It's hard to pinpoint exactly when I stopped playing the ccg. I was there for Lotus and Hoshi Masujiro, though.

I do know that I was absolutely and obliviously down with the initial voting and concept when they pitched it, though. Like dancing blindfolded on the edge of a cliff, from what I recall of the Dragon clan in Onyx.

Heaven's Net wasn't exactly fun, either.

I started just before diamond and eventually stopped when I was made redundant the day before I was due to fly out to the worlds (in Europe). Stopped for around a year but kept up with fictions. Restarted but could not get over the destruction of my beloved harriers (scouts are so bland compared to them) and the store I was playing it (mikes away) kept closing for the night and not telling anyone so the wasted journeys and the increased awareness of cost stopped me restarting.

I did look again later but the aeg forums seemed to have turned into a hate filled cess pit.

ffg and the lcg model came at a good time for me.

I started with Jade Edition and Hidden Emperor, and that terrible Rolling Thunder distribution model. I would say my low point was the introduction of Gold edition because my faction (Monk) got eliminated, along with many others. Supposedly they wanted to move the focus back onto the great clans so they eliminated all the non-great clan factions. Except Ratling, pfaugh. Well, and Shadowlands. I played through most of Gold as a Dragon player but they never really clicked for me the way Monks did. By the time the next set after Gold was looming and we started getting dual bug cards my local group was basically done and we all quit playing.

Ivory because it was boring.

After the bans Emperor was Hella fun. And then ivory. I got excited through 20f and then the sale before Onyx.

God Ivory sucked.

I played the game from its very beginning in Imperial Edition to its end, loyal Lion always.

The low point was always, always, player factions dicking over other players, which was the whole problem of the "storyline-driven game". AEG never had a good hold on it after Jade (arguably after the Second Day of Thunder), and it only got worse.

10 minutes ago, Gaffa said:

I played the game from its very beginning in Imperial Edition to its end, loyal Lion always.

The low point was always, always, player factions dicking over other players, which was the whole problem of the "storyline-driven game". AEG never had a good hold on it after Jade (arguably after the Second Day of Thunder), and it only got worse.

The big problem with the whole "storyline driven game" aspect of it was that story rewards ballooned out of control. It needed to rein that **** in, every tournament did not need some story prize associated with it. Hell having a prize for every kotei was probably way too much. If your only opportunity to influence the story is at 1 or 2 100+ person events per year, and they're actually important story points, you're liable to take them a little more seriously than say, mantis clan kenku ninja, or trying to get an elephant assigned imperial rank.

4 hours ago, Ryric said:

]I played through most of Gold as a Dragon player but they never really clicked for me the way Monks did.

I came in when the Brotherhood ceased to be playable, so I find this point really interesting. Did Brotherhood play much differently from Dragon?

2 minutes ago, Nagori-A-Go-Go said:

I came in when the Brotherhood ceased to be playable, so I find this point really interesting. Did Brotherhood play much differently from Dragon?

The original Brotherhood was an attempt to make Enlightenment a viable victory condition for at least one clan. Their efforts there later contributed to the monk-ish themes Dragon ended up with, years later.

Meanwhile, Finding Enlightenment through Air in Phoenix proved to be sufficiently combolicious that it proved you didn't need to make a clan to make Enlightenment viable, you just needed abusable card combos.

24 minutes ago, McDermott said:

The big problem with the whole "storyline driven game" aspect of it was that story rewards ballooned out of control. It needed to rein that **** in, every tournament did not need some story prize associated with it. Hell having a prize for every kotei was probably way too much. If your only opportunity to influence the story is at 1 or 2 100+ person events per year, and they're actually important story points, you're liable to take them a little more seriously than say, mantis clan kenku ninja, or trying to get an elephant assigned imperial rank.

There will always be people who go for the silly/unusual no matter how many choices are available. The moment AEG printed an elephant personality was the moment someone had the opportunity to start thinking, "What silliness can i involve this elephant in?"

