for Friday Night Magic's decades-long success is that it gets scheduled every Friday night. [...] Under the Encounters program, stores ran the same adventure every Wednesday night. [...] Now, given that WOTC encourages stores (and other locales) to purchase and run scenarios from the Dungeon Master's Guild, players have no idea what any given store has running. [...] The consistency of the program has gone out the window". In 2018, Christian Hoffer, for ComicBook.com, highlighted the "controversial" rule changes implemented with 8th season of Adventurers League. Hoffer wrote, "instead of players divying up treasure that they can sell in exchange for gold, players instead earn 'treasure points' that can be used to purchase specific items. The concept behind this system is that players can spend treasure points to gain items they want instead of trying to exchange items they find in dungeons or treasure hoards. [...] One of the biggest controversies surrounding the new changes was how the game deals with gold. Players no longer earn gold for completing adventurers, and some players (especially casters) felt that this hurts how they add new spells to their arsenal and cast certain spells. However, admins pointed out that players can still convert treasure points into mundane items that can then be sold off, which would give them more gold than the current system". In 2020, Jacob Bourque, for CBR, highlighted that the seasonal structure the D&D Adventurers League "irks some people, [since] the AL organization as a whole generally will dictate the module for the league in a season. This may not be a players first choice of adventure, and it will generally be a recent release from Wizards of the Coast". Bourque wrote that role-playing is minimized which "may also irk people. Part of D&D is the roleplaying experience, the acting and the social element of D&D. Quite a few people who go to AL view it as a more competitive version of D&D, though happy to play with first time players, the emphasis is definitely on the mechanics of the game. If players are willing to play a much more tactical D&D game with a lower emphasis on story and roleplaying this shouldn't be too much of an issue though". References Role-playing game associations