Thoughts on Season 9 of AL

[Dalebert]

What do folks think of the changes. I've only heard of them 2nd-hand and I'm sincerely confused. Admit I have a ulterior motives of actually getting a better understanding it. Have folks seen this response?

Dear Adventurers League, It’s Not Me, It’s Definitely You: A Break-Up Letter From Players (http://dmsworkshop.com/2019/04/26/dear-adventurers-league-its-not-me-its-definitely-you-a-break-up-letter-from-players/)

[stoutstien]

All and all it really pushing me to write up an underground AL rule set for my local.

[quark12000]

What do I think? I think WOTC is trying to kill AL. That's what I think.

[ZorroGames]

They're succeeding in my area. Last AL LGS stops at the end of May.

Growing much faster apparently than PF locally based on number of tables on weeknights. Cannot speak for weekends or private gaming.

[ZorroGames]

What do folks think of the changes. I've only heard of them 2nd-hand and I'm sincerely confused. Admit I have a ulterior motives of actually getting a better understanding it. Have folks seen this response?

Dear Adventurers League, It’s Not Me, It’s Definitely You: A Break-Up Letter From Players (http://dmsworkshop.com/2019/04/26/dear-adventurers-league-its-not-me-its-definitely-you-a-break-up-letter-from-players/)

Read it.

Seemed like a childish tantrum laced controlling toxic pablum. The very thing that they said WOTC was doing.

Not impressed. Hubris at it’s best... worst... most excessive.

[Dalebert]

I just discovered the other thread on the same subject. Not sure how I missed it before or I would've just posted there.

[opaopajr]

Eh, sounds like typical power-gamer grousing for comps after update nerfs from online video games. :smalltongue:

"I and my friends pour $X money into your game servers month on end and now you've ruined my DPR DOT exploit. Where's my compensation to keep us gamer whales still playing?" :smallfurious:

I guess I could be sympathetic, but Org Play is always this sort of metagamed politics between the Mr. Moneybags & the Squeaky Wheels out there. RPGA was similar back in the day; PFS is a poo-storm of legalese hell; what makes AL so immune from the same nonsense structure that poisons it all in the first place? :smallsmile: But yeah, I guess someone took away their PvP server or whatever and now they gotta slum it with "Mother May I?" tables where you gotta get along with others instead of buffaloing the table into compliance.

My heart bleeds. :smallamused: Another MMO lost to the anti-social, hyper-competitive. I did 1.5 years of AL anyway, yet was done by session four... same RPGA problem as before. Life's too short for Tournament Playing "Let's Pretend!" :smalltongue:

[OverLordOcelot]

It's hard to say until they actually present the rules changes, but I think it's going to hurt their new player acquisition and casual player retention rather than help it. The Diablo-style 'make a new character just for this season and ditch the character after the season is over' playstyle does not, in my experience, appeal to anyone but hardcore gamers, casual players who play once in a while don't want to have their character force-retired. I'm not sure how they expect to attract casual players mid-season with this model; it seems like you'd need your local league to keep rerunning the current season modules constantly so that someone who joins in the middle of the season could start from the beginning, and that's not the way I've seen leagues run. They also need to produce more and better content than they have for season 8, if the modules are as awful as the season 8 modules to the point that as a DM you have to create most of the content yourself, I don't see people interested in paying for and running them constantly. If the published rules actually include the 'non-current season characters can't get unlocks from any season adventures at all' that is implied by the preview, there is going to be a huge number of people who just ditch AL so they don't have to retire their beloved characters.

Overall, the rules seem to be geared towards hardcore, convention-going players and stores that structure their leagues specifically to feed a set of new characters into the convention circuit each season. They seem to be actively hostile to a league where people show up and play a variety of content for a few days a week, which is most of my local community.

[DMsWorkshop]

Have folks seen this response?

Thanks for sharing my article! I really appreciate it!

It's been very, very difficult as someone who is not within the problematic minority of players who snipe magic items, build gimmicky characters that are overly optimized, or otherwise break the system to see Wizards of the Coast happy to invalidate my hours of hard work. I don't even get to play my characters very often, since I'm always DMing (and my characters didn't get much at all in S8 because of the removal of several DM quests), and now I don't know if I'll ever play them again.

