New Character Builder from WotC!

[Bagpuss]

Because they don't. You got a freebie. Great for you. Now you don't get that freebie anymore. That doesn't make WOTC bad or evil. It just means they aren't giving away the farm anymore.

You know I distinctly remember paying some money, let me check my credit card statement.... yes, yes I definitely paid some money over. It was never a freebie.

Pirates now they might have got a freebie, but that's a different issue.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't really understand how they can actually think to enforce such a thing for a paid service.

They quite possibly don't. For all we know, they fully intend on opening up the number of character slots once the CB actually goes live and they get through the "first wave" of character uploads.

Once that initial influx of heavy usage is done... they can then look and see how their system has handled it, and make the decision to open up more slots.

But what would be worse for them? Open up 100 character slots from the start and then find that their system overloads and breaks down that first week because every single subscriber uploads everything at once (thereby generating a huge outcry of hate as people can't use ANY of their characters while the system gets fixed)... or just deal with the complaints from people now about how 20 is too small (knowing full well that most current subscribers will probably at the very least wait for the system to go online before deciding to cancel their subscription) and then be able to announce next week after the initial upload has occurred that they've found the transition went smoothly and they are now able to open up more slots for people?

Now I'm in no way saying that this *IS* what is happening... but I do think that WotC is fully aware that 20 is small enough to cause major upheaval, and that they'll do anything in their power to make sure that the transition works, is stable, and expandable once things calm down.

 

[mudbunny]

I am posting this here just to be on the safe side.

Assuming everything goes well, the new CB should be pushed live today. I assume that it will go live around the same time that every other CB/MB/Compendium update has gone live, or somewhere between 9 and 11 AM PST, or noon-2pm EST.

 

[Scribble]

You know I distinctly remember paying some money, let me check my credit card statement.... yes, yes I definitely paid some money over. It was never a freebie.

Pirates now they might have got a freebie, but that's a different issue.

Actually I remember when the system was first starting they were saying that a user would only have access to the stuff from the months he/she subscribed, but they didn't end up going that route... So you kinda got a freebie...


Damn you wizards lying about not giving us something you ended up giving us!!!!
(How come no one gets mad about that?)

 

[WalterKovacs]

I never assumed CB to be a replacement for the book. In facts, I own the mayority of 4E books out there.

Still, 20 characters for account is utterly ridiculous! It would be ridiculous a low number for a demo software.

I don't really understand how they can actually think to enforce such a thing for a paid service.

20 characters sounds pretty gross ... they better get the export feature implemented fairly quickly. A DM will likely want all his players characters on his account (which already will be a pain until the export feature is implemented), and unless they allow a single character to have multiple levels of play work at once (i.e. you build out to level 11, but you can move it around easily to the level it's currently at without as much fuss as the old character builder did). If you DM multiple games it could add up quite fast.

It does sound like an ok ammount to tide over until exporting assuming they get to it before the end of the year though. Call me an optimist, but I'm guessing that because of the complaints about delays, they want to get the current version up today, and then finish working on the export/transfer/etc functionality in the meantime. With the big hurdle out of the way, they should have more time to work on that stuff anyway, as nothing as big as Essentials or Dark Sun in terms of new rules is on the horizon until the Class Compendium.

 

[renau1g]

How was it a replacement? Yes, you could do download the CB and not buy the books? Sure. Was there ever any single line from WOTC saying that they intended this to be a permanent fixture? Did they ever come out and say, "Yes, we want people to give us ten bucks every six months or so and never buy a book"?

I don't think so.

Because they don't. You got a freebie. Great for you. Now you don't get that freebie anymore. That doesn't make WOTC bad or evil. It just means they aren't giving away the farm anymore.

Did I say they are evil? Man calm down. I also didn't get a freebie. They offered a service I paid $60-70 or something like that for it (yeah you're also wrong with how I purchase, thanks though).

My comment was WotC created a product that supplanted their books, not supplemented them. There was no presumption, they also never came out and said "hey you must go buy the books and pay for this tool". Was there ever a single line from them saying the opposite? No. I also never said they owe me anything. So again, chill. Stop putting words in my mouth.

Maybe if you hadn't had your uber-defense shield up you'd read my post and maybe think about it before firing back all cylinders with the same rhetoric posted a ton of other places.

I said they designed it that way. If the company could not foresee the possibility that offering their rules with the tool without requiring any purchase of the books would potentially have an adverse affect on sales of physical copies...well ... someone screwed up. Again, if they only wanted you to access the books you bought there'd have been an activation code or some other way of getting the data into your CB. There was not.

 

[renau1g]

Actually I remember when the system was first starting they were saying that a user would only have access to the stuff from the months he/she subscribed, but they didn't end up going that route... So you kinda got a freebie...


Damn you wizards lying about not giving us something you ended up giving us!!!!
(How come no one gets mad about that?)

Or you can say the cost of such an infrastructure far outweighed the benefits for them, so there was no "freebie" it was a cost savings for the company...just playing devil's advocate.

 

[Scribble]

Or you can say the cost of such an infrastructure far outweighed the benefits for them, so there was no "freebie" it was a cost savings for the company...just playing devil's advocate.

Doesn't matter what caused it... It would still be a freebie.

 

[Danzauker]

They quite possibly don't. For all we know, they fully intend on opening up the number of character slots once the CB actually goes live and they get through the "first wave" of character uploads.

So, they expect me to pay for a demo???

Well, sorry, if they want people to stress test their software, they'd better give accounts for free for a couple of months. They don't even need to hand free accounts to anybody. They could have an invitation system or something like that.

Then go live and ask money for a reasonable number of characters, instead of 20!

I mean, I'd never use a word processor or spreadsheet or mail client that lets me create 20 documents! Not even in my mobile phone! And I'm supposed to pay for this???

 

[drothgery]

Keeping in mind that .NET is also a web-development framework, and they'd be able to leverage all that work, experience and the rest while making a web-app, I'm going to stick with my position that choosing Silverlight was wasting an opportunity.

As an aside, I'm not personally fond of using .NET as a web-development framework, but for developers strictly used to desktop development it makes a lot of things easier by letting them stick with those comfortable desktop development methodologies.

Going from a WPF/.NET client app, like the offline character builder, to a Silverlight app is not a major development effort; almost all code can be reused. Going from a WPF/.NET client app to an ASP.NET/AJAX app is pretty much a complete rewrite that happens to use the same programming language and some of the same libraries for the server-side code (but if you want to do anything client side, you need to find libraries or write Javascript).