JoeGKushner
First Post
You find someone taking bets with you against those odds and I'm in too.
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The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
November 16th release for Web-based Character Builder
- Thread starter mudbunny
- Start date
You find someone taking bets with you against those odds and I'm in too.
ki11erDM
Explorer
It really depends on how they display all the characters at the character selection screen. Is it a drop down? A 100 different items in a drop down would suck…
Is it icon based? A 100 different icons in a huge long list would suck… and think about it on a phone!
They could/will find a good way… just saying it is much easier if you are only dealing with a limited selection and I would rather they did that as a feature upgrade later.
garyh
First Post
I play a lot of Play by Post games. I have 8 ongoing PC's in such games. I DM 6 PC's in another game. I also maintain another 4 for the game my wife DM's (one of the eight I play in).
That's 18 PC's right there.
Oh, and we also rotate DMing Dungeon Delves to try out new PC's, so that's either 1 more PC if I'm playing or 5 more if I'm DMing.
And that's before we get to PC's I've made just for fun, or multiple copies of possible paths my PC's my take.
20 is low. The fact that you can't export at launch exacerbates this.
EDIT: Just checked, and I have 326 saved character files on my hard drive. They take up all of 34 MB on my 600 GB HD.
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For reference sake, most dnd4e files are around 200kb, and it's hard to imagine the online files will be biggerthan uncompressed XML.
My free gmail account offers more storage space then what WotC wants me to pay for.
This is legitimately moronic. So at dnd4e files sitting at, let's say, 2mb, I have in my computer enough storage space on my computer to hold 512,000 characters. At 20 characters per person, I can cover 25,600 DDI subscribers. On my house computer that I use to play video games on. The computer I casually put together.
Tell you what WotC, you pay me a buck for each user for each month, I'll totally set you up for some storage space. Clearly this is a way better goddamn job then you're able to do on your own, because every year one subscriber pays you enough for 2 TB hardware space at current prices, and I'm going to leap to an insane feat of logic and decide you have more then just one subscriber.
My free gmail account offers more storage space then what WotC wants me to pay for.
This is legitimately moronic. So at dnd4e files sitting at, let's say, 2mb, I have in my computer enough storage space on my computer to hold 512,000 characters. At 20 characters per person, I can cover 25,600 DDI subscribers. On my house computer that I use to play video games on. The computer I casually put together.
Tell you what WotC, you pay me a buck for each user for each month, I'll totally set you up for some storage space. Clearly this is a way better goddamn job then you're able to do on your own, because every year one subscriber pays you enough for 2 TB hardware space at current prices, and I'm going to leap to an insane feat of logic and decide you have more then just one subscriber.
garyh
First Post
You must spread some Experience Points around before giving it to ProfessorCirno again.
Well said, ProfessorCirno.
Nikosandros
Golden Procrastinator
Ditto on bout counts.
dvvega
Explorer
My personal opinion on all this is quite simple. If you take a quick look at a Google search on Dungeons and Dragons Character Builder you will see a gamut of wares sites offering the program with the latest updates etc included.
WOTC were obviously banking on money from subscribers but if those subscribers can get all the DDI they want from somewhere else, they lose a lot of money.
What about the gaming groups that chip in a bit of money each and purchase a single DDI subscription to share? That's a group of 6 people paying 1 subscription. Sure they cannot all be logged in at the same time but there is nothing there that requires them to be logged in together. Or the DM "owns" the account and downloads everything available for his/her players.
So it is about economics to begin with. Sure the other stuff might still be possible, but the character builder is not distributable now. Wait until they start doing that with Dungeon and Dragon. Realistically they were selling physical magazines and those were being shared, however they thought they could make some money with this DDI thing. They realise they are not and so the next step is to make it impossible (?) for anyone to get hold of some of the features without an account.
The storage space thing needs to be thought out better by WOTC - naturally. Limiting the number of characters to 20 is not 100% logical however looking at how long a campaign takes to play, even a short 5 level mini-campaign, I can see that 20 characters is plenty for some players. But it really should just be unlimited with a little judicial monitoring on their part.
I personally do not see much (more) good coming of this move except to protect their income stream. However if this turns a lot of people away then what next?
D
WOTC were obviously banking on money from subscribers but if those subscribers can get all the DDI they want from somewhere else, they lose a lot of money.
What about the gaming groups that chip in a bit of money each and purchase a single DDI subscription to share? That's a group of 6 people paying 1 subscription. Sure they cannot all be logged in at the same time but there is nothing there that requires them to be logged in together. Or the DM "owns" the account and downloads everything available for his/her players.
So it is about economics to begin with. Sure the other stuff might still be possible, but the character builder is not distributable now. Wait until they start doing that with Dungeon and Dragon. Realistically they were selling physical magazines and those were being shared, however they thought they could make some money with this DDI thing. They realise they are not and so the next step is to make it impossible (?) for anyone to get hold of some of the features without an account.
The storage space thing needs to be thought out better by WOTC - naturally. Limiting the number of characters to 20 is not 100% logical however looking at how long a campaign takes to play, even a short 5 level mini-campaign, I can see that 20 characters is plenty for some players. But it really should just be unlimited with a little judicial monitoring on their part.
I personally do not see much (more) good coming of this move except to protect their income stream. However if this turns a lot of people away then what next?
D
They may be trying to protect their income stream, but I see them losing a lot of subscriptions over this which would be counterproductive to protecting their income stream. I can see them getting some mac users or people who play with laptops with constant internet connections, but how many people could that be? Apart from die hard WotC apologists that somehow think WotC can do no wrong even after constantly employing policies that alienate or downright rip off customers, a lot of people that can somehow benefit from the new format will object to it on principle. Who really want's to "rent" a character builder and your characters when you are used to owning both? I sure don't. I'd rather go back to making characters by hand than having to pay a monthly fee to "access" my characters. They are my characters, I should own them and always have access to them for free.
Ahrimon
Bourbon and Dice
My understanding is that silverlight has an offline mode. Does anyone know how easy/hard it is for a user to switch an application to offline mode?
Granted there would be no data available for an offline version of the builder since that's all seperate. But all WotC would have to do is release some sort of a data app and *poof* offline CB.
I don't see them doing this. At all. But it remains an option, especially down the road when 5e comes out.
Granted there would be no data available for an offline version of the builder since that's all seperate. But all WotC would have to do is release some sort of a data app and *poof* offline CB.
I don't see them doing this. At all. But it remains an option, especially down the road when 5e comes out.
renau1g
First Post
They've stated they won't be using the offline Silverlight potential and there will be no more offline CB.
[MENTION=524]dvvega[/MENTION] - there's nothing with the new system stopping the sharing either. Buy 1 account per group and still make all the PC's (which for the vast majority of people is the reason they subscribe, the CB). Also, have they revealed they're losing money with DDI? I've not seen that posted anywhere.
[MENTION=524]dvvega[/MENTION] - there's nothing with the new system stopping the sharing either. Buy 1 account per group and still make all the PC's (which for the vast majority of people is the reason they subscribe, the CB). Also, have they revealed they're losing money with DDI? I've not seen that posted anywhere.
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