Setting aside the fact that I personally did not lose a legendary weapon from White Plume Mountain (it was merely a convenient example for the anonymous adventurer in the letter), I am surprised that so many people are blasé about Adventurers League actively spiting their players by confiscating things that took many hours of work to obtain, especially when what was offered in exchange is hardly of equivalent value. I've run tables where legendary weapons were in play, and I've never had a problem with them. When this was announced, it was a clear signal to me that Adventurers League had forgotten about their players.

Of course, I see now that I was wrong; they didn't forget, they were actively sabotaging them. This seasonality change is just the latest move in a bid to retire all the pre-S8 characters from play rather than fix the real problems that are present in AL. It's lazy and I'm extremely disappointed in the admins for it.

More to the point, I'm done defending them for what they're doing.

[Contrast]

Of course, I see now that I was wrong; they didn't forget, they were actively sabotaging them. This seasonality change is just the latest move in a bid to retire all the pre-S8 characters from play rather than fix the real problems that are present in AL. It's lazy and I'm extremely disappointed in the admins for it.

I honestly would have preferred them to just say 'Rebuild all your own characters - they have a no magic items, any they had are now on their unlocked list and they have a number of TP as if they levelled under the S8 rules' than what they're doing at the moment which seems like its going to actively hurt casual players going forward. The whole point of AL is to provide an easy drop in drop out system for occasional game play.

[Keravath]

On the season 8 changes ... I actually like them for the most part.

1) ACP rather than XP works wonders to prevent the scorched earth players from killing everything in sight to maximize XP. Most modules were written rewarding XP for things killed rather than XP for situations or problems solved. There was a minimum and maximum XP awarded and I played a lot of modules where the minimum XP was awarded because the players played their characters and solved problems rather than killed stuff. Most DMs I played with did not award XP if you managed to avoid a fight, you usually received nothing. So ACP was a definite improvement in my opinion.

2) TCP avoids all sort of meta game issues that DID happen and caused lots of angst.
- folks rolling for magic items they had no use for because they wanted a rare to trade
- folks who serially created new level one characters because they liked collecting magic items. New level 1s had the best chance to win something in tier 1 groups since higher levels might have something already.
- group size no longer affects how many magic items you have. If you typically played in 3-4 person tables you wound up with twice as many magic items as folks who typically played at 7 person tables
- it prevents folks from playing characters through tier 2 and even tier 3 refusing to roll for magic items so that they would guarantee themselves the very rare or legendary that might drop later.

I've seen ALL of these behaviours (admittedly not most players) at local game stores and not just conventions. Some of these had a very negative impact on newer players. TCP levels the playing field a lot and I can easily come up with in game explanations for why I have to wait to get a magic item made rather than claim it from loot.

3) Gold and gp loot. These are also ok in most circumstances. The gold/level represents an average of income less expenses with you having about 75gp left after reaching a new level in tier 1. This too can be easily explained. The character DOES receive gold but he spends most of it. The character motivation stays the same. The player just doesn't see the gold come in. They could have just increased your expenses at each level but it would be hard to keep it more or less even.

However, there are a few areas where this system falls short:
- normal plate and half-plate armor are so expensive that you can't reasonably purchase it until tier 3 at which point magical versions become available at a lower effective GP cost since they cost fewer TCP than the gold exchange rate to use TCP to buy mundane versions. Even a breastplate is almost in this category at 400gp.
- cost of material components for wizard spells makes it almost impossible to choose or cast certain wizard spells
- cost of scribing wizard spells makes wizard spellbooks far more limited. This is one of the basic features of the class and limiting the spell book usage through gold restrictions isn't reasonable in my opinion.
- cost of material components for some iconic clerical spells. Revivify, raise dead and greater restoration are basic party support cleric spells that are more or less unusable at the appropriate levels in AL due to the material component costs.

If they fixed up the holes in the gold system then I think it would be pretty reasonable.

------------------------

The proposed season 9 "seasonality" rules are a different story. Are they playable? Yes. Folks could play AL under almost any arbitrary set of rules. However, the key question is are they proposed rules both fun and solving issues of some sort. I would say that they aren't fun and don't solve any particular issue.

