27 minutes ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

It wasn't anything about the rules that led me to give up. It was when the local regular casual L5R tourneys became solely a place to test your Kotei decks, making it no longer fun to play at.

We had a pretty sizable group, but once Lotus rolled around tournaments basically boiled down to Kotei decks and a bunch of casual players never came back. Some of that, I think, had to do with our clan choices and who was seen by the players to be unbalanced.
What were the major changes to Ivory?

1 hour ago, SirEuain said:

the infamous 300 Crab > the entire Scorpion Clan

Which story was this?

I never stopped playing L5R because of the rules. I did have to take a long break between Lotus to Emperor, but that was because of other circumstances unrelated to the game.

26 minutes ago, SirEuain said:

And yet the Second Pit was somehow located elsewhere.

Which I blame on predetermined results. The Second Pit was always going to end up in Scorpion Lands.

26 minutes ago, SirEuain said:

That AEG kept forgetting the Scorpion Clan in an arc primarily taking place in Scorpion lands was only part of it. Goddesses meant that everyone else in the Empire compromised with the Spider. It meant that the entire universe rewrote itself in favor of the Spider. It meant the culmination of an entire arc about the Spider was, for all intents and purposes, AEG doubling down on how much cooler and more awesome the Spider were than anyone else in the Empire. For most of my friends who still played, it meant AEG told them to play Spider or not bother playing at all, so they picked the latter.

Goddesses was originally a Gempuku Gang story and a story that, in hindsight, looks like it was rewritten because Scorpion players being Scorpion decided to redirect everyone into Kyuden Ashinagabachi for the lulz. Because pretty much everyone was focusing on defending Kyuden Ashinagabachi only an Imperial Legion and the Spider Clan forces were at the final battle and the even had to write up a few flimsy justifications to get Spider characters assigned to defend Ashinagabachi to the "real" final battle. AEG may have fumbled the ball trying to get the plotline back on track but a stupid amount of weight for the Spider (+ Imperial Legion) winning in Goddesses Part IV was on the Scorpion playerbase.

The downhill roll began with the ever-increasing attention on "themes" in each clan that slowly started growing in late Diamond, but really hit peak intensity by Celestial and, most especially, Emperor.

In a game that had always been about the clan, suddenly clan almost became a second fiddle to having the right keyword (scout, berserker, etc) - there were several cases where you were better off with an out of clan personality with the right keyword than an in-clan one without. It also completely did away with the notion of the clan as a whole entity - Daidoji just didn't belong in the same deck as Doji (in fact, they didn't even pursue the same victory condition). The flavor of the game suffered a lot, and by the height of the movement, it just didn't feel like L5R to me anymore.

Then, as they had done before with Gold and Samurai, design tried to hit the brake hard at 100MPH in response to fans complaints about speed of the game, and this time, the wheels came off and the whole thing collapsed.

I have been playing since Imperial. For me the low point of the game was summed up in one card: Moto Garehis. An unstoppable force that used the old Calvary rules. Sure he's 15 gold, but the Unicorn had almost as much money as the Mantis. And opponent could play no cards against him unless it destroyed him or removed him from the battle.

I was not really liking the free gold and speed honor that was happening in the later Editions. When Ivory came out, I actually liked it because it returned the game to where it began. You had to earn your victories, and had not free gold to build a province killers on turn one.

52 minutes ago, Himoto said:

In a game that had always been about the clan, suddenly clan almost became a second fiddle to having the right keyword (scout, berserker, etc) - there were several cases where you were better off with an out of clan personality with the right keyword than an in-clan one without. It also completely did away with the notion of the clan as a whole entity - Daidoji just didn't belong in the same deck as Doji (in fact, they didn't even pursue the same victory condition). The flavor of the game suffered a lot, and by the height of the movement, it just didn't feel like L5R to me anymore.

That was done to alleviate the pressure on the card pool that needed to cater to clans that more often than not had the same theme. Pulling a rare that you were never going to use because you don't play the clan was underwhelming, but pulling a rare that worked with Scouts might work for that scout theme they were giving your clan at the time. While I doubt it will be at the extreme it was during the Celestial/EE, I do think you will see this in the FFg version if only to keep cards from being pigeonholed into one deck from one clan.

1 hour ago, C2K said:

...I do think you will see this in the FFg version if only to keep cards from being pigeonholed into one deck from one clan.

This presumes that "Strategies" (or whatever they'll be called) are always Neutral. In Thrones and Arkham Horror, cards can be faction/role restricted. There will of course, be some Neutral "Strategies", but I anticipate the number will never surpass any one faction's total number of faction-restricted "Strategies".

5 hours ago, Mon no Oni said:

Storywise, it was the end of the Toturi Dynasty. Too obviously railroaded, all surviving Toturi scions were killed by story fiat because they needed to go to make room for the next plot. Which I kind of understand, but it was clumsily plotted.

Seconded. Although I'd stopped playing the CCG a while before that for personal reasons (left for college and didn't find another play group), this was when I stopped reading the fictions.

