November 16th release for Web-based Character Builder

[UngainlyTitan]

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.

By default in the browser, the offline mode has to be supported by the developers to use isolated storage to cache the data that is needed to support offline mode. As far as I know there is no way for the user to simply decide to go offline if this has not been supported by the developers.

 

[Qualidar]

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.

This strategy eliminates those groups, I would think. I hope that WotC doesn't think that in situations where the DM was floating a group subscription for a marginally invested table of players this strategy is going to get those players to sign up. I think it's far more likely that what this is going to do is make them switch games. In place of one DM with a subscription, they're going to have one DM with no more need for that subscription, or books, or perhaps minis, depending on where they go.

 

[evilref]

This strategy eliminates those groups, I would think. I hope that WotC doesn't think that in situations where the DM was floating a group subscription for a marginally invested table of players this strategy is going to get those players to sign up. I think it's far more likely that what this is going to do is make them switch games. In place of one DM with a subscription, they're going to have one DM with no more need for that subscription, or books, or perhaps minis, depending on where they go.

It certainly doesn't eliminate those groups.

In both my groups i'm the only one with a subscription, for a variety of reasons (though the mac users might now get one). The change in no way eliminates how I'll be using the CB, or changes my system from how I and the group have used it in the past.

 

[Truename]

I agree that the 20 character limit is probably intended to prevent people from sharing a single account. WotC strikes me as being very concerned about piracy. But you know what? There's no stopping piracy, and my support of anti-piracy measures goes up in smoke the very instant it makes my life as a paying customer worse. I have no patience for it.

For what it's worth, I'm not a power user, just a DM, and even I have 15 characters on my hard drive from the players of various campaigns I've run. 20 is too few.

My subscription ran out recently, and I'm holding off on resubscribing until things improve. I originally subscribed for Scales of War, and now I'd rather give my money to ENWorld.

 

[tuxgeo]

Re: The 20-playing character limit already discussed:

Let's go binary, shall we? How about a 128 (or, ZERO-based, a 127) character limit? That would really screw with peoples' minds, wouldn't it?

And the paying customers could pop for more money to get a 256 (or, ZERO-based, a 255) character limit.

Geeks around th3 (not "the," but "th3") world would rejoice!

 

[lkj]

I agree that the 20 character limit is probably intended to prevent people from sharing a single account. WotC strikes me as being very concerned about piracy. But you know what? There's no stopping piracy, and my support of anti-piracy measures goes up in smoke the very instant it makes my life as a paying customer worse. I have no patience for it.

For what it's worth, I'm not a power user, just a DM, and even I have 15 characters on my hard drive from the players of various campaigns I've run. 20 is too few.

My subscription ran out recently, and I'm holding off on resubscribing until things improve. I originally subscribed for Scales of War, and now I'd rather give my money to ENWorld.

It may not matter to those of you who don't like it, but that Paulo fellow from WotC gave the following explanation for the 20 character limit:

I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.

I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.

Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?



Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.

Link:

Whoops! Browser Settings Incompatible

 

[Ketjak]

Not so

It's great for me. I can access from nigh anywhere and mac users will be able to also. It may suck for people on a plane (which affects how many really?) but basically every sleezebag motel even offers free wi-fi these days. It's a good move for more people than it hurts, which would be the goal.

Er, wrong on the part I bolded. I just stayed at Walt Disney World's Wilderness Lodge and not only didn't they have free wifi, they didn't have free access at all - $9.99 per 24 hours of access - and the access they had was a roaring 356K (no more than 400 down). That's fairly common, to charge for access.

I use the CB when I'm winding down at night. I won't be able to do that when traveling unless I pony up. Now, I will probably do that anyway - but now I have to to build or review characters. And if I go back to the Wilderness Lodge or an equivalent, the access is so slow it's going to be a real pain to pull down the Silverlight client every time.

Not so sure I like the way this is shaping up.

That said, I have said many times the Compendium alone was worth the annual subscription price per month. I still think that's true, but the shine is wearing off a bit and since the Compendium is not accessible by iPhone or Android phone...

 

[Dumnbunny]

Er, wrong on the part I bolded. I just stayed at Walt Disney World's Wilderness Lodge and not only didn't they have free wifi, they didn't have free access at all - $9.99 per 24 hours of access - and the access they had was a roaring 356K (no more than 400 down). That's fairly common, to charge for access.

The last time I stayed at a hotel with free internet it was worth every penny I paid for it. It ranged from painful to impossible to use. And it was a decent hotel.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Hell, is WoTC wants to give it a positive spin, they should provide Wi-Fi to every game store that runs encounters and then they can boldly say, "Available at your Favorite Gaming Shop."

CB having no wi fi effects me at the shop because they have no Wi-FI.

If B S wants to talk about how he can use it anywhere now, make it so B S

 

[IronWolf]

It may not matter to those of you who don't like it, but that Paulo fellow from WotC gave the following explanation for the 20 character limit:

I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.

I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.

Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?

Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.

This is sort of a weak explanation for a 20 character limit. First, one would presumably need to have a DDI account to start uploading characters with a credit card on file. But let's go ahead and say this hacker that want's to take WotC down gets his stolen credit card number, signs up for an account and then proceeds to run this malicious script from 20 computers simultaneously.

It looks like from other posts that a fair number of dnd4e files are around 200kb in size. The same information in a DB table is quite likely to be less than that, but we'll go with 200kb. So 20 machines running the same script for an hour will generate 1.4GB of data. Working from there, rounding up to 1.5GB per hour means it would take 682 hours to generate 1TB worth of files. And even if the size of file is double the 200kb I worked with you are still going to need 341 hours to fill 1TB. Or even if the script runs in half the time, one still needs a good number of hours to cause harm via this method being used to justify the 20 characte limit.

So a 20 character limit seems to do nothing to really prevent an overnight attack of this manner other than frustrate the legitimate users of this system. It seems limiting simultaneous logins would do more to circumvent a scripted attack as described in the above quote.

And finally, anyone that wants to attack the WotC DDI servers is going to find a more traditional DDoS attack on their network and servers much more expedient than trying to fill up their disk space by uploading a multitude of fake 20th level characters.