There will always be stronger and weaker characters. Some folks optimize everything and some nothing. Some folks play a lot and some only a little. There are lots of item drops in CCC modules as well as season 9 that are desirable.

Forcing everyone to create new season 9 characters if they wish to have magic item unlocks from season 9 modules and similarly preventing season 9 characters from unlocking magic items if they are playing older modules are both bad ideas.

People play AL to have fun. Many play AL in preference to a home game because AL is flexible. You can play when you want. If real life events get in the way, you can cancel out on a session and no one is relying on you specifically to be there. People are invested into their characters, and far less the party and the story in AL because in many cases there is NO party and NO consistent story. You sit down to play AL and even if some of the players are the same, you might not have the same characters. Occasionally, a shop might run a hardcover as a long term AL game. These are about as close as AL will come to a campaign. However, you still may have different players each game and it is only the players wanting to bring the same characters that will give a feeling of party continuity.

This is the reality of AL. It is still fun. Folks have a good time. You socialize and role play for a few hours and add an new experience to the history of YOUR character, including ACP, TCP, magic item unlocks and possibly some gold.

With this model of play, the entire idea of "seasonality" doesn't work. Local game stores run a wide range of content, different seasons, CCC's, occasional hardcovers. Individual players and characters may turn out some days and not others, might play tier 1 one day and tier 4 the next. To feel like their characters are advancing they receive the rewards. Take away the rewards for some of the play and you take away one of the reasons for playing those characters at all, for even playing AL at all.

Scenarios:
- I have a tier 1 character I really like which I created and got to level 3 in season 8. Season 9 rolls around and I have to hope the store runs older content or CCCs so I can continue leveling him and receiving rewards. I have a disincentive to play season 9 content.
- I create a season 9 character and this week the store isn't running any season 9 content, so I have to hope there is a tier appropriate CCC available if I want the rewards or I am forced to play something from a previous season without the magic item reward options
- I create a season 9 character ... if AL is anything like previous seasons then there will NOT be enough season 9 content for the character to get out of tier 2, never mind tier 3, 4 or level 20. AL has NEVER released enough content to fully level a character for ANY season unless you play hardcovers all the way through and those don't fit the flexible AL format at most stores very well. This means that the players have to hope that the store runs enough CCC of the appropriate tier for the season 9 characters to advance.
- you now have two groups of players/characters - season 9 and pre-season 9 - who want to play different content except possibly for some CCC's where they could both earn some rewards. If the local game store has a limited number of tables to satisfy both groups then they are forced to choose - season 9 for one group, pre-season 9 for the other group or possibly CCC's for both groups. The game stores are pretty much forced to run CCC's instead of AL season content to avoid the "seasonality" constraints.
- try explaining this to a new player who shows up with their new season 9 character to play a season 5 giants module, or season 2 or another season. "I'm sorry, under AL season 9 rules your new character isn't eligible to receive the magic item unlock but all of the characters we made in previous seasons can". New player might be disillusioned and leaves game and AL.
- The situation isn't much different for more experienced players. More experienced casual player has a couple of tier 2s and a tier 3 but hasn't managed to get their season 9 character into tier 2 by the time the tier 2 or 3 content for season 9 starts releasing. The game store is only running the new content for a week or two when it first comes out to give the players a variety of choices. This person has the choice of playing season 9 for reduced rewards since they don't have a tier appropriate season 9 character or they try to play something pre-season 9 but miss out on the new content.

The new ideas create a lot of situations that are NOT fun. In addition, the new ideas do NOT solve any problems since there will ALWAYS be differences in power levels between characters. As time goes by the characters from previous seasons with lots of gold and magic items WILL advance to tier 4 and level 20 and will likely be retired from play except for the occasional tier 4 game. These characters are not a "problem" that needs to be solved. They go away over time anyway.

-------------

One final comment. The biggest issue with season 8 was putting legendary items on the season 8 evergreen list. It is ridiculous to allow the Cloak of Invisibility and Staff of the Magi before tier 4 but the way it was set up in AL this year a level 12.5 will have enough tier 3 TCP to purchase these. I have NO idea who thought this was a good idea. Maybe it was an attempt to "bribe" the player base with something cool added to season 8 like the character flight options suggested for season 9, but it is a massive fail from a balance perspective through tier 3 and 4.

