57025236 wrote:
Just another example of how they expect their customers to pay the same amount of money for a service that is severely diminished .
But yeah, even I was shocked at that statement.
It's gonna be a tight squeeze.
Yeah, 20 is an awfully low number.
I'm guessing they had no way to anticipate their server space needs, and picked it out of a hat. Now, I don't use those 106 all, of course - in fact, less than 20 are played - but I do it to experiment, to simply have fun, and to familiarize myself with player character options. Heck, my "hordes of wary, heavily armed sociopaths" was used as a testimonial for the product.
I just nosed at one of my campaign folders with my players characters in... The 15th level wizard (for example) has a file size of about 350kb.
20 Characters comes in at about 7MB.
About 40,000 subscribers, comes in at about 267GB.
Remember that enterprise storage isn't quite as cheap as home storage space. Remember that it will likely be being stored in multiple mirroring and load balancing machines across multiple clusters.
Remember that they have to have backup solutions that can cope with the quantity of data involved as well.
Remember that they will want to allow for storage for other upcoming tools as well, so some of the available storage space has to be allocated for future growth.
Finally, they've no idea how many people will store 1 character or 3 dozen. So if they set a limit of 100 and everybody suddenly uploads 100 characters, they will be running at high capacity right away.
I believe the 'initially' in the statement absolutely. Its something that will change over time, based on demand, usage and their experience with the service.
So while 20 might seem small, in the broader picture of offering a new service, I can understand where they're coming from.
Additionally, once they offer external storage (or expot/import or however they do it) this issue goes away.
As a DM, I need copies of the characters for all of my players. I also frequently like to create important NPCs using the CB first, before I NPC-ify them.
Like you, I also have lots of characters that I put together to explore concepts and optimization. I find it fun to build characters like this, and even to build entire hypothetical adventuring parties.
20 slots just doesn't cut it, and I hope that WotC wises up and raises that number before Nov 16.
Excuse me, I've got to go look behind my couch for some loose change, so they can buy a real harddrive. I've currently got 70 characters in the directory structure for the old builder. 20's just silly.
Edit: To clarify, that's S3's 99.999999999% reliable solution, not anything as unreliable as normal enterprise RAID5. 0.14/Gig/Month. The reduced reliability solution, only 99.99% reliable, is 9.3 cents/Gig/month. And there are bulk discounts from there.
This is a simple math issue from an infrastructure point of view.
I just nosed at one of my campaign folders with my players characters in... The 15th level wizard (for example) has a file size of about 350kb.
20 Characters comes in at about 7MB.
About 40,000 subscribers, comes in at about 267GB.
Remember that enterprise storage isn't quite as cheap as home storage space. Remember that it will likely be being stored in multiple mirroring and load balancing machines across multiple clusters.
Remember that they have to have backup solutions that can cope with the quantity of data involved as well.
Remember that they will want to allow for storage for other upcoming tools as well, so some of the available storage space has to be allocated for future growth.
Finally, they've no idea how many people will store 1 character or 3 dozen. So if they set a limit of 100 and everybody suddenly uploads 100 characters, they will be running at high capacity right away.
I believe the 'initially' in the statement absolutely. Its something that will change over time, based on demand, usage and their experience with the service.
So while 20 might seem small, in the broader picture of offering a new service, I can understand where they're coming from.
Additionally, once they offer external storage (or expot/import or however they do it) this issue goes away.
Yes, 267 GB of storage? I mean, its not like these 40000 subscribers are actually paying money or anything for this? You know, it makes me think that maybe they should consider an offline solution? That would be novel...
Yes, 267 GB of storage? I mean, its not like these 40000 subscribers are actually paying money or anything for this? You know, it makes me think that maybe they should consider an offline solution? That would be novel...
At one tenth of a cent per subscriber per month... I think they can afford to up the limit.
And when I DM I like to have summaries sent to me so I can pick magic items for my PCs, that's 5-6 of 20 right there.
50 is a more reasonable opening gambit, 100 even...but 20? That's just pure spiteful.
Assuming they have no better method to store the characters than the current uncompressed xml files that would be enough for 40000 people to each have nearly 600 characters each...
So storage cost is not really the issue.
Hell the game i DM will soon have 12 current characters. That's just one game. Storing the current characters at their current levels.
Another thing... when I subscribe, I won't be limited at all by the 20 character limit - I will print all of the "just had an idea I wanted to check out," or just in case," sort of characters (all those not currently in an active campaign) into PDFs like I already do so that I can email them to myself or to a friend to check out without the "ugh... jeez... load already!" wait time from Character Builder.
If it turns out that many subscribers have over 20 active characters... I hope they up the limit.
About 40,000 subscribers, comes in at about 267GB.
Remember that enterprise storage isn't quite as cheap as home storage space. Remember that it will likely be being stored in multiple mirroring and load balancing machines across multiple clusters.
It's not as cheap as home storage, but it's still cheap. Getting a SAN to store this much data is trivial.
About 40,000 subscribers, comes in at about 267GB.
Remember that enterprise storage isn't quite as cheap as home storage space. Remember that it will likely be being stored in multiple mirroring and load balancing machines across multiple clusters.
It's not as cheap as home storage, but it's still cheap. Getting a SAN to store this much data is trivial.
True enough, but that doesn't take into account multiple servers, support costs, licensing costs. Yes, cloud services are an option, but its not always the best solution for many different reasons (all though I believe the usual reasons against it will become less and less relevant). As a proportion of the money they have available, they no doubt haven't spent as much on infrastructure as they could have.
Or to put it another way, you don't build a google sized data centre when you've no idea what the actual usage might be.
I guess limiting to 20 characters per account will be their way of making sure "Account Leasing" doesn't hurt them too much, this at the unfortune of paying customers again. Sad.
It's really like bringing a '73 Mustang Big Block 429 cu. in. to the dealer and get in return a '03 Mustang GT 4.6 L while being told that you're still getting your Mustang sports car back with a V8 in the belly.
20 WTF? I have more players than that...IS this an official post from someone at WOTC?
Yep - check community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/758... if you want to see the full post.
And that takes development. It'd probably be cheaper to just get more storage.
[Yes, cloud services are an option, but its not always the best solution for many different reasons (all though I believe the usual reasons against it will become less and less relevant). As a proportion of the money they have available, they no doubt haven't spent as much on infrastructure as they could have.
My point, in bringing in S3 costs, is that S3 is actually idiotically expensive for bulk storage. The S3 value proposition is that they distribute it for you, and they scale down much better. (down, not up.)
Just having ye-olde SAN is much much cheaper, if you can fill a fraction of it's space.
And my far more expensive cloud-storage fancy-buzzword solution STILL came to $40/month, for all subscribers using all 20 allotted characters. $40 total for WotC, that is. The expensive solution.
So what # do you think should it be capped at?
30?
40?
50? (enough for me)
75?
100?
256?
(That's a duh at my own reasoning, not anyone else on the thread, FYI.)
1. Raise the limit to 100 temporarily as a minimum.
2. Get exporting in very quickly
3. Allow the program to be pointed to a folder and access .dnd4e files.
True enough, but that doesn't take into account multiple servers, support costs, licensing costs. Yes, cloud services are an option, but its not always the best solution for many different reasons (all though I believe the usual reasons against it will become less and less relevant). As a proportion of the money they have available, they no doubt haven't spent as much on infrastructure as they could have.
Or to put it another way, you don't build a google sized data centre when you've no idea what the actual usage might be.
No, it doesn't take all of that into account - but those costs are not really that high. (also they will not need that much storage - if they are storing characters in uncompressed xml then they deserve the storage costs ( a simple zip will compress those files to 1/10 their size)
And they had better have an idea what actual usage will be - that is what project management is all about. If they don't have any idea what usage will be then they have not done their due diligence.
I have 4 characters I played in a dead campaign. 2 LFR char (sans items
I have 1 more that I played in another campaing, two more from my brothers, 6 gladiators from a short time campaign while Spartacus aired. 127 concept characters that could be dumped but I pull ideas or NPCs from time to time. The default characters like Raistlin that came with the CB...
Puts me up to 172. The entire folder including the original instal program takes up 84 mb on a Gig hardrive. Insignificant storage for me to store my characters. Now we are going to be limited "at-all".
Don't even talk to me about numbers. Auto-renewal/cancelation sent to Customer Service done!
Oh, and duh, once they have export, your hard drive becomes the long-term storage. Fair enough.
(That's a duh at my own reasoning, not anyone else on the thread, FYI.)
That does defeat one of the selling points of it being cloud based. "here we have an online tool. Access your character anywhere!*
(*well 20 of them, the rest you'll have to store yourself when we finally get the export facility working)"
20 does seem arbitrary and while probably more then enough for most people, lot's of char-op will be disapointed.
No number worth mentioning. 4000 or some such.
Seriously. Storage is dirt cheap. Even enterprise storage.
1. No export feature;
2. No sharing of characters (for DMs and groups);
3. No ability for house rules; and now
4. This ridiculously low 20 character limit.
Seriously, WotC please get your head out of the sand (or wherever else it might be) and smarten up. Most people didn't think the CB, and instead of "fixing it" you are ruining it by implementing widely unpopular features. It would have been nice if you had thought about these things before you decided to change the CB. Now you must change things for the better ASAP.
Daren
Oh, and duh, once they have export, your hard drive becomes the long-term storage. Fair enough.
(That's a duh at my own reasoning, not anyone else on the thread, FYI.)
That does defeat one of the selling points of it being cloud based. "here we have an online tool. Access your character anywhere!*
(*well 20 of them, the rest you'll have to store yourself when we finally get the export facility working)"
I agree, and absolutely hope that they just do away with the limit eventually (once they get a better estimate of heavy users vs. light users?). But, I'm struggling to think of a case where I'd be on the road and need 21 characters.
Yo Wizzy, what we want is a big fat Cumulonimbus Cloud ! 20 ?? Please put another 0 at least.
I agree, and absolutely hope that they just do away with the limit eventually (once they get a better estimate of heavy users vs. light users?). But, I'm struggling to think of a case where I'd be on the road and need 21 characters.
But since you also can't export the characters yet it's not a time when you'd need 21 characters at once, but if you'd ever want 21 characters ever total.
Or...they could just be completely arbitrary.
I agree, and absolutely hope that they just do away with the limit eventually (once they get a better estimate of heavy users vs. light users?). But, I'm struggling to think of a case where I'd be on the road and need 21 characters.
But since you also can't export the characters yet it's not a time when you'd need 21 characters at once, but if you'd ever want 21 characters ever total.
Yeah, for now it's 21 characters total. But, I believe them when they say export is coming soon.
Just waiting on my confirmation email folks.
Here is analogy maybe Hasbro can understand
Every little girl in america can only have 1 Barbie 10 dresses and a barbie car (But no ken).
You have to give all the rest back and you can pay for it Forever or we take your barbie away.
(Sry for the Nerd Rage I am off to other things with my free time)
Yeah, for now it's 21 characters total. But, I believe them when they say export is coming soon.
I don't think anyone has said it is coming soon - just that it is a high priority. (besides - soon is a dirty word around here)
, and most are from PHB1! 20 is like a number I will never reach... but I feel for those that do have higher numbers. That's hopefully something easy to adjust, or perhaps they have plans for people who want more. A survey of how many characters you have would be good before picking a number. Then you can select an average number and go with that.This type of statement is what makes me think they are shooting for a graphically intensive character builder. Not unlike an MMO, where you can choose not just the feats and class, but also what your character looks like in 3D. Think about something like the City of Heroes character creation, and it makes a lot more sense if we are talking about 20 characters.
Or...they could just be completely arbitrary.
A 3D generated character saved consists of a series of numerical modifiers.
For example: 33/44/66/34/76 (example of course) would be what is logged in your character file it would denote. head type, body type, left hand item, right hand item, boots. You could add numerical modifiers to change colour and such. A graphical interface would not add more then a few kilobytes of information. The graphical data like in World of Warcraft would exist inside a folder or exe on your hard drive. So the limit is not for visual data.
Chances are they just thought it would be fine. Without freaking out or nerdraging we need to inform them of our use so they can adapt.
What is BLATANTLY apparent to me in this, is that they have NO IDEA how their customers utilize the tool. As I posted in my thread, "A Tale of a Man", deployed soldiers used the offline CB in their downtime, creating hundreds of characters. I myself have at least 20 if not more from current and past campaigns as well as concepts for future characters. I play in a group with several guys that have 5 or more backups ready to go at any time. 8 players, times 6 characters (current and backup) thats 48 characters for the DM to go over and approve...well, not in the CB anymore, apparently!
This is a baaaaaad idea, this small limit WotC!
Yeah, for now it's 21 characters total. But, I believe them when they say export is coming soon.
I don't think anyone has said it is coming soon - just that it is a high priority. (besides - soon is a dirty word around here)
I interpret "high priority" as "soon", because there was the sense that they had schedule A, and the amount of posts about export led them to making it a high priority in schedule B. But I also scrutinize developer posts a lot less than most people here, so I can also accept that my perception means little.
(And I purposefully used the word soon because people seem to hate it. It's funny.)
It still seems low though... At least we'll be getting an export feature.
I agree, and absolutely hope that they just do away with the limit eventually (once they get a better estimate of heavy users vs. light users?). But, I'm struggling to think of a case where I'd be on the road and need 21 characters.
But since you also can't export the characters yet it's not a time when you'd need 21 characters at once, but if you'd ever want 21 characters ever total.
Yeah, for now it's 21 characters total. But, I believe them when they say export is coming soon.
Oh I believe that the export function is coming. What I don't know is when it is coming. Either way, a 20 character limit is far too small. I can just about fit 20 characters on a floppy drive (I could get just over my first 15 characters alphabetically, granted none of them are high level).
Nov - Character Builder is online with 20 slots
Dec/ Jan - while a lot of subscribers actually cancelled their subscription, the majority still uses the service and comes to like the tool
Feb - some new features/ additions will make a lot of people happy and the online CB will become an invaluable tool for gamers
Mar - WotC offers a new subscription for a small fee increase: "D&D Insider Premium" that let gamers store up to 50 characters
I'm sure there is a plan to increase the maximum number of characters that can be stored. The way I imagine it goes along the following lines:
Nov - Character Builder is online with 20 slots
Dec/ Jan - while a lot of subscribers actually cancelled their subscription, the majority still uses the service and comes to like the tool
Feb - some new features/ additions will make a lot of people happy and the online CB will become an invaluable tool for gamers
Mar - WotC offers a new subscription for a small fee increase: "D&D Insider Premium" that let gamers store up to 50 characters
And in the meantime I could create and store just under 5 million using the classic CB on my hdd (well store at least, I'm not sure how I'd create that many).
Allow access to the CB for free w/o a subscription with limited character storage (1? 5? 20?) and perhaps limited content/levels (similar to the demo of the offline CB). And then give subscribers access to full content with unlimited character storage (or at least a limit measured in thousands... perhaps that's what's going on, there was a miscommunication and it's actually 20 kilocharacters, that would be reasonable).
I suspect that once you have an import/export, you really only need to store your "active" characters in the vault, everything else locally. Premium price perhaps for more slots, not unreasonable in my opinion.
You mean other than it removing the only positive reason (from the customer standpoint) for it being online?
I suspect that once you have an import/export, you really only need to store your "active" characters in the vault, everything else locally. Premium price perhaps for more slots, not unreasonable in my opinion.
I must completely disagree. When one of their advertised "features" is cloud storage, expecting us to store locally makes no sense (and won't even be possible at launch). And even if that was the plan, 20 characters is a ridiculously small number since that comes out to just a couple of MB (the first 20 characters on my hdd total 1.92 MB).
20 does seem arbitrary and while probably more then enough for most people, lot's of char-op will be disapointed.
So what # do you think should it be capped at?
30?
40?
50? (enough for me)
75?
100?
256?
Shouldn't be one.
Edit: What I mean to say is there shouldn't be a cap. At least that is how I feel about it anyways.
My thinking is that you could load up the vault with the characters you need/want to access from anywhere, and save one slot (or they give you one) for upload / download slots so you can import when you need it from your USB thumb drive. Not much different from today.
The true benefit, I suspect, isn't so much that you can access characters from anywhere (even though that's what they posted as being the benefit), but that it can be integrated with other tools that are forthcoming.
I agree 20 seems arbitrary, they should have done a survey to ask what a reasonable expectation is. I also am totally fine with a premium add on service to buy more slots for those who use the system more, particularly because I am unaffected but also because if they give you an import / export feature, then you can still have most of the function and all the characters you want, just not all of them online.
Enterprise class storage is NOT cheap. Nor is the backup and maintenance of said data. I have no idea the size of a character, but if everyone had unlimited characters and as many DDI subscribers as they might have, I totally understand the drawing of the line.
And no, I'm sorry, but I don't think it's an arbitrary number. I thinks its an intentional number for controlling the situation. They realize that people can just share their username/password, so they're going to limit the number of characters to a very nominal amount to prevent the piracy - at the expense of realistic usefullness of their customer.
Definitely, people like to concept out many characters. One of the great things about the current character builder is the way you could use to to spend time just trying things out and creating synergy. Create various characters of different roles for various 'tiers' and 'bands' (H1, H2, H3) so you always had one prepared. Or creating a version of every class to see what works for you.
What drives me crazy about this approach is the service. I understand that there is a Product-model and a Service-model. But, when I pay Comcast to deliver me their content as a service, me and my entire family as a household are able to enjoy all of that service together. You don't pay an extra fee for every member of the family. Same thing when I buy a video game or a movie. When I buy a movie, the screen that comes up before the movie plays doesn't say that each member on the couch also has to contribute fees or they're conducting copyright infringement.
I realize it is not appropriate to share your account with the rest of the players in your play-group, but what about the family level?
With this approach, I am expected to purchase an seperate account for my 11 year old son if he wants to have a couple of characters built as well? And if my wife wants one or two characters, well, I'd better spin up an extra account for her too because I want have the room in my account.
They are so freaked out about piracy that they're going to go too far in the other direction and alienating the people who do pay them well.
You never want to support customers that are causing you to lose money, but you never want to lose the customers that are making you money.
20 does seem arbitrary and while probably more then enough for most people, lot's of char-op will be disapointed.
So what # do you think should it be capped at?
30?
40?
50? (enough for me)
75?
100?
256?
Shouldn't be one.
Edit: What I mean to say is there shouldn't be a cap. At least that is how I feel about it anyways.
