I've just come back from the first session of the new AL campaign; character creation this week.
We all knew this was coming, and the experienced players (my table) all arrived with concepts already worked out.
Since the rule for AL is point buy, we could do this. We then just co-ordinated skills and languages, alignments etc. We made sure we had a (roughly) balanced party.
I arrived with two solid concepts, so fleshed out that I could start straight away with only minor tweaking. I would play whichever of the two made for a better balanced party. As it turns out, I'll be playing my shadow monk/assassin rogue instead of my barbarian/fighter.
The twist is this: the DM announced that we could use point buy, OR 4d6k3 six times.
If we could roll and then take point buy if we didn't like what we rolled, then I'm pretty sure we would all have done that.
But if we chose to roll, there would be no take backs.
No-one chose to roll!
I hate point buy, but I daren't roll because point buy guarantees that I could play my concepts which were designed under point buy anyway, while rolling may let a concept work (with even better stats), but may fail altogether, leaving me scrabbling around for a new idea.
Now, had we known from the start that it was rolling, then we would have turned up with few, if any, preconceptions about our PC, and would have enjoyed a group rolling session and created concepts based on our rolls.