If this is the problem that they want to "solve" via seasonality then I think they need to come up with another solution. The AL admins introduced these items without sufficient thought and didn't listen to feedback suggesting it was not a good idea. Introducing seasonality as a band aid to try to fix their botched magic item strategy is going from bad to worse.

[PeteNutButter]

The new proposed rules are terrible. Yes they aren't in effect and could change, but last time they ended up even worse by the time they became official.

I mentioned this in the other thread my complaints, but I'll go into more detail as this is a chance to more thoroughly state my point.

The only appeal to AL is the plug and play. That you can always join in a game, provided you have the right tiered character, and your characters never truly retire. I can take my character to a con, and potentially reach really high level, things that don't happen in home games.

With these new changes:
-They simply don't release enough content in a given season to reach high level. This was a big problem with the Eberron setting. Not enough to play.
-Characters are forced into a weird half-retirement when their season is up. Outside of CCC content they'll never earn anything other than ACP & TCP. Mind you, most characters get quickly get everything on the evergreen list that their character actually needs, making TCP worthless after ~2-3 very rare items.
-The proposed rule doesn't mention trading yet, but if they leave it as is, the discrepancy grows for the more senior players, since the newer players will never be able to get the old stuff. In this case, players are encouraged to keep two characters, the one they like, and the one they use to farm unlocks. The unlock farmer plays in any mod where the item unlocked is something they want and trades it to the character that the player really wants to play... The only alternative is to remove trading altogether or prevent trading between characters of different seasons.

Basically high level characters will either be extinct or just those that have been around since before these changes. Powerful characters will still exist, but no one new to the game will be able to make anything as strong. Part of this problem is the season 8 rules, which leaves me with some characters who are way way ahead on items and others behind. No new character I make can have ever as much loot at their level as some of my existing ones. They are without a doubt, overpowered.

Silly rules are silly. I'm done with AL.

[Naanomi]

How does any of this work for convention play? That was the one thing AL had going for it for me... that I could keep a few characters at every tier, and when a convention came around I could hit a table or two. Now... having to juggle characters from different seasons as well? It lost all feasible utility for me

[Dalebert]

How does any of this work for convention play?

I wonder about that as well. One really cool thing about many conventions is a chance to play tier 3 and 4 games. How many people will have tier 3 or 4 characters that started at level 1 in the current season?

[noob]

Eh, sounds like typical power-gamer grousing for comps after update nerfs from online video games. :smalltongue:

"I and my friends pour $X money into your game servers month on end and now you've ruined my DPR DOT exploit. Where's my compensation to keep us gamer whales still playing?" :smallfurious:

I guess I could be sympathetic, but Org Play is always this sort of metagamed politics between the Mr. Moneybags & the Squeaky Wheels out there. RPGA was similar back in the day; PFS is a poo-storm of legalese hell; what makes AL so immune from the same nonsense structure that poisons it all in the first place? :smallsmile: But yeah, I guess someone took away their PvP server or whatever and now they gotta slum it with "Mother May I?" tables where you gotta get along with others instead of buffaloing the table into compliance.

My heart bleeds. :smallamused: Another MMO lost to the anti-social, hyper-competitive. I did 1.5 years of AL anyway, yet was done by session four... same RPGA problem as before. Life's too short for Tournament Playing "Let's Pretend!" :smalltongue:

It is not that I have read some more specific discussions and it seems that one of the concerns is the oddity of magical items and gold existing in modules and them not being aviable if you do not pay virtual points for them but still being in front of your character.
The fix would be rather easy: rewrite all the adventure to contain no gold or magical items and instead have those be rewards you get at the end of the adventure (and you pay those virtual points for deciding which kind of gift the king gives you after saving the kingdom from 2139239492395932946595795439 balors by killing each one with the cursed spoon(which does not hurts as much as a regular sword) because otherwise the infinitely huge demon from the abyss would successively evade due to the curse)

One such way of justifying would be having oxyders much more common: most gold just gets destroyed if it is left unguarded for too long and dragons quickly gets bored of having to fight oxyders every day and so does not hoards gold.

