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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7365396" data-attributes="member: 18">I can only compare what exists, and no, I'm not comparing them "at the end of their life". It's very clear you didn't use the 4E tools much after second iteration, if at all. So don't make things up.No, again that's just rubbish. The second DDI site look good and ran well, and certainly looked 2010 or later. I do agree Silverlight was a huge problem, though. I imagine it looked like a good bet in 2009 when they were developing it, as it was still new - it came out in 2007 (not 2005).A digital product that doesn't do the math is incredibly lazy design. I mean that's staggering.First off, I don't think it did come out a "year later", not the second iteration one, though I don't remember the exact timeline (and I know you definitely don't!). Second off, the second iteration was a "renamer" for like a month, if that. Yes, they absolutely did finish it.Beyond doesn't do subclasses. It also appears, from their pricing scheme, that if I, as a DM, wanted to share a Feat or magic item with a player, that I'd created, they'd need to be on a paid subscription plan of their own to have it shared.If so, they're incompetent. But I know whoever is in charge of their digital stuff is incompetent, so that's not surprising. They've made nothing but bad decisions.In 2015? I disagree. And given that they've C&D'd everyone who was effectively helping them... All competent IP-owning companies seek out companies to license their IP as well as letting people come to them. Some exclusively seek people out and are not interested in people coming to them.That you're claiming otherwise is absolutely bizarre.3E launched with a character builder on a goddamn CD for god's sake....How is this difficult? Amazon gets money when Amazon gets paid. Amazon gets money when Curse gets paid. It's all Amazon.No, Beyond is the same as the books from online purchasing.You literally have to be joking. Beyond is a massive, cynical rip-off there. It's so awful I didn't even want to bother arguing about that. $10 will buy you 5 spells. Buying a background, subclass and the spells you'll likely use over your career will be very close in price to buying the entire book, certainly at least 50%. So no, Beyond is a much worse deal here.I haven't used HeroLabs, but it really seems like you're being disingenous here, and that in fact one group can use one copy of HeroLabs just fine.Because you're paying for the cost of the entire book. You are entering bad-faith arguing territory, now, so that's pretty crummy.My wife actually did build a pretty superb 3E character builder, so that wasn't a great line of argument for you <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> (and no, I'm not sharing it). Could we do better? Well with the access to the same resources, I absolutely guarantee it. Uhhh, it's the exact same free content as elsewhere, MINUS all the UA content, and minus Mystics and Artificers.Yes, that is interesting. They are definitely winking at copying PHB stuff in and so on for now. There weren't initially, but the guidelines for what's allowed mysteriously vanished and people are certainly getting away with it. Whether they will suddenly turn around on this, I dunno, but that is nice.What the heck?No, they would not. Just grey them out or something. It's not difficult. It's just basic bad design and basic bad business, you shouldn't be defending that. No-one needs to be "suddenly charged". Just have a greyed-out Duergar sitting there with a "purchase X to get this" option.I just don't think you really used the 2nd iteration of the DDI very much, because those were first-iteration issues.I'm not the one forgetting. You're the one who barely touched the second iteration.No, it absolutely IS an ebook reader.They literally justify charging full-price by saying it's full content. So you literally can't argue that. They made special proprietory e-books of the books for their app and everything. It is one of the core features of Beyond. It is absolutely not "just a character builder/manager". This is nuts.It was definitely a fail from DDI. But it's a bigger fail from Beyond, because they do offer ebooks, it's just you can't read them offline (yet, they claim), and they justify their pricing by the fact that you get "all the content".</blockquote>

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