Number of opportunities will not prevent this sort of stuff being pushed. The only thing that can prevent this sort of thing is limiting the possibility for such choices to be made.

48 minutes ago, McDermott said:

The big problem with the whole "storyline driven game" aspect of it was that story rewards ballooned out of control.

I don't remember many of the story prizes from my time, but the big story prize going into Lotus was advertised as choosing between keeping enlightenment and moving into the Age of Enlightenment, or "Dark Lotus," which iirc would have removed the enlightenment victory condition from the game, at least for the arc. That such a choice was even offered was bonkers to me. But then there were story prizes to determine which clans would have characters find enlightenment, which made just as little sense. Even as a Crane player I couldn't figure out how three no-name jobronis unlocked the mysteries over the universe before, say monks who had dedicated their entire lives to it. Sekawa maybe, but the others?

1 hour ago, McDermott said:

you're liable to take them a little more seriously than say, mantis clan kenku ninja, or trying to get an elephant assigned imperial rank.

At least his name literally means "mistake"...

3 hours ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

There will always be people who go for the silly/unusual no matter how many choices are available. The moment AEG printed an elephant personality was the moment someone had the opportunity to start thinking, "What silliness can i involve this elephant in?"

Number of opportunities will not prevent this sort of stuff being pushed. The only thing that can prevent this sort of thing is limiting the possibility for such choices to be made.

I disagree with this entirely. People pushing for that may exist but their ability to get the job done shrinks dramatically when there are only 1 or 2 opportunities a year and its a field of 250 instead of 40

24 minutes ago, McDermott said:

I disagree with this entirely. People pushing for that may exist but their ability to get the job done shrinks dramatically when there are only 1 or 2 opportunities a year and its a field of 250 instead of 40

That is more size of the field doing the limiting than number of opportunities, and even then all it takes is the guy with a goofball idea or someone willing to roll with that goofball idea (possibly for a bounty) to win for that goofball idea to get chosen. Player skill does not equal willingness to take a choice seriously.

Also a fair amount of the reason L5R was popular/successful was because of those story prizes. The story prizes were not the problem, it was more more failure to properly limit the scope of those story prizes and the ever growing amount of tournament results that were less story picks and more influence card design choices. So many tournaments had pick a keyword or name a card as a prize rather than make a story choice.

2 hours ago, McDermott said:

I disagree with this entirely. People pushing for that may exist but their ability to get the job done shrinks dramatically when there are only 1 or 2 opportunities a year and its a field of 250 instead of 40

Which thoroughly excludes reasonable people who are unable to travel to the 1 or 2 events in the year. Where would they be? America and Europe? What about the previously vibrant communities elsewhere?

Yes, story prizes were overdone, but I think they could be as frequent without being so disruptive if handled carefully.

56 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:

That is more size of the field doing the limiting than number of opportunities, and even then all it takes is the guy with a goofball idea or someone willing to roll with that goofball idea (possibly for a bounty) to win for that goofball idea to get chosen. Player skill does not equal willingness to take a choice seriously.

Also a fair amount of the reason L5R was popular/successful was because of those story prizes. The story prizes were not the problem, it was more more failure to properly limit the scope of those story prizes and the ever growing amount of tournament results that were less story picks and more influence card design choices. So many tournaments had pick a keyword or name a card as a prize rather than make a story choice.

Except that i can go on the jade hand's old page, and thumb through gen cons from 15 years of records and note that there are 0 hurr hurr joke choices made. I can even recall most of the posts the players made about the WHYS of their decisons. So while i have evidence that after nearly 2 decades no one has managed a joke choice at gen-con (and i suspect if i bothered to dig through the gen-con uk's and origins id say the same), you've got basically nothing backing up the idea that they'll happen anyway. The reality is that people really aren't willing to put in the kind of effort required to test and prepare a gen-con championship quality deck, nor sit through the 12 to 16 hours of grueling cardplay only to crack a funny.

