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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9615501" data-attributes="member: 18">I have to say I disagree, at least terms of functionality.We had a character builder that:A) Worked better and had better usability than Beyond's one.B) Automatically had ALL mechanical content in it. C) Only required one person to subscribe.We had a monster builder that:A) Actually worked automatically and easily, and had guidelines. Whereas Beyond is just HTML, essentially. And damn hard work.B) Could pull in information from multiple different monsters.C) So you could reskin a monster and/or give it extra abilities or level it up in minutes, in some cases even seconds. This is simply not possible with Beyond.We had a rules encyclopedia where:A) The search actually worked and reliably found what you were looking for.B) All the rules were included for the price of the subscription. Not just what you'd purchased/linked.So frankly whilst it was a lot less attractive visually than Beyond, I think the actual product was significant superior as a customer offering.The one thing that was disastrously bad though was billing. WotC had Digital River doing the billing, and they were completely incompetent, I mean just terrible. They'd do stuff like double-bill you randomly, fail to let you log in, and generally were incredibly painful to work with. When I complained about their double-billing at one point they double-refunded me (rather than just refunding me the extra billing), and refunded me for more months than I said, so this didn't even work to their advantage!</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 9615501, member: 18"] I have to say I disagree, at least terms of functionality. We had a character builder that: A) Worked better and had better usability than Beyond's one. B) Automatically had ALL mechanical content in it. C) Only required one person to subscribe. We had a monster builder that: A) Actually worked automatically and easily, and had guidelines. Whereas Beyond is just HTML, essentially. And damn hard work. B) Could pull in information from multiple different monsters. C) So you could reskin a monster and/or give it extra abilities or level it up in minutes, in some cases even seconds. This is simply not possible with Beyond. We had a rules encyclopedia where: A) The search actually worked and reliably found what you were looking for. B) All the rules were included for the price of the subscription. Not just what you'd purchased/linked. So frankly whilst it was a lot less attractive visually than Beyond, I think the actual product was significant superior as a customer offering. The one thing that was disastrously bad though was billing. WotC had Digital River doing the billing, and they were completely incompetent, I mean just terrible. They'd do stuff like double-bill you randomly, fail to let you log in, and generally were incredibly painful to work with. When I complained about their double-billing at one point they double-refunded me (rather than just refunding me the extra billing), and refunded me for more months than I said, so this didn't even work to their advantage! [/QUOTE]

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