Ivory editon was the low point. How could it not be? It was a massive rules change, and culminated in the sale of the property. Some folks might cheer on an edition that didn't actually exist as way way better, but Ivory arc was so bad that it literally killed the game, something all the free gold/spells/followers/cards throughout the history of the game couldn't manage to do.

And people will gripe about EE but the cold truth is that EE had the greatest faction balance in kotei wins of any arc prior. I'm pretty sure spider was the odd man out.

55 minutes ago, McDermott said:

I'm pretty sure spider was the odd man out.

I got 2nd at 3 koteis, at least. Getting stomped by the ever present autoloss that was Kalani's Landing.

Had it not been for that dumb ass stronghold, I'm sure I could have won more than 3 with Spider during EE.

Locally our community was 30-40 strong from Imperial to just before Spirit Wars. Gold and Diamond never did well here, but Lotus was the big boost for town and from there Samurai was our new peak, and my favourite iteration of the Post Gold era. Celestial went strong for us but the whole community died into Emperor and other than some Collectors no one liked Ivory at all.

We are very excited for the LCG, though slot of us are very upset about the altered history/Canon, and a teensy bit worried about LCG as a whole, as so far every LCG community crashes and burns two years in and newnblood is expensive to add in.

But yeah low point was definitely Emperor Edition.

2 hours ago, NathaninVic said:

newnblood is expensive to add in.

Forgive my ignorance but is not new blood always expensive to add? While rotations do help, anyone new to a CCG or LCG faces an uphill battle to create a collection that allows him/her to be "competitive". Altough I guess that LCGs lacking introductory sets of sorts do not do any favours?

I know that if I wanted to join Android Netrunner right now, it would require an insane amount of money. Even if I did investigate about which cards are the ones to have for current meta, so I could avoid buying useless packs.

32 minutes ago, Wintersong said:

Forgive my ignorance but is not new blood always expensive to add? While rotations do help, anyone new to a CCG or LCG faces an uphill battle to create a collection that allows him/her to be "competitive". Altough I guess that LCGs lacking introductory sets of sorts do not do any favours?

Where i saw whole playgroups entering or returning with new edition after 2-4 years break in CGG, all new "fresh" blood in LCG after 3 years are guys with collections they bought from someone with discount or some rare nerdy individuals.

17 minutes ago, Wintersong said:

Forgive my ignorance but is not new blood always expensive to add? While rotations do help, anyone new to a CCG or LCG faces an uphill battle to create a collection that allows him/her to be "competitive". Altough I guess that LCGs lacking introductory sets of sorts do not do any favours?

I know that if I wanted to join Android Netrunner right now, it would require an insane amount of money. Even if I did investigate about which cards are the ones to have for current meta, so I could avoid buying useless packs.

True. But look at a CCG " I must buy certain cards suggested to me by friends/store to play". New players look at an LCG and see an expansive product line and that they need to do actual research to determine what they can scrimp to build one fictional deckbuild. This is the complaint I hear from new to the LCG players at my store.

8 minutes ago, kempy said:

Where i saw whole playgroups returning with new edition after 2-4 years break in CGG, all new "fresh" blood in LCG after 3 years are guys with collections they bought from someone with discount or some rare nerdy individuals.

Yeah good point. The resale market for collections is pretty big.

12 minutes ago, kempy said:

Where i saw whole playgroups returning with new edition after 2-4 years break in CGG, all new "fresh" blood in LCG after 3 years are guys with collections they bought from someone with discount or some rare nerdy individuals.

3 minutes ago, NathaninVic said:

True. But look at a CCG " I must buy certain cards suggested to me by friends/store to play". New players look at an LCG and see an expansive product line and that they need to do actual research to determine what they can scrimp to build one fictional deckbuild. This is the complaint I hear from new to the LCG players at my store.

Interesting. I had not thought about those. Thanks!

Hopefully someday I can tell the horror stories of working on Ivory Edition. It was definitely a trial by fire for me.

Unfortunately, by the time the Design Team was really able to gel, it was 20F and then it was all over too soon.

19 hours ago, Mon no Oni said:

Storywise, it was the end of the Toturi Dynasty. Too obviously railroaded, all surviving Toturi scions were killed by story fiat because they needed to go to make room for the next plot. Which I kind of understand, but it was clumsily plotted.

This confused me so much when I came into the game in Ivory. I had started collecting the game and sort of following the plot back in early Diamond, then lost track sometime around Lotus. When I actually started playing in Ivory, I was rather disappointed to discover that the Toturi Dynasty had been so short-lived.

16 hours ago, C2K said:

That was done to alleviate the pressure on the card pool that needed to cater to clans that more often than not had the same theme. Pulling a rare that you were never going to use because you don't play the clan was underwhelming, but pulling a rare that worked with Scouts might work for that scout theme they were giving your clan at the time. While I doubt it will be at the extreme it was during the Celestial/EE, I do think you will see this in the FFg version if only to keep cards from being pigeonholed into one deck from one clan.

