33 minutes ago, Hinomura said:

Top of Clan prizes have a long and proud history in L5R...I'm sure we'll see that carry forward.

I don't know if FFG will support it but I'm sure as hell that dedicated T.O. will

Yep, that's exactly what I'm thinking, man. The reduced cost of running events (compared to Kotei during the AEG era) leaves a fair amount of funds free to great really creative with extra prize support. I'm extremely lucky to live in an area that has a bounty of quality TOs all within reasonable driving distance, and I can't wait to see what they come up with.

Not just Top of clan, but I've seen Bottom of Clan bounties, as well as 'Decks playing with this character'.

I always enjoyed when tournies offered bottom player prizes, and people would rally behind the ones at the bottom and really sincerely root for them.

4 hours ago, Hinomura said:

Yep, that's exactly what I'm thinking, man. The reduced cost of running events (compared to Kotei during the AEG era) leaves a fair amount of funds free to great really creative with extra prize support. I'm extremely lucky to live in an area that has a bounty of quality TOs all within reasonable driving distance, and I can't wait to see what they come up with.

Once the game is release and we see the first tournaments taking place, it would be nice to share extra prize ideas on a dedicated topic.

Oh man I'm so hyped :')

6 minutes ago, MrMenthe said:

Once the game is release and we see the first tournaments taking place, it would be nice to share extra prize ideas on a dedicated topic.

Oh man I'm so hyped :')

I'd actually like to get ideas sooner rather than later so that I can start brainstorming a launch event.

How do bottom player prizes work? Give second to last a reward for beating their final opponent?

3 minutes ago, Badmojojojo said:

How do bottom player prizes work? Give second to last a reward for beating their final opponent?

Probably just giving some prize to the players finishing last. That could encourage them to come back and stick with the community.

In Heroclix we would give away something called the "fellowship" prize that was voted by all the players based on a few different options like newest player, most friendly or fun to play against, most creative team, etc. This not always coincided with the worst player, but it felt less silly than a participation prize.

37 minutes ago, Badmojojojo said:

In Heroclix we would give away something called the "fellowship" prize that was voted by all the players based on a few different options like newest player, most friendly or fun to play against, most creative team, etc. This not always coincided with the worst player, but it felt less silly than a participation prize.

We always had this with Mechwarrior prize support. If there wasn't a new player, who we wanted to encourage to return, we would usually vote for the best sportsmanship or a person who was having a particularly rough day of it

The theory behind Bottom of Clan was that the player could use some encouragement or help. Normally it was one or two rare clan cards that might be harder to get hold of, but were staples for the clan.

If you want an idea for something similar for the LCG, how about buying a Core set and splitting up the cards by Clan? Bottom of Clan gets a set of their Clan's core cards. The idea is that it is something which would be useful to newbies or the people who can't afford to buy 3 core sets, but not so good to encourage people to play badly.

Sometimes we offered latest Learn to Play set for bottom player.

There was also that acrylic chrysanthemum "Imperial Favor" token that I have an altogether embarrassing collection of.

Super excited to come in at the beginning. I am finally at a point where I have the Money and the education to make good decks.

I have two friends and a brother already involved. And I just talked a cousin into getting a box. Now I just need to lure in his roommates.

1 hour ago, Devin-the-Poet said:

Super excited to come in at the beginning. I am finally at a point where I have the Money and the education to make good decks.

I have two friends and a brother already involved. And I just talked a cousin into getting a box. Now I just need to lure in his roommates.

In all honesty, having a group of 4ish players is more than enough (and I would argue IDEAL) for multiplayer within that number of players.... We just need the rules for multiplayer from FFG.... ?

28 minutes ago, LordBlunt said:

In all honesty, having a group of 4ish players is more than enough (and I would argue IDEAL) for multiplayer within that number of players.... We just need the rules for multiplayer from FFG.... ?

My favorite multi player was a home brew where honor tokens were placed on provinces. But could be used to pay other players. Sometimes a heavy bribe to one player was simply encouraging other players to attack them.

I think we called it the koku system. And I can't wait for multiplayer rules clunky or not.

All hype and no QQ - just played my first game with the cards as released, and every turn is so intense! It's like if you played MTG and every turn were turn 1 or 2 again. Getting ahead in this game is tough, even when you're winning because all personalities fade, taking their attachments with them. All you're left with is whether you kept your provinces up, and knocked theirs down.

There is no boring build up, and no aversion to attacking. Every turn you use everything you buy or risk having wasted the fate playing it.

The game can also turn on its end as a miscalculation in a single turn could give your opponent the advantage back.

On 5/9/2017 at 8:59 PM, MrMenthe said:

Probably just giving some prize to the players finishing last. That could encourage them to come back and stick with the community.

I saw this go bad once, where the person who came in last didn't care too much for having attention brought to them for that fact. They were already feeling kind of crappy for doing so bad. Making a ceremony out of how crappy they did was just salt in the wounds.

I would be OK with seeing this tradition disappear. Or, at any rate, keeping the whole thing on the DL.

3 hours ago, Yogo Gohei said:

I saw this go bad once, where the person who came in last didn't care too much for having attention brought to them for that fact. They were already feeling kind of crappy for doing so bad. Making a ceremony out of how crappy they did was just salt in the wounds.

I would be OK with seeing this tradition disappear. Or, at any rate, keeping the whole thing on the DL.

I like the idea of a participation prize that can go to everyone just for showing up, and/or doing the fellowship prize where you give it to someone who is either there for the first time, or random to anyone - and then give prizes to the top players. This way you can get something just for being part of the community, which is nice. I don't think I would appreciate a prize for losing every game, or only winning against the player that lost every game - or anyone drawing attention to my game if I was on the bottom. I think it would feel too false for me and I hate being patronized.

