A thing we've known for nearly a year now.

Due respect kempy, you've spent most of these discussions defending the game based on an edition that never actually came out. Rose colored shades indeed.

Cheering on the samurai edition love I feel like all the strongholds from that editon were the pinnacle of thematic for the clans involved. The abilities reflected the miltary style and feel of the clans better than most other edition.

To be fair, revenge served decades later is a pretty solid trope for samurai drama

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

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.

Pretty sure that elephant was in 2 kotei stories.

Would you say its a.... SLAP IN THE FACE?!!?

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.

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

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.

At one point L5r was running between 30 and 50 yearly tournaments with an average attendance of 40-90 players and tournaments at the major conventions that often had attendances exceeding 250, more if you count the side tournaments for people who didn't play in. So i mean, small...mmmmmaybe, i kind of doubt anyone has actual numbers for it. It was also a property that for a very very long time propped up an entire gaming company, and spawned a successful enough rpg that the setting got the d20 treatment back in 3.0. So financially outperformed by pokemon and yugioh? Yeah probably, but i think you're probably wrong with dragonball z, force of will, and card fight vanguard.

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.

Loading a bad decktype up with overpowered cards doesn't make it a good decktype, it just makes it post ToE lotus.

Whether they decreed it or not it was a stupid decision. If their strategy was midgame follower commander and shugenja pearl cards it was even dumber. Midgame follower has been a bad to mediocre strategy from the dawn of time and they weren't going to manage to out shugenja deck the phoenix.

This is so spot on, so many MAJOR issues in the game came from uneven resource development between clans, players, entire factions.

I dont know but honest to god don't add factions that are just reskinned versions of strategies other factions are supposed to be good at. If you don't have a legitimately new way to play with a faction, don't add it. If your new way to play is really close to something an existing faction already does, roll that **** into the existing one. Dont make lion weenie=ratling swarm=naga blitz.

The last edition's rules were literally the worst the game had ever operated under. I'm unbelievably glad they didn't do this

Due respect but fixing it after long time playtest and design players point the problems out, you ignore them and go half an arc with ivory base is too little too late. There was a vast vast gulf that encompassed "better than ivory" and "As good as diamond or samurai edition". You don't really get kudos for making choices you were warned were bad choices then backtracking after the consequences of those choices manifest. And due respect, adding factions after removing one with a current and passionate fanbase doesn't get kudos either. Bringing Naga back and killing mantis wasn't going to do the company favors. Naga as a faction were basically ratling+ lion military and had been gone for a decade+, their players had moved on to other games or factions. Maybe it was different in onyx but i kind of doubt they were designed without some sort of sliveresque strategy to the faction. Pretty much everything I've seen on this LCG paints it as better mechanically than ivory.

Ivory edition came with a massive rule set change and a massive design philosophy change. First and foremost gold pooling altered the way you purchased things. You really didn't have to think about how you'd assign your holdings as much, and raw gold amount became more important. This came with the design philosophy change that every clan should pay the same gold for each point of force on a personality. This point IMO is where design really crapped the bed. They didn't change who went first, so suddenly clans that always went first were producing force at the same rate as clans that always went second. They also removed the blood money rule (where you could pay extra to ignore honor requirements on personalities and proceeded to print otherwise playable personalities that required 2-3 turns of proclaiming your 1 to 2 ph personalities before you could buy a 3/3 with an ability. Fate wise it was basically an array of bow or straighten and +2 or -2 force pumps. Ivory edition was basically gold edition without any of the powerful or fun cards included. It was the Hida Kuroda nonexp of arcs.

Uh, welcome to L5R, the game where a factions playerbase actually accused AEG of conspiring to screw them out of a story prize because their (internet tallied) information did not match up with the information the company had.

Because working with, or giving money to Games Workshop is a universally terrible idea. They are game company cancer.

To be honest people who dispute that ivory killed L5R are deluding themselves. It was a bad edition full of bad rules changes that i know for a fact went through over the objections of a number of experienced CCG players and tanked the game. They could have renamed every card in samurai edition, nerfed a handful of the problem cards from that arc and released it nearly unchanged and it would have been better for the game than Ivory was. AEG could have stuck with the design philosophies of Diamond or samurai edition, looked at those cards and strategies and kept near to that and we probably wouldn't be seeing FFG have it today. This, honestly looks so much better than the Ivory arc, that even if I don't have the time to play with any seriousness i might pick it up on the off chance i do get time eventually.

As opposed to every other incarnation of the game where you dinked around, drew half your deck and fiddled at unopposed provinces til you won and if you screwed up the timing on the rube goldberg machine you could take yourself out of the game entirely?

I'd say the biggest problem with WH40k is that it requires doing business with games workshop and they're just universally terrible.