I agree w/ Draco. But if there is going to be a limit, a reasonable size would be perhaps 500 MB. That's how much my old school email account gave me (as the smallest of the email account storage spaces). At the size my character files are on average that works out to just under 5000 characters.
20 does seem arbitrary and while probably more then enough for most people, lot's of char-op will be disapointed.
So what # do you think should it be capped at?
30?
40?
50? (enough for me)
75?
100?
256?
Shouldn't be one.
Edit: What I mean to say is there shouldn't be a cap. At least that is how I feel about it anyways.
I agree w/ Draco. But if there is going to be a limit, a reasonable size would be perhaps 500 MB. That's how much my old school email account gave me (as the smallest of the email account storage spaces). At the size my character files are on average that works out to just under 5000 characters.
I would be happy with 100, I could deal with 50... but only 20?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!??!?!?!
I would be happy with 100, I could deal with 50... but only 20?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!??!?!?!
At 100 characters, assuming 200 kb/character (twice the size mine are running), 40k subscribers each using all of their storage space... that works out to ~800 GB of total storage. Just barely more than 1 gmail account, less than a single yahoo account (which are free). It also works out to 20 MB storage per customer, so still not much. Sure 100 would be enough for my use in general, but it's still absurdly low for technical reasons. If it has nothing to do with technical reasons and more to do with worrying about account sharing, than all I have to say to WotC is this: Figure out how to solve your problems without hurting the paying customer.
yall YOU ALREADY HAVE ALL YOUR PCS ON YOUR CPU. you can have 20 loaded on the website at a time but you arent losing the data, its not like when they went in and deleted items from the old cb or something. and when you can save them (soon) it wont matter at all
Yes, I could load less than 30% of the PCs on my computer to the online builder... but what would that accomplish? There's already a builder on my computer that handles those just fine, and if I make any changes to them while online they're stuck there until an undisclosed time.
yall YOU ALREADY HAVE ALL YOUR PCS ON YOUR CPU. you can have 20 loaded on the website at a time but you arent losing the data, its not like when they went in and deleted items from the old cb or something. and when you can save them (soon) it wont matter at all
Yes, I could load less than 30% of the PCs on my computer to the online builder... but what would that accomplish? There's already a builder on my computer that handles those just fine, and if I make any changes to them while online they're stuck there until an undisclosed time.
And how many of these characters have you recently changed? How recent were these changes? A month? Three months? Longer?
And let's not forget that there are creative ways to save the new CB characters to your computer.
yall YOU ALREADY HAVE ALL YOUR PCS ON YOUR CPU. you can have 20 loaded on the website at a time but you arent losing the data, its not like when they went in and deleted items from the old cb or something. and when you can save them (soon) it wont matter at all
Yes, I could load less than 30% of the PCs on my computer to the online builder... but what would that accomplish? There's already a builder on my computer that handles those just fine, and if I make any changes to them while online they're stuck there until an undisclosed time.
you said it, i mean if thats the case why even use the new one at all? i get that some of yall have tons of pcs, but what are you waiting to load 100 on at a time to get a dark sun power or something? using 20 pcs at a time with your others saved (and able to switch out for one of the other 20 at any time) or on the old cb doesnt seem like a big deal. importing them probably takes two seconds. i dont even see why you need to store any unless you are adding esentials to all of them and even then soon you can save your new pcs. given that, i dont see any reason they should have people save 100 online, i mean youre gonna back them up anyways the second they allow it. when that happens ill only have pcs on there im currently working on and working on 20 at a time seems very reasonable imo
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Just curious, how many of you have more than 20 *active* characters that you play all the time or expect to play at a convention? It's really foreign to me given my 4 characters, but it seems to me that there is a reason for a limit, and that is that if it were unlimited they would simply fill up with characters endlessly.
The thing that really gets at me about the new Character Builder is that it is moving backwards, planning to move forwards in the future. Theoretically, a large amount of the DDi userbase could have upwards of 10GB of characters.
Going into my DDi Folder, the first 20 characters I have in there equal up to 2.53MB. The entire folder, consisting of 85 characters is 10.8MB. As someone mentioned before, you can get e-mail accounts for free that have a greater storage capacity.
And as far as active characters is concerned, I really don't think it matters. I'm currently about to enter a campaign in the near future for Dark Sun [The updates seemed to have alluded me for the last couple of months ;)] and I have made around 7 characters for that campaign alone, and I will continue to make characters with different race and class and other customization options until I find that one that I like. I will not go back and delete those previous editions of the characters either because they are still valuable for a future campaign or a build change or perhaps my character dies and these builds will take its place.
Point being, 20 isn't too low. It's unacceptable. Anything less than 75 is unacceptable in my opinion. I want unlimited. At the very least is should allow for every Build / Race / Class combinations.
The only way I'd accept something in the 100 range is if they increased the number by ~35 with each new book that adds a build, class, race or something.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
plus we will be able to save them to our own pcs! also im curious if i was right that it only takes a couple of seconds to import a pc in
It's unacceptable. Anything less than 75 is unacceptable in my opinion. I want unlimited. At the very least is should allow for every Build / Race / Class combinations.
The only way I'd accept something in the 100 range is if they increased the number by ~35 with each new book that adds a build, class, race or something.
draco, you already have this, your pcs are saved on your cpu. as many as your heart desires. and they will have pcs able to be saved soon so you wont even need to use their site for storage at all, you can only save 20 to the site but would you rather have them saved to wizards site or to your hard drive? honestly
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Let's see, 10 computers, each making one 200 kb character every 10 seconds works out to a total of 720 MB/hour... so about 58 days.
EDIT:
For those who like to see the math: 10 computers * 0.2 MB/character * 6 characters/minute* 60 minutes/hour = 720 MB/hour. 1 TB ~ 1000000 MB (yes, I know it's actually a little bigger, so my estimate is on the low side) --> 1000000 MB * 1 hour/720 MB * 1 day/24 hours = 57.87 days
If there is no limit at all as to how many characters one account can have... that opens a theoretical door to subscribers out there that want to have tons and tons of characters for what ever reason filling up the storage space, leaving the rest of us (temporarily, while the WotC guys purge the abusive files and/or account from the server) without somewhere to save even 1 character.
If an account doesn't have at least some limit to how many characters can be saved, then a vengeful person could even, in theory, sign up and generate character after character until the storage was filled - locking everyone else out.
Not that either of those are likely, just... theoretically possible. I'd rather they not be.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
wow...I guess that would be a good point.
It reminds me of the urban myth (that I belive for the record) that when batman comics had a vote to kill or save robin someone had an autodialer going...
I can easliy see WotC haters (I mean way worse then most on this form) that would throw 5-10 accounts and do just that...
of all the recent news, this is the biggest red herring, you can store and save as many pcs as you want on your cpu, just not all at the same time on their site. you can import them in whenever you want! this is meaningless!
At release, you can't save any pcs at all on your pc... and if you come up with a way to save anything on a CPU you'll win a prize.
It's unacceptable. Anything less than 75 is unacceptable in my opinion. I want unlimited. At the very least is should allow for every Build / Race / Class combinations.
The only way I'd accept something in the 100 range is if they increased the number by ~35 with each new book that adds a build, class, race or something.
draco, you already have this, your pcs are saved on your cpu. as many as your heart desires. and they will have pcs able to be saved soon so you wont even need to use their site for storage at all, you can only save 20 to the site but would you rather have them saved to wizards site or to your hard drive? honestly
They are saved to PDFs. With 85 characters at this point in time without Dark Sun or Essentials, if I wanted to go back and edit build 62, I'd have to open the PDF and rebuild it again. Yes this is an option, but as I said before, its a step backwords, not forwards.
killing robin is a no brainer
well I must say that Tim Drake is my fav robin...with steph being second...good old jason is dead last
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
wow...I guess that would be a good point.
It reminds me of the urban myth (that I belive for the record) that when batman comics had a vote to kill or save robin someone had an autodialer going...
I can easliy see WotC haters (I mean way worse then most on this form) that would throw 5-10 accounts and do just that...
But the math doesn't work out... 10 computers at that rate would still take almost 2 months to generate 1 TB. If that's really the concern though, something like a 100 MB limit would make sense... which would be more like a 500 character limit.
It's unacceptable. Anything less than 75 is unacceptable in my opinion. I want unlimited. At the very least is should allow for every Build / Race / Class combinations.
The only way I'd accept something in the 100 range is if they increased the number by ~35 with each new book that adds a build, class, race or something.
draco, you already have this, your pcs are saved on your cpu. as many as your heart desires. and they will have pcs able to be saved soon so you wont even need to use their site for storage at all, you can only save 20 to the site but would you rather have them saved to wizards site or to your hard drive? honestly
They are saved to PDFs. With 85 characters at this point in time without Dark Sun or Essentials, if I wanted to go back and edit build 62, I'd have to open the PDF and rebuild it again. Yes this is an option, but as i said before, its a step backwords, not forwards.
If they're PDFs then you can't edit them on the current CB either. And how many builds do you typically edit in a month? When you're done editing a build, why would it have to reamin on the new CB? WotC is not responsible for your pathological desire to build one of every kind of character that can be made from the existing race, class, and build possibilities.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
An alternative could be putting new accounts at the 20 cap, and bumping the cap (100 seems safe) for people who have been subscribed for X consecutive months. Even signing up 10 accounts to do a DoS would be curious (are they going to try to cancel without penalty the next day?), but if someone's been paying you for six months... they're probably not interested in doing an only somewhat more effective griefing.
Also, the data rate math that dbmeboy gave. I think the DoS concerns, while technically valid, are being a bit over-estimated. You could also institute a quota-related system that guaranteed each subscriber had at least 1 MB free for themselves at all time, if you were really worried about it. That's more of a filesystem thing than a database thing, though (to my knowledge).
Even with export function, requiring paying customers to swap characters is not a fair solution.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
I understand your need (as a company, not necessarily yours personally) to protect yourself from DDoS and other types of attacks. My stance is that the powers that be should have realized this BEFOREHAND and worked out something like an export feature to be available at launch. Or a validation code of some sort like the SUBSCRIPTION LOGIN + Captcha...unless you are expecting unlicensed users to be able to get in and perform these attacks at will? This shows bad development planning to me, and is largely a reason why WotC won't be getting a dime from me for a long long time *looks fondly at the approximately 50 4e products sitting on the shelf and sighs*
Proper Planning Prevent Poor Performance
They are saved to PDFs. With 85 characters at this point in time without Dark Sun or Essentials, if I wanted to go back and edit build 62, I'd have to open the PDF and rebuild it again. Yes this is an option, but as i said before, its a step backwords, not forwards.
If they're PDFs then you can't edit them on the current CB either. And how many builds do you typically edit in a month? When you're done editing a build, why would it have to reamin on the new CB? WotC is not responsible for your pathological desire to build one of every kind of character that can be made from the existing race, class, and build possibilities.
Why does the number matter? I'm sure people on these boards could think of hundreds, maybe even thousands of reasons why editing a build is needed or necessary.
Also, the current character builder doesn't save to PDFs [To my knowledge] so I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here. I can edit any character I make with Character Builder Classic quick and easy but with Character Builder Shiny it has to be in my 20 limit or I have to go through a few more hoops to do so. Is this acceptable to you? Making the process more complicated?
Also, the current character builder doesn't save to PDFs [To my knowledge] so I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here. I can edit any character I make with Character Builder Classic quick and easy but with Character Builder Shiny it has to be in my 20 limit or I have to go through a few more hoops to do so. Is this acceptable to you? Making the process more complicated?
Hoops that don't even exist yet.
Also, the current character builder doesn't save to PDFs [To my knowledge] so I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here. I can edit any character I make with Character Builder Classic quick and easy but with Character Builder Shiny it has to be in my 20 limit or I have to go through a few more hoops to do so. Is this acceptable to you? Making the process more complicated?
Hoops that don't even exist yet.
so if you could save pcs at launch, you agree this wouldnt matter? so in a month or two it wont matter, in the meantime make 20 essentials pcs. the things are all the same anyway
I mentioned unlimited wasn't reasonable for that very reason. It's not hard to script up something that sits and loops and generates endless characters... heck I have web site testing tools that could cripple a site like that pretty quick (if the hacks didn't bring it down, the scripted input patterns would easily if I dropped a loop in there). So I totally understand the limit. Hopefully it will be higher than 20.
Another thing I thought of was backup that adds to cost, all that data must be backed up, to multiple (probably hot) locations or even a cloud backup solution. Having just gone through an exercise to move our tape backups to a more cloud like system, it ain't cheap (and we get heavy discounts), roughly .80 cents a gig per month to back stuff up... and this was the least expensive solution that fit our needs. I have no idea their setup, but it's probably something similar to what we run given the number of DDI subscribers and what our customer base is.
Also, the current character builder doesn't save to PDFs [To my knowledge] so I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here. I can edit any character I make with Character Builder Classic quick and easy but with Character Builder Shiny it has to be in my 20 limit or I have to go through a few more hoops to do so. Is this acceptable to you? Making the process more complicated?
Hoops that don't even exist yet.
so if you could save pcs at launch, you agree this wouldnt matter? so in a month or two it wont matter, in the meantime make 20 essentials pcs. the things are all the same anyway
If we could actually save PCs from it, it would still be very silly and annoying and unacceptable, but at least it could be circumvented.
They are saved to PDFs. With 85 characters at this point in time without Dark Sun or Essentials, if I wanted to go back and edit build 62, I'd have to open the PDF and rebuild it again. Yes this is an option, but as i said before, its a step backwords, not forwards.
If they're PDFs then you can't edit them on the current CB either. And how many builds do you typically edit in a month? When you're done editing a build, why would it have to reamin on the new CB? WotC is not responsible for your pathological desire to build one of every kind of character that can be made from the existing race, class, and build possibilities.
Why does the number matter? I'm sure people on these boards could think of hundreds, maybe even thousands of reasons why editing a build is needed or necessary.
Also, the current character builder doesn't save to PDFs [To my knowledge] so I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here. I can edit any character I make with Character Builder Classic quick and easy but with Character Builder Shiny it has to be in my 20 limit or I have to go through a few more hoops to do so. Is this acceptable to you? Making the process more complicated?
First off, you put my words in frosthof's mouth. Given how often we've disagreed in the past, I can't say that I think he'd like that idea.
Relating to PDF's: you said your 85 characters were saved as PDFs. You said that if you wanted to edit them you would have to open the PDF and rebuilt the character. I was pointing out that you would have to do that anyway since the current CB (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't import chars from PDFs.
As for the limit on the new CB, that's 20 characters that you can actively work with without having to export finished characters and import others to work on. Considering that you are physiologically incapable of actively working on more than 20 characters at the same moment in time your objection is laughable.
draco the number doesnt matter at all, you can save as many as you want you just cant have them all on the wizards site at the same time. something people were complaining about anyway only yesterday. but yeah if you want to add essentials to all 100 of your builds at once, you are screwed. screwed hard
I totally and completely understand that the export option will be available "Soon". What I'm trying to say, in completely bare bones, is I have a reason why the limit should be much more than 20 characters per account. I'm sure I'm not the only one out there.
With this option not even being available at launch, I truly believe the product should have not been given a release date until it was at the same level as the product it hopes to be. The other solution to this would be to update both Character Builder Classic and Shiny at the same time. I'd be 100% fine with that but the chances of that are not even possible.
Microtransactions for more server space.
First off, you put my words in frosthof's mouth. Given how often we've disagreed in the past, I can't say that I think he'd like that idea.
hey, nothing wrong with a few minor squabbles between fellow dnd junkies. we seem to come together on common sense issues (such as this one)
i thought it was unacceptable to have them save on wizards site? people saying their intellectual property would be stolen, 20 seems reasonable to store on the site, given you will be able to save to your pc soon. now if they drag their ass on that ill be pod anyways bc i need the files for other tools
Yes, people who are worried about the IP will be able to avoid that problem (maybe) once they can export. However, they are advertising cloud storage as a feature. I wonder if there are any other cloud storage services that give less than 5 MB.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Well for you math quiz it depends on how poor your method of storage is (which you have failed to mention) If I assume that your storage is as innefficient as the uncompressed xml that is currently used then that character would come in at around 300kb then it would take approximately 9260 machine-hours (over one machine-year) to fill up 1 TB.
If you actually do minor compression (like a basic zip compression) multiply that by 10.
So unless you have someone who has a zombie network at their disposal (and you didn't bother to put in even basic limits like how many systems can be logged in for a single account) then I find it hard to believe that you would have storage problems before you could flag an account manually.
Personally I would be more worried about access rate and server cpu usage. For example, without using up even 20 characters I could create a program that would create that character in 10 sec, then delete it and start over. That would create more of a stress on the system than your script that is just creating characters (and would be much harder to notice unless you are doing more traces on the system.
The fact that you choose this as a method to protect yourselves against DOS attacks really makes me doubt your team's experience in building enterprise level applications.
i thought it was unacceptable to have them save on wizards site? people saying their intellectual property would be stolen, 20 seems reasonable to store on the site, given you will be able to save to your pc soon. now if they drag their ass on that ill be pod anyways bc i need the files for other tools
Yes, people who are worried about the IP will be able to avoid that problem (maybe) once they can export. However, they are advertising cloud storage as a feature. I wonder if there are any other cloud storage services that give less than 5 MB.
see the way i saw it is they advertised it as a feature simply bc they didnt have it where you can save pcs at launch, and they attempted to spin that weakness to appear deliberate and helpful
Well for you math quiz it depends on how poor your method of storage is (which you have failed to mention) If I assume that your storage is as innefficient as the uncompressed xml that is currently used then that character would come in at around 300kb then it would take approximately 9260 machine-hours (over one machine-year) to fill up 1 TB.
If you actually do minor compression (like a basic zip compression) multiply that by 10.
So unless you have someone who has a zombie network at their disposal (and you didn't bother to put in even basic limits like how many systems can be logged in for a single account) then I find it hard to believe that you would have storage problems before you could flag an account manually.
Personally I would be more worried about access rate and server cpu usage. For example, without using up even 20 characters I could create a program that would create that character in 10 sec, then delete it and start over. That would create more of a stress on the system than your script that is just creating characters (and would be much harder to notice unless you are doing more traces on the system.
The fact that you choose this as a method to protect yourselves against DOS attacks really makes me doubt your team's experience in building enterprise level applications.