Didn't the Story Team reserve the right to reject a choice if they felt it was unreasonable?

1 minute ago, shineyorkboy said:

Didn't the Story Team reserve the right to reject a choice if they felt it was unreasonable?

They did. Specifically because of that friggin' elephant, as I recall.

Pretty sure that elephant was in 2 kotei stories.

7 minutes ago, McDermott said:

Pretty sure that elephant was in 2 kotei stories.

Which was stupid. I sincerely hope FFG won't let stuff like that happen.

7 minutes ago, McDermott said:

Pretty sure that elephant was in 2 kotei stories.

But he wasn't allowed to be the character it was about- he'd show up, but he wasn't credited with whatever stupid "every kotei gets a story" action players were picking characters for.

I'm pretty sure the elephant was chosen as a joke as well. Was there not a Mujina picked for a story prize as well?

A goblin ate Kali-ma, IIRC. but I was not playing or paying attention at that time, so I could be wrong about this. But the goblin getting a story prize makes more sense to me than an elephant or a mujina...

But I'd like the new story to be about Samourai, not elephants, dogs, or things like that. I do find the Nezumi, for example have their place in the setting, as well as the Kenku, Ogres, Trolls (who are represented on the forums, anyway), but I'd rather they stay part of the background or neutral characters than be playable factions.

And this is coming from someone who loved playing Ratlings, with their own stronghold, or with At-t-ok-tuk sensei.

The Naga, on the other hand, I could see as a playable faction when the time comes. It will depend whether FFG gives them an important part in the story or not.

1 minute ago, Ser Nakata said:

The Naga, on the other hand, I could see as a playable faction when the time comes. It will depend whether FFG gives them an important part in the story or not.

The problem i've always had with the naga, ESPECIALLY the second coming of the naga, was that they're supposed to be this dying nearly extinct race that has trouble breeding. Putting them in as a faction implicitly puts their power on par with clans that field legions of troops, which undermines the whole nearly extinct race thing.

15 minutes ago, McDermott said:

Except that i can go on the jade hand's old page, and thumb through gen cons from nearly 20 years of records and note that there are 0 hurr hurr joke choices made. I can even recall most of the posts the players made about the WHYS of their decisons. So while i have evidence that after nearly 2 decades no one has managed a joke choice at gen-con (and i suspect if i bothered to dig through the gen-con uk's and origins id say the same), you've got basically nothing backing up the idea that they'll happen anyway. The reality is that people really aren't willing to put in the kind of effort required to test and prepare a gen-con championship quality deck, nor sit through the 12 to 16 hours of grueling cardplay only to crack a funny.

Actually they did get through several times. Andrew Ornatov and Robby Swann both had goblins decks and goblins were part of their gencon results. The Story team managed to make the results work, but the choices they made were a little disruptive.

We were mostly lucky with who won major tournaments and that the less than serious choices ended up being at less disruptive story prizes.

Since I have been commenting on various posters low points, I feel I should state my own.

My lowest point was Winter Court 4 when the brand and story team kind a proved that player choice wasn't going to influence the story they wanted to tell. They rendered what had been built up to be one of the biggest turning points in the plot since the end of the Race for the Throne mostly meaningless as Kanpeki was going to rebel no matter which Heir won.

1 hour ago, Ser Nakata said:

A goblin ate Kali-ma, IIRC. but I was not playing or paying attention at that time, so I could be wrong about this. But the goblin getting a story prize makes more sense to me than an elephant or a mujina...

Daigotsu killed her, the goblin just nommed on the corpse and got divinity mutationed.

Gakku didn't eat Kali-Ma, he ate the God-Beast's brain (which... was a really, really lame thing in and of itself, but moving on...)

EDIT: The fact that that piece of knowledge is forever lodged in my brain? Almost depressing.