Possible DDI News...

[Merlin the Tuna]

So their big announcement is that they're now going to offer us... Less?

Well, that will save me several dollars a month.

Yeah, I have to say I'm pretty underwhelmed by this. This seems like a case of saying "Yes, the old character builder had lackluster house rule support, but the NEW one has no house rule support! Hooray!" and so on and so forth.

But frankly, online-only is a huge huge issue. I don't ever want to have to say "Well Comcast has their heads up their butts again, so we can't play D&D this weekend because we don't have characters anymore."

Edit: Although maybe I should have expected something like this to come up after the last CB update came and said "Hey, you used to be able to buy magic items for your character, but don't worry -- we fixed that."

 

[JoeGKushner]

My sub is up in a couple of days.

I'm done for now.

If any of my friends go with it, I'll ask them how they like it. If they say it's awesome, great.

But like embertiger, I play where there is no internet connection. I know, print out a full color sheet you cheap bastard! Use up that ink. Or I know, print it out in draft mode.

I like doing things the way I'm doing them now. Laptop open and using it for looking up magic items in the old CB, as well as rituals and other bits because I can't access the online compendium.

This just shot that in the face.

Done.

 

[Ryujin]

They indicated they've tested it with a demand size much larger then their current DDI user base... and it worked. So hopefully it will be ok.

Funny, but we thought the same thing. Then the walls came tumbling down. We had to invest in a rather expensive piece of testing software in order to truly mimic loading.

 

[Riley]

That depends on your definition of "Less". If less means that you have the same tool, but it's only available online then yes you have less. Try suggesting to Mac/Linux users that THEY have less.

Yes. The free gravy train has ended. Why are we shocked?

There was nothing free about DDI; I was a paying customer from Day 1 til last week. As for the content; well, it didn't really seem to have enough 'gravy' to justify me continuing my subscription before this new announcement, and there is even less gravy now.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Cheer up, us Linux gurus will have REAL fun with this. There is no chance that Moonlight is going to handle this. Heck, I haven't actually yet seen it ever successfully load an SL app. WotC has simply not learned about platform independence. Not really exactly their fault in terms of building a web app, you have few good choices. SL? NO mobile support at all, limited Mac support but no iPad (an awesome device to have at a table BTW). Flash? Still nothing that actually WORKS on an iPad. HTML5? hmmmmm nah, almost but not quite.

So they stuck with what is familiar to them and got to port their UI code for free. I dunno, a Java app would at least run on Androids, OTOH CB wouldn't be the app in its present form you'd want there anyway.

Eh, whatever, they'll probably have to port again in a couple years, but so it goes in this day and age with web stuff.

 

[Jhaelen]

So, where's the good news in all of this?

I'm just glad I still have the old character builder. At this time, I don't want to have anything to do with this Essentialized stuff, anyway.

 

[Ahrimon]

The good news is that there have been hints that this is step one towards a real vtt.

I don't like the lack of offline capability, but i've never actually used the CB when I didn't have web access, so I doubt it will be an issue. It's the thought of loosing functionality (even if I never used it) that I don't like.

As long as they make it robust enough to handle my gaming needs I'll probably come to like it.

 

[surfarcher]

Lucky you. The only time I've "used" it online is to update it.