Yeah, I already posted a similar analysis... the excuse actually makes no sense.
see the way i saw it is they advertised it as a feature simply bc they didnt have it where you can save pcs at launch, and they attempted to spin that weakness to appear deliberate and helpful
That's actually a novel perspective, one I hadn't thought of. Instead of there eventually being "export" functionality, there will eventually be "full support for all the files on your PC" *and* you can upload 20 to have anywhere you want.
The Silverlight app will be running on your PC. It could look at a local directory for files before/while showing your uploaded characters. They could actually spin this the right way.
That's actually a novel perspective
thank you
That's actually a novel perspective, one I hadn't thought of. Instead of there eventually being "export" functionality, there will eventually be "full support for all the files on your PC" *and* you can upload 20 to have anywhere you want.
The Silverlight app will be running on your PC. It could look at a local directory for files before/while showing your uploaded characters. They could actually spin this the right way.
Yep, add a feature that allows direct saving and loading (without having to import and take a slot on the online storage) from a local hdd and this is workable. Too bad the feature doesn't exist yet.
That's actually a novel perspective, one I hadn't thought of. Instead of there eventually being "export" functionality, there will eventually be "full support for all the files on your PC" *and* you can upload 20 to have anywhere you want.
The Silverlight app will be running on your PC. It could look at a local directory for files before/while showing your uploaded characters. They could actually spin this the right way.
Yep, add a feature that allows direct saving and loading (without having to import and take a slot on the online storage) from a local hdd and this is workable. Too bad the feature doesn't exist yet.
Why does it matter if it uses a slot? Just export it back off the online storage (or export to your hard drive then delete from online storage) when you're done working with it and the space is empty again.
They are saved to PDFs. With 85 characters at this point in time without Dark Sun or Essentials, if I wanted to go back and edit build 62, I'd have to open the PDF and rebuild it again. Yes this is an option, but as i said before, its a step backwords, not forwards.
If they're PDFs then you can't edit them on the current CB either. And how many builds do you typically edit in a month? When you're done editing a build, why would it have to reamin on the new CB? WotC is not responsible for your pathological desire to build one of every kind of character that can be made from the existing race, class, and build possibilities.
Why does the number matter? I'm sure people on these boards could think of hundreds, maybe even thousands of reasons why editing a build is needed or necessary.
Also, the current character builder doesn't save to PDFs [To my knowledge] so I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make here. I can edit any character I make with Character Builder Classic quick and easy but with Character Builder Shiny it has to be in my 20 limit or I have to go through a few more hoops to do so. Is this acceptable to you? Making the process more complicated?
First off, you put my words in frosthof's mouth. Given how often we've disagreed in the past, I can't say that I think he'd like that idea.
Relating to PDF's: you said your 85 characters were saved as PDFs. You said that if you wanted to edit them you would have to open the PDF and rebuilt the character. I was pointing out that you would have to do that anyway since the current CB (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't import chars from PDFs.
As for the limit on the new CB, that's 20 characters that you can actively work with without having to export finished characters and import others to work on. Considering that you are physiologically incapable of actively working on more than 20 characters at the same moment in time your objection is laughable.
I don't post too often so the quote reducing thing is still a little new for me.
As far as PDFs go. I don't have any PDF characters. I was just mentioning that Character Builder Shiny exports them as that, or at least that is what I thought I read.
And as for as your comment about the limit, I'm not sure we are on the same page and will leave it at that.
draco i dont know if im following you but paolo said you can save pdfs off the new cb so if you need pdfs from it, theres no problemo
I think I see the confusion now! No I don't have any crazy desired impulses to save my characters to PDFs. That would be silly.
<.<
Why does it matter if it uses a slot? Just export it back off the online storage (or export to your hard drive then delete from online storage) when you're done working with it and the space is empty again.
It matters only because adding extra steps that shouldn't have to exist in the first place is silly.
Why does it matter if it uses a slot? Just export it back off the online storage (or export to your hard drive then delete from online storage) when you're done working with it and the space is empty again.
It's quicker if you can go direct to local disk without having to dink around with uploading/exporting/deleting from the online store. And if you have 20 characters already uploaded, you'd have to do some silly shell game to get the 21st on your disk.
The Silverlight app will be running on your PC. It could look at a local directory for files before/while showing your uploaded characters. They could actually spin this the right way.
Silverlight can only access local filesystem if it is running as an Out Of Browser application and if it is running with trusted permissions. Safe to say that will not be happening.
Why does it matter if it uses a slot? Just export it back off the online storage (or export to your hard drive then delete from online storage) when you're done working with it and the space is empty again.
It's quicker if you can go direct to local disk without having to dink around with uploading/exporting/deleting from the online store. And if you have 20 characters already uploaded, you'd have to do some silly shell game to get the 21st on your disk.
Oh certainly. And if you want to pay more for that convenience you're welcome to get a second subscription. Otherwise it will likely take less than 30 seconds to do the export and delete.
Silverlight can only access local filesystem if it is running as an Out Of Browser application and if it is running with trusted permissions. Safe to say that will not be happening.
I know nothing about Silverlight, so I can't say anything about the latter constraint, but the former kind of sounds like it will be happening. There was talk about only having to download the client when it changes in code (not data sources), indicating that you'd download it once and it'd sit on your machine until it needed an update. That sounds out of browser-y to me.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Flood limits? Creating a new file shouldn't happen more than every 20m (using a roundish number), tops...maybe the first couple weeks it'll be faster than that, especially if you can import old CB, but after that, most people make new characters over the course of hours, or days, not seconds.
Silverlight can only access local filesystem if it is running as an Out Of Browser application and if it is running with trusted permissions. Safe to say that will not be happening.
I know nothing about Silverlight, so I can't say anything about the latter constraint, but the former kind of sounds like it will be happening. There was talk about only having to download the client when it changes in code (not data sources), indicating that you'd download it once and it'd sit on your machine until it needed an update. That sounds out of browser-y to me.
Yeah, I'm almost positive it's designed to run out-of-browser. The trusted thing I know nothing about (that is, I don't know whether you mean "I allow it to do stuff" or "there's something you need to do in Silverlight to make it trusted").
Why does it matter if it uses a slot? Just export it back off the online storage (or export to your hard drive then delete from online storage) when you're done working with it and the space is empty again.
It's quicker if you can go direct to local disk without having to dink around with uploading/exporting/deleting from the online store. And if you have 20 characters already uploaded, you'd have to do some silly shell game to get the 21st on your disk.
Oh certainly. And if you want to pay more for that convenience you're welcome to get a second subscription. Otherwise it will likely take less than 30 seconds to do the export and delete.
Err...
How about this. Lets step out of D&D for a second. Are you saying that are completely fine with having a feature on a product get more complicated for no [visible] reason?
I've got 13 LFR characters I need to maintain that I play with some degree of regularity. Then, there's the 5 PCs in my home game. That only leaves me two slots to play with, and I've built another dozen or so characters that I've decided not to play because I like seeing what can be done mechanically. Requiring users to constantly delete characters instead of being able to keep them around for reference is crazily inconvenient. At the absolute very least, you need at least as many slots as there are classes in the game.
You do realize this character limit has nothing to do with storage capacity and everything to do with limiting the number of people who can share an account.
the second you can export pcs that argument wont hold water
You do realize this character limit has nothing to do with storage capacity and everything to do with limiting the number of people who can share an account.
Actually not the reason Paolo gave (his reason had to do with limiting potential DOS attacks, but his math didn't check out). But to play along, here's what I would say to WotC: If the reason is account sharing control, go find a way to fix it that doesn't impede paying customers.
Oh certainly. And if you want to pay more for that convenience you're welcome to get a second subscription. Otherwise it will likely take less than 30 seconds to do the export and delete.
Err...
How about this. Lets step out of D&D for a second. Are you saying that are completely fine with having a feature on a product get more complicated for no [visible] reason?
Your analogy doesn't work because the new CB is a new product that is replacing an earlier one not a feature of an existing product. That the two separate products fill the same role (both being character builders) is irrelevant to the fact that they are separate products.
from DDOS and other types of attacks.
That's why I didn't suggest no cap. I suggested an idiotically high cap (4k). You've got bigger DDOS problems from infinite journal entries bloating the size of the character file than from the number of character files, honestly.
As far as number goes, each customer is paying $10/month. Assuming 100k character files (and yes, you also need to limit the size) and budgeting fifty cents toward storage at S3 prices (higher than reality), you still can afford 30,000 characters.
Compared to that, I think 4k is pretty tight.
Oh certainly. And if you want to pay more for that convenience you're welcome to get a second subscription. Otherwise it will likely take less than 30 seconds to do the export and delete.
Err...
How about this. Lets step out of D&D for a second. Are you saying that are completely fine with having a feature on a product get more complicated for no [visible] reason?
Your analogy doesn't work because the new CB is a new product that is replacing an earlier one not a feature of an existing product. That the two separate products fill the same role (both being character builders) is irrelevant to the fact that they are separate products.
I suppose it can be viewed that way. I will keep my ignorance though! As far as I am concerned, the new Character Builder is an "Upgrade 2.0".
The Silverlight app will be running on your PC. It could look at a local directory for files before/while showing your uploaded characters. They could actually spin this the right way.
Silverlight can only access local filesystem if it is running as an Out Of Browser application and if it is running with trusted permissions. Safe to say that will not be happening.
From what I have read Silverlight can use offline storage even running in the browser, it is only that Paolo et al didn't want to use it (probably introduces too much complexity or something). This is not the same as accessing the local file system, but it could certainly act as a buffer for those extra five characters I have (I have only 25 in my current directory, plus the nine example chars). Not only could this help aleviate the max limit, I guess it would also help to soothe those who need offline access to their characters.
From what I have read Silverlight can use offline storage even running in the browser, it is only that Paolo et al didn't want to use it (probably introduces too much complexity or something). This is not the same as accessing the local file system, but it could certainly act as a buffer for those extra five characters I have (I have only 25 in my current directory, plus the nine example chars). Not only could this help aleviate the max limit, I guess it would also help to soothe those who need offline access to their characters.
Begin guessing and theorizing:
Interesting. Eyeballing it, I would think it wouldn't be a large effort to have the data layer aware of both the offline database and the online WotC database, with the user getting to choose their target. Export, then, would be delayed not because offline storage is hard, but because they haven't gotten to the database to XML file writer yet. Plausible.
They should just have a folder which we can have all our characters stored locally on our own computer. Then select up to 20 characters that are stored on their server for access anywhere.
This is a perfectly acceptable solution, but one that I don't expect to see anytime "soon".
They should just have a folder which we can have all our characters stored locally on our own computer. Then select up to 20 characters that are stored on their server for access anywhere.
This is a perfectly acceptable solution, but one that I don't expect to see anytime "soon".
That will be the situation once the export feature is added.
"soon"
That's getting really old on both sides of the fence.
On a more serious note, I know that people don't like micro-transactions... but what if (with the export feature implemented) they allowed extra storage slots to be bought for a ridiculously low flat rate (say 100 slots for 10 bucks, permanently). A-la Guild Wars?
So this is a cloud service, right?
This number is likely to increase to 80 within the next couple of days.
This news is just a slap in the face! I mean, all of the "updates are coming soon" and all that well, that was a toilet backed up and overflowing with crap....then the new CB with its reduced and limited functionality, thats the M80 that got tossed in the toilet...and this "20 character limit" is the stinkbomb that got thrown in on top of all that.....
Are you really playing more than 20 characters at the same time? Can I get in on your gaming circle? I play once a week with the same character as the DM, and I'm having boatloads of fun... You must be in a D&D orgy!
This news is just a slap in the face! I mean, all of the "updates are coming soon" and all that well, that was a toilet backed up and overflowing with crap....then the new CB with its reduced and limited functionality, thats the M80 that got tossed in the toilet...and this "20 character limit" is the stinkbomb that got thrown in on top of all that.....
Are you really playing more than 20 characters at the same time? Can I get in on your gaming circle? I play once a week with the same character as the DM, and I'm having boatloads of fun... You must be in a D&D orgy!
No, perhaps he has three or four con games ready to go, plays in another game and GMs another - I do that and have got 22 characters in the builder.
This news is just a slap in the face! I mean, all of the "updates are coming soon" and all that well, that was a toilet backed up and overflowing with crap....then the new CB with its reduced and limited functionality, thats the M80 that got tossed in the toilet...and this "20 character limit" is the stinkbomb that got thrown in on top of all that.....
Are you really playing more than 20 characters at the same time? Can I get in on your gaming circle? I play once a week with the same character as the DM, and I'm having boatloads of fun... You must be in a D&D orgy!
No, perhaps he has three or four con games ready to go, plays in another game and GMs another - I do that and have got 22 characters in the builder.
Well, they've none the less addressed this issue, and have brought it to our attention they're considering changing the limit.
I love building characters and do them for a hobby. I use them for NPCs in my game - ones which I never expect the PCs to fight, like the Grandmaster of the Knights of the Sun, an organization of paladins. It's fun to build them and should they do something crazy like attacking an NPC in my world I'll have a character sheet for him in my massive collection.
I'm hacked off with this now.
Edit : When the export facility comes online (could be a while) then you can save characters to hard disk. But the whole point of this was supposed to be having all your PCs in the "cloud" - which I really like as it means you never lose them, don't have to back them up, can always find the right one, don't have to worry if you change laptop or don't have your laptop with you.
There is no point in "cloud" based computing if you can't hold all your characters in the cloud. Having to export to disk TOTALLY destroys the point of cloud based computing. If I can't access ALL my PCs whenever I get on the internet then the whole point of an online CB is ruined. Absolutely. This is such a bad idea as it spoils all the benefits you gain by taking the CB online (which I love the idea of).
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Paolo, I think the problem here is that the combination of going to a web based CB with a 20 character limit is forcing a new way of working on the users. That is, we have to work out what characters we want to work on and upload them from our PCs to the CB. If we're at our 20 character limit we have to export some back to our PCs. So therefore:
1. The argument that it's easier to access your characters from a web tool is specious, because most of them will have to live on our PCs anyway
2. The "export to .dnd4e" function is not there at launch (although I know it has been bumped up in priority) which means we can't work this way until the next update
In RL I work as an Enterprise Architect. I've followed most of the recent threads about the new CB, and what strikes me is that it does not seem to meet the actual user requirements. I'm sure it meets Wizards'/Hasbro's requirement to get a better grip on their revenue stream and IP (which is fine because it is a business after all). But given the number of posts from people whose FLGS doesn't have WiFi, who report that conventions often don't have Internet access etc etc I don't see how it can possibly meet the real "day to day" needs that most users have.
Unfortunately this is a classic problem: developing a technologically driven solution that the users don't want or need.
Having said that, I'd glad that I can now access it directly from my Mac (although starting a Windows VM is not much of a chore) and the future direction for the general suite of tools (now they are web based) could be extremely interesting. But I don't suppose you could enlighten us on the fundamental reasons for the new technical directions that the tools are taking could you?
Flood limits? Creating a new file shouldn't happen more than every 20m (using a roundish number), tops...maybe the first couple weeks it'll be faster than that, especially if you can import old CB, but after that, most people make new characters over the course of hours, or days, not seconds.
You suggested it before I did. I'd personally go with something like 20 characters per 24-hour period as a hard limit, and the account gets flagged for review if you're bumping up around 15 characters per day over a five-day period. That should mostly cover the issue of importing when that becomes possible, and you could still have an overall cap on characters (but put it significantly higher - on the order of 200 characters).
The problem that I have again is that the functionality goes down from what we already had, which makes the new version a hard sell for an end-user who doesn't benefit from being able to use it on a Macintosh.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Ok I can see you guys having that concern and a limit of some sort seems reasonable.
You guys are pushing this new communication initiative so why not do a poll? Ask how many characters would like to be stored.
If it turns out everyone just asks for a bagillion so they can have unlimited space then clamp it down to a lower number but at least you guys will know.
They should just have a folder which we can have all our characters stored locally on our own computer. Then select up to 20 characters that are stored on their server for access anywhere.
This is a perfectly acceptable solution, but one that I don't expect to see anytime "soon".
That will be the situation once the export feature is added.
No, the export feature will only allow a rough facsimile of that description. And having a workaround for a silly restriction doesn't make it any less silly.
I'm really opposed to make it inconvenient for the users (excluding the online issue as you cant get around that at this point).
With these new restrictions we are given work arounds. Pretty frustrating that you are paying a monthly subscription and you have to do work arounds.
"To get the functionality of the old tool you can print out your character sheet, give it to your DM so he can manually type it into his account, after he deletes one of his characters because he hit his limit, but only after the game because he doesnt have an active internet connection."
20, lol.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
If characters are around 100K? A terabyte is a million megabytes. Ten characters to a megabyte, so it'll take 10 million characters to fill 1 TB. 100 million seconds. If you run that script on 100 computers, it'll take 11 days before a 1 TB disk fills up. I'd recommend running a daily script to report the top 100 accounts in terms of characters generated; that should catch the problem before it gets out of hand. I'd recommend speccing out 5 TB of disk space just to give yourself more headroom.
You might also consider some compression on the XML files (assuming they're stored as XML in the cloud). Compressing one of my local dnd4e files dropped the size to 1/8th of the previous, so you'd get eight times as long to notice the problem.
The new CB is a boon for me; as I've noted elsewhere, I'm a Mac user and I like the idea of having it live in the crowd. However, a 20 character limit is not a good long-term solution for me.
2. The "export to .dnd4e" function is not there at launch (although I know it has been bumped up in priority) which means we can't work this way until the next update
Just to point it out, it *could* be available at launch... if they delayed the tools. Which is the lesser evil thing to do?
Your analogy doesn't work because the new CB is a new product that is replacing an earlier one not a feature of an existing product. That the two separate products fill the same role (both being character builders) is irrelevant to the fact that they are separate products.
According to WotC it is both a new product and an update for the previous CB. (Just to be clear, this is not sarcasm, merely a statement of fact.)
To those here who have a hard time understanding why anyone would be bothered by this limitation:
Anyone who feels the number is too low is perfectly justified in voicing their complaint, as they are paying for this service. Their desire to explain what they find objectionable prior to simply terminating service is beneficial to WotC, as it allows them to possibly retain more revenue by correcting those issues.
Simply because you do not feel this change merits concern, does not mean others cannot validly feel that such limitations fail to meet the cost of the service. I further feel it is an issue when a customer feels one of the few stated benefits of a major change ceases to be a benefit once more information was gained. Further, I feel some who were happier about being able to access the new CB from places like work (something I did note someone was excited about in a post), may feel this limitation negates any gained benefit (as tinkering in the builder becomes less fun if you have no space and can't save the file on the computer you are using).
