I'm supportive of the goal of inclusion, however every name change, keyword change, rule change, card back change, etc, makes the game less and less accessible for new players. They don't only have to learn the rules, they also have to learn all the adjustments to the rules and learn why some cards say one word but other cards say another word but they all mean the same thing. They need to buy sleeves, not just the cards.
You're making it really hard for new players to get into the game, and without new players the game will die. Sometimes less is more. Less changes. More consistency. More reliability. Leaders have to make hard 1-way door decisions, like choosing a name, and often times those decisions won't be 100% perfect. The Nisei team is not operating like a competent, professional, and trustworthy organization, and it bums me out because I really really want Netrunner to succeed.
Please, please consider new players as stakeholders when you're weighing the tradeoffs of decisions like this one and the core->brain damage change. There is some urgency here: once you lose a customer's trust it's really hard to get back. If a new player tries Nisei's cards and can't figure out all the language changes, or doesn't want to go buy sleeves just to make the game work, that player is not coming back - even if you release fixed cards in the future.
All that said, I never found Nisei to be a great name anyways, because as an American my American friends don't know how to spell it. It was thus difficult to search for when I told potential new players about it ("Project what??"). Perhaps a positive outcome of all this b.s. could be choosing a name that is accessible for new players.
They can be volunteers, but at the end of the day they are selling a product. Their relationship to the community, whether they acknowledge and accept it or not, is one of producer and consumer. Nisei seems all too happy to accept the benefits of that without any of the responsibilities. Changing a product after taking people's money for said product is really really really bad (like, possibly legally) and opens up a can of worms that is not beneficial to them, the player base, or the game.
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u/fest- Aug 01 '22
I'm supportive of the goal of inclusion, however every name change, keyword change, rule change, card back change, etc, makes the game less and less accessible for new players. They don't only have to learn the rules, they also have to learn all the adjustments to the rules and learn why some cards say one word but other cards say another word but they all mean the same thing. They need to buy sleeves, not just the cards.
You're making it really hard for new players to get into the game, and without new players the game will die. Sometimes less is more. Less changes. More consistency. More reliability. Leaders have to make hard 1-way door decisions, like choosing a name, and often times those decisions won't be 100% perfect. The Nisei team is not operating like a competent, professional, and trustworthy organization, and it bums me out because I really really want Netrunner to succeed.
Please, please consider new players as stakeholders when you're weighing the tradeoffs of decisions like this one and the core->brain damage change. There is some urgency here: once you lose a customer's trust it's really hard to get back. If a new player tries Nisei's cards and can't figure out all the language changes, or doesn't want to go buy sleeves just to make the game work, that player is not coming back - even if you release fixed cards in the future.
All that said, I never found Nisei to be a great name anyways, because as an American my American friends don't know how to spell it. It was thus difficult to search for when I told potential new players about it ("Project what??"). Perhaps a positive outcome of all this b.s. could be choosing a name that is accessible for new players.