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WotC_Trevor wrote:

Hey all. I just wanted to drop in and talk about the “Ruling Skill Challenges” article that was scheduled to be released today. If you’ve checked the calendar today, you’ll see that the article was moved to next Wednesday. There were some scheduling conflicts and it was decided to move the article to next week, but unfortunately the calendar wasn’t updated with that information until today.

*blink "scheduling conflicts" of something planned to publish?

This is double speech if nothing else is.

The only way it could be a "scheduling conflicts" is a person tasks to produced to much too soon or IT did not have the time to post it. Your comment on the face of it needs to be the former, however more likely WotC provided an extension for time to complete.  Oh WotC clearly has the right to change schedule, however when dealing with the customers an advanced (and explained) reason for changes likely would help much as far as interaction goes.

I do not like being treated like a mushroom.

rjdafoe wrote:

Interestingly enough, the main page with the Coming Soon of the other tools is gone. The Coming Soon has been replaced with Subscribe with no mention of anything that but what is out. I don't know how long this has been in place, but that is news in of itself I think.

this is a good point to bring up. is it a mere coincidence, that DI and that ad-removal come at pretty much the same date? i would say not. but since WOTC always fails at bringing such points across, i doubt we will hear anything about it, except for "statements" from the CM team (trevor+chuck - while they are great at saying nothing to smooth things over, they are also great at hiding anything they know from us.)

mudbunny wrote:

The rest of the Digital Tools (Dungeon builder, Character Visualizer, Game table) have not been cancelled. There has been no announcement of it.

They'll try their best to keep it from us and make it as quiet as possible. The same way they did with the DDi 4e screw-up.

mudbunny wrote:

Here is why I think they are not disclosing anything until they are closer to a beta.

[hypothetical]
They say that they are working on tool X, and that it is in closed alpha at WotC.

3 weeks go by, and no mention of it moving to beta.

There will then be a flurry of posts of the type:
[indent]...It is obvious that the programmers they have are crap and should be fired...I could put something out like this in a weekend...They are lying to us...[/indent]

[/hypothetical]

That is what the character builder experience has taught them. They are also wary of over committing and then being forced to change plans, which has already happened once.

I understand your points completely, but there's a huge difference between over committing and saying "we're stepping back to take a look, and we'll let you know when we know". This is what I meant by "doom". I don't follow the forums daily, but have been following DDI fairly close since the early, frustrating days in '07. Based on everything I've seen in the last year and half (and 25+ years of purchasing from TSR/WoTC), my confidence level in their ability to deliver further digital products is really waning. And I'm a cheerleader, most of the time.

Here's to hoping that sometime in the next few weeks they'll announce at least tentative development plans. If not, I believe they'll start to see a serious loss of interest/faith from within the community.

And, even though I know I'm in the minority here, I'd like to again "vote" for continued progress on the visualizer. I suck that bad as an artist, that I'd really like the ability to create cool looking character portraits. Reasonable game tables we already have, imo, but I've not found a similar tool for creating character images.