Online Character Builder is LIVE!

[Riastlin]

I was planning to wait a week at least to worry about using it. There's always a rush to use stuff when it first comes out which is likely (though not necessarily) a big cause of the crashing that people are experiencing. In other words, in a typical day, the servers will probably handle the load just fine. When everyone wants to use it at the same time though . . . crashes will likely be common, at least in the near future.

That said, it is disappointing if its truly not doing all the math correctly, that is the main reason (in my opinion) to use the CB after all. Having the power cards with the math already done makes it so much quicker during game play. While its still quicker and easier to use the CB to build a character, the power cards were always my favorite feature.

 

[renau1g]

Oh...umm maybe I'm doing something wrong but a Mage can't select any Wizard powers...it's limited to only Mage ones.

 

[Sunseeker]

Running commentary as I work on a character.

One crash so far, recovered, not bad.

Seemed to lock up for a moment, but came out after about 5 seconds, oop! Did it again, seems to get more revalent as you raise your level. But it could be that a lot of people are using it right now too. Hmm, did it a lot, but I hadn't saved it. Saved it, and now no problem. Perhaps a storing unsaved data problem?

Hmm, seems to be greying out more as time goes on, I suspect it's an issue with how many people are using it.

 

[Insight]

Tried to make a Mul Psion Level 2. Crashed after selecting Race with the following:

Error: Template Not Found

and some other code related jargon

Unfortunately, I can't select and copy/paste the error and I'm not retyping all of it.

There should be a bug report button of some kind.

Upon relaunching char builder, I was able to recover the character in progress back to the point where it had crashed.

After I selected "Dwarf" as my "Born of Two Races" option, it crashed again. When I recovered it again, it took my "Born of Two Races" option without crashing.

The Character Details screen was a little slow, but it didn't crash. I like the character portrait choice option. I didn't see an option to upload a picture from my computer, though. Oops, spoke too soon. Crashed again. After restarting again, I was able to get through Theme and Background just fine.

Got through Ability Scores, Skills, Powers, and Feats fine.

Completed everything without any further issues.

Only issue: they need to work on the item names. Maybe just rituals. It listed Unseen Servant as an item and did not say that it was a ritual.

 

[webrunner]

Oh...umm maybe I'm doing something wrong but a Mage can't select any Wizard powers...it's limited to only Mage ones.

There's a checkbox to show wizard powers (it's like, 'show all options' or something)

 

[mudbunny]

A note from WOtC_Trevor:

Hey all. We have discovered an issue with the servers that is causing some people to crash out or hang up in the CB when filling out their characters. We're working to pinpoint the exact issue and fix it, and as soon as I have any new information I'll let you know.

 

[Foundry of Decay]

While the interface looks clean and nice, I dislike the fact that after each selection I have to wait for up to 10 seconds for the next step in the process to load. I realize in the grand scale of things 10 seconds isn't long, but the offline 'classic' builder seems much quicker at processing since it doesn't have to contact the server every button click.

I've had two rather massive fatal errors when creating a cunning bard, both times I was greeted with some 'template' error and no way to report it. The third try finally let me through, and did keep all of the data which I'm pleased about.

I still wish you could just enter a custom race though, or click a 'custom' option, which led to simply typing in bonuses and the like. Even the 'classic' character builder at least let you do that in a very broken and rudimentary way.

But I do realize this is very, very, very early in the character builder process. Just thought I'd add my thoughts.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

Slow. "Waiting on Vecna"

Also worse keyboard support than offline. (Which was already abysmal.)

Vecna is the god of DRM. (Keeper of Secrets)

 

[Mengu]

Crashed 5-6 times, froze about that many times in the last hour. I tried to add some stinking thieves tools to the monk I was trying to create, and finally gave up.

Sometimes an operation (like selecting or unselecting a power) takes 2+ minutes.

It's got a ways to go before I can use it in a meaningful way. Today may have been the launch day, but at best I'm going to consider this a beta.

 

[Festivus]

Started testing it out, creating a Lvl 11 Monk, was going through the system.
Personal preference is to do Abilities first, then choose class, thankfully you can skip and return fairly easily, but I liked the Over-head menu navigation more. Anyways, picked choices down to abilities, as mentioned above, seemed to grey out as it talked back to the servers after every choice I made... slowing me down. When I got to my abilities, and was entering my charisma it decides to crash. Try to go back in, crash again. Discard, try from scratch... no dice... must be a fair amount of people trying it out for this to happen.( at least this is what I'm telling myself so far...) First day, it's going to be a rough stress test. More errors as I attempt an essential ... crash.. sigh, I'll try again later tonight.

Oh, and from a coder viewpoint, one shouldn't probably use names for things like
"at WotC.XAMLUtilities.PropertyUpdatePropertyData.GetPropertyValue[TValueType](IDataSource dataSource, TValueType& value) in eDiAppstrunkCharBuilderEssentialsDDiAppsCharBuilderEssentialstrunkXAMLUtilitiesNotificationPropertiesPropertyUpdatePropertyData.cs:line 278
at stupid(Object )
at WotC.XAMLUtilities.LazyAttribute.CreateValue(Object owner)"

There could very well be a context for these name choices I don't see from the error messages, but it seems an odd choice to me.

The fact that you are even seeing a verbose error message like this is a bit of a problem in my opinion. Really, stuff like this should never be exposed, only a cryptic error message and perhaps a code, but the rest should just be quietly logged somewhere to be reviewed.