If I'm doing bad help me get better, right? Especially in an LCG where there are no card rarities so the answer isn't to just invest deeper.

On 5/6/2017 at 6:57 AM, MrMenthe said:

Out of the core it was weyland (easier for the corp to money up and no meat DMG prevention), then it was HB and after that NBN.

Runner wise, out of the core Crim was good and skyrocketed with Andromeda but Noise was also super oppressive after a couple of packs. Shaper went god shortly after their big box.

Early ANR wasn't that bad (took a long time to have a viable Jinteki deck tho).

Yeah, early ANR was actually way more balanced than people realized. The issue was is people thought they solved the game with Criminal being the best Runner, which wasn't entirely true. Corp side was actually pretty diverse during the first year. In my first regional, all factions were represented and I think most made it to the top 8. I was running Kate/Weyland (Scorch). My Shaper deck was destroying games that day. In fact, the only reason I lost in top 8 was due to some severely bad RNG. I was up against an HB Glacier deck and the game ended up dragging out with his agendas apparently sitting in the bottom of R&D. I think I was only one agenda away from winning, but I don't remember. I was hitting R&D every other turn with multi-access and finding nothing, and he had ICE'd up extremely well by that point. And counter to what people would have thought, Noise and NBN: Making News won that event.

From my experience, even though some games, balance can be way off, but what happens just as much is players settle with what seems to be an established meta and stop exploring other options. Hopefully L5R will have a diverse meta for a long time.

2 minutes ago, KingOfOdonata said:

From my experience, even though some games, balance can be way off, but what happens just as much is players settle with what seems to be an established meta and stop exploring other options. Hopefully L5R will have a diverse meta for a long time.

So true - I'm glad my friends who game with me here love to spite the meta in favor of creative and unique decks. Our games are rarely stale haha. If the games are stale, its because the game just doesn't give the options.

54 minutes ago, shosuko said:

So true - I'm glad my friends who game with me here love to spite the meta in favor of creative and unique decks. Our games are rarely stale haha. If the games are stale, its because the game just doesn't give the options.

Fight the Meta!

(learn from the Meta, but still fight it)

After playing a little in Old5R and trying some board game sim, I can report that I am excited about the new game. No gold starvation or having to round etc. Economy just feels better and less snowbally. I think the game is less snowbally in general, someone who wins early isn't guaranteed a later win which is nice. The Mono No Aware prevents one side from getting to big. Honor feels like something both sides can affect, where as Old5R made you have to focus on it with your deck. The rings feel impactful and part of core mechanics which is awesome since their the titular aspect of the game. The old game always felt like Legend of the ???? The political and military conflict cards feel like two sides of the world. Old5R political meant honor and military meant blowing up provinces. Now it feels like you can still affect the board and still want to declare combats rather than pass on conflicts to help dishonor your opponent. Numbers feel more balanced, provinces feel great how you don't lose them, they are just broken and each conflict will be different at different conflicts. Many more subtle decisions like biding, rings, passing, etc. not just which ability to trigger. Attachments don't feel as punishing, you can draw more cards so you are more consistent, unique can be included multiple times in a deck for consistency and so you can actually play with your cool personalities, but they are expensive so just drawing a clan champion isn't always the best thing.

To summarize, all the things I hated (and some I didn't realize I hated) have been reworked to feel better. Also starting at the beginning I get to engage the story more!

48 minutes ago, wolfien8 said:

After playing a little in Old5R

So, let's enter CCG expert area again.

49 minutes ago, wolfien8 said:

someone who wins early isn't guaranteed a later win

?

50 minutes ago, wolfien8 said:

Old5R political meant honor

?

50 minutes ago, wolfien8 said:

Many more subtle decisions like biding, rings, passing, etc. not just which ability to trigger.

What?

Anyway Action phase passing in CCG had completely different momentum. You could just make a fake a passing waiting to hit with impactful action, but you risked to hear pass from OP. AFAIR that was always a matter of skill and reading board game position.

Splitted attacking and defending in midgame was also just a moment when game freezed for some time becasue of many decisions and planning.

52 minutes ago, wolfien8 said:

Numbers feel more balanced,

Could you explain this?

56 minutes ago, wolfien8 said:

Now it feels like you can still affect the board and still want to declare combats rather than pass on conflicts to help dishonor your opponent.

Military and Control. You could tweak most deck with Military and Control elements. That was freedom of choice supported by cardpool.

Anyway do you think that players that played passive, defending, solitaire kind of decks were forced to play them? Maybe that was just their choice? They liked them, this kind of gameplay? A fact you like fight and attacking doesn't mean that everyone around is also fan of such things.

1 hour ago, wolfien8 said:

Attachments don't feel as punishing

?

16 minutes ago, kempy said:

Anyway do you think that players that played passive, defending, solitaire kind of decks were forced to play them? Maybe that was just their choice? They liked them, this kind of gameplay? A fact you like fight and attacking doesn't mean that everyone around is also fan of such things.

?

Two points here.

1) Sometimes players were effectively forced to play this way. Clan loyalty was a massive thing in my playgroup, and I'm sure we weren't alone in that. Some players, especially the Crane, often had very limited options if they wanted to stay loyal and take something vaguely competitive to a Kotei, so they had to make a choice between playing solitaire style decks or losing.

2) If someone does enjoy playing solitaire style decks, that's fine, but they can't realistically expect others to find it fun to play against, at least not for long. Even if forcing interaction makes the game less fun for the solitaire fan, well, tough. To have any longevity the game needs to be fun for both players.