I also feel it is unfair to claim that something is a non-issue based on features that haven't even been given a deadline yet. Especially given the past few months track record with the CB updates. Personally, I will no longer trust that any feature will be added until such time as it is actually present. That may change in time, but not anytime soon (as I have yet to see a CB with Dark Sun material after multiple missed deadlines).
I would also point out that a those most utilizing the service being offered would actually be those inconvenienced the most by the storage limit. Those content with a number of characters much lower than the limit may find what they care about most rather different than those who create characters often for amusement. Despite your belief that it is not WotC's need to fufill their "pathological need" to create characters, it most certainly should be. Would those people not be their best customers? Would they not be the ones most likely to find and report bugs? To put the software to its test? Are the char-op boards not considered quite useful for their assistance in these same functions for the game system itself? Don't many char-op regulars use the CB to create their builds that test the system? I highly doubt any of them are under the 20 character limit for the characters they use for play and tinkering.
In the end, I feel that 20 characters is far too few for the money being asked. I don't care how many of those slots I use, I do not accept that number as reasonable. Nor have I ever met a D&D player that didn't create characters for fun. To be told they would be limited to a cap of 20 (after deducting the number of active characters they have) to actively tinker with at a time for an unknown length of time (until the addition of the export feature) on a service they are paying 6-10 a month for is absurd. Nor do I feel the offering of additional slots for additional money would be acceptable (actually, I would see it as utterly deplorable given the small amounts of space that have so far been discussed).
find a 3rd party print to pdf freeware - i use pdf creator from sourceforge.net
now all your web-CB characters are available 'off-line' without printing
not ideal by any means but it's something
But the more I read, the less enthusiastic I'm getting, not more. Online only, no export at first, and NOW A 20 CHARACTER LIMIT? I feel like a chump. Others were right, when I resubscribe soon I'd be paying for a hobbled version of what I already have. And I defended this product. I'm not so sure now.
That venting having been done, I have little doubt this will evolve into a great tool in the future. The problem is I'm really torn as to whether to renew my subscription on the 13th or wait until that happens and just continue using the reliable NOT HOBBLED classic character builder in the meantime. My main fear is that if I wait several months to resubscribe, by that time the fee will be raised.
Meanwhile, I'll miss out on using the online compendium, which is very helpful to me.
So I'm really up in the air here, and really in doubt.
As far as I'm concerned, the 20 character limit is UNACCEPTABLE.
This is bad news. I really am torn as to what I'm going to do as far as resubscribing goes.
They will have more char slots avail as soon as they get the payment gateway working for micropayments. Coming soon!
Besides you'll be able to save chars to your hard drive soon, so you can not access them in the cloud when your away from your computer. Boy what a bunch of babies.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
No, PaoloM. No. I'm sorry, but no. This is the silliest possible explanation for this limitation.
If someone is spamming the Character Builder with a new character every 10 seconds and is doing it nonstop, that is something you can detect and stop on an individual basis. There's no reason at all to introduce such a limit for the reasons you are talking about.
Two things that I have;
Gmail:
Cost = Free
Storage = 7,500,000,000 bytes
Character Builder Online:
Cost = Roughly $8.33 a month
Storage = 4,000,000 bytes (20 characters at estimated 200k per character per my current files)
I'm definitely turning off my auto-renew at this point. I just renewed, (un?)fortunately, so you have some time to convince me to give them money again in 3 months. And when the new CB goes live on Nov. 16th I will be recreating my current characters and filling up any remaining slots with dummy characters, as will I hope many other subscribers.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to say this. Don't patronize us; the only real reason for this limitation is to curb account sharing. Before it was capped by number of downloads, now it's capped by number of characters. A limit of 20 PCs and no exporting of character files at launch are two things that should quite obviously be community-unfriendly and quite simply should have come up as issues during pre-reveal discussions. Either you don't care about the opinions of your customers or you're ignorant to them.
This news is just a slap in the face! I mean, all of the "updates are coming soon" and all that well, that was a toilet backed up and overflowing with crap....then the new CB with its reduced and limited functionality, thats the M80 that got tossed in the toilet...and this "20 character limit" is the stinkbomb that got thrown in on top of all that.....
Are you really playing more than 20 characters at the same time? Can I get in on your gaming circle? I play once a week with the same character as the DM, and I'm having boatloads of fun... You must be in a D&D orgy!
No, and I never said I was playing over 20 characters currently. But I do have at least 20 on the old CB, which is a very small number compared to almost all of the others that I game with.
However, what you said about being able to limit people spamming the CB is dead on correct. There are so many ways to do this from a network standpoint without putting a ridiculously low character limit in. Having a 20 character limit is silly. It's far too low.
If you want my opinion, I'd say give us a 256 character limit and also limit the frequency of new character creation to something reasonable to prevent spam attempts, except during a character import from the classic CB. Heck, I'd even be happy with a 128 character limit. 64 characters might be pushing it though.
20 characters to prevent DDOS attacks? Sorry, this is bad, bad, bad. It needs to change as soon as possible or I'll just have to continue to use the classic CB.
That is, up until my installation or computer blows up sometime, which is inevitable, and then I can't reinstall it anymore. And I will not resort to illegal means to back up my installation so if classic CB goes south on my comp, it's pretty much the end.
DON'T WAIT TO "MONITOR AVERAGE USAGE AND RAMP IT UP AS NEEDED." THE NUMBER OF CHARACTERS DOESN'T HAVE TO BE UNLIMITED, BUT A LIMIT OF TWENTY IS RIDICULOUSLY LOW. Look at the number of complaints this one issue is generating. I'd be willing to bet just about anything that almost all subscribers to CB have more than 20 characters on their local machines, and making them prune their characters is going to create even more bad feelings than some of the other features.
Okay, that felt better. Thanks for listening and do your best.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to say this. Don't patronize us; the only real reason for this limitation is to curb account sharing.
Unfortunately, I think you're right. Well, I can pretty much forget having anyone else in my group make easy to read, correctly calculated, legal characters if this limit stays. They've been using my CB to make their characters and now they'll not only not subscribe, even if I were to be a jerk and say they can't use mine, but I also get the added "benefit" of not having their characters easily accessible for when I plan encounters. I can't force them to subscribe. Sheesh. Not saying it's not possible to play DnD without this stuff but it now makes my life a lot busier.
Maybe PnP gaming was really meant to be PnP.
Are you really playing more than 20 characters at the same time? Can I get in on your gaming circle? I play once a week with the same character as the DM, and I'm having boatloads of fun... You must be in a D&D orgy!
I really liked keeping a version of each of my characters at each level in the CB. With a 20 character limit I can pretty much forget that. And that's really with only one character I actually play and several characters for experimenting with builds and just for fun. Way over 20.
Are you really playing more than 20 characters at the same time? Can I get in on your gaming circle? I play once a week with the same character as the DM, and I'm having boatloads of fun... You must be in a D&D orgy!
I really liked keeping a version of each of my characters at each level in the CB. With a 20 character limit I can pretty much forget that. And that's really with only one character I actually play and several characters for experimenting with builds and just for fun. Way over 20.
As I mentioned above, I have 106 characters in existence now, 25 or so of which are "live" (as in, used in games either by my players or by me). I could weed that, I guess.
I buy the "clampdown on account sharing" reason, though. It's reasonable from a business perspective - if I could store unlimited characters and access the builder anywhere, I can almost run a character building farm. Wizards wants everyone to have a subscription (a reasonable business desire) and this is a way to make sure there's a limit to how many people can practically make use of a single account.*
Again, the move to online-only benefits Wizards first; benefits to the customer are nice too.
* I don't mean illegally - I mean "one guy who makes characters for his friends," not "one guy who gave his username/password to his friends." Though the ToS could say you agree only to make characters for your personal use in play, which makes both of those ToS violations. That would be both silly and unenforceable, though.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
[...]
We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
One could write scripts that automate the forums, CS-feedback forms, Any other of generated content on the WOTC page that do even worse damage than that.
Setting a hard limit on users is exactly that - setting a hard limit on users.
It's in no way an effective intruder prevention. If you want your software to be secure, that security measures, not half-handed obscurity measures.
Not that I wasn't already planning to drop DDI after the charbuilder online announcement, but this is just getting hilariously ineptly designed.
I thought I'd add this chunk of response here for the record:
Compression is bad in data storage - if you have a disaster recovery situation the slightest error makes entire chunks unrecoverable. Admittedley the amount of failures that have to occur to get to recovering individual files is pretty serious (servers hardware, dirve hardware, mirrors, backups, older backups...) but I've known it happen occasionally (usually when one guy screwed up and hadn't been testing the quality and validity of backups and no one was checking on him).
My point wasn't so much that its difficult to get loads of storage online, but that there are other considerations beyond simple putting in bigger drives.
The cost of an enterprise quality 1TB 15k SAS HD is about $600, compared to about $60 for a 1TB consumer drive. Also, it will be in a RAID configuration of some sort (the paranoid favourite being RAID 50, but probably just 5), then their is the storage mirror, the storage load balancing (in a DB application, its not just the CPU time that needs load balancing) and then theirs the redundant cluster.
Throw all that in and 1TB of storage quickly becomes more like $10,000. That's without the other server hardware of course.
Of course, here I'm making the assumption they're installing best in class hardware and doing their best to reduce bottlenecks.
While that still looks like peanuts, the budget for the Insider program has to pay all the staff salaries, maintain this hardware (and power isn't getting cheaper), software and bandwidth agreements and WotC/Hasbro will still be expecting to make a profit.
Finally I'm not saying WotC can't add more infrastructure, or won't add more. I'm not even saying I think 20 characters is a useful limit. Ignoring all other considerations, they need to see how people use the service and see what provisioning they need, and from a purely service provider point of view, I can see why they're cautious without resorting to paranoia.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
[...]
We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Sounds like you guys haven't taken a security course yet. There are lots of ways to prevent this. You could limit the frequency of updates and add a monitoring system to trigger a block on rapid char creation in the app. Say more then 100 char creations in a few hours time, locks the account, with a hard limit of 200.
Given your IT dept tends to be limited in ability, I'm guessing your buying into someone elses cloud. I'm going to futher guess it's Azure given your preference to MS products (hey I l like em too). That means your buying resources from them. More resources = more money spent. The whole selling point of cloud to buisness is money savings.
I think we (meaning WoTC) are trying to:
1. Save money on IT expenses, increasing profit
2. Prevent people from what you guys probably see as "abusing" the CB by letting multiple people create and maintain chars on the same "account", also increasing profit (in your minds).
If the solo reason is to protect against DoS attacks, it's time to go back to school.
20 is not a reasonable limit.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
You're right, you shouldn't have done this.
Because you can't be serious. You aren't. It was just the first excuse you thought of and thought would fly.
No one here that we should take seriously is suggesting you allow an unlimited number of characters. The serious suggestions are merely that 20 is too low and that not having an export/import feature doesn't help.
You must know that there's no way a group of players will each be buying DDI subscriptions. I mean, that's asking for $300-$400 a year to play D&D besides the books. You're simply setting a limit that is low enough that most group will want to buy two... or maybe in the extreme case... three subscriptions.
This is the only reason for setting it at 20. I'm not saying it should be unlimited or that it should be 1000, but let's be serious here. The limit was not chosen to prevent DDOS attacks or to save on storage. You can do that through reasonable policies.
These were marketing choices. Choices that, I might add, you are entirely allowed to make. You have every right to run your business as you like.
But when I looked at the number of characters I had stored on my laptop to allow my group to play in three different campaigns, it was more than twenty. This included one-off sessions where we experimented with new classes, powers, and so on. We'd blow past twenty very quickly.
And again, we're adults here, we know that entire groups of people can't afford to each have a DDI sub for the value. So there's no question my group was over using the CB on my laptop when we got together. This is not news. It is the only way to get any value out of it.
You can cite plenty of other solid reasons for why you set a 20 character limit. Just don't use DDOS attacks. That plainly flies in the face that no reasonable person would suggest you make it unlimited or 1000. Heck even 40 or 50 is way better. And an easy way to manage overflow characters locally would end even the most outrageous complaints.
This is purely about driving subs and keeping them for the long haul, since characters disappear forever when you cancel. It's okay to admit that. We know you're in a tough business and we know it's getting tougher to stay in business.
Please stop defending your technical and marketing choices. You are allowed to make them and you don't have to defend them. Just know that when you do try to make technical points only bad things can happen. You will slip and make a point you don't really mean (let's blame our marketing decision on technology) and you will look like you don't know what you are doing.
sure, throw it in the ocean and it will drown - but in normal uses cases, those kind of system simply do not fail, because they have a lot of failsafes to support the main cause for their existance:
data integrity and storage. would be a mess, if they could not do that. Althought honestly, I'd really like to see HP in a lawsuit or two over this. Just has not happened. And probably never will.
No, PaoloM. No. I'm sorry, but no. This is the silliest possible explanation for this limitation.
If someone is spamming the Character Builder with a new character every 10 seconds and is doing it nonstop, that is something you can detect and stop on an individual basis. There's no reason at all to introduce such a limit for the reasons you are talking about.
Two things that I have;
Gmail:
Cost = Free
Storage = 7,500,000,000 bytes
Character Builder Online:
Cost = Roughly $8.33 a month
Storage = 4,000,000 bytes (20 characters at estimated 200k per character per my current files)
I'm definitely turning off my auto-renew at this point. I just renewed, (un?)fortunately, so you have some time to convince me to give them money again in 3 months. And when the new CB goes live on Nov. 16th I will be recreating my current characters and filling up any remaining slots with dummy characters, as will I hope many other subscribers.
Edit: Oh, I forgot to say this. Don't patronize us; the only real reason for this limitation is to curb account sharing. Before it was capped by number of downloads, now it's capped by number of characters. A limit of 20 PCs and no exporting of character files at launch are two things that should quite obviously be community-unfriendly and quite simply should have come up as issues during pre-reveal discussions. Either you don't care about the opinions of your customers or you're ignorant to them.
Actually....
Botnets.
While I find it disingenuous to use the really large bot nets that wouldn't have the time or care to attack WotC and instead focus on whats available on the blackmarkets...well, I won't be linking but lets just say that PaoloM's concerns are not as ungrounded as you may think, after all botnets brought down LiveJournal and TuCows who certainly have better internet security than WotC would have. DDoS isn't a joking matter, Google's Gmail isn't a big target due to way the protocols on it work, and Google's theoretical retaliation capability.
You can cite plenty of other solid reasons for why you set a 20 character limit. Just don't use DDOS attacks. That plainly flies in the face that no reasonable person would suggest you make it unlimited or 1000.
I think I'm sane, and I suggested 4000.
(they need to limit file size just as much as character count. And that sort of "will never be reached" limit is effectively equivilent to unlimited, while still protecting them, and still being really really cheap.)
While I find it disingenuous to use the really large bot nets that wouldn't have the time or care to attack WotC and instead focus on whats available on the blackmarkets...well, I won't be linking but lets just say that PaoloM's concerns are not as ungrounded as you may think, after all botnets brought down LiveJournal and TuCows who certainly have better internet security than WotC would have. DDoS isn't a joking matter, Google's Gmail isn't a big target due to way the protocols on it work, and Google's theoretical retaliation capability.
well, the other thing of course remains...
you can down an application from the outside, if you have enough muscle, there's no need to actually do anything on the inside. LJ is just one of those cases.
as for google, it would be incredibly hard to get their infrastructure to crash, as it is simply divided across the globe. as for wotc, i doubt it would be hard for anyone really trying to get their servers down. after all, they're using partially unpatched .net servers, and have two SSO-solutions to other companies. (DR and onesite)
@saitir: a properly configured SAN simply does not go away that easily.
sure, throw it in the ocean and it will drown - but in normal uses cases, those kind of system simply do not fail, because they have a lot of failsafes to support the main cause for their existance:
data integrity and storage. would be a mess, if they could not do that. Althought honestly, I'd really like to see HP in a lawsuit or two over this. Just has not happened. And probably never will.
Oye, I hope I never have to work on a system you're maintaining! The attitude of 'these systems simply do not fail' is ridiculous.
There are so many ways for 'impossible to go down' systems to die, its not funny, expecially when you don't have geographically diverse clusters. Usually takes a company digging up the street, faulty UPS sending spikes along the power lines, actual drive fires, exploding UPS batteries and other highly improbable events.
I'm not saying its likely, or even credible in a million years, but to say its impossible and not plan for it really isn't something a good system admin ought to be doing.
20 / 5 = 4
And some gaming groups have more players. This is completely unacceptable from the viewpoint of -group- play and is yet another attempt at WotC to squeeze money out of the consumer whom has started to abandon their lackluster vision. When I read today's Ampersand article I seriously became ill. It's clear that WotC cannot take any level of criticism nor learn from their mistakes. Espousing the benefits of character builder without even acknowledging the weaknesses in providing such a system screams the level of hubris that this company has, and the contempt for its consumer base.
I dislike dishonesty, and WotC continues to be dishonest. Yes, a 20 character limit is dishonest. I'll laugh when they start to include a 'pay for more char slots' option, or 'pay for export'. I will give them one month. Just one to give them a fair chance, but it's not looking good for them.
I urge people to consider the math, and make your voices louder.
20 does seem arbitrary and while probably more then enough for most people, lot's of char-op will be disapointed.
So what # do you think should it be capped at?
30?
40?
50? (enough for me)
75?
100?
256?
1000 seems actually really reasonable. It needs to be a number that functions as limitless for most practical purposes, but will stop somebody from hogging all server space. (No need to make it 100.000 for example). At 150 kb per character, that would amount to 150MB storage. That's not much.
I'm not saying its likely, or even credible in a million years, but to say its impossible and not plan for it really isn't something a good system admin ought to be doing.
it's unprobable, and that's why a serious company does daily or at least weekly backups.
as for my administering a system: no, sorry, won't happen.
as for major faults: well, good luck with retrieving any data from a burned drive. there's no difference in retrieving compressed data or normal data on that. that's why my original point stands - modern storage systems are well up to the task of storing xml data and keeping them available.
(ah, and just in case you wonder: we do daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly backups, where the quarterly backups are stored in a big government bunker, and the weekly ones get carried to a safe in a building about 3 miles away.)
20 / 4 = 5
20 / 5 = 4
And some gaming groups have more players. This is completely unacceptable from the viewpoint of -group- play and is yet another attempt at WotC to squeeze money out of the consumer whom has started to abandon their lackluster vision.
