JoeGKushner
Adventurer
Mr. Apple, I'd like you to meet Mr. Orange.
Seriously, the two are not comparable to me in any field. One is a computer game, the other is some mags and tools that are still in development.
TSR, WotC and Electronic Support: a loveless marriage
- Thread starter Remathilis
- Start date
Mr. Apple, I'd like you to meet Mr. Orange.
Seriously, the two are not comparable to me in any field. One is a computer game, the other is some mags and tools that are still in development.
Henry
Autoexreginated
...and so it should be worth, oh, say, half to two-thirds as much, wouldn't you say? And so, it is!
Me, I'm on for the full 10 bucks a month, and probably should change to a cheaper plan because I've been a subscriber for about a year, now, but I don't consider it a rip-off by any means. Quite frankly, if I were to find 10 bucks a month too much for my hobby, I would also have no business with netflix, World of Warcraft, Hulu plus, and all those other ten or fifteen dollar a month services that are rampant all over the Internet, now.
I don't know anything for certainty. I surmise from evidence. The behavior is consistent with the development team being... non-present. Or minimal - there for bug fixing and maintenance, but not new development.
How long has it been since DDI released new tools? How long has the monster builder been in "beta"? If the team is there, they're either working on a long-term project WotC isn't talking about and is unwilling to release piecemeal, or they aren't there at all.
Maturing, insofar as they stopped talking about what they couldn't deliver, yes. But not maturing, as in becoming a better organization for developing and selling software.
Well, if they were smart, what they have on their end is basically a content management system - a big database the builder and compendium draw from. Adding new classes, races, and powers wouldn't require code development, or at least very little. It looks like that is what they did, and they did do it correctly.
No, marketing isn't evil. Marketing is necessary: without marketing, you'd not know things were available for sale! My point is that if you don't know the business, you make errors, rookie mistakes - like announcing great features and software, and have it turn out to be vapor.
Yes Joe. Now, please go back and note how the point wasn't to compare them. It was to correct a factual error - the guy said he remembered thinking that a WoW account and a DDi account cost the same. I disabused him of that notion. That's all.
Shemeska
Adventurer
All of it. The VTT, visualizer, dungeon builder, character builder, etc (all the originally promised tools) and Gleemax were all outsourced initially to a studio called Radiant Machine. When things went south WotC canned Gleemax, brought the DDI back in-house and had a hastily brought together in-house team restart more or less from scratch on what was doable in under a year (actually 6 months was the target timeframe as I understand it) and ignore what wasn't.
Given what they had to deal with, management and otherwise, I think the in-house group did a good job on what the put out. I'd love something similar for Pathfinder (and the primary developers -unless they signed a non-competition contract- are out there somewhere, no longer with WotC for a while now, hint hint maybe please that would be cool?)
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JoeGKushner
Adventurer
I don't consider it a rip off in terms of the DDI.
However, as the game seems to be suffering some type of identity crisis with the Essentials line and as Dragon and Dungeon have been sucking heavily these last few months, it's a variable value for me.
I do think that WoTC would best serve its fans and subscribers by augmenting the utility of the tools and having solid dates for doing so and meeting those dates. This is not shareware.
Remathilis
Legend
WotC did a good job with the char-gen overall, but there are some things I'd love to have seen (customization, last I checked, was a name on char-sheet, nothing that could affect the math like custom races or items, something CR2 and even e-tools could do).
When WotC puts out 5e, they should have the following ready to roll out within a year of its release.
* A char-gen tool that allows official rules, house rules (defined in a separate area), and "notes" (tweaks on paper only).
* A monster builder in the same vein.
* A simple tile-based* (in terrain placement, not as in Dungeon Tiles) mapper that can build dungeons, cities, and overworld maps. Bonus if it could do hex-maps.
* An "Adventure Tools" Hub that connects to the latter programs. It can track initiative, place encounters on maps, total XP with a click of a button, has a dice-rolling program, link to the rules online (searchable), and has a simple word-processor for campaign journaling and notes. In essence, it should be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for the DM at game.
* THEN, create a separate program for online play that incorporates the earlier programs database and includes a visual table-top, character-designer, etc. That could be a year 2-3 project, since there is a lot more to handle on it.
I figure 5e should be out in 2015, so if WotC starts NOW, they could have it all ready for roll-out. This time.
I prefer hard copies...but why do you say the pdfs are unreadable?
Hmm. In that case I may have to rethink my stance. I was under the impression that all the 4E stuff was being done in-house from the start.
Certainly I have no complaints (well, no big ones) about the quality of the software we've gotten. I wish it had more features, but the ones it does have work well. Especially if they had to bang it out in 6 months! I shudder to think of the corners they must have cut to meet that deadline.
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