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MwaO wrote:

There is nothing stopping anyone from choosing to not play the first couple of years of LFR, wait until they have a lot of regional mods available, then mapping out the best way to have one character play all the mods of a particular region(s)

I would hope that your recommendation for people who are interested in getting involved in a storyline is not "don't play LFR until 2011; by then it will have stopped sucking for you." LFR is still young and a lot of people are still checking it out to see if it is going to work for them (myself included). It doesn't matter if the campaign will be ready for us in 2011. For my part, if the whole package does not measure up now, I'll find something else to do. (And though I have no doubt that my contribution to the play numbers Dave Crist was crowing about earlier in the thread is reasonably impressive for an individual, the jury is still out).

The bottom line is this: either regional buy-in and continuing storylines matter to the campaign management or they do not. If they do not, there will still be nothing in 2011 even if there are 24 regional mods available and a character can play from 1-30 without ever leaving his region. On the other hand, if the campaign management does care, they should be able to lay the framework for doing something about it now. The question is whether or not the campaign administration considers it a priority or not.

(Though, even if regional buy-in etc DOES matter to the campaign management, I doubt that it can be sustained over a 2-3 year writing process. (So the wait until 2011 model probably won't work--even if anyone was willing to wait that long). Some of the major weaknesses in at least my region and meta-region's LG storylines came from that kind of a time lapse. Over that period of time, the entire management responsible for the stories typically cycled at least once, possibly more times and any stories that the previous coordinators had been keeping under their hats passed through so many hands that the final resolutions were often no longer consistent with the initial stories. The good news was that, under the previous model, there were enough modules released each year that some of them at least had the coordination necessary to create a cohesive storyline--at least for a while).

Dragon9 wrote:

That's not to say that they don't take such criticisms to heart... but if you have a player base in the thousands and you have a small handful of poeple complaining, and reported play numbers inidcate that people are playing a lot and new people are coming in, then why change it?

It's very true that they have to be wary of a vocal minority providing a false impression of what the majority is looking for. I'd be shocked if the regulars on this forum represent even one percent of the player base, although I suspect that it represents a higher percentage of active DMs.

On the other hand, I think it is notable that there are effectively no voices coming out in support of the way that the RPGA is structuring regional mods/storylines. People supporting related aspects of the campaign, like replaying adventure? Yes. People who feel that the vocal disagreements go too far and should be toned down? Sure. But there is no one standing up and saying that the random, disjointed nature of the regional mods is really working for them and they would like to see more of it in the future.

Right now, assuming that we start seeing the initial story lines from the 1-1 mods get wrapped up by the 1-6 mods (2-2 mods?) it will be 2010 before stuff from 2008 really pays off. That is assuming that your character from the 1-1 mod has happened to level at just the right rate to qualify for the various story mods.

For the players I run, no one is even caring about which character ran which adventure. most of the players have 2-3 characters, so the odds of the right character playing the right followup adventure at the right time are pretty small. They just sort of keep following the few plotlines as players, not characters. Essentially, the story of LFR has become entirely metagame OOC information.

Personally, the RPGA would be well served by dumping the fixed regions entirely. Figure out three or four storylines/themes for each tier of modules then set up three or four clusters of adventures in different parts of the world. Characters can work through two or three sets of adventures before they level out of range, then move to a different set of locations for the next tier of modules.