November 16th release for Web-based Character Builder

[renau1g]

Good idea as people will also see it as adding features, rather than losing stuff if they had to reduce.

 

[Sunseeker]

I would probably even say for a large majority of personal users out there 20 is probably more then enough...

I hardly consider myself a power user, but in the first week of having the CB I threw together roughly 30 different characters. Some were power builds, some were for groups I'm in, some were just theory-crafting, others were just neat themeatic ideas I came up with.

50 characters is hardly a stretch, but I wouldn't be surprised to see this turn into a DDO-like scenario where if you want to make more characters, you have to pay for more "slots". Which will wholly kill any desire I have to use their service(and why I don't play DDO either!), I don't mind microtrans when they're reasonable. But Microtrans for another 20 PDF-like files?

Wizards my friends, that's just silly.

 

[Scribble]

I hardly consider myself a power user, but in the first week of having the CB I threw together roughly 30 different characters. Some were power builds, some were for groups I'm in, some were just theory-crafting, others were just neat themeatic ideas I came up with.

50 characters is hardly a stretch, but I wouldn't be surprised to see this turn into a DDO-like scenario where if you want to make more characters, you have to pay for more "slots". Which will wholly kill any desire I have to use their service(and why I don't play DDO either!), I don't mind microtrans when they're reasonable. But Microtrans for another 20 PDF-like files?

Wizards my friends, that's just silly.

Eh... Personally I think anytime you start using statements like "some were just theory-crafting" you're entering power user territory...

I mean you might not be 232 dude on hold power user level, but still.


All in all I agree- I think they need to up the count to meet at least lower level power user levels, but I can understand why they started relatively low.

I don't think they really NEED to support making your own army of characters though...

Again I hope export makes this a moot point.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I would have thought that 30 would be an appropriate maximum, as it allows someone to have a version of his character saved (or pre-prepared) for every level of his life from 1st to 30th.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

20 is absurdedly low, epecially if you're a DM who wants to have records of everyone else's characters ('Course you used to not need to manually make their characters on your account either, so this is literally WotC creating a new problem based on a previous problem that they just created).

It's cool though, if you have too many characters you can always expo - ooooohhh.

 

[Sunseeker]

I don't think they really NEED to support making your own army of characters though...

Again I hope export makes this a moot point.

Indeed, you could make an army, or not, with the old builder, because you could save as much as your HD could hold. Given how small they are, a literal army is not hard to imagine.

I would have thought that 30 would be an appropriate maximum, as it allows someone to have a version of his character saved (or pre-prepared) for every level of his life from 1st to 30th.

Actually, I think an interesting solution would be to instead of making each level of each character a unique file, each "character" was a possible iteration of that character 1-30. This would drastically adjust how 20 characters looked, if you could save Character A as levels 1-30, and still only use up one slot, since it's only one character.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Just power users get screwed for a while. Hopefully once they get the export function up and running this will be a non issue.

I have a question regarding the export function now that the storage space issue has come up. I know the plan is to provide export functionality in the future but with limited space available for storage what provisions will there be for re-importing or uploading an existing file back into the cloud so that it could be modified again?

Once a character is exported it will have to be deleted or nuked from the cloud in order to actually free up any space. Will there be a way to send that file back if you want to re-activate that character for use?

Mind you this would be allowing users to upload data directly into WOTC servers which could be a management nightmare. I wonder if this issue has been planned for?

 

[evilref]

I have a question regarding the export function now that the storage space issue has come up. I know the plan is to provide export functionality in the future but with limited space available for storage what provisions will there be for re-importing or uploading an existing file back into the cloud so that it could be modified again?

Once a character is exported it will have to be deleted or nuked from the cloud in order to actually free up any space. Will there be a way to send that file back if you want to re-activate that character for use?

Mind you this would be allowing users to upload data directly into WOTC servers which could be a management nightmare. I wonder if this issue has been planned for?

Depends entirely on how the DDI team will implement it.

We already know you can import.

We know they intend to add exporting.

It would be logical that exporting just allows you to save the *.dnd4e file to your hard drive and leaves the character in the cloud.

It's logical that if you try and upload or create character #21 you'll be prevented from doing so. Maybe there'll be a UI option to delete another character (which you could then export to back it up first).

It's unknown, we'll find out about the importing on the 16th and the exporting as soon as it's added (maybe December, if not i'd be surprised to see it longer than end of Jan).

 

[Scribble]

Once a character is exported it will have to be deleted or nuked from the cloud in order to actually free up any space. Will there be a way to send that file back if you want to re-activate that character for use?

Mind you this would be allowing users to upload data directly into WOTC servers which could be a management nightmare. I wonder if this issue has been planned for?

Well.,.. they've indicated 2 things...

1: At launch the system will have import capability so you can import any characters you already have built.

2. The export function will export to the .dnd4e file format that already exists.


From that I surmise it will let you re-import... But I don't know for sure.

 

[bbbmmmlll]

What number would be good for a power user then? If not 20... 50? That just seems extremely high to me. And if you go towards 100 you are going start creating UI issues.
I would not want my programmers worrying about numbers that extreme when I am trying to make a widely used tool. They should instead spend the time making the export tool, something that most people could use and would also solve these issues.

That's short term thinking. How many characters are you going to create over the next five years? Twenty just doesn't cut it. I often make a few characters for every new game just to play around with concepts. Maybe it's OK for six months, but if the product is successful then it's going to need to be increased. From a programming perspective, the app already needs to handle large lists of items and Silverlight has components to do exactly this. One scrollable window with sortable columns for name, race, level, campaign name and character image is a few hours of work.