WotC Response to CB issues?

[Farnsworth]

I got a chance to use the CB prior to the new online version, and it was great. I've been considering a DDI subscription, but the vast majority of the feedback I've read is negative. Some very good points have been raised as to why the quality of the CB, and thus DDI is questionable. Has WotC addressed any of these concerns?

Everytime I try to find some sort of official response, all I seem to come up with is more negative user feedback.

 

[I'm A Banana]

WotC hasn't addressed those concerns as such, no.

However, they're hoping to keep the thing up-to-date and make it stable by the end of the month.

My personal advice would be to wait on the DDI sub until spring or so, and check back then to see how it is. It might be fine. It might still not be fine. But be patient. It's probably not worth $10/month to most average players right now, let alone a longer subscription. That might change, and if you're especially forgiving or desperate for Essentials or Dark Sun stuff the equation changes, but that's the situation as I see it from here.

 

[Trebor62]

It depends on how much ten dollars means to you. If its a lot I would wait if you wont miss it I would go ahead and try it out now. I have only used it for a few low level characters with no problems. Others however have had lots of trouble judging from other posts, so it is a bit of a gamble.

 

[Mad Hamish]

The online builder has some issues.
I haven't had any crash issues since I started using it (probably an advantage of being in a much different time zone from the USA) but there are some annoying bugs and lack of support for some things it probably should have (house rules, inherent bonuses, PC export etc).

iirc Wizards thinks that they've identified the causes of the crashing problems and that they'll be fixed in December and some of the bugs will be fixed

As other people say it really depends on how much the money is worth for you, I'm intending to reup for a year this month because I think it's worth it but depending what you use if for and how much spare cash you have you could legitimately have a much different opinion.

 

[Farnsworth]

I'm not so concerned about the $10, my immeadiate concern is time. I'm running a variant of a "flashback" adventure this weekend, where the characters are going to meet an NPC who tells them a store about an artifiact that is a pivotal piece of the campaign. My players will play the part of the heros in the story, which will run for 3 encounters. Each encounter will be at a progressively higher level culminating in the climax of the artifacts history.

Needless to say it would be both faster and easier for me to build 3 different versions of 5 seperate characters with the character builder as opposed to sitting down with pencil and paper. The amount of time a character builder could save me is easily worth $10, unless the character builder would take as long, longer, or worse, not work at all/sufficiently.

 

[Caerin]

Check out the known issues and compiled list of errors on the Character Builder technical forum over at WotC. If any of those are seriously problematic, then you'll have to do at least some things by hand, but depending on the particular character it might be a simple fix. For me, for example, my Dark Sun characters don't have the inherent bonuses added, so I can add them pretty easily by consulting the book. My weapons-as-implement characters are kind of hosed, but I can still figure their powers out at different levels- it just takes more work. Overall, it's a time saver for me even with the issues.

 

[OnlineDM]

I think that if I had never used the downloadable Character Builder I would find the online version to be pretty awesome. Sure, it has some bugs and it doesn't do everything I could think of, but it works pretty well.

The problem for me is that I HAVE used the downloadable Builder, and the online version isn't as good. That makes me sad.

That said, the online Character Builder works pretty well for most things most of the time, in my experience.

 

[Spatula]

If I had never used the offline CB, I would still think that the online CB is a hideously slow mess. I haven't had any crashes since the first day, but building a character is just painful. Click a button. Wait for options to load. Click on option. Wait for description to load. Click Accept. Wait for character to re-calculate. And that's when you know what you want to pick.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

CB Classic + CBLoader + patches online.

The 4e fanbase is literally better at updating WotC's products then WotC is.

 

[smtwtfs]

CB Classic + CBLoader + patches online.

And the riddle of how a botnet is created has been explained, YMMV.