Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 5388222" data-attributes="member: 1210">All right, so I subscribed to DDI fairly early in the 4e lifecycle. I've been an annual sub for just under two years now- I believe my sub is up in like March or something- and, unlike last year, I am seriously debating whether or not to renew my sub.When I subscribed, I felt as though DDI had a very high value for me. I got:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A Compendium with everything in it</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A Character Builder that was stable and had every character option in it within a month of release</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A Monster Builder that, while a touch buggy, was very usable</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Fair to good content in Dungeon</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Great content in Dragon</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Kick-ass preview and playtest material</li> </ul>I no longer feel like I am getting any of those things for my money, except for one- the preview material.  The Compendium is no longer complete; according to a post on the WotC boards, there is no intention of adding the monsters from Dark Sun to it. I thought that the whole point was to have all the D&D resources available at your fingertips (well, on your screen, anyway). If I have to have my books open alongside the Compendium when I am writing an adventure, why have the Compendium open at all?I'm pretty sure everyone is familiar with the Character Builder debacle- a great, fun, workable tool was replaced with an unstable piece of software. Using the old CB was fun; using the new one is a drag and feels like work. Moreover, it doesn't have the functionality of the old one- even simple things like the lack of even minimal house rules support make the new CB useless to me. The lack of the inclusion of new material in the old CB makes it less useful to me, although it's possible to end run around this... but if I have to do all the work to do so, why exactly am I paying for a Character Builder at all?Likewise, when WotC switched the Monster Builder to the new MM3 stat block, a bunch of instability crept in. Things don't print right; damage tends to reset randomly; etc. Now, I would be totally fine with this, if I thought these problems were going away, but the forthcoming online version again implies that the old school Monster Builder won't be updated or fixed. So until the new one comes out, we're left with a tool that is, ehhh, unreliable. Then there's the Dragon and Dungeon content. I'm going to roll my comments about this together with my comments on preview and playtest content. You see, we're still getting tons of preview content and dribbles of playtest material here and there- but the rest of the content in Dungeon and Dragon seems to have dried up. If the mags were still in print, I'd never pick a copy up these days- it's like paying for advertising. So the long and the short of it is- where is the value in my DDI sub? Especially as the price has gone up, I really feel like there needs to be something that I can point to as worth it. A Monster Builder that prints my monsters wrong, a Character Builder that can't build characters for my campaign, two electronic mags that have become largely in-house ads, a Compendium that doesn't save me the hassle of having the books with me- what exactly am I paying for here? What should I be expecting for my subscription dollar?I am not intending this as a rant. Rather, I'm increasingly frustrated by this, and I would love to have someone point out what I'm missing. Is it just the promise of "coming soon!"? Because it seems to me that if "coming soon" is all DDI is offering, I might as well wait until it's come.[MENTION=56746]mudbunny[/MENTION], I know you forward certain comments on to WotC. I hope that at least the gist of my concerns, if not this actual post, makes it onto your list.</blockquote>

Verification