG wasn't allowed to call it LCG. I forget what they called it. But it had an identical distribution model.

Yeah, LCG seems like such a great and ethical model, but has a proven track record of being hard to keep alive.

I'm currently a very happy player of Flesh and Blood TCG and think it's a fantastic game with great stewardship, but I have very mixed feelings about game economy entirely based on boosters, especially now that I work on games myself.

> Just to not give a purely rosy picture, I'll note that they foster a very combative social justice element which drove some heavy-handed choices

This is also true of WotC.

As far as I know, it's a whole different scale of issue. WotC did some fashionable corporate virtue signaling. Some of it sounded reasonable enough to me, some of it was a bit eyerolly but nothing I'm aware of seemed too egregious.

To give one example - Netrunner has (had, I guess) a mechanic called Brain Damage, tied to effects which in lore terms did just that to the runner (hacker) character: heavily damaged by nasty corp tech while jacked into the cyberspace, and having to operate with less capacity/limited resources from that point on. Pretty standard cyberpunk stuff.

Null Signal decided one day that the term is grossly insensitive and now purged from the game, and while they might've told you to print cards containing it up until yesterday, reading it off your cards is now considered literal violence and will get you booted off tournaments. If you're not immediately 100% on board with this decision, you are a morally deficient person and not welcome in the community.

Null Signal's blog post[0] about the topic seems to entirely contradict your narrative about how this change is being approached. Have there been further developments since this was first announced?

"You will not be banned for referring to brain damage. We prefer that you switch to core damage, and will remind you, but it’s not an enumerated infraction.

However, if a fellow player is harmed by any aspect of your behavior (including using the old term instead of the new term) and politely requests that you stop, you are expected to do so. We have always asked players to be polite and make easy accommodations when asked, as is clarified by our Code of Conduct. This is not a change in policy."

[0] https://nullsignal.games/blog/core-damage/

You'll notice that was added in an addendum, they must've backtracked. I haven't seen it before. What I saw was the original announcement and the resulting Reddit discussion, in which the article author and several other members of the organization had a very different, self-righteous, and downright combative tone. The threat of banning people for not complying was explicitly spelled out.

That Reddit thread is here. It seems to have been thoroughly cleaned up, but you can still see some slivers. I don't think it's worth wading through it, especially if Null Signal learned to be more diplomatic from it - just wanted to make it clear that I was being truthful, or at least as best as I could. I remember the "violence" and "morally deficient" bits as direct quotes, but my memory might be faulty and hyperbolized.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Netrunner/comments/vvr25h/nisei_an_...

(NISEI is the former name of Null Signal Games, that's also a term they deemed insensitive, and chose to fully rebrand.)

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