[sithlordnergal]

My thoughts on Season 9 are two fold:

On the one hand, AL does need to be cleaned up a bit. There are very clear imbalances between characters made in, say, Season 5, which had a massive Dragon Hoard with tons of magic items and gold at the end, and a character made in Season 8 where magic items and gold are scarce. So I can see what they're trying to do by bringing everyone to a level playing field. And you know what, it is a good and needed thing. AL does need a bit of a reset, because there can be huge differences in power that start showing up in Tier 2. Two characters of the same class and the same level can be wildly different, especially if one is a Legacy Character that was made before the Season 8 rules change.

Case in point, I have a Moon Druid that recently reached Tier 3. I made him during Season 7, and finished that season with two Staffs of the Woodlands, Brazier of Commanding Fire Elementals, Eversmoking Bottle, Ring of Evasion, Belt of Hill Giant's Strength, a Flametongue Longsword, and about 40,000 gold.

Compare that to my level 9 Fighter/Rogue. I'm about to reach level 10 any day now, and I have an Ild Rune Hand Crossbow, a pistol, I had a Necklace of Fireballs, and I am sitting on 150 gold after having bought Half Plate and a shield. There is absolutely no way for my Goblin to get 4 more magic items equivalent to what my Druid has, and impossible to get 39,850 gold, between level 9 and level 13.



There is no way to really level that playing field without a hard reset. However, no-one would accept a hard reset where they throw out all of their characters they worked on for multiple seasons. So instead we get this half assed "soft reset", which I suspect is meant to give new players a way to "catch up" to those of us that have been playing since season 1. If they did want to do a soft reset like this they would need to do several things:

First, they would need to lock Legacy characters from the new content, allow new characters to gain the rewards of the old content, and allow old characters to gain the rewards of the old content. The benefit from this would be two-fold. It would allow older Legacy characters to continue to receive the rewards from older modules, but limits what those characters can get to said older modules. While on the other hand, newer characters can "catch up" to the older ones by giving those characters access to the same rewards and more.

Second, allow players to keep the gold they find. Seriously, that was the dumbest idea of Season 8. They gave us stuff to spend our gold on, then took the gold away. Meaning any Legacy characters that had a **** ton of gold already had a clear advantage to new characters since they could afford the spell scrolls, spell components, and potions that were offered.

Third, give all players a really good incentive to drop old characters. And it has to be far better then the current incentive of "you get a special race option". Very few people will care about being able to play an Aasimar without it counting as your +1. That should have been allowed from the start. Even with it, I'd be very surprised if anyone bothers to use the "special race" options they're so graciously handing out. Not when Half Elves and Variant Humans are so strong.

Last but not least, only do the season lock for this season, and this season alone. Maybe with the warning that they'll do a season lock once every 8 or 9 seasons. That way players can continue to use their characters after a season ends. Because if they don't, then they'll need to put out top tier content for all tiers of play every season. And that is just not possible. It's a good goal to have, but it is not feasible.

[opaopajr]

Honestly, I think they should rebuild Raven's Bluff, the RPGA Forgotten Realms city, and let the hardcore AL go speculation crazy on it, like Ultima Online. :smalltongue:

Oh, there'll be tears and grief. But it'll be contained to infighting over little slices of fake real estate -- and is optional for home tables. Let the tourney player munchkins have their bragging rights PvP server. :smallsmile:

[Yakmala]

Like most AL players, my initial reaction to the Season 9 changes was not good. But then I realized there are still a lot of questions unanswered. Depending on the answers to these questions, Season 9 could be better or worse than we currently imagine.

So, I'm reserving judgement until I get clarifications for the following:

1: When a new character is made after the start of Season 9, is the character's season defined by the first content they play or the current season? For example: If I create a new character at the start of Season 9, and the first adventure they play is Storm King's Thunder, is this character considered a Season 5 character or a Season 9 character for the purposes of which adventures provide story rewards and magic item unlocks?

2: For characters created prior to Season 9, do they still have access to story rewards and magic item unlocks from seasons 1 thru 8, or is each older character's season now based on the first seasonal adventure listed on their log sheet?

