Community

Mar 1, 2011 -- 4:20AM, Plaguescarred wrote:

@DMapple, you just recently found out you were in the BETA right ? Because i was in before the Implementation when we had to enter all the infos by hand, from Skills to Powers to HP & Defenses. Believe me, the Integration is in place and its wonderful for inputing Monsters was taking an eternity. Powers have dice icon and covers the basics. I did't think it would do it right from the get go. Ther's still some glitch, bugs in some of them. its far from being perfect.

No I do realise it is a great improvement from entering things by hand, but it still isn't true integration. Integration requires two way communication between the CB and the VT, at the moment it's only one way. At the moment you can export too the VT from the CB but you can't import from the VT to the CB to update a character you've used and altered in the VT, that two-way communication, real integration, is a long way off from what I've seen.

The Monster Builder BETA is still in developpement having only a Feature to level up & down and Renaming. Yet the integration eased the DM job greatly right off the bat. Not having to type it all in was a huge improvement. It will be awesome when the MB is completed with Customization Features and all.

I'm not confident on how quick that level of customization will come considering the level up/down feature doesn't actually correctly modify the powers at the moment, and how long it is taking them to reintroduce features to the CB that we know the OCB can support (like inherent bonuses).

I agree that the VT has a lot of potential, the voice chat is great I had great fun playing round with the voice modes, the male to female modifier is really impressive. The campaign manager for organising games is the killer feature it has over other tables I've used in the past, and true integration with actual working tools will make it a real winner, even if they can't match the automation of other tables. I just think we are talking at least months if not years away based on WotC previous performance in this area.

Mar 1, 2011 -- 3:22PM, Naethanyl wrote:

I'm considering possibly quitting my subscription, but I still hold out that WoTC will address their concerns with the community.

Funny.  I'm cancelling my subscription until they address the community's concerns with WotC.

They did promise to communicate better.  That lasted all of a month.  Then again, they never said for how long, so I suppose I should be grateful.

Mar 2, 2011 -- 5:33PM, Mock wrote:

Mar 2, 2011 -- 1:00PM, DMaple wrote:

Oh yeah there is no need for an OCB to work with the VT, they don't share the same database at all, not even the same file format. With all the other half-truths, broken promises and outright deceptions I'd forgotten the line about needing to move online to allow for integration.

A slight correction - there was no technical need for an online CB to work with the VT at first; however, the changes to the VT (removing the ability to save out to the hard drive, or import from it, as I recall) make the online CB a requirement now, even if it doesn't share the same data.

If I recall correctly from discussions about this change, it (removing export/import from the VT) was characterized as a "business need" by WotC. 

And that's why I am done in 2 days.

Simply put, DDI is a very poor product over all, more so now that I am getting less for my dollar at this point for it, then I was 2 years ago when the sub cost less.

A fairly poor online CB, the drop in content in the amount and type in dragon, miss leading(and sometimes out right lying) reasoning given  to the change to a online CB and a inability meet reasonable deadlines on getting out online article. 

PLAYBOY/STUFF/MAXIUM ect can put a full 100+ hardcopy printed pages on our door steps every month, at the beinging of the month(newsweek and TIME do it weekly). And now you're telling me you can't even give me what day during a given month you're going to have each article ready?  And we think that's cool or OK?  It's not like you are putting out the same amount of content as you were a year ago, or even 6 months ago, but you are offering you don't have the ability to get out even in a timely fashion.

You had a problem with piracy.  You had to pug that hole, and ensure that people were not just subbing quarterly to get 3 or 4 months worth of updates at once to the CB. 

I can under stand all that.  But you gave us a crap product that is frankly, not worth the time to use it vs doing it the pen and paper way.  You moved from and offline product that held all the data in your laptop/desktop and had support for house rulings(one of the core fundamental points of any role playing game system), to something that can only be used when you have net access, is prone to crashing, has to save any change made right after the change has been made.

Frankly DDI your product blows.