Yo man, lay off the cynicism already. This article describes how they want to take a less ham-fisted approach to errata in the new edition, which ought to be good news to you based on your stated preferences.
For a guy named DDNFan, why do your posts so often include such bitter and negative comments about WotC's competence? I genuinely don't see how being so miserable helps.
Enabling modularity, at the line by line level in errata, in online tools is not a given. It costs money to have options. They didn't do it in DDI because it would have added expense, and I harbour doubts that the new online tools will offer this level of fine grained toggling as this article is mentioning. Of course you can hand pick which errata to apply to your own books or your own game, but you can't really do that if you're using a character generator and from past experience using their products, I don't see how the new iteration will be different here. I expect errata to be non-selectable. This could be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on various factors as he mentions. But the economics of offering a la carte errata selection will come into play, which is why what you see as cynicism on my part, I consider merely common sense.
Sorry if that offended anyone. Maybe we can get an official response from the new online tools company reps who post here on this issue : Will errata be toggle-able? Will people be able to add their own houserules, e.g. free feat at level 1, or humans get +1 to two stats or a +2 to one instead of +1 to all, which many people find unbalanced?
It's not just errata that need to be selectable and affect your characters, it's houserules. You could do that in the offline character builder, but in the online one you were basically thrown into the mainstream, whether you liked it or not. That's not value added proposition, that's value removed. They gave us an inferior, less customizable product with their online offering, and that was a top down decision. There were hidden options in the online builder that were never exposed to enable customization, such as adding your own powers, feats, removing them, and so on.
I paid a lot of money to be a DDI subscriber and they let a lot of people down. It was seen, rightly I think, as a cash grab to make you have to pay to access your own characters online because they were stored in the cloud, instead of paying for it once. So their idea of value added was adding new powers and feats and stuff, but they didn't actually want people to customize the game their own way. Like fixing Expertise using a checkbox on your sheet, instead of making people take a feat. Or a host of other houserules that people could have shared with each other.
If Wizards were serious about seeing where the game is evolving to, they should add a way to add houserules to the online tools, see how many people are using which ones, then make those official "optional" rules, similar to how the article describes. Surveys are a poor way to get to the data that will already exist in the online builder. They will see how many times Expertise is taken, then see how little it's taken once people select "free expertise fix", to use a 4e example. Then they can see "change Second Wind to be a reaction that gives 1d10 + level Temp HP when you take damage", and see how many people use that instead of the default.
His idea of using survey data is flawed, slow, and not ideal at all to get real numbers, when they already can have access to that data. How many times has subclass X been selected and levelled up, and how many of those used such and such a weapon? I think you will see patterns, such as daggers are virtually never used by rogues in 5th edition, for example. There is no mechanical reason to ever use a dagger instead of a shortsword, or a rapier over two short swords. If you took the Dual Wielder feat as a rogue to get extra AC and use a rapier in your main hand, great, but you will still be using a short sword in your offhand, not a dagger. And by "you" I mean the common gamer, not any particular person who simply prefers daggers or finds a magic +1 dagger and that's the only reason he's using it.
