New Character Builder from WotC!

[Jack99]

Just as a thought experiment, I zipped one of my characters and checked the file size... 20 kB.

So 50000 subscribers saving 1000 characters each would fit into 1 TB. I would assume WotC could afford a few terabytes of storage...

I am not sure what your point is. I know you hate WOtC with a passion. Just because they can, does not mean they should. There might be other considerations - beyond those of how much space costs.

While it certainly may not matter to you it does seem to matter to several of the people in this thread. It seems quite "bad wrong fun" to say because it isn't your style that others concerns are invalidated and not relevant.

Everyone has different ideas of what is fun. So while a tool might meet all of your needs, it might not meet everyone's needs. With that said, WotC will never be able to please all the people 100% of the time. They just need to determine how the majority of people use the tool and then determine which limitations people comment about are going to warrant changes.

I do not think I called B-W-F anywhere in my post. I just stated my own opinion, just like others have done, and pointed out that it was indeed still possible to use the CB to make hundreds of characters to "test" builds or make "thought experiments" - you just can't save more than 20 of those. I went further to explain that I do not think its necessary to be able to save all those characters, and that I doubt people actually use/look at all their characters, if they have several hundreds saved.

Again, I see no bad-wrong-fun. I can only say that if you still think it is there, it is not intended.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

In my opinion Wizards wants a service that virtually costs them only an employee's hourly wages and costs the customer everything. Essentially they want something for nothing, while there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, they are taking a risk that could cost them their customers.

What Wizard's really needs to focus on is gaining back that trust from it's customers.

 

[Oldtimer]

I think the issue isn't so much storage, it's retrieval. Memory is so cheap that it's practically free. But, if every time you boot up your CB, it queries every single character you have saved in the database, that's going to eat up bandwidth.

At least, that's my very, very uninformed guess.

Bandwidth? Of course it wouldn't download all the data for 1000 characters every time you started the CB. Does Word open all your documents on your hard drive every time you start it? CB would only need to download a small fraction of the data - enough to let you choose which character to open. Say 100 bytes worth of data per character - that would mean you download 100 kB (assuming 1000 characters) when you start the CB.

Compare that to the WotC D&D homepage (Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page) which is 78 kB of HTML and 2.8 MB of graphics and javascript (most of which your browser will cache).

Bandwidth should not be an issue here.

 

[Oldtimer]

I am not sure what your point is. I know you hate WOtC with a passion. Just because they can, does not mean they should. There might be other considerations - beyond those of how much space costs.

The issue of storage space was suggested as a reason for the 20 character limitation. My point was that is not a very likely reason. Wasn't that fairly obvious?

Of course there could be other considerations. My point was that there must be, since storage space alone makes no sense.

I would appreciate if you don't ascribe hate or passion to me so lightly. My dislike of what WotC is doing has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. I'm an annoyed customer. Can't I be that without being described as a hatemonger?

 

[garyh]

It is for me. As DM primarily, and player secondarily, I have perhaps made 200 different characters since 4e was launched, if not more. I do however only have 11 or so on my computer. The one I play, a handful of characters I would play if my ranger died, and a copy of the characters in my own campaign.

Everything else, I never save. I might make something, just to see how it looks, but I do not see an absolute need to save and save it for posterity. I seriously doubt that those people who have hundreds of characters ever get to reopen most of them.

Look, I am not saying I think 20 is more than enough. I think its too little as well. 50-100 should cover people's needs without risking any issues. I also bet they will up the limit quickly.

I am however saying that some of the people complaining about their "needs" for hundreds of character slots are (grossly) exaggerating said need. IMO, of course. But hey, it's the Internet, the place where restraint doesn't exist.

Actually, based on the fact I have hundreds of CB characters on my hard drive, and WotC is only allowing 20 in "the cloud," the Internet would actually seem to be the place where restraint exists in this case.

Okay, this part I just don't get. Yes, the new CB has a character-file limit, and yes, it doesn't have character-file exports, but so what? Your character-file IS NOT YOUR CHARACTER.

The new system will still allow you to output a character to print - or to PDF file via a PDF-writer like CutePDF. And that print-out contains every single piece of data you need to re-create that character from scratch.

If, at a later time, you find yourself wanting to go back and modify that intellectual-exercise character in the CB, it's going to take you, at worst, a maximum of ten minutes to re-build it based on the printed character sheet. That's less time than it'd probably take you just to nail down all the sources of your feats and powers if you were resurrecting a manually-created character.

