DDI Monster Builder

[Nemesis Destiny]

This is how you build D&D tools. One dude plunking away in his free time does better than a company that should be able to retain the best talent available anywhere?

 

[Dannager]

Really? Is it December 2010 when they first said they'd try to release the online monster builder?

You mean the beta of this tool that's been out for a while now?

 

[Dannager]

This is how you build D&D tools. One dude plunking away in his free time does better than a company that should be able to retain the best talent available anywhere?

I'm not sure how you're deciding what makes it "better". It's a good tool. So are many of the tools WotC has released.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I'm not sure how you're deciding what makes it "better". It's a good tool. So are many of the tools WotC has released.

I consider it "better" because you can tweak and edit things (as well as homebrew from scratch), which are all features I desire greatly that WotC's tools have largely failed to provide in any useful measure.

The old monster builder doesn't count, as it deletes info from your creations seemingly at random.

 

[Aegeri]

Yeah, this just made me purely angry on so many levels. This is something I can do easily myself - upscaling and descaling monsters is not that difficult. What I want is something that builds monsters and this fails to do that on any level.

Why Wizards? Why would you do this?

 

[JoeGKushner]

As a former subscriber, I would like to thank WoTC for continuing to insure that i remain a former subscriber and saving that money every month.

Thanks WoTC!

 

[Tazawa]

You mean the beta of this tool that's been out for a while now?

It's still a beta. And it has only been available to a small subset of DDI subscribers on an invitation-only basis.

It's bad enough being charged to beta-test software, but to pay money and still not be invited to test the software is even worse.

I've now had a look at the online version. It's basically the compendium with a level slider. Not much more functionality than copy and pasting from the compendium really. No export as RTF or .monster files. Not much use--I'll continue to use the bug-prone, memory-hog, offline builder. At least I don't have to keep paying to use it.

 

[Dire Bare]

Yeah, this just made me purely angry on so many levels. This is something I can do easily myself - upscaling and descaling monsters is not that difficult. What I want is something that builds monsters and this fails to do that on any level.

Why Wizards? Why would you do this?

What a thread full of crankiness! The original MB is still available for now, and this tool is obviously now in open beta (notice the "beta" tag on the opening splash page). And . . . it's useful to some of us. Scaling monsters might be easy for you, but not for me, I think it's pretty cool as it is. Should it do more? Duh, of course. And it will.

The negativity of the gaming community never ceases to amaze me.

 

[Dannager]

From WotC_Trevor on the official forums:

Hey all. The fix is up now and you should be able to save monsters that you've leveled and import and save custom monsters from the classic Monster Builder. It looks like some of you bumped into some issues while we were pushing the fix, but hopefully all those are over.

Now on to the topic of "why did you release something that wasn't feature complete?" questions/complaints. Main reasons, short and sweet - we wanted to give all the DDI members a chance to check out what we're working on, and we wanted to make sure that all DDI members had the chance to use the MB to import monsters into their VT games during the next step of the VT beta.

You still have access to the classic MB (you can download it right now). We won't be doing any more updates to it, but it's still there and still usable. Yes it has issues, but I'm hopefully most people understand that we won't be working on the old tools while adding features to the new tool. With the web-based MB, we have something that gives very basic functionality and is usable with the VT that we wanted to get into everybody hands, not just the small group of testers that we had before.

The VT point is a bit more tangible - Having the web-based MB out, even in this limited form, makes imputing monsters into the VT 1000% (statistic completely made up) better for DMs. So getting this out to DDI subscribers who will very soon be testing out the VT seemed a pretty important thing.

I am definitely sorry that I haven't given you more news on what to expect with this AT release these last few weeks. I'm also sorry if I led you to believe that the AT would be more robust than what the closed beta testers had access to. We did add a couple features, but the biggest changes are on their way. I will be back in the coming days with more information on the features we'll be implementing, focusing on whatever the next big thing is.

 

[Dannager]

The negativity of the gaming community never ceases to amaze me.

It's pretty sad.

WotC released new software?
[insanitywolf.jpg]
They killed your dog!