It’s time for a perennial pre-Worlds Organized Play Policies Update. We’ve done our best to keep the changes small this year as they will be in effect for Worlds. You can find the full policies here. For the high level overview of changes continue reading!
Notable Changes:
- A player may refer to their decklist during a match. During the cut a player can also refer to their opponent’s decklist.
- When we expanded the notetaking policies a few years back we initially kept referring to decklists from explicitly being allowed. However, digital events led to us allowing them for online play as it was difficult to police. Once in person play resumed we started seeing situations where the first minute of a top cut was both players scrambling to write down as many cards as they could remember from their opponent’s decklist. Given that we’re already trying to reduce the memory requirements by allowing note taking, extending this to include information that was completely revealed made a lot of sense. We will be monitoring to see if this impacts the pace of play, but are optimistic that this will mostly be an improvement for players.
- Judges now have a mandate to intervene when they observe illegal board states.
- Before there was no clear guidance on what a judge should do if they observed an illegal board state without getting called. Judges now are instructed to intervene. Illegal actions (see below) also require intervention when observed.
- Illegal actions added explicitly to the guidelines.
- When reformatting the document for the last major revision, policy around illegal actions was missing. Explicit policies for infractions and repairs have been added.
- Single Sided Swiss round number and round length recommendations
- Initially the recommendations for the number of rounds was trying to minimize the difference between the number of rounds played between double sided and single sided. However this led to many events having more rounds than needed. Conversely many players reported feeling that at large events 35 minutes was too brisk and meant they felt like they constantly had to be rushing opponents. 40 minutes is now the recommendation for all single game rounds.
- Examples of a significant change in board state for the purposes of rewinding.
- Rewinding board states remains quite complex to explain the general principles of. We added roughly 2 paragraphs of examples and recommendations. This is a section we will continue to improve over time.
That summarizes the major changes. There are a few minor changes in the form of corrections and clarifications. We hope these improvements to the Organized Play Policies help both judges and players. If you have questions, feedback, or other things you’d like to see improved in future versions of the Organized Play Policies you can join the TO’s of Netrunner Discord as a good way of reaching us.