Didn't you hear? Groups owning an account is against the ToS. Apparently that makes you (and anyone else doing the same) a thief in the eyes of WotC. *rollseyes*
Instead of trying to remove group ownership they should have been trying to facilitate a better way for it to work within their business model.
Otherwise you just end up with stuff like a ridiculous 20 character limit and a whole bunch of disgruntled customers.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
If I'm paying monthly for the use of a program (something that would normally be a one-off payment) and I'm forced to use their storage the least they could do is let me use as much as I like.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
i'm not a very active gamer (i mostly dm), still i do have maybe 20 characters floating around on a regular basis. some of them were built for friends, and maybe could be deleted. some of them were created for me, to look at a concept more easily than just writing it up, and might be exported.
some are absolutely essential, and those are the 10 characters that actually play in my groups. i need full access to those.
so, half of my space here would be gone with just the characters i do NOT play.
Didn't you hear? Groups owning an account is against the ToS. Apparently that makes you (and anyone else doing the same) a thief in the eyes of WotC. *rollseyes*
Instead of trying to remove group ownership they should have been trying to facilitate a better way for it to work within their business model.
Otherwise you just end up with stuff like a ridiculous 20 character limit and a whole bunch of disgruntled customers.
Just had a thought...
The smallest suggested party size is 5 (4 players + DM), so maybe if they can relate accounts together they could give discounts for subscribing.
"If you the DM and your 4 players subscribe you get a 10% discount to each"
Since the DM is more likely to subscribe, perhaps this could encourage 'groups' to join.
Perhaps with expanded character limits..., although 20 is awfully small
Didn't you hear? Groups owning an account is against the ToS. Apparently that makes you (and anyone else doing the same) a thief in the eyes of WotC. *rollseyes*
Instead of trying to remove group ownership they should have been trying to facilitate a better way for it to work within their business model.
Otherwise you just end up with stuff like a ridiculous 20 character limit and a whole bunch of disgruntled customers.
Just had a thought...
The smallest suggested party size is 5 (4 players + DM), so maybe if they can relate accounts together they could give discounts for subscribing.
"If you the DM and your 4 players subscribe you get a 10% discount to each"
Since the DM is more likely to subscribe, perhaps this could encourage 'groups' to join.
Perhaps with expanded character limits..., although 20 is awfully small
A discounted group sign-up isn't a bad idea. Even better would just be saying 'Pay a small fee, get access to your DMs character builder'.
A discounted group sign-up isn't a bad idea. Even better would just be saying 'Pay a small fee, get access to your DMs character builder'.
hopefully, that would expand the dm's storage space by 20, or else it would be a very sad solution.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
If I'm paying monthly for the use of a program (something that would normally be a one-off payment) and I'm forced to use their storage the least they could do is let me use as much as I like.
Your statement above is very out of touch with reality.
You do understand that server space costs money, right? As much as you like? Really? 
Would you be willing to pay an added fee for more space? Now that sounds reasonable to me.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
I'm not sure you understand the point trying to be made, at least by me. It doesn't matter that some people don't have 20 actively played characters. What matters is this tool [In my opinion, regardless of whatever facts are out there] is the Character Builder and it should have the same functionality as Character Builder Classic at the very least.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
Respectfully, I disagree with this.
I run one game and play in two. My game has 5 full time players and one part timer. Each has two characters (there are two plot lines running that will intertwine). I have copies of all characters.
I have my own charcters saved at a current level, and a future level, so i can keep an eye on making sure i have prerequistes and stuff in time.
I also have a couple of character of other in my group; that is they come around my house and use my machine, not have an install of their own from my account.
That already puts me on what? 18? That's just for actually playing the game. If I chose to make a couple of new ones, either for the sake of it, for a new game, or just to experiment with an idea in a couple of ways BANG i hit the limit and have to start cutting useful characters.
A limit of 20 is low. Low enough that it can interfere with normal useage.
Some people do however use it as a hobby itself. I used to myself, it's fun. And who are you to tell them that their enjoyment of the game is invalid? Up until now that has been a feature they have enjoyed. This limit takes it away from them.
On the technical concerns, storage costs, etc. it's been wizards choice to go down this route, and to roll it out this way, they are responsible for making sure that it's service is up to a useful level. I guess it's their choice to do this by creating limits, but that's clearly not a popular one.
I also note that dispite draconian character storage limits to protect from greifing of whatever sort. There's still no talk of an SLA or uptime guarentee.
Wizards, please reconsider and push to 40-50.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
i'm not a very active gamer (i mostly dm), still i do have maybe 20 characters floating around on a regular basis. some of them were built for friends, and maybe could be deleted. some of them were created for me, to look at a concept more easily than just writing it up, and might be exported.
some are absolutely essential, and those are the 10 characters that actually play in my groups. i need full access to those.
so, half of my space here would be gone with just the characters i do NOT play.
I am a player in one campaign (1 character), and a DM for another (5 characters). As I DM I keep copies of my players characters, so I have exactly 6 characters in CB (plus the samples). Assuming WotC eventually comes out with some kind of account linking by campaign, and allows DMs to see the characters of other members who identify themselves as playing in my campaign, I can't imagine ever needing more than enough space to store a couple of characters. 20 seems a ridiculously high amount to me.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
If I'm paying monthly for the use of a program (something that would normally be a one-off payment) and I'm forced to use their storage the least they could do is let me use as much as I like.Your statement above is very out of touch with reality.
You do understand that server space costs money, right? As much as you like? Really?
Would you be willing to pay an added fee for more space? Now that sounds reasonable to me.
I thought that I was paying for the service? (well, not anymore, seeing as I've unsubbed, but whatever)
I'd expect that some of that money goes towards my storage space.
20 characters is a tiny amount of disc space.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
I'm not sure you understand the point trying to be made, at least by me. It doesn't matter that some people don't have 20 actively played characters. What matters is this tool [In my opinion, regardless of whatever facts are out there] is the Character Builder and it should have the same functionality as Character Builder Classic at the very least.
Except that is a ridiculous demand when it comes to server space. They are not saying you can't fill up your own HDD with as many character exports as you can possibly create, only that you can't fill up their HDDs with as many characters as you can possibly create.
Furthermore once exports are available (I understand it is frustrating they won't immediately be available) it will have exactly the same functionality in this regard because the character files were all on your HDD before and they all can be again.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
If I'm paying monthly for the use of a program (something that would normally be a one-off payment) and I'm forced to use their storage the least they could do is let me use as much as I like.Your statement above is very out of touch with reality.
You do understand that server space costs money, right? As much as you like? Really?
Would you be willing to pay an added fee for more space? Now that sounds reasonable to me.
I thought that I was paying for the service? (well, not anymore, seeing as I've unsubbed, but whatever)
I'd expect that some of that money goes towards my storage space.
20 characters is a tiny amount of disc space.
You are, and the service allows you to have 20 characters. LOL
I'm sure it does, and the more you use the more you should have to pay.
The size is immaterial to the argument. 20 is the limit set for the price they are charging. Want more, maybe they will let you pay more.
You do understand that server space costs money, right? As much as you like? Really?
Not really. not in real terms.
Using $10000 for 1TB of commercial storage, that's $0.00045 per character, roughly. That's 20 characters for less than two cents, for around 3 years. Not 2 cents a month per customer. Not 2 cents a year per customer. 2 cents per 3 years per customer. And that's really expensive storage (too small for decent scale)
Using S3 pricing instead (0.14/Gig/Month), which is very expensive, geographically distributed storage, it works out to 1 cent per 3 years per customer.
Since I would pay $5/month for this service, I think it's reasonable to use, say 14 cents of that, per month for storage. That allows over 1000 characters. For 14 cents per month.
14 cents per month, 1000 characters.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
I'm not sure you understand the point trying to be made, at least by me. It doesn't matter that some people don't have 20 actively played characters. What matters is this tool [In my opinion, regardless of whatever facts are out there] is the Character Builder and it should have the same functionality as Character Builder Classic at the very least.They are not saying you can't fill up your own HDD with as many character exports as you can possibly create
Well actually... since the export feature isn't available at launch, that is exactly what is happening <.<.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
Respectfully, I disagree with this.
I run one game and play in two. My game has 5 full time players and one part timer. Each has two characters (there are two plot lines running that will intertwine). I have copies of all characters.
I have my own charcters saved at a current level, and a future level, so i can keep an eye on making sure i have prerequistes and stuff in time.
I also have a couple of character of other in my group; that is they come around my house and use my machine, not have an install of their own from my account.
That already puts me on what? 18? That's just for actually playing the game. If I chose to make a couple of new ones, either for the sake of it, for a new game, or just to experiment with an idea in a couple of ways BANG i hit the limit and have to start cutting useful characters.
A limit of 20 is low. Low enough that it can interfere with normal useage.
Some people do however use it as a hobby itself. I used to myself, it's fun. And who are you to tell them that their enjoyment of the game is invalid? Up until now that has been a feature they have enjoyed. This limit takes it away from them.
On the technical concerns, storage costs, etc. it's been wizards choice to go down this route, and to roll it out this way, they are responsible for making sure that it's service is up to a useful level. I guess it's their choice to do this by creating limits, but that's clearly not a popular one.
I also note that dispite draconian character storage limits to protect from greifing of whatever sort. There's still no talk of an SLA or uptime guarentee.
So you admit (as I have in another post) that you use the character builder in an abnormal way. It isn't a campaign character tracker (though I use it that way too), and frankly with export enabled there isn't any reason you can't continue to track your campaigns' characters they way you do. Perhaps a 3rd party dev will create a small app precisely for view the export files in a pretty format. Paolo has asked for devs to contact him I assume to discuss the possibility of an API.
The size is immaterial to the argument. 20 is the limit set for the price they are charging. Want more, maybe they will let you pay more.
And our point is that 20 is far too few for the price they are charging. Free services offer hundreds to thousands of times that space. And regardless of whether the price is "worth it" or not, it marks a significant decline from my storage space with the old CB (which numbers in the millions of characters).
You do understand that server space costs money, right? As much as you like? Really?
Not really. not in real terms.
Using $10000 for 1TB of commercial storage, that's $0.00045 per character, roughly. That's 20 characters for less than two cents, for around 3 years. Not 2 cents a month per customer. Not 2 cents a year per customer. 2 cents per 3 years per customer. And that's really expensive storage (too small for decent scale)
Using S3 pricing instead (0.14/Gig/Month), which is very expensive, geographically distributed storage, it works out to 1 cent per 3 years per customer.
Since I would pay $5/month for this service, I think it's reasonable to use, say 14 cents of that, per month for storage. That allows over 1000 characters. For 14 cents per month.
14 cents per month, 1000 characters.
Except that no one charges hardware cost for anything. You have to pay your admins, your vendors for tech support, your offsite backup storage, electricity, HVAC, literally dozens of other expenses. Now maybe WotC is using a vendor to supply them with all this and the servers aren't even at WotC headquarters, but that service I guarantee you costs them more per customer than you are quoting.
yall YOU ALREADY HAVE ALL YOUR PCS ON YOUR CPU. you can have 20 loaded on the website at a time but you arent losing the data, its not like when they went in and deleted items from the old cb or something. and when you can save them (soon) it wont matter at all. it makes no difference how many you can save, since you already have them saved, and once you can save new ones to your pc (soon), there wont be any reason to even keep them on the website at all
Just had a thought(yes rare for me) but what if this 20 char limit is an attempt to limit all the account sharing going on which many posters have openly admitted. What WotC truly wants is $10/month forever from every DDI user. While I understand that I am unsure why they ever abandoned those model requirements when DDI became available. Even with an offline tool there are ways they could have made acct sharing difficult at best.
The only thing that has been made clear since the Nov 16th announcement for me has been that WotC would liek to make D&D4E an MMO. Well if thats really the case they had better actually produce a product that is worth the sub rate. Currently IMO D&DI's pay more for less than any MMO available today. Looks like my DS game will not be getting the support I thought it would as I doubt I will be subscribing at these prices for the content currently offered.
I wish I could read their minds and see what exactly they were really trying to accomplish by moving the CB online in the first place as it might explain this decision which from this perspective seems almost insane or punitive.
The size is immaterial to the argument. 20 is the limit set for the price they are charging. Want more, maybe they will let you pay more.
And our point is that 20 is far too few for the price they are charging. Free services offer hundreds to thousands of times that space. And regardless of whether the price is "worth it" or not, it marks a significant decline from my storage space with the old CB (which numbers in the millions of characters).
Have you considered the "likely" fact that 20 character is only a portion of your storage once the other apps come online? What about your custom monster storage (likely to need to be much larger than character storage), what about campaign storage, what about map storage? What if they get that all online and keep the pricing the same, but you get more overall storage?
Storage is cheap and just keeps getting cheaper every year if not month to month. Any excuse about storage space price being an issue is just beyond ridiculous.
I wish I could read their minds and see what exactly they were really trying to accomplish by moving the CB online in the first place as it might explain this decision which from this perspective seems almost insane or punitive.
Personal computer storage is cheap, but I don't think you want DDi running from Paolo's laptop.
1 - By starting it low (20), it makes it easier for them to implement things like cross-account sharing.
2 - It also makes it easier to implement things like filters, etc with a small amount of files to look at to find out where it breaks.
My friend also commented that it is trivially easy to increase the number of possible slots and that it wouldn't result in any downtime.
Another note that he said is that, from a PR point of view, it is *always* better to start at a low number (that you *know* your system can handle) and increase slowly as opposed to starting at a high number (that you think your system can handle), and being forced to decrease that number, possibly causing people to have to choose characters to remove from the cloud.
(Keep in mind that my experience with programming, etc is saving stuff in Google Docs, so I may have mis-understood what was said to me.)
So you admit (as I have in another post) that you use the character builder in an abnormal way. It isn't a campaign character tracker (though I use it that way too), and frankly with export enabled there isn't any reason you can't continue to track your campaigns' characters they way you do. Perhaps a 3rd party dev will create a small app precisely for view the export files in a pretty format. Paolo has asked for devs to contact him I assume to discuss the possibility of an API.
Honestly I wouldn't see this as abnormal, maybe i run two games or three? and it was prefectly within the functionality of the existing tools. Given that it comes with about 10-15 characters preinstalled (Raistlin, Binwin etc.) I'd say it was almost expected. Either way it is how a large number of people used it. And as they are saying this is an "update to the existing tool" I'd expect it to have similar functionality. Whether that's to keep records of the party you DM, or creating character for fun. Those are expected functionality based on what we already have and this cuts it. People are understandibly annoyed.
Except that no one charges hardware cost for anything. You have to pay your admins, your vendors for tech support, your offsite backup storage, electricity, HVAC, literally dozens of other expenses. Now maybe WotC is using a vendor to supply them with all this and the servers aren't even at WotC headquarters, but that service I guarantee you costs them more per customer than you are quoting.
That 0.14/Gig? That's hosted by amazon: they pay the OpEx, electricity, backups. That's what it costs.
The 10k 1TB SAN? That's including support. Not electricity, nor admins, but it does include support. In fact, that's why I assumed a 3 year lifecycle, that's the length of the standard support agreement.
I think your operational experience in this field is dated.
Sounds par for the course.
And no, enterprise storage is not cheap - it is not as expensive as some here would like to make it out to be, but it is not cheap. The problem is if Wizards wants to go to cloud computing and play with the big boys then it has to bite the bullet and build a system capable of handling the application.
Then again, given Paolo's comments earlier I have to wonder if they even did their due diligence to figure out what they would need to run this system.
I have a lot of characters at any given time – How many characters can I save to the web-based Character Builder?Currently, the limit for saved characters is set to 20. This is something we may increase in the future.
We only get 20 characters? We can't even have one character of each class? (Completely ignoring essentials there are 26 classes currently available)
Combine that with the lack of any ability to save a character to local storage and I really have to wonder what exactly is going on in the heads of the people at WotC...
WHAT!? That is EXACTLY the type of heavy handed AWFUL limitation I was afraid of with this online CB. I currently have one character for each race, one separate one for most classes, and about 20 more that are just random thought experiments. I don't even keep track of things for other players. I have this many characters in the CB for multiple reasons.
1- I like to try and make strange builds to see how viable they are... easily compared in the CB to other characters that I know are of a certain power level standard.
2- I like to just make characters of every class so that I can see what that class has to offer more than simply reading a list of powers in the book.
3- In campaigns I run and my friends run, we often will use NPCs that use PC stats for certain enemies meant to be of a higher caliber, or running organizations. The CB allows me to create groups of PCs of a certain theme.
4- Many of our campaigns only last about 4 months give or take, and then we switch DMs. We often start new worlds and characters as new content comes out, multiple players/DMs have to leave for awhile, etc.
Let me tell you, people on CharOp (which is the main place I hang out, so I use it as an example) make tons of characters just to test the flexibility or limits of the system. Many posters on there have made many quality, awesome, interesting builds when new spiffy material comes out, and on the whole, I think they have improved the game tremendously. The sheer creativity over there for tweaking the system is astounding, and putting a 20 character limit is pathetic. When my free gmail account gives me... what... 7.5 Gigabytes of storage space, to put a dismal limit on character creation count is asinine.
Now to all those who just say "Well, I can't imagine using more than 20, there is no need to change it", that is tantamount to saying "I don't use this game element, so I see no need for it to exist". I hate every single Primal class save Druid, but I love that they put out options for those who do like them. As for server space, the size of the CB files were pretty small relatively speaking, and server space is extremely cheap for how much data we need to store.
Just had a thought(yes rare for me) but what if this 20 char limit is an attempt to limit all the account sharing going on which many posters have openly admitted. What WotC truly wants is $10/month forever from every DDI user. While I understand that I am unsure why they ever abandoned those model requirements when DDI became available. Even with an offline tool there are ways they could have made acct sharing difficult at best.
.
yeah thats part of it, after all bill s. himself says exactly that in todays column. it is in part a way to combat piracy. that doesnt change the fact that you can store as many pcs as you want on your cpu, you just cant have more than 20 up to edit. i dont see the big deal. its nothing compared to how they went in and deleted items from the old cb and forced rarity, knowing they were going to dump it anyway, to me that was far more egregious
Except that no one charges hardware cost for anything. You have to pay your admins, your vendors for tech support, your offsite backup storage, electricity, HVAC, literally dozens of other expenses. Now maybe WotC is using a vendor to supply them with all this and the servers aren't even at WotC headquarters, but that service I guarantee you costs them more per customer than you are quoting.
That 0.14/Gig? That's hosted by amazon: they pay the OpEx, electricity, backups. That's what it costs.
