What will Masterplan be after the C&D?

[Blastin]

My hope is that, much as with the various power card and character creation sites, this is the prelude to similar WotC software. I have my doubts, so it's really just a hope and nothing more.

I'm disappointed. It's a shame.

-O

This is what I was thinking as well.

 

[davethegame]

My hope is that, much as with the various power card and character creation sites, this is the prelude to similar WotC software. I have my doubts, so it's really just a hope and nothing more.

I'm disappointed. It's a shame.

-O

Also color me disappointed. Masterplan clearly is a lot of work, and has tons and tons of devoted fans... As far as I recall, those other sites didn't require DDI. Masterplan required DDI to do all the importing.

Even if there was some kind of encryption problem with the data, it seems like the answer is to tell them that instead of sending a C&D first.

 

[Oldtimer]

Old ladies and tiny kittens would die in droves if I vented my full anger and frustration over WotC and their lawyers right now.

I really wish this company suffers the consequences of their stupidity.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And this is exactly why the vast majority of us developers won't touch anything to do with 4e with a 10' pole.

 

[Mephistopheles]

Masterplan doesn't encrypt the data it grabs from DDI so I can understand WotC taking issue with this feature (although somehow I doubt the response would have been any different regardless). It would be nice, however, if companies dealing in products that are community driven could understand that responding to the creativity and innovation of their community with something other than blunt legal weaponry may be a worthwhile investment.

 

[mudbunny]

From my understanding (and I have heard nothing from WotC about this), MasterPlan allowed you to *download* the compendium to your HD and save it, and then share that library with other people, and that ability to download it and then share it with others who might not be subscribers is/was the problem.

I am going to be poking The Powers That Be to try to get something official out of them about this.

 

[Scribble]

From my understanding (and I have heard nothing from WotC about this), MasterPlan allowed you to *download* the compendium to your HD and save it, and then share that library with other people, and that ability to download it and then share it with others who might not be subscribers is/was the problem.

I am going to be poking The Powers That Be to try to get something official out of them about this.

Well, that would make sense then.

Perhaps 9.0 will still let you get info from the compendium but not let you share it.

 

[doctorhook]

I find it silly that Wizards is so short sighted that they would move against something that actively promotes subscriptions to D&D Insider.

I perhaps shouldn't say this, but my D&DI subscription has lapsed, and thus I have no access to the compendium currently. And yet, after reformatting my laptop last week, and after reloading Masterplan version 8.8, I was able to download a massive collection of library files for it from a certain website. From those files, my new copy of Masterplan was suddenly equipped with the stat blocks of every official monster in 4E as of last month, including even the stat blocks of monsters from RPGA adventures Dungeon Magazine. I never paid for access to those, and yet I had it.

Now, the files I downloaded and imported into my copy of Masterplan weren't created by me -- but they were mined from D&DI by someone else's copy of Masterplan, someone who must also have had an active D&DI subscription when they did it. After Masterplan collected the data, it was just a matter of that person copying the library files and posting them somewhere online, where anyone could download them.

So, on this basis, I understand why WotC doesn't approve of Masterplan in its current form.

Old ladies and tiny kittens would die in droves if I vented my full anger and frustration over WotC and their lawyers right now.

I really wish this company dies a painful death.

That's harsh. Seriously.

Anyway, I'm an optimist. I'm happy to hear that Masterplan is alive and kicking! I'm mildly bummed that we won't have such simple integration for Masterplan anymore, but I'm also confident that it's just a matter of time before an alternative is found. I don't endorse piracy, but I do like Masterplan -- I just want it to have monsters.

 

[Nightson]

I'm pretty sure it was already brought up in this thread, but data mining the compendium is something that's been not okay since the very start according to WotC. Now honestly, I have a pretty low regard for what exactly companies may want in general, but I can't say I'm shocked or angry that WotC followed up on a policy it's had in place since the start that Masterplan knowingly violated.

 

[frog]

I just wish that there was a version that supported 3.5 or Pathfinder...