Adventurer's League DM advancement

I was just checking out the new Adventurer's League Player's Guide, and I was happy to see that DMs can get XP to advance their own character by DMing. I'd love to be able to DM a home game and then join my players at a convention for a Battle Interactive (now D&D Epics) to fight alongside their characters from the campaign.

However, it looks like the XP for DMing a session is a small fraction of the XP that the characters in that session will earn. For example, the Starter Set adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver -- explicitly mentioned as appropriate for Adventurer's League home games -- has four parts and takes characters from levels 1 to 5 (6,500+ XP). Assuming those four parts are each an "episode" as mentioned in the Adventurer's League guide, the DM would get 1200 XP for a character during that same time.

The ratio gets even more extreme at higher levels. Overall, I'd guess that a DM would be able to advance a character at 10-20% of the pace of the players he's DMing for.

Am I reading this correctly? If so, I'm not really sure what the point of the DM character rewards are. I guess it's a nice token, but it wouldn't enable DMs to join their players in organized play like I was hoping (or allow a group to play together in organized play with occasional DM changes).

Firstly, all those level 5 characters won't have anything to do at Gen Con. Those events are all Tier 1 (1-4).

Secondly, just 3 sessions at 300xp a pop will get you a Level 3 which is a great place to be for a convention until November.

You can also use all that accumulated downtime to 'catch up' if needed.

Home and Encounters play is good to get your characters into the sweet spot for a Tier but if you level too much you'll miss out.

For examply the first Tier 2 Expeditions adventure is:
DDEX1-10 Tyranny in Phlan
Designer: Greg Marks
Characters of Level 5-10
Playtime: 4 hours
Premiere: Hal-Con, November 7-9
Available: 11/17/2014

All the level 5 characters are sidelined for Expeditions until December.

Also if the whole party levels out of Tier 1 play, one of them can run you and the next set of PCs through the adventure.

I expect there will be a lot of players bringing Level 5 characters to Gen Con and then have to use pre-gens.


In a side note, LMoP lists as evergreen so it stands as the 'grinding' module for getting characters to level 3 for OP in about 9-12 hours of play.