The problem is that, in the vast majority of cases, "rare that work for scouts" replaced more general-purpose rares (actions/strategies, which were rarely clan-specific) ; not clan-specific ones (eg, personalities).

Plus, that Scout theme card would work for you only if you happened to be interested in playing your clan's variant of the scout theme. If you were (say...) a Crane player and interested in playing a honor deck, that scout card was exactly as useless as a Scorpion one. Even worse, thanks to personalities being pigeonholed into themes, that meant that a lot of your own clan's clan-specific cards became utterly useless if you weren't playing the right theme. Pull a Daidoji Scout out of your pack? Yeah, if you're not interested in playing Crane Scouts, that card is exactly as useful to you as the Scorpion dude you might have pulled instead.

No ; themes did not address the problem you describe. If anything, they made it worse by further subdividing the game into approximatively thirty-six different pigeonholed niches instead of nine different niches.

18 hours ago, muzouka said:

Which story was this?

I'm not sure, and it's a long time ago, but the Scorpions wanted to kill the reincarnated Hida Kisada for some reason. This ended in failure repeatedly. Kisada surived all assisation attempts but his followers weren't so lucky. In the end Kisada ravaged the scorpion countryside with a small warband. The scorpion were unable to stop this mobile, but small, warband and eventually offered a sacrifical scorpion, who took all the blame, to Kisada. Together with some "falsehoods" about the line of succesion of the Yasuki family. A once proud Crane family who betrayed their oaths in joining the Crab, luckely they were redeemed by Yasuki Hachi but his death would result in the Third Yasuki war. After a lot of dead samurai, a ravaged province, priceless art destroyed by Crab brutes etc the Crane "won" the war by giving away the price to the losers.

And afterwards the Scorpion finally assasinated Kisada.

I think it's this story he was talking about.

The lowest point for my group was definitely Ivory Edition, a.k.a. Magic Edition thanks to the gold-pooling rule. A couple of rules tweaks every new base set was the trend for years but then Ivory comes along and makes a few large ones which alienated a lot of our regulars. On top of that the cards were bland and boring, battles lost their exciting feel as whomever went into an opposed battle with the advantage usually won the battle (and likely the game), and the environment was almost entirely defined by the powerful cards from previous expansions that hadn't rotated out yet. The following expansions fleshed things out and made the environment a bit more tolerable before Twenty Festivals really opened up the fun again but by that time the damage was done. And when one of the best decks in the pre-20F environment is called 3F Blank Dudes because that's its most noticeable feature, there's something wrong. See http://www.unicornclan.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2045.

i played gold-lotus, then came back in CE and played through the end of the ccg. bonkers as the story often got, i never hit a point i would have walked away. i stayed with it that whole time. i stopped playing between lotus and CE because my playgroup dissolved. for me tho, the mechanical nadir of the game was lotus, which is saying something because emperor was some real hot garbage. i think Kempy mentioned the free gold nonsense (may kalani's landing rot in card hell for all time). i'll add to that how frikkin expensive emperor was. Full playsets of multiple chase rares, fixed set rares, and IA promos were staples in EVERY deck. tournament decks were not cheap. but then ivory rolls in and "fixes" all that by making the game a) boring and b) busted in new and different ways. on a personal note, i also didn't enjoy the design direction spider took. it wasn't until 20F that they started giving spider some cool stuff to do.

1 hour ago, Mig el Pig said:

I'm not sure, and it's a long time ago, but the Scorpions wanted to kill the reincarnated Hida Kisada

One of my fondest Kotei memories was getting to (barely) kill the same copy of Kisada three times in one battle. He murdered most of my army in the process, but I kept him down eventually!

I was never turned out by the game or the rules itself but by their business model.

When I got in contact with this game I was 17yo with a low allowance and I was already commited into M:TG.
I played a lot of this game with a buddy from the same class, he was all into Rokugan and L5R so I played his decks.

I went on and off into this game when I dropped M:TG, around the Urza cycle.
I remember Naga, I remember Ninjas and also Skaven, pardon, Ratlings.

When Emperor Edition came out, with all it embezzlement, I was immediatly hooked. I wasn't hooked into M:TG so I needed a fix. I was playing AGOT and starting A:NR, but needed a much more "solid" game.
Problem with L5R was always the same, being a CCG. I was always a deck brewer, never a netdecking player. And this model, like M:TG, is very punishing in the wallet if you want to brew and test decks. And in my local scene, the number of players wouldn't justify and investment of 1 display box per month when comparing against the AGOT and A:NR model when I could build and play any deck in the game.
But I ended up getting in touch with the OCTGN community and started playing there on a regular basis... as long as it had being played there...

The business model. That was the problem for me. My great hope was AEG turn this game into a LCG as they did with Doomtown: Reloaded. But then they announced the IP transfer and my hope turned into hype... untill 19th April.