To anyone at Fantasy Flight whom it may concern:
I'll be honest, I can't say that I'm happy about writing this but I feel like I can't communicate with anyone at Fantasy Flight without putting words into this box.
I'm really disappointed with how FFG has dealt with this NetrunnerDB situation. I'm really into Netrunner, really, really into it. I think it's one of the best games that has been released this side of the decade.
One of the things that drew me to Netrunner was the amazing community that has embraced it. The previous card game community I was a part of was Magic: the Gathering and it never felt friendly or welcoming, just competitive and toxic, I eventually just stopped participating because across several states in different environments it still felt the same and I couldn't put up with it anymore.
I love the Netrunner community so much that I help run a meetup (@thelocalmeta on Twitter) and have previously written you about trying to set up our own tournament (with a tournament kit). You said no because we weren't a retailer and in some ways I have come to terms with it, disappointing some of the 40-odd individual players who have shown up to my meetup in the past. I hope we can at least provide a space in NYC for one our local retailers to run a proper NYC Regionals next year, but I'll handle the details with them.
But more than what I'm doing and the somewhat excellent game that Netrunner is at its core, it is also a global community with participation on forums and other fan sites that helps us all run nets and learn from each other. This is exactly why I was so disappointed to see the C&D sent to NetrunnerDB. I understand the legal nitty-gritty of a takedown (my job deals with it daily), but I couldn't quite understand why you would want to close a community that is not only encouraging and willing to discuss high-level strategy for the game but creates fantastic content that wouldn't exist without it. Several friends of mine wrote, in character, about their rigs and corporations, you can still see one of their masterpieces on the Wayback Machine http://web.archive.org/web/20140401074905/http://netrunnerdb.com/. That's a whole earnings call written from the point of view of Jinteki executives detailing the choices for a deck. If you could see the comments you would see other people from the community asking questions about deck choices ALSO IN CHARACTER.
That is the kind of community you want to encourage as it only creates excitement and fascination based on the game you created. It's really sad for me to see that go, and before you say "well why not do the same on CardGameDB?", yes, we could, but anyone with community experience could tell you that it'll take time and effort, both of which it seems Fantasy Flight has been unwilling to contribute to their individual games (remember when you made a single post in what was supposed to be a series about Netrunner lore? yeah, me too).
I would love to see Fantasy Flight publish some sort of fair use policy for their products so that other fan sites don't have to fear legal action. I would still like to share my enthusiasm for Netrunner with other people, not necessarily in a space provided by Fantasy Flight. CardGameDB could be loads better, but I hope you ask (and listen to) the community on how to improve it, not just assume you know the best way to make it better.