My Monday night Online AL group seems to have broken up so I went to look for other open games and didn't find much. Wondering if the season is just dying out or if many of the groups are just filled up right now.
I really hope beyond decides to offer a decent interface to sign up for games that is better than the rest because the community seems fragmented as to where to find online games listed to sign up for.
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Roll the dice and play the game, I’m not here to listen to your politics.
“But this isn’t right. You’re meant to charge in, sword drawn, banner flying-that’s what all the other knights did!” “Yeah, right before they burst into flame.”
Alonlinetools is pretty good for scheduling games in advance. I also found a pretty active discord server where they regularly setup LFG sessions on the fly.
Alonlinetools is a useful tool, but quite frankly has a very out of date interface and has glaring problems such as not really being able to link to games, and not being able to view games without being logged in. Furthermore the website seems to have about a 75% chance of working correctly at any given time. In fact I just tried it and its not working, I don't think 8 AM is peak usage time.
Roll20 interface for looking for games is horrendous as well, while more modern appearing than alonlinetools, its really almost useless to attempt to find any game to join, let alone AL ones.
Fantasy grounds also has a group matching calendar, but it doesn't seem particularly popular, seems a bit dated. But is at least functional.
Curse are really good developers, back since wow they have been streamlining previously overly complicated processes, I think they would be able to make a solid interface that was both functional, modern, and cross platform compatible. I do not know if that is in the contracted list of things they are supposed to develop though. And I don't think they are going to want to pour money into developing a pretty intensive feature for free (Handling a calendar for thousands of people is a big database headache), although I do believe people would migrate to it and it would drive usage of the product in general.
When the tools begin to reach the release date there will probably be mods assigned to particular forums. It would be great if the mod assigned to these forums were able to control/moderate an AL group calendar.
In my opinion (and that of a few Regional D&D coordinators I've talked to), Wizards hasn't really done a very good job supporting the D&D Encounters/Adventure League programs since the move to 5th Ed. Having run several of the seasons for my LGS, I noticed a steep decline in content quality right up until Wizards basically offloaded everything onto the DM's Guild and stopped giving stores free access to the adventures.
Right now there isn't much real guidance for people wanting to do Encounters or Adventure League. I was at a convention a few months ago and all they had available was older adventures from previous seasons and very little in the way of tools to properly hype the material. The feeling I get from WotC these days is "Run whatever you want and advertise it as an Encounters/Adventure League event!" which is dumb. I'm sure that is affecting online games as well. There's just less guidance and less quality content so there are less games.
I posted elsewhere but I think WotC had to drop any and everything that hogged revenue without directly producing revenue. So no free adventures because they can't afford the negative of producing them on the books, even if it might produce a benefit down the road. I feel like a lot of decisions right now is an attempt to save the brand and a lot of activities not directly generating profit is going to be on the back burner for a while till D&D recovers.
This does make Adventures league less of a priority as it doesn't really generate direct revenue.
If that is the logic Wizards is using, they are doomed. I am a fairly new player and to me, AL is the portal into D&D. I have spent a couple hundred dollars I never would have spent if I was never able to find a regular game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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My Monday night Online AL group seems to have broken up so I went to look for other open games and didn't find much. Wondering if the season is just dying out or if many of the groups are just filled up right now.
I really hope beyond decides to offer a decent interface to sign up for games that is better than the rest because the community seems fragmented as to where to find online games listed to sign up for.
Roll the dice and play the game, I’m not here to listen to your politics.
“But this isn’t right. You’re meant to charge in, sword drawn, banner flying-that’s what all the other knights did!”
“Yeah, right before they burst into flame.”
Alonlinetools is pretty good for scheduling games in advance. I also found a pretty active discord server where they regularly setup LFG sessions on the fly.
Alonlinetools is a useful tool, but quite frankly has a very out of date interface and has glaring problems such as not really being able to link to games, and not being able to view games without being logged in. Furthermore the website seems to have about a 75% chance of working correctly at any given time. In fact I just tried it and its not working, I don't think 8 AM is peak usage time.
Roll20 interface for looking for games is horrendous as well, while more modern appearing than alonlinetools, its really almost useless to attempt to find any game to join, let alone AL ones.
Fantasy grounds also has a group matching calendar, but it doesn't seem particularly popular, seems a bit dated. But is at least functional.
Curse are really good developers, back since wow they have been streamlining previously overly complicated processes, I think they would be able to make a solid interface that was both functional, modern, and cross platform compatible. I do not know if that is in the contracted list of things they are supposed to develop though. And I don't think they are going to want to pour money into developing a pretty intensive feature for free (Handling a calendar for thousands of people is a big database headache), although I do believe people would migrate to it and it would drive usage of the product in general.
That sounds like a great idea.
When the tools begin to reach the release date there will probably be mods assigned to particular forums. It would be great if the mod assigned to these forums were able to control/moderate an AL group calendar.
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In my opinion (and that of a few Regional D&D coordinators I've talked to), Wizards hasn't really done a very good job supporting the D&D Encounters/Adventure League programs since the move to 5th Ed. Having run several of the seasons for my LGS, I noticed a steep decline in content quality right up until Wizards basically offloaded everything onto the DM's Guild and stopped giving stores free access to the adventures.
Right now there isn't much real guidance for people wanting to do Encounters or Adventure League. I was at a convention a few months ago and all they had available was older adventures from previous seasons and very little in the way of tools to properly hype the material. The feeling I get from WotC these days is "Run whatever you want and advertise it as an Encounters/Adventure League event!" which is dumb. I'm sure that is affecting online games as well. There's just less guidance and less quality content so there are less games.
I posted elsewhere but I think WotC had to drop any and everything that hogged revenue without directly producing revenue. So no free adventures because they can't afford the negative of producing them on the books, even if it might produce a benefit down the road. I feel like a lot of decisions right now is an attempt to save the brand and a lot of activities not directly generating profit is going to be on the back burner for a while till D&D recovers.
This does make Adventures league less of a priority as it doesn't really generate direct revenue.
If that is the logic Wizards is using, they are doomed. I am a fairly new player and to me, AL is the portal into D&D. I have spent a couple hundred dollars I never would have spent if I was never able to find a regular game.