Imperial Assembly, Dark Side and Anthem

Hello, everyone!

As we all know, Imperial Assembly Memberships are very important not only to the players of L5R, but the stores that support them. I want to help support our local player base by awarding Imperial Assembly Memberships at regular tournaments.

I'm going to remove my Courtier keyword for a moment and try be direct about this.

Anthem and Dark Side are in relative close proximity to each other. All my Dark Side locals that have Imperial Assembly Memberships have The Dark Side as their Stronghold Store. What's the deal with Anthem? I don't know exactly what's going on with Organized Events over there. I haven't seen any posts concerning any Pre-Release Events (i.e., the Draft and Sealed) at Anthem. I know that Anthony had generously brought the promos for that Event to Dark Side to help make sure everyone got one (minus the one for the Draft, which should have been a playset's worth, but that was on AEG), and for that I am very thankful.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is, do Anthem players with an IA Membership plan to keep Anthem as their Stronghold Store? I want to award IA Memberships to players who don't have them at our regular tournaments, but I don't want to make Anthem guys put their money towards making Dark Side a higher level Stronghold Store (my goal is to get Level 5 before the fall so we'll have a Katana for the Global Storyline Event!) if they still plan to support Anthem on that front. Vice Versa, I don't want to make Dark Side players put their money towards an IA Membership that will go to Anthem.

Anthem guys, please let me know what you plan to do with IA Accounts. I am not asking or forcing you to switch to Dark Side, I'm just trying to deal with the gray areas that come with awarding IA Memberships out of a prize pool that other store's players contribute to.

Thanks a lot, guys!

MY IA account was in a black hole for a while, but I recently got it figured out. About 3 weeks ago I switched stores to your guys's store. AFAIK, the rest of the players have as well. The only remaining IA memberships at anthem are old ones from players who don't really show up any more, were only casually playing in the first place, or some other reason.

As sad as it is, we currently only have 5-6 regular players at our store, and the CCG scene has gotten VERY weak as of late (our store switched locations and has become much more miniature driven instead of CCG driven) so the recruiting pool is kind of lame. We are doing everything we can, but it's just not as lively a scene as it used to be. That being said, our 5-6 players are all very serious competitive players (whom you all know very well) and I think we go a long way towards making the greater playgroup better.

This was the reason that we really pushed for a unified SE and the reason we created the Forgotten Bay. Because, in general, players in the SE are small pockets of skilled players (like thrakhath and his friends up in gainesville) instead of large playgroups in centralized cities. But as far as IA memberships go, the darkside has our full support.

I haven't done so yet, but I'll switch IA to darkside, however I will likely be moving later this year as the Anthem guys already know

We at the forgotten bay (reads anthem) are shifting our support to the Darkside store to centralize support. I have done so already.

Okay, sounds good. Now for another question: would you rather pay $5.00 entry fee, but have less packs in the prize pool because a chunk of prize support is for an IA Account (awarded to the person who doesn't have one that does the best), or pay a $10 entry fee to have even more packs in the prize pool on top of the IA Account prize?

Umiushi Jaredo wrote:Okay, sounds good. Now for another question: would you rather pay $5.00 entry fee, but have less packs in the prize pool because a chunk of prize support is for an IA Account (awarded to the person who doesn't have one that does the best), or pay a $10 entry fee to have even more packs in the prize pool on top of the IA Account prize?

For me, honestly, supporting the players is fine until everyone is covered. For us the prize pool rarely matters unless it's something cool, but improving store ranking would be more efficient. That said I would like to see an initiative to have all southern Florida players center their IA memberships into one store to get awesomeness. But if you do that you need to support the away players (for example mailing them promo's).

Note: I am specifically talking about the miami, gaineville and other northern Florida players, Orlando also although I don't know if they have players as well.