Why should I have to spend any of my time rebuilding a character every time I want to tinker with it when it takes about 100kb storage unzipped? As ProfCirno said earlier, memory is so cheap that GMail offers gigs of it with a free e-mail account to a lot more people that have ever heard of DDI.

Look, a lot of us enjoy using the CB in a certain way, such as making tons of characters. If others only use it for the 2 PC's they're actually playing at the moment and the 20 character cap doesn't impact them, good for them. Really. But for those of use who liked to use the Character Builder to build characters, and lots of them, this is a major issue. Especially with no export feature at launch. And no, printing to PDF doesn't count.

 

[Jack99]

The issue of storage space was suggested as a reason for the 20 character limitation. My point was that is not a very likely reason. Wasn't that fairly obvious?

Of course there could be other considerations. My point was that there must be, since storage space alone makes no sense.

I would appreciate if you don't ascribe hate or passion to me so lightly. My dislike of what WotC is doing has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. I'm an annoyed customer. Can't I be that without being described as a hatemonger?

Of course you can. But if I didn't have a life, I could link to at lot of your previous 742-odd posts, and your feelings towards just about anything WotC does should be quite clear. In short, my comment was based on your posting history, not just this last one. Now, if you say that I am wrong, and that you are not what I called you, then fair enough. I can only say that you come of as such - quite often.

 

[tuxgeo]

Bandwidth? Of course it wouldn't download all the data for 1000 characters every time you started the CB. Does Word open all your documents on your hard drive every time you start it? CB would only need to download a small fraction of the data - enough to let you choose which character to open. Say 100 bytes worth of data per character - that would mean you download 100 kB (assuming 1000 characters) when you start the CB.
< snip >
Bandwidth should not be an issue here.

To me, the interesting part is the amount of data downloaded when the online CB opens. Oldtimer is saying that it should be about 100 bytes per character, to show the user which characters are available. To me, this seems to suggest that WotC won't be storing our personalized character portraits online.
I know that I have assigned non-standard portraits to more than one character, but the portrait files are stored on my local hard drive. I guess I'll have to trust that the online CB will point to the same files, so when I open the online version, it will show me the character portraits that I have selected without having to download another 13KB of image data for each PC.
That's not a heavy bandwidth usage, there.

 

[Umbran]

In short, my comment was based on your posting history, not just this last one. Now, if you say that I am wrong, and that you are not what I called you, then fair enough. I can only say that you come of as such - quite often.

Jack, you're getting personal.

The logic of his current position will stand (or not) on it's own. You don't need (and shouldn't use) past history to discredit current points.

That he dislikes WotC doesn't mean he isn't correct. So, address the real point, please, instead of the character of the person speaking. Thanks.

 

[IronWolf]

I do not think I called B-W-F anywhere in my post. I just stated my own opinion, just like others have done, and pointed out that it was indeed still possible to use the CB to make hundreds of characters to "test" builds or make "thought experiments" - you just can't save more than 20 of those. I went further to explain that I do not think its necessary to be able to save all those characters, and that I doubt people actually use/look at all their characters, if they have several hundreds saved.

Again, I see no bad-wrong-fun. I can only say that if you still think it is there, it is not intended.

No worries. When I read your post it had just seemed you were dismissing the concerns of many here about the 20 character limit because you thought being able to build, but not save characters above the 20 limit would not be an issue - for you. I completely respect that this limit poses no issue or limitation for your usage.

But that does not mean that the people that feel the need to save characters above 20 even if they are "test" characters is not a valid concern. They've stated their usage of saved characters and clearly, not being able to save characters over and above the 20 character limit is an issue for them.

It sounded to me like saying "I never save more than 20 characters, so a character limit of 20 should be of no concern to you."

 

[IronWolf]

Actually the official explanation of the 20 character limit for CloudCB is that it prevents automated script attacks that would create character after character in a Denial of Service attack on the WotC servers. Source (Paulo, lead dev on the DDI tools before they yanked all official response to a single person WotCTrevor I believe).

While this explanation is laughable at best, its the one they have provided. Having talked a friend who is a software developer, his basic take is this is to prevent folks from buying one login and having an entire group's PCs on that one account.

Yeah, this is what gets me. I posted on another thread using some rough numbers how long it would actually take to fill 1TB of disk space by repeatedly creating and uploading characters via script across 20 computers. It wasn't happening overnight even with unlimited number of characters per account. Plus there are far easier ways to DDoS a company's servers than this method.

Weak explanations instead of just saying why there is a limit is the harder pill to swallow in my opinion. Just say that we have a low limit to help curb account sharing. I have more respect for that than a bogus technical explanation that doesn't hold water.