The 10k 1TB SAN? That's including support. Not electricity, nor admins, but it does include support. In fact, that's why I assumed a 3 year lifecycle, that's the length of the standard support agreement.
I think your operational experience in this field is dated.
You are talking about the Amazon that sells everything at below cost? LOL
But, as a cost limitation to 200kb character files? Dirt. Cheap.
The salary for the sysadmin is a heck of a lot higher than the cost of the SAN, on the scale (40k customers, ~50 files/customer average) wer're talking. Even after you allocate his time to the other things he's managing, cause swapping the occassional dead drive and running backups won't take that much of his time.
Or, you know, you could outsource that storage to S3, get geographically distributed datacenters to allow you to skip the backups. And pay 14 cents per gig per month.
This is Dirt Cheap.
Didn't you hear? Groups owning an account is against the ToS. Apparently that makes you (and anyone else doing the same) a thief in the eyes of WotC. *rollseyes*
Instead of trying to remove group ownership they should have been trying to facilitate a better way for it to work within their business model.
Otherwise you just end up with stuff like a ridiculous 20 character limit and a whole bunch of disgruntled customers.
Just had a thought...
The smallest suggested party size is 5 (4 players + DM), so maybe if they can relate accounts together they could give discounts for subscribing.
"If you the DM and your 4 players subscribe you get a 10% discount to each"
Since the DM is more likely to subscribe, perhaps this could encourage 'groups' to join.
Perhaps with expanded character limits..., although 20 is awfully small
A discounted group sign-up isn't a bad idea. Even better would just be saying 'Pay a small fee, get access to your DMs character builder'.
Does an online only CB suddenly seem better? There isn't really a way to do what you suggest with an offline one. Moving to online opens this and *many* other ways of doing things that were not previously possible.
I do think that would be pretty slick, particularly for people who only want the CB and care not for the monster builder, compendium, magazines, etc. A discounted version for just CB access.
After talking with friends that have built data-storage systems and complaining to him about it, he pointed out a couple of things. It is not so much the storage space that needs to be taken into account. rather it is the processes and operations that will be done on the data files that needs to be looked at.
1 - By starting it low (20), it makes it easier for them to implement things like cross-account sharing.
2 - It also makes it easier to implement things like filters, etc with a small amount of files to look at to find out where it breaks.
My friend also commented that it is trivially easy to increase the number of possible slots and that it wouldn't result in any downtime.
Another note that he said is that, from a PR point of view, it is *always* better to start at a low number (that you *know* your system can handle) and increase slowly as opposed to starting at a high number (that you think your system can handle), and being forced to decrease that number, possibly causing people to have to choose characters to remove from the cloud.
(Keep in mind that my experience with programming, etc is saving stuff in Google Docs, so I may have mis-understood what was said to me.)
I'm not sure of WotC has ever done one, but wouldn't a Beta Test be perfect for this type of situation?
I'm not sure of WotC has ever done one, but wouldn't a Beta Test be perfect for this type of situation?
Maybe they were going to, but with all the nerd-rage going on they though it best to just release the darn thing and do the stress tests live.
Yes its thoughts like these that keep me up at night....
You are talking about the Amazon that sells everything at below cost? LOL
Excuse me, I've worked on/coded distributed large scale storage systems. They are not based on SANs, they are based on clouds of small PCs with as many HDs as possible, using software to distribute the file system. They are dirt cheap on a cost/gig basis, which higher OpEx costs from the extra unreliability of the hardware. But they are so cheap on a cost/gig basis, you just distribute the data 3-5 times and don't worry about it.
After talking with friends that have built data-storage systems and complaining to him about it, he pointed out a couple of things. It is not so much the storage space that needs to be taken into account. rather it is the processes and operations that will be done on the data files that needs to be looked at.
1 - By starting it low (20), it makes it easier for them to implement things like cross-account sharing.
2 - It also makes it easier to implement things like filters, etc with a small amount of files to look at to find out where it breaks.
My friend also commented that it is trivially easy to increase the number of possible slots and that it wouldn't result in any downtime.
Another note that he said is that, from a PR point of view, it is *always* better to start at a low number (that you *know* your system can handle) and increase slowly as opposed to starting at a high number (that you think your system can handle), and being forced to decrease that number, possibly causing people to have to choose characters to remove from the cloud.
(Keep in mind that my experience with programming, etc is saving stuff in Google Docs, so I may have mis-understood what was said to me.)
While this is all true, it would all be true for a 100 character limit. 20 is still ridiculous.
After talking with friends that have built data-storage systems and complaining to him about it, he pointed out a couple of things. It is not so much the storage space that needs to be taken into account. rather it is the processes and operations that will be done on the data files that needs to be looked at.
1 - By starting it low (20), it makes it easier for them to implement things like cross-account sharing.
2 - It also makes it easier to implement things like filters, etc with a small amount of files to look at to find out where it breaks.
My friend also commented that it is trivially easy to increase the number of possible slots and that it wouldn't result in any downtime.
Another note that he said is that, from a PR point of view, it is *always* better to start at a low number (that you *know* your system can handle) and increase slowly as opposed to starting at a high number (that you think your system can handle), and being forced to decrease that number, possibly causing people to have to choose characters to remove from the cloud.
(Keep in mind that my experience with programming, etc is saving stuff in Google Docs, so I may have mis-understood what was said to me.)
You don't need to go as low as 20 to accomplish this. Unless they're going very far out of their way to intentionally write terribly slow SQL (that's so inefficient you couldn't accidentally make it suck so hard), we're talking about trivially small record sets to process.
What your friend tells you is sound, but more so for information systems where you're retrieving, searching, sorting, manipulating, etc, data sets composed of many thousands or millions of records.
Bulk Storage is dirt cheap, even redundant distributed bulk storage.
DB space is not. The IOPs requirements for a DB, especially a larger DB capable of handling lots of clients, drive your cost/gig through the roof. So if they're keeping the characters not as XML files, but as normalized DB entries, a 20 character limit is reasonably justified by cost considerations.
(I'd point people to Clusterix, a company started by a friend of mine that sells an idiotically scalable multi-master DB solution, but their webserver is down)
Okay, I'm just a casual Access programmer here, but aren't we talking about many thousands of records here? On the order of 800,000?
I've managed small single-server DBs that averaged millions of transactions per day? And more custom DBs that inserted billions of rows per day? 800000 rows is a small DB.
When you open the character builder and then click to load a character. It should give you a list of your character folders. ex.
[Online Characters]
1-20 Characters
[Offline Characters]
1-1 million
click one it opens and you can choose your character. Drag and drop functionality to move from one folder to the other.
Until you have that functionality to have a library of characters, just raise the cap. No one can legitimately argue that you aren't trying to meet us half way if the cap is raised.
kilpatds,
I thought you knew that the characters would be stored in a database, not as XML. I think that's partly where our disconnect was with other expenses. I didn't even mention DBA's because I thought that was assumed.
Okay, I'm just a casual Access programmer here, but aren't we talking about many thousands of records here? On the order of 800,000?
I've managed small single-server DBs that averaged millions of transactions per day? And more custom DBs that inserted billions of rows per day? 800000 rows is a small DB.
VaultDweller was the one who said many thousands. I was just pointing out that we are indeed talking about many thousands, nearly a million.
kilpatds,I thought you knew that the characters would be stored in a database, not as XML. I think that's partly where our disconnect was with other expenses. I didn't even mention DBA's because I thought that was assumed.
Their "when it will break" (two users editing the same character) is consistent with a file-based solution. And, honestly, It would never cross my brain, as an architect who likes using DBs for what DBs are good for, to keep anything other that minor metadata (name,race,class,level,owner,permissions) in a DB. The characters belong in more file oriented (or NoSQL, if you need your buzzword compliance) storage.
As far as state management goes, the common reason for keeping state in the DB is to avoid putting it in the servers. If you put state in your servers, you have to figure out some way to pin clients to the servers that have the state. If you put it in the DB, you don't.
But in this case, you've got a moderately heavy client (13meg download). You can use that to keep your state and thus can keep it out of both the server and the DB.
Having a single DB limits your end scalability unless you go the clusterix (or equivilent) route I mentioned. Increases costs, and doesn't seem to be needed. So yes, I was assuming bulk file storage, because that's, IMHO, the sane approach.
is a ridiculous demand when it comes to server space. They are not saying you can't fill up your own HDD with as many character exports as you can possibly create, only that you can't fill up their HDDs with as many characters as you can possibly create.Furthermore once exports are available (I understand it is frustrating they won't immediately be available) it will have exactly the same functionality in this regard because the character files were all on your HDD before and they all can be again.
How much IT experience do you have? Cause it's not a rediculous amount of space.
First of all you guys are measuring the size of an XML file. A file chock full of definition. Depending on naming the file is 50-70% fluff and would not apply to any common sense storage solution on thier end. if a character record requires more then 3Kb i would honestly be suprised. Generally stuff like this it's alot of integers and linked lists to save not only space, but effort.
Second of all, disk space is cheap, even on servers. Not desktop cheap, but cheap when you consider the size of the enterprise and the income.
Third of all, they are running in a cloud where everything is cheaper then acctually purchasing it outright. They buy space, CPU, and bandwidth as necessary, NOT in bulk.
10,000 subs (a small number) x $10 a month on avg is a cool million income, a MONTH. If they average more then half of that in IT costs in a cloud a MONTH, something is wrong.
Just raise it to 100 until you get export or better yet a folder it can pull the characters from.
When you open the character builder and then click to load a character. It should give you a list of your character folders. ex.
[Online Characters]
1-20 Characters
[Offline Characters]
1-1 million
click one it opens and you can choose your character. Drag and drop functionality to move from one folder to the other.
Until you have that functionality to have a library of characters, just raise the cap. No one can legitimately argue that you aren't trying to meet us half way if the cap is raised.
Unfortunately, because they are using silverlight it will not be a simple thing to have it be able to browse your local storage. To do so would require them to code the application as an Out-Of-Browser application (which adds to the complexity of the application) and would require the application to be run in trusted mode (which would give the application unrestricted access to your system) which would greatly limit the usability of the application (since it requires administrator rights on a system to grant trusted mode to an application)
10,000 subs (a small number) x $10 a month on avg is a cool million income, a MONTH. If they average more then half of that in IT costs in a cloud a MONTH, something is wrong.
40000 * $5 is a more accurate current estimate, I believe. $200,000/month.
I also notice how all the nerd-ragers have conveniently ignored Mudbunny's rather interesting and probably very close to factual post about account linking and stress testing. LOL Complain away!
Nerd-ragers thats a good argument ROFLCOPTER. Cause everyone is raging and their nerds GET IT. Its funny, its good stuff. Argument over.
10,000 subs (a small number) x $10 a month on avg is a cool million income, a MONTH. If they average more then half of that in IT costs in a cloud a MONTH, something is wrong.
Ummm, that works out to $100,000 a month.
kilpatds,
They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data. If every one is building goliaths, we'll see more goliath content in Dragon Magazine, etc. I think it makes a lot of sense to better provide what the customers want as far as content is concerned. IMHO.
10,000 subs (a small number) x $10 a month on avg is a cool million income, a MONTH. If they average more then half of that in IT costs in a cloud a MONTH, something is wrong.
40000 * $5 is a more accurate current estimate, I believe. $2million/month.
$200,000 a month.
$200,000 a month.
Yeah. Fixed.
therealking,
You didn't read my post. I said it is a ridiculous demand to ask for unlimited space (on a server).
Oh, and it's not an XML file, it will be a DB record.
kilpatds,
They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data. If every one is building goliaths, we'll see more goliath content in Dragon Magazine, etc. I think it makes a lot of sense to better provide what the customers want as far as content is concerned. IMHO.
aiiiighh i hope you are wrong, this would lead to the classes that most need help being abandoned
kilpatds,They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data.
I don't know their cloud framework, but I'd be planning solving that via map reduce (Hadoop). But that doesn't have to be solved for a while, because....
To be perfectly honest, at the scale we're initially discussing... find | grep | sed will work just fine.
kilpatds,
I thought you knew that the characters would be stored in a database, not as XML. I think that's partly where our disconnect was with other expenses. I didn't even mention DBA's because I thought that was assumed.
Of course storing the information in a database would also drop the storage requirements by nearly a order of magnitude (that is how space inefficient the current character builder files are)
At my job I run multiple systems with larger databases than the one that would be needed to store every character that every insider would be allowed to have with a limit of 20 per account (they would probably need to allow everyone 1000 characters each before it would equal the storage that some of the databases I use take up). And the databases I use are not really that big...
I also notice how all the nerd-ragers have conveniently ignored Mudbunny's rather interesting and probably very close to factual post about account linking and stress testing. LOL Complain away!
Starting small scale is good, but 20 is too small. Also, this should be done in some kind of stresstesting first, long before it ever hits the street.
as for the database - LOL! see below:
VaultDweller was the one who said many thousands. I was just pointing out that we are indeed talking about many thousands, nearly a million.
Nearly a million - so what? Using Oracle 10g, we currently handle Operations from 120+ million geometries spatially indexed vs. our own datasets that still range in the 10+ millions to do really nice performing geometry algorithms. And it's not even a cluster system, or running parallel. Simple Text Column-Based Tables can range in the Billions and still perform (if you know how to properly divide your data in proper subsections - called partitions in oracle speak)
@Bunny: Yes your friend might have a lot of expertise. But 20 is still to low, he probably wasn't aware of what amount of data per CB file we're talking.
@kilpatds: agreed, a non-database storage would do, but even with a database behind it, a billion sounds a probable number to be still performing nicely with just one single foreign key. :-)
btw: you don't happen to be working at google, do you?
kilpatds,
They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data. If every one is building goliaths, we'll see more goliath content in Dragon Magazine, etc. I think it makes a lot of sense to better provide what the customers want as far as content is concerned. IMHO.
aiiiighh i hope you are wrong, this would lead to the classes that most need help being abandoned
Or...maybe if no one builds a certain class, they might want to find out why. Geez, overreact much?
Their "when it will break" (two users editing the same character) is consistent with a file-based solution. And, honestly, It would never cross my brain, as an architect who likes using DBs for what DBs are good for, to keep anything other that minor metadata (name,race,class,level,owner,permissions) in a DB. The characters belong in more file oriented (or NoSQL, if you need your buzzword compliance) storage.
File based storage is not logical for this kind of application. Your linking alot of tables together to save space and time, then noodling the math on the fly. This is exactly the kind of application that thrives in a relational db. Also keep in mind they are a microsoft shop, thier probably using Enity framework to SQL Azure storage.
And I highly doubt the comment about it "breaking" when two people are editing it has anything to do with the storage mechanism. Thats all about coding it properly.
kilpatds,
They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data. If every one is building goliaths, we'll see more goliath content in Dragon Magazine, etc. I think it makes a lot of sense to better provide what the customers want as far as content is concerned. IMHO.
aiiiighh i hope you are wrong, this would lead to the classes that most need help being abandoned
Or...maybe if no one builds a certain class, they might want to find out why. Geez, overreact much?
im just kind of raw and tender, i have a strength cleric
Of course storing the information in a database would also drop the storage requirements by nearly a order of magnitude (that is how space inefficient the current character builder files are)
Earlier comments about compression showed an 8x improvement. So that's good enough for ballpark estimates.
kilpatds,They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data.
I don't know their cloud framework, but I'd be planning solving that via map reduce (Yadoop). But that doesn't have to be solved for a while, because....To be perfectly honest, at the scale we're initially discussing... find | grep | sed will work just fine.
I don't think those utilities have been implemented in .Net... (I kid, I kid)
But, given the demonstrated technology bias so far, I can easily see why it would occur to them to store everything in a DB for data mining purposes.
File based storage is not logical for this kind of application. Your linking alot of tables together to save space and time, then noodling the math on the fly.
No, it's quite reasonable.
Because one of the architectural decisions is to leverage code they already had (rules engine). And that code uses the data structures it has. And those datastructures are based on non-relational data. (look at the XML).
The use case for the application is data centric... not relation centric.
The first place we decided to make changes was to move from a client-based to a web-based tool set. We are moving to a web-based solution to make the tools accessible to multiple platforms. The web-based solution makes it easier for us to react to new technology opportunities, such as tablets and mobile devices. We also wanted to move to a solution that promotes individual account ownership and hinders piracy.
Hello trees, I'd like you to meet forest.
btw: you don't happen to be working at google, do you?
Naw. I used to work at a different Internet Scale company. I was an architect and manager of the group that wrote the tools to manage tens of thousands of computers. We saved around 4-5000 metrics per system per minute in our DB, so that managers could get real time graphs of almost anything they wanted. You want to know reqs/sec served by this cluster over the last year? Sure. You want to know which songs get the most play on the streaming service? sure. You want to know where your customers are located geographically? Sure. Gimme about 3s to render that graph for you...
File based storage is not logical for this kind of application. Your linking alot of tables together to save space and time, then noodling the math on the fly.
No, it's quite reasonable.
Because one of the architectural decisions is to leverage code they already had (rules engine). And that code uses the data structures it has. And those datastructures are based on non-relational data. (look at the XML).
The use case for the application is data centric... not relation centric.
Character save data != Application Data
That is probably no more then a serialized character object saved to disk. Tack on that they have already said numerous times that one of the reasons to move it up to the cloud is so they could share the database.
We could argue design all day, but your statements do not make sense to me as a 20 year veteran of large scale buisness solutions.
That is probably no more then a serialized character object saved to disk.
Exactly. And that's my point.
This type of statement is what makes me think they are shooting for a graphically intensive character builder. Not unlike an MMO, where you can choose not just the feats and class, but also what your character looks like in 3D. Think about something like the City of Heroes character creation, and it makes a lot more sense if we are talking about 20 characters.
Or...they could just be completely arbitrary.
City of Heroes lets you have 132 characters (11 Servers, 12 characters each) included with your subscription, with the option to purchase 264 more slots (24 per server). This includes all the graphical information.
20 characters is unacceptable by any standard.
Once we can export, then we can save to our hard drives again, and the problem is solved.
Since the Character Builder is not worth $7.95 / month to me without offline storage (or with a 20 character limit), I will be demanding a refund for November and every month following until export is included.
If they refuse, I will cancel and demand a refund for the unused time, and won't resub until export is added.
www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/d...The first place we decided to make changes was to move from a client-based to a web-based tool set. We are moving to a web-based solution to make the tools accessible to multiple platforms. The web-based solution makes it easier for us to react to new technology opportunities, such as tablets and mobile devices. We also wanted to move to a solution that promotes individual account ownership and hinders piracy.