3: If a character made prior to Season 9 has only played CCC's, and has never participated in previous seasonal content, are they still eligible for story rewards and magic item unlocks in Season 9?

4: Can characters from different seasons trade magic items, assuming the items being traded are from the same table and have the same rarity?

5: Can Season 9 characters make use of Fai Chen's certs from previous seasons, if those certs have yet to be assigned to a character?

6: Can DM Rewards earned during Season 8, in particular ones that grant magic items, be assigned to Season 9 characters?

Hopefully we will get answers soon.

[DracoKnight]

For the sake of clarity in this discussion, I tracked down the season 9 changes (http://www.dragonmag.com/5.0/#!/article/116674/103749157?loadFresh=true&title=25_09_Adventurers%20League%20News) (since it seemed like some people were confused as to what they are). I am once more glad that I do not play AL.

[opaopajr]

Sounds like a needed reset to prevent competitive AL players from spawn camping the best loot drops with their decked out PCs. :smalltongue: I spoke MMORPG for a second...

[darknite]

Season 9 rules will see me play my fewest AL games since 5e came out and probably reduce my DMing to nil. I've poured hundreds of hours into it, averaging 5 cons a year and nearly 4 years of FLGS weekly playing/DMing (now done with that).

It's the increasingly cavalier & disrespectful way that the Admins approach earned progress and player choices that's really turned me off. At first I was more open to change. When CoS came out and everyone was locked in Barovia, I was at first like, "What about AL's promise of character portability?" And the answer was, AL didn't want a static/stale play environment, but wanted to add new wrinkles for players season to season. Sort of a PITA, but manageable and even to some degree, enjoyable.

Then we got the Season 8 rules. Out with XP and certain bad-fun treasure (which had been duly EARNED by the PCs that were awarded them with scores of hours invested). Followed quickly by the mud-in-the-eye that was the Red War, a Kobayashi Maru scenario that was created to teach those uppity players out there that they weren't diddly squat and should learn their place. Instead of empowering the PCs it seemed like a Uber DM tantrum that the players weren't respecting a favorite NPC's authoritay! Yeah, I get that it was likely a mid-narrative bump that's meant to get the players to focus on the Red Wizards as a powerful Big Bad, but the way it played out it my area was very akin to vengeful taunt rather than a dark chapter in a larger conflict.

Now we see these Season 9 shackles, uh rulz. More disrespect for players who have put in the time to make AL what it is today. Restrictions are a lazy way to fix a problem. Are there tables out there getting rolled because of there's a 20th level, 28 Cha Paladin and company blowing the challenges away? Good for them! Add another level of difficulty to the mod to handle those. Tier 1 and 2 tables, where most of your desired new players are at, are not effected by these fixes which seem to fix on older, higher Tier PCs. So why have these rules?

I enjoy playing in the AL community but the leadership, who had once seemed enabling, has become (in my view) anything but. Oh well, I suppose all good things...

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

I have a pox-on-both-their-houses attitude at this point. I dislike the restrictions from WotC, but I'm also pretty sick of players treating adventures like they're playing a video game. Both sides to me seem to be handling things contrary to the spirit of the endeavor.

[stoutstien]

I have a pox-on-both-their-houses attitude at this point. I dislike the restrictions from WotC, but I'm also pretty sick of players treating adventures like they're playing a video game. Both sides to me seem to be handling things contrary to the spirit of the endeavor.

Agreed. They keep trying to address the symptoms of the problem vs the actual issue. If they just had a special AL loot table to replace all the treasurers in published campaigns where players can't grind for certain items the whole system gets cleaned up. While I'm at it I'd say ditch the whole unlocked magic item shop crap and rebalance the expected gold earning per session so the players can buy the stuff they need like plate armor and diamond dust.

I love how one of the base ideas of 5e is that magic items are not factors for game play then they turn around and make magic items the biggest factor in the so called organized format of game play....

[opaopajr]

Same, pox-on-both-houses. :smalltongue:

That said, I dig the AL-only magic tables. Maybe even go further and do like Diablo II and have Ephemeral Gear that cannot be repaired -- have Magic Gear that lasts X sessions. :smallsmile: