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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neptune" data-source="post: 6673863" data-attributes="member: 95936">Hi,Whatever they are doing, GenCon was epic... An EPIC FAIL!!! I predict that having not being there this year will go down as the most cataclysmic mistake in the history of Wizards of the Coast and maybe Hasbro.  After the great buzz created in 2014, the outsourcing of GenCon game play to Baldman Games (BMG) resulted in a situation where hundreds of people walked away wondering if they would ever attend again and many wondering if they will every spend another dime on the product again.  Before I complain in detail and this gets lost, not one bit of what I am posting here is a complaint of any DM.  I had some absolutely great DMs! Yeah, I had one DM that needed a lot more seasoning, but when you have 100 volunteers, well, your bound to have a bell curve of talent. My all-access DM was great. If it wasn't for her... well, she is a hero, let me just say that. It's amazing what a great DM can do with garbage.So, on to the crux of the matter...1) Rip Off - The All-access pass which cost $150  was a complete swindle. It was, effectively, the combination of 4 events. If you purchased the 4 events separately, you paid $40. The difference between the two options last year was that players who signed up received the brand new Player's Handbook and an advanced copy of the Monster Manual (both retailed for $49.99 at the time). This year we received 4 certificates for adventure's league. That is 4 cardboard sheets which many people left on the table. Based on the math, each sheet of cardboard cost me $25. (sarcasm).2) Epics modules were a disaster - What can I say. Whoever wrote this, wrote crap. I could write a book about this but I'll just give you one example. I played in the mid-tier module with 4 others. The climax of the weekend had us facing off against the big-bad guy and our table defeated him before he got an attack.  It was so stupidly easy that our DM called over a marshal of some sort who had the bad guy reappear. Once again he was slaughtered within minutes. Between both the season 2 and season 3 epic sessions we had about 2-3 hours where we sat around and waited because of the timing schedule. 3) Non-Interactive Interactive Epics - As I mentioned, there were two epic sessions, season 2 ending and season 3 launch. Neither made a player feel like he or she was involved in something that impacted or was impacted by anything else. In other words, we just blew through a module, hacked some demons and went home. At the end of the first epic, the lights went out in the hall at midnight before there were any announcements (GenCon and the convention center are at fault for this, I'm sure) so I guess I'll be kind and give them a bye for that. But at the end of the Saturday night Epic some BMG captain tried to shout over the noise of thousands of people to the 300 or so participants. Yes, I said shout. He didn't have a microphone. Nobody heard squat. 4) Players felt abandoned - At least I did. Where was WOTC? Players and DMs felt like they were given up for adoption by their parents.  I felt particularly abandoned because I don't play Adventurer's League (AL) in stores. There was squat for home play gamers. (It's impossible for home game players to meet the rules for AL because we don't have access to the DM stuff).  But more than that, there were a couple of banners over the crowd but nothing else. The setup looked like little Sally's Lemonade Stand compared to prior years. No displays, no giant beholders, no giant drow....no nothing. It's easy to say that WOTC failed but that would be too kind. They DIDN'T EVEN TRY.There's a lot of nit-picky stuff that I would say in a different year but the disaster of 2015 was so huge that it would be meaningless to even bring those (otherwise serious) issues up now.I didn't want people to walk away thinking this was some good experience when it was a disaster.Oh, just so you guys get a clearer picture of how bad this was, start reading posts following this in the GenCon community forum.</blockquote>

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