Hello trees, I'd like you to meet forest.
For something meant to "promote individual account ownership" it doesn't appear to be doing much to make me want to keep owning my account.
kilpatds,They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data.
I don't know their cloud framework, but I'd be planning solving that via map reduce (Hadoop). But that doesn't have to be solved for a while, because....To be perfectly honest, at the scale we're initially discussing... find | grep | sed will work just fine.
Shhhhh! These are .NET Developers. They might be allergic to grep and sed. :P
This type of statement is what makes me think they are shooting for a graphically intensive character builder. Not unlike an MMO, where you can choose not just the feats and class, but also what your character looks like in 3D. Think about something like the City of Heroes character creation, and it makes a lot more sense if we are talking about 20 characters.
Or...they could just be completely arbitrary.
A 3D generated character saved consists of a series of numerical modifiers.
For example: 33/44/66/34/76 (example of course) would be what is logged in your character file it would denote. head type, body type, left hand item, right hand item, boots. You could add numerical modifiers to change colour and such. A graphical interface would not add more then a few kilobytes of information. The graphical data like in World of Warcraft would exist inside a folder or exe on your hard drive. So the limit is not for visual data.
Chances are they just thought it would be fine. Without freaking out or nerdraging we need to inform them of our use so they can adapt.
I'm not talking about their server limitations, I'm talking about the aesthetics of their new CB. It would look dumb if they let you have 1000 characters and their UI looked like this:
That is probably no more then a serialized character object saved to disk.
Exactly. And that's my point.
Sorry I don't see it validating your arguement. Because they serialize a char to a file locally does not mean they will do that in the cloud based solution.
Code re-use for them probably revolves more around the libraries developed to figure out what powers are legal and all the special case stuff.
kilpatds,They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data.
I don't know their cloud framework, but I'd be planning solving that via map reduce (Hadoop). But that doesn't have to be solved for a while, because....To be perfectly honest, at the scale we're initially discussing... find | grep | sed will work just fine.
Shhhhh! These are .NET Developers. They might be allergic to grep and sed. :P
Nah, just confused by them. Now introduce them to Vi or Emacs...
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Let me help you out; there's this new technology called a 'captcha'. With it you can stop automated programs from filling your servers with useless junk! I hope my check is already in the mail for helping you out with this innovative and new concept.
Or, you know, you could limit it to something like 100mb of data per account. Assuming the character builder is stored completely uncompressed (which would be insane) and uses about the same space as the current CB files, that works out to something closer to 200+ characters per account. A limit of 20 is nothing other than stupidity.
Of course storing the information in a database would also drop the storage requirements by nearly a order of magnitude (that is how space inefficient the current character builder files are)
In fact, let's see how much space an efficiently-stored character takes up. At each odd level you gain a power and each even level you gain a feat, with a few extra at levels 1, 11, & 21. Let's say round up to 40 total. Each power and feat clearly has a unique ID already for the system to reference, so we only need to write that down. Let's use 32 bit IDs for ease of use and speed, even though a 32-bit space is massive overkill. Let's also reserve another ID each level for whatever we retrained out of. That's only 70 integers so far.
Items will need two IDs, one for the base item and one for the magic property. Let's go nuts and use three integers, so we can store the base item, magical property, and enhancement bonus as separate fields. Then we'll be ridiculously generous and allow for 50 magical items, so that's another 150 integers, for 220 total so far.
Then there's your attributes. We'll need six integers to hold them (and let's stick with 32-bits for simplicity). Every time you get to boost even one of them, let's just store the whole new set instead of the delta. That's 12 sets of 6 integers, for 292 total.
Let's not forget class (possibly hybrid), race, paragon path, and epic destiny, plus a selection of class features and racial choices. That should fit in ten integers no problem, for 302 total. Oh, yes, some people have rituals. Give room for 50 of them, too, and that's 352 total, or 1.4kb.
Of course, there's all those open-ended text features like name, height, weight, player name, RPGA number, notes, and character journal. We'd want to put those last two in separate tables, as they're potentially pretty large, but even the most verbose of players should be able to bring it in under 5kB.
Thus, we're looking at a very generous maximum of 7kb for a character. That means we could stick 100 of them on a formatted twenty-year-old double-sided 3.5" floppy disk. On a modern 1TB disk, we could stick 143 million player characters. Size is not the limiting factor here.
btw: you don't happen to be working at google, do you?
Naw. I used to work at a different Internet Scale company. I was an architect and manager of the group that wrote the tools to manage tens of thousands of computers. We saved around 4-5000 metrics per system per minute in our DB, so that managers could get real time graphs of almost anything they wanted. You want to know reqs/sec served by this cluster over the last year? Sure. You want to know which songs get the most play on the streaming service? sure. You want to know where your customers are located geographically? Sure. Gimme about 3s to render that graph for you...
aaaaah! the enemy! the enemy! aaaahhh...
but we need to face one thing...
wotc might have no clue about what you're talking about. actually i believe lots of people here don't.
that's what makes it so difficult to go to a new tech anyway... most of the times, buzzwords all over but noone really investing into actually teaching your programmers what it's all about. WOTC would be one of the first companies on my list of embracing buzzwords without understanding.
That is probably no more then a serialized character object saved to disk.
Exactly. And that's my point.
Sorry I don't see it validating your arguement. Because they serialize a char to a file locally does not mean they will do that in the cloud based solution.
Programmers like dealing with structures/objects as a general rule.
object->attribute = 5
DBs rearrange that. "update table set attribute = 5 where object id = 27"
Code written assuming objects ("object->attribute = 5"), and libraries that are written that way, tend to be very hard to port to a Relational view of the data.
Yes, you can use object relational models, depending on your model and language. They come with their own serious pain.. and then what's the win?
DBs generally work better when you expect multiple answers from any given query, to be honest. But that's only true in for this use case in the data-mining situation. And datamining doesn't have the same performance parameters.
So why would you turn structured data into relational data? What's the win? The cost is real, the return is marginal.
Since we agree that their code uses structured data as it's internal model ("serialized object written to disk"), we agree that any code they could salvage is assuming structured data. So there's going to be some pain moving that to relational data, but hiding that from the salvaged code. Just so that datamining queries ("what's the most popular class", "what's the most popular power") can run in milliseconds instead of hours? These are not queries you repeat that often...
The graphical information isn't saved. It just has coordinates to access the specific graphical information that would be on your own hard drive. A character file for City of Heroes or World of Warcraft is not very large at all, its just alpha-numerics that are stored and then re-interpreted.
So mmos are a false analogy.
20 characters is an exceedingly small amount of space, they could take the 10 bucks for this month from all DDi accounts and mail us all a usb stick that would store 100s of thousands.
I think the decision to stick to 20 characters has multiple roots, Paolo isn't lying he's worried about the database being flooded. The first day I will be uploading 19 characters and saving a spot for my Dark Sun character. So it will be full for me and unusable day 1. The optimization forum guys minds will explode when they see the restriction. If 20k people upload 50 to 1000 characters on day one maybe the system will choke, I don't know.
Also it may be an attempt to force people to get their own accounts and stop leeching off their DMs or friends, I don't think this will stop those people, either way I pay for the character builder to make characters, if I can't make characters then I'm not getting my investment out of it. I like making characters I derive pleasure from it and I spend alot of time agonizing over 10 characters I've made to play in my new game. Maybe I'm abnormal but I doubt it, the best part of WoW and CoH for me was making characters.
Either way, this is going to make me one of those people that subscribes for a month, I'll make my characters, print them and then unsubscribe, since I can't get full use.
Maybe I'm abnormal but I doubt it
Don't doubt it, you are abnormal. So am I. I play in 1 campaign, and I have exactly 1 character. (And BTW I think I get my money's worth out of the CB.) I think normal is somewhere in the middle. I think the number of people who write up that many characters is a subset of HS kids with too much time on their hands, or unemployed adults. The vast majority will find 20 characters sufficient. More proof I do not require than the fact that those complaining in this thread are maybe a dozen people.
kilpatds,They chose a DB over file storage because they plan to mine the data.
I don't know their cloud framework, but I'd be planning solving that via map reduce (Hadoop). But that doesn't have to be solved for a while, because....To be perfectly honest, at the scale we're initially discussing... find | grep | sed will work just fine.
Shhhhh! These are .NET Developers. They might be allergic to grep and sed. :P
Nah, just confused by them. Now introduce them to Vi or Emacs...
Hahaha, thanks for the laugh. I am a .NET programmer and spoiled by all the shiny bits in VS, but I did all of my schooling in Emacs, so that just brings back some nice fuzzy memories. And I was just in school 2 years ago, so you'll be glad to know that some schools force you to use those kinds of things so you don't get dependent on all the shinnies.
On topic again, I just counted 93 characters on this computer, I have several on my other computer as well. I already explained why I have so many, but honestly, once you have made a lot of characters already, and keep up to date on new materials, making a new character that is very decent takes very little time. I work full time, have a happy girlfriend, and am an avid gamer and DnD player, but I still have lots of characters because I like the thought experiment, and I really like to have general knowledge about player abilities when I am DMing, and having build a decent member of every class helps me know the general strengths and limits of characters.
Don't doubt it, you are abnormal. So am I. I play in 1 campaign, and I have exactly 1 character. (And BTW I think I get my money's worth out of the CB.) I think normal is somewhere in the middle. I think the number of people who write up that many characters is a subset of HS kids with too much time on their hands, or unemployed adults. The vast majority will find 20 characters sufficient. More proof I do not require than the fact that those complaining in this thread are maybe a dozen people.
Well, I'm definitely not unemployed or in high school, my hobby is DnD, I buy the books and I subscribe to DDi. A hobby takes an investment of time, my investment is retooling characters that I may or may not use, I don't DM, I like Dragon and Dungeon magazine but I pay for the Character builder and Compendium and them alone, If I can't make new characters, it loses most of it's viability for me. The cost is validated by use, lack of use invalidates me paying for it.
If you only have one character and you subscribe for that one character, that's great that you are willing to put that much money into one character, I can print off my one character at all 30 of his levels and then cancel the subscription and save money.
That is probably no more then a serialized character object saved to disk.
Exactly. And that's my point.
Sorry I don't see it validating your arguement. Because they serialize a char to a file locally does not mean they will do that in the cloud based solution.
Programmers like dealing with structures/objects as a general rule.
object->attribute = 5
DBs rearrange that. "update table set attribute = 5 where object id = 27"
Code written assuming objects ("object->attribute = 5"), and libraries that are written that way, tend to be very hard to port to a Relational view of the data.
Yes, you can use object relational models, depending on your model and language. They come with their own serious pain.. and then what's the win?
DBs generally work better when you expect multiple answers from any given query, to be honest. But that's only true in for this use case in the data-mining situation. And datamining doesn't have the same performance parameters.
So why would you turn structured data into relational data? What's the win? The cost is real, the return is marginal.
Read up on Microsofts entity framework
I apologize if I was being judgmental. I just though I was injecting a little light-hearted humor.
x3nth10n,
But my question would be, do you think that usage is normal, or do you think you are probably an exception?
I think my usage is abnormal. 1 campaign, 1 character. I build what I want based on what I read in the books. I don't need to play around with different min-max efficient builds or anything like that. In fact I don't think it is possible to build a non-decent character with the system. I'm more focused on non-mechanical aspects of the game though. I picture the character I want in my head and I build him or her. 1 time for each campaign, 1 character.
Well, I'm definitely not unemployed or in high school, my hobby is DnD, I buy the books and I subscribe to DDi. A hobby takes an investment of time, my investment is retooling characters that I may or may not use, I don't DM, I like Dragon and Dungeon magazine but I pay for the Character builder and Compendium and them alone, If I can't make new characters, it loses most of it's viability for me. The cost is validated by use, lack of use invalidates me paying for it.If you only have one character and you subscribe for that one character, that's great that you are willing to put that much money into one character, I can print off my one character at all 30 of his levels and then cancel the subscription and save money.
+1
I agree with this. I too have a full time job, go to school part time, in the Tech field, almost a requirement nowadays. I build, not necessarily keep, many characters but I probably have 10+ or so. Also my son, age 12, is really getting into DnD and sits for hours just building different toons and doing a mini encounters with various monsters it to see how it works. So, yea there are many different reasons to have more then ONE character.
I apologize if I was being judgmental. I just though I was injecting a little light-hearted humor.
x3nth10n,
But my question would be, do you think that usage is normal, or do you think you are probably an exception?
I think my usage is abnormal. 1 campaign, 1 character. I build what I want based on what I read in the books. I don't need to play around with different min-max efficient builds or anything like that. In fact I don't think it is possible to build a non-decent character with the system. I'm more focused on non-mechanical aspects of the game though. I picture the character I want in my head and I build him or her. 1 time for each campaign, 1 character.
i can tell you in my group of friends we tend to play around with builds to see what takes our fancy. We also at times might find the char we're playing less interesting and want to try something new. That doesn't mean we delete the old char, I'd like to shelve it and come back it. Not archive it, that breaks the cloud arguement.
I can print off my one character at all 30 of his levels and then cancel the subscription and save money.
True, or you can export all the ones you don't use regularly and still have no definable limit. Or you can make you wishes known, continue to use the CB Classic and wait to see what the future brings the New CB. I just don't see the big hubbub about this limit. You know, since it really isn't a limit.
Read up on Microsofts entity framework
I have not used that specific ORM ("Object Relational Model", as I mentioned in the bit you quoted), but I have used the one used by Ruby on Rails, the one used by Django (google apps), and Class::DBI in perl. They can work ... they also, in my experience, frequently break in spectacularly hard to debug ways.
I can print off my one character at all 30 of his levels and then cancel the subscription and save money.True, or you can export all the ones you don't use regularly and still have no definable limit.
For all intensive purposes, this feature does not exist. Yeah, it'll be in there eventually, but how do we deal with the situation before that? Increasing the slots is a great solution to the "Before Export" phase and great for the "After Export" phase.
But my question would be, do you think that usage is normal, or do you think you are probably an exception?
I think my usage is abnormal. 1 campaign, 1 character. I build what I want based on what I read in the books.
I spend most of my time lurking in the Character Optimization Board. Some of those guys will build dozens of the same fighters with minor tweaks, just to compare and perfect.
I started this hobby about 8 months ago when my daughter turned 5 months, my wife and I both started hobbies so we`d have more then work and home. I picked DnD and went to my local store for encounters.
I consider my self normal in that I don`t erase my characters, I have fond memories of them.
I have 3 encounters characters at various stages. A Paladin, A Psion and a Thief.
I have a regular game once a week on thursdays after dinner in Dark Sun with an Ardent.
I`m also starting a Saturday RPGA thing and will be making a Wizard and my other game fell apart Eberron with an Orc Paladin, that I hope to use again.
So that`s 3 characters that I want to keep that are in use and 3 that aren`t but I still like seeing them. I have 5 wizards that I tooled around with including one that was a magic missile experiment that are all made and kitted out that I may erase or may use. I have a Lazy Leader that I made that I`m waiting for the right game to use him. I have one character that I haven`t used that I leveled to 30 and saved him at every level and then various experiments with classes I haven`t used.
I know I use it alot more then average but I would be willing to bet that a lot of people are past the twenty mark.
I have been running 4E since even before the official game was released by making a homebrew mini-campaign on the preview material as it was given out. The first and only campaign I ran after PHB1 was released is currently at 26th level and was run over the last 2+ years. In addition, all the characters have at least some minor house-rules (including higher point buy).
In that time I had players come in and out of the group, players change characters as new books came out (and thus not always because they died), and I got to play in a few pickup games. What made all of that possible was the ease of making characters, even higher level ones, with the character builder.
In my game we accumulated 19 different characters. Older ones that were no longer being actively played often got turned into NPCs or had guest cameos much later in the game (and thus needed updates to higher level on the fly). So if you had just my one campaign plus characters I played I'm easily over the 20 character limit.
If you count the three ring binders full of characters I have over the years that I still like to have access to including games where characters come out of retirement for a new epic adventure from 5, 10, or 20 years ago then I would want access to any and all my characters. So again, 20 characters is way too small especially with the lack of export functionality to begin with.
I can understand that user feedback on the forums cannot be immediately rolled into the Nov 16 release but the character limit of 20 does not seem like a true coding revamp/hindrance. For me, the ability to incorporate the house rules already supported in CB Classic is also needed as none of our existing characters can even be imported into the new Online CB. So we're stuck with the CB Classic until house-rules are supported.
Just my one and one half cents.
You really believe that stuff about captchas?
I can print off my one character at all 30 of his levels and then cancel the subscription and save money.True, or you can export all the ones you don't use regularly and still have no definable limit. Or you can make you wishes known, continue to use the CB Classic and wait to see what the future brings the New CB. I just don't see the big hubbub about this limit. You know, since it really isn't a limit.
But I can not export or upload PDFs to the program and I don`t know when or if they will put that in. I know they want to but want and will are different things. I always assume that WotC and the DnD crew have the best wishes for us, they want us to be happy, they want to make a profit and they want to be happy.
I know they have the best intentions, I just think this is a small error, I don`t think there should be a limit but if there is it should be high enough that less then 10% will run up against it. It`s like building a car, you design it`s physical space for 90% of people, if you are to tall, short or fat, then you are SOL, don`t build the CB so that 90% hit the limit, which they will.
@RPZip_:
You really believe that stuff about captchas?
Which part, that they exist or that they're new? Because they're neither.
They're hardly completely unbreakable either, but they can be quite painful to crack... and the incentives for breaking Wizard's captcha is going to be massively less than the incentive to break the one Google uses, which held up for quite a while.
They're obnoxious, but if the reason they can't give people more character storage is some idiotic fear of people filling the servers with an automated script generating junk then they'd be an effective deterrent.
EDIT: The explanation for that fear is roughly equivalent to someone telling you to unkink your computer wires because otherwise the 1s can be trapped in the bend, although the 0s can still make it through.
I apologize if I was being judgmental. I just though I was injecting a little light-hearted humor.
x3nth10n,
But my question would be, do you think that usage is normal, or do you think you are probably an exception?
I think my usage is abnormal. 1 campaign, 1 character. I build what I want based on what I read in the books. I don't need to play around with different min-max efficient builds or anything like that. In fact I don't think it is possible to build a non-decent character with the system. I'm more focused on non-mechanical aspects of the game though. I picture the character I want in my head and I build him or her. 1 time for each campaign, 1 character.
Well, if you felt that I was offended or upset by anything you have written thus far, I apologize. I think my writing may tend to come off as aggressive when I don't mean it to. Sometimes I do, but it is usually very very obvious. I am not upset with anyone in this (or the other huge thread on DDi General), though I am upset about the general state of the New CB.
As for normal usage, if you took all 40,000 + subscribers, I am sure that I am not normal by any means. On the other hand, the storage space for all of my combined characters is also insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and if nothing else, it is just one more downgrade in function for the moment at least. It is of course impossible to please everyone, especially the farther out of the average norm they are, but when the feature is simply "maximum allowed space", it is pretty reasonable to try and appease all but the most extreme (read: most likely automated to fill up the server vindictively), especially when storage space is so small.
On the subject of why I build so many, it is just the way that I am. I am a numbers guy by nature and profession (software engineer), so I like trying to take mechanics and manipulate them to see different results. I always have liked system mastery in every game I play, but it is really more like a parallel thing. When I get a campaign going, I do as you do, I come up with a character concept and personality, and then mold the mechanics around it. I love to RP my characters, really develop their personalities, mannerisms, attitudes, etc. I have become really attached to several main characters I have played for long periods of time, and still have fond memories of them. When I am just sitting around though doing nothing and bored, I like to tool around with systems. Sometimes it is DnD, sometimes it is MtG (coming up with a weird deck concept), sometimes it is a new build idea in Guild Wars, sometimes it is designing something in minecraft, whatever else. Just my nature :D
I know they have the best intentions, I just think this is a small error, I don`t think there should be a limit but if there is it should be high enough that less then 10% will run up against it. It`s like building a car, you design it`s physical space for 90% of people, if you are to tall, short or fat, then you are SOL, don`t build the CB so that 90% hit the limit, which they will.
You can not KNOW that. I will believe that the devs are passionate about thier product and are trying to put out what they think is the best tool possible, and maybe the product manager. BUT I do not believe the people making the real decisions(sometimes known as the stakeholders) have our best interests at heart. I have a hard time believing they are even gamers and understand the market place beyond sales figures.
I know they have the best intentions, I just think this is a small error, I don`t think there should be a limit but if there is it should be high enough that less then 10% will run up against it. It`s like building a car, you design it`s physical space for 90% of people, if you are to tall, short or fat, then you are SOL, don`t build the CB so that 90% hit the limit, which they will.
You can not KNOW that. I will believe that the devs are passionate about thier product and are trying to put out what they think is the best tool possible, and maybe the product manager. BUT I do not believe the people making the real decisions(sometimes known as the stakeholders) have our best interests at heart. I have a hard time believing they are even gamers and understand the market place beyond sales figures.
I also think they lowballed us on purpose (I know I would) so they can add later, becuse the oppasite would be a problem.
Imagin if they started with 1,000 character limit, and 3-5 months later they said 'opps we need to roll that back to 100' what it would cause. On the other hand if they start at 20, and next month bring it up to 25, and in jan bring it up to 40, and in april bring it up to 50 people will be happier... imagin that 100= people upset, and 50=people happy... becuse lowballing is a better start...
Because it's an unreasonable number of characters to limit at. So is 20.
The graphical information isn't saved. It just has coordinates to access the specific graphical information that would be on your own hard drive. A character file for City of Heroes or World of Warcraft is not very large at all, its just alpha-numerics that are stored and then re-interpreted.
So mmos are a false analogy.
20 characters is an exceedingly small amount of space, they could take the 10 bucks for this month from all DDi accounts and mail us all a usb stick that would store 100s of thousands.
Again, you are looking at what D&D is now, not what it might be.
If their service is a VTT, your characters have graphical representations, and they have online matchmaking/modules(dungeons), then how is that different from an MMO, where they often limit you to a handful of character slots?
I'm not talking just a character builder, but a future product where the character creation process is a small part of the whole. Then people pay their $10, and play D&D over the internet, just like in an MMO. (Envision a battlemap and miniatures replaced with a table full of laptops. Or heck, everyone staying home and seeing/hearing each other via webcams/microphones.)
It's not that far fetched, since 300 times as many people play WoW instead of DDi (12 million versus 40,000). You think Hasbro/WotC isn't at least a little bit annoyed that they don't have those numbers? Do you think the whole essentials thing is there to streamline characters for ease of use over a computer? (Easier to fix balance issues with less options.)
So in my mind, it's less about creating characters in their CB, then printing them out, but more about linking to other people and playing with them over the internet on WotC's VTT. So when/if that does come out, they don't have to say "Sorry guys, we have this neat VTT, but you have to pick your favorite 20 characters and delete the other 980."
And if the VTT never pans out, then they can always go, "Oops, we messed up, 20 was too low, now you can have 500 characters," and everyone rejoices, and resubscribes.
That they work. ;)
Seriously, just do some searching and you find out how easy it is nowadays to break captchas. While you won't break every single captcha, getting 20% to 40% through is good enough - especially if you throw a botnet with 100k drones at it. And that's only using automated scripts and tools and doesn't account for the fact that you can "outsource" captcha-breaking to China or India and have human beings work on it for 1.20$ per 1000 captchas.
Seriously, if someone wants to mess with WotC's online service captchas really won't stop them. And there are reasons why one would do so, the perhaps most important being to attack and damage WotC's/Hasbro's business.
On the other hand, captchas have the tendency to really annoy users if not used in a so conservative way that they are already next to useless.
- Just logged in? Solve captcha. Then goto 2 or 3.
- Create a new character? Solve captcha. Then goto 4.
- Load a character? Solve captcha. Then goto 4.
- Save character? Solve captcha. Then goto 2 or 3.
I also think they lowballed us on purpose (I know I would) so they can add later, becuse the oppasite would be a problem.
Then a question is are they going too low with the initial lowball. For example, 10 million characters would probably meet the needs/wants of even the most active optimizer, while 1 character would likely fail to meet most peoples usage. So is 20 too low?
I think it is for me. (Checking my computer - I find 61 character files. 48 are my son's and 13 are mine.) Is 20 low enought to keep me from re-subscribing? Maybe not by itself, but it is a big red x on the negative side.
On the other hand, captchas have the tendency to really annoy users if not used in a so conservative way that they are already next to useless.
- Just logged in? Solve captcha. Then goto 2 or 3.
- Create a new character? Solve captcha. Then goto 4.
- Load a character? Solve captcha. Then goto 4.
- Save character? Solve captcha. Then goto 2 or 3.
is captcha the thing that I can't read that looks like wavey words?
I HATE THEM... I have a mild Learning disability... I was told from a young age I would never read above a 4th grade level...well by 7th grade I was readign at a collage level...and in high school I made honnors classes... but those things mess with my head. I have found some now will let you have them rad to you witch works a little better
captchas slow down/stop the script kiddies with a grudge because you took away thier favorite encounter power.
@RPZip_:
That they work. ;)
Seriously, just do some searching and you find out how easy it is nowadays to break captchas. While you won't break every single captcha, getting 20% to 40% through is good enough - especially if you throw a botnet with 100k drones at it. And that's only using automated scripts and tools and doesn't account for the fact that you can "outsource" captcha-breaking to China or India and have human beings work on it for 1.20$ per 1000 captchas.
Seriously, if someone wants to mess with WotC's online service captchas really won't stop them. And there are reasons why one would do so, the perhaps most important being to attack and damage WotC's/Hasbro's business.
On the other hand, captchas have the tendency to really annoy users if not used in a so conservative way that they are already next to useless.
- Just logged in? Solve captcha. Then goto 2 or 3.
- Create a new character? Solve captcha. Then goto 4.
- Load a character? Solve captcha. Then goto 4.
- Save character? Solve captcha. Then goto 2 or 3.
Three things- (edit: I can count!)
1) The original concern was that PaoloM would 'write a simple script' to flood the WotC servers with random characters. If he can break a Captcha system that quickly then good for him, but you should consider using one that isn't designed by a two-year old. Assuming it only came up when creating a new character for the first time (not an unreasonable demand, albeit annoying) it'd still solve his apparent concern for script kiddies.
2) 100k bots could be doing literally anything more productive, like a straight-up DDoS attack., which would kill the servers far more effectively if they actually gave a damn.
3) There's only so much abuse you can do on a system where you paid them to sign up and they have your payment information. Holy hell, if people are actually using their account and spamming the servers somehow it's not difficult to terminate or limit that specific account, given that you by default have an enormous amount of information about that person. This is behind a paywall! If those 100k bots are each buying an account in order to flood the Wizard servers with useless characters then I don't know what to tell you except to enjoy your $1m in subscriber income for that month.
It was a largely sardonic reply, but Captchas are far, far safer than you're giving them credit for. Not to mention that the whole concern is nonsensical given that it's behind a paywall. The only rationale I can think of is that they don't want it to 'corrupt' their data-mining software with characters that people don't actually use, and that is an extremely stupid way to prevent that. Something like a button that says "I actually use this character" or seeing how often the sheet gets accessed would be far more useful as a differentiator.
Wow! The complaints in these forums keep getting more and more ridiculous. What do you guys play in like 30 different campaigns? It is a tool, not a game in itself. If you are writing up more than 20 characters for the fun of it, the product you want is Character Builder Toy, not Character Builder Tool.
NPCs.
The Character Builder is enormously helpful in creating NPCs with its quick build option. Campaigns, in particular, have lots of NPCs.
While having a limit is not unreasonable, a 20-character limit is bewilderingly unreasonable.
start small for testing. Good and cool. So, why not start with 1 character?
Because it's an unreasonable number of characters to limit at. So is 20.
This.
And besides, 20 characters sounds reasonable for a beta. For that matter, everything they've told us so far about the Web Character Builder would make perfect sense for a beta.
They should have called this Nov. 19 a beta release of the WebCB, and announced a six-plus month overlap of CBClassic and WebCB, with both being updated with content (even if that means Dark Sun and Essentials stays in the WebCB.
I realized that I was making a lot of unfounded assumptions about how
Wizards might design their system, resulting in a lot of time spent
trawling through the innards of what Amazon offers. Instead of trying
to divine how their system is designed, I'll go with simple.
I'm using this calculator:
calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html
40,000 users, each with 20 characters of 300KB size.
This requires 240GB of data storage.
Since they're building it in Silverlight, we'll figure that they're
all hardcore Microsofties and will use a Windows server (costing them
a little more than a Linux one would).
We'll assume that they do a dead-simple setup where the server does
little more than retrieve data from the disk/send it out and receive
data from the net/store it. As such, figure that the server won't need
a ton of CPU and RAM, because it's not doing anything heavily
compute-bound.
They'd use an EC2 Reserved instance, utilized at 100%, because the
service needs to be running 24/7. [the utilization here refers to the
fraction of the month that the server is "on", not the actual load on
the server. Amazon bills for servers per hour "turned on"]
The Amazon Large EC2 instance meets the storage requirements (
aws.amazon.com/ec2/#instance ) with 850 GB of storage. So we'll
order up a single Large Reserved EC2 instance running Windows.
Now, data transfer. This relies crucially on what assumptions you make
about how often people use the Character Builder and how its innards
are designed.
Assumptions:
1. Every user uses the character builder for an hour a day, every month.
2. He saves and loads a character sheet every 10 minutes, resulting in
6 loads and 6 saves an hour.
3. Each load or save requires a full transfer of the sheet to/from the server.
4. Each sheet is 300KB (people like to make hideously complicated
characters because the software makes it so easy! or something)
From 1 and 2, each user makes 180 character sheet loads and 180 saves
over the course of a month.
Over 40,000 users, that's 2.16 terabytes of transfer each way, each month.
At this point, we're looking at about $700/month in server fees, as
seen in 1.png (attached).
Now, what about backups? Well, let's keep it simple; figure that they
have a single full copy of all their player data in Amazon S3. Let's
call it 300GB of data all told, rounding way up from 240GB. If I
understand Amazon correctly, transferring this data into S3 from EC2
doesn't incur data transfer charges, so the static storage cost is it,
no matter how frequently they make backups. See 2.png (attached).
One thing I've left out is redundancy: they might want to have a
second server or some load balancing. But these are a bag of tricks
that I'm not willing to analyze; their use is strongly contingent on
the actual use patterns.
40,000 users making 360 requests each a month (spread only over half
the day, because people sleep) comes to about 6 per second, so I think
the setup I've already outlined could be enough to keep the service
running smoothly (not thinking about launch day).
As seen in 2.png, the final total comes to around $750/month, or about
2 cents per subscriber per month in compute costs. As you can see, you
can shuffle up the load a couple orders of magnitude before the
infrastructure costs get significant per-user.
Note that's 2 cents/subscriber/month assuming some pretty intense use from every single person in the 40k DDI group.
EDIT: I'm ignoring Paolo's DoS excuse because as many have already pointed out, it doesn't really make sense.
Sadly I'm not sure which answer I'd prefer to be true...
I have to wonder - is the DoS protection really the reason they decided on the 20 char limit, or was it just an excuse that Paolo thought would fly? (not knowing that there were other computer professionals who read these boards)
Sadly I'm not sure which answer I'd prefer to be true...
i'd greatly prefer the dishonest answer over the stupid one, every time.
as the saying goes... you can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest.
as for not knowing: everyone knows that geeks, nerds, freaks are some of the core customers of all RPGs. Always have been, always will be. Assuming otherwise would even be worse than thinking that 20 chars will save you any trouble on the DoS-side of things.
@RPZip_:
You really believe that stuff about captchas?
Which part, that they exist or that they're new? Because they're neither.
They're hardly completely unbreakable either, but they can be quite painful to crack... and the incentives for breaking Wizard's captcha is going to be massively less than the incentive to break the one Google uses, which held up for quite a while.
They're obnoxious, but if the reason they can't give people more character storage is some idiotic fear of people filling the servers with an automated script generating junk then they'd be an effective deterrent.
EDIT: The explanation for that fear is roughly equivalent to someone telling you to unkink your computer wires because otherwise the 1s can be trapped in the bend, although the 0s can still make it through.
Captcha has a host of problems, not the least of which is ADA compliance. I find a humanizer to be a far better way to pull these sorts of security things off. A humanizer will propose a random question, of which there can be a limited number of correct answers (e.g. Name an orange vegetable, or What color is broccoli?), after which you know with pretty good odds you have a human.
I totally agree, captcha's are super annoying and totally breakable.
Wait. 'This is the Internet'. Civility doesn't count. Of course, they can only be idiots or liars. Probably both.
Bah, I can't believe I'm getting involved in the discussion of an infrastructure that only aids in some way (large or small) my pretending to be an elf. Humbug.
DustyPhoenix.
So they can either be idiots or liars? Cautious just doesn't enter the equation for people? Heck, if I were them, I'd rather set it at 20 so I could ensure the things stays up for the first month than have it be a significantly higher number and not be rock solid dead certain. Because the firestorm around a launch week crash would make this week's flames pale.
Wait. 'This is the Internet'. Civility doesn't count. Of course, they can only be idiots or liars. Probably both.
Bah, I can't believe I'm getting involved in the discussion of an infrastructure that only aids in some way (large or small) my pretending to be an elf. Humbug.
DustyPhoenix.
I have no problem with them being cautious. But that is not what they told us. They told us that this was done to protect against someone overloading the system with creating characters.
I can understand being cautious, but normally what you do is put in limits that keep people from going beyond what you have tested the system to handle (and if they only tested the system to handle 20 characters per account then they really need to learn something about stress testing...)
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Let's see, 10 computers, each making one 200 kb character every 10 seconds works out to a total of 720 MB/hour... so about 58 days.
EDIT:
For those who like to see the math: 10 computers * 0.2 MB/character * 6 characters/minute* 60 minutes/hour = 720 MB/hour. 1 TB ~ 1000000 MB (yes, I know it's actually a little bigger, so my estimate is on the low side) --> 1000000 MB * 1 hour/720 MB * 1 day/24 hours = 57.87 days
I appreciate the lead developer trying to explain his rationale, but unfortunately it reveals lazy programming. I might not know much about D&D, but I know a lot about programming. There are dozens of very simple ways to prevent this specific type of DDoS that don't involve a hard cap on the number of characters. The most obvious is adding a soft cap such as preventing more than X characters to be created and saved within a specific time period.
In fact, I find it a little hard to believe. Maybe they're planning to up the limit in a few days, and they're using the 20 number to just make the new number seem more acceptable?
Or maybe this guy didn't understand the reason for the cap. Maybe it is a lazy way to prevent overloading the servers from the spam of character creation and not necessarily the space used. That's typically how DDoS attacks work anyway.
So I asked my friend who is an electrical engineer working in programming what he would call a non-free cloud based storage system with less than 10 MB/user storage space. His response: "Some name that demonstrates its uselessness in a concise and witty manner." I got him to work out an analysis of the technical end, and here's what we came up with:
After looking at the reasoning used, I see that a lot of that is probably invalid. For example, since this seems to be heavily cloud based, it would make more sense to go to Windows Azure as a development platform instead of developing on their own servers. This improves stability and server storage space. (Azure is an interesting platform in and of itself but I doubt if this is the location for that discussion.) Using that invalidates most of your other statements.
So I asked my friend who is an electrical engineer working in programming what he would call a non-free cloud based storage system with less than 10 MB/user storage space. His response: "Some name that demonstrates its uselessness in a concise and witty manner." I got him to work out an analysis of the technical end, and here's what we came up with:
After looking at the reasoning used, I see that a lot of that is probably invalid. For example, since this seems to be heavily cloud based, it would make more sense to go to Windows Azure as a development platform instead of developing on their own servers. This improves stability and server storage space. (Azure is an interesting platform in and of itself but I doubt if this is the location for that discussion.) Using that invalidates most of your other statements.
Even in Azure it's not alot of space. 1 10gig blob would store 40 chars for every current subscriber(though that number seems to be changing every couple hours
)Now that CB is coming out, they are trying to limit number of characters... to promote individual use. A shift in the plan.
aka "We aren't making enough money from our substandard product, so we're going to limit the use of our substandard product further, and take away some important features, because of 'piracy'"
I just realized something.. Wizards requested that players share the Character Builder for multiple use between players when it was first released. They acknowledged that groups would want to use the tool, and built the tool for use with groups.
Nope. They have always, always said that one user, one subscriber. The 5 installs per month is a realisation that people often have a desktop at home, a desktop at work, and maybe an additional laptop that they would wish to keep up to date every month.
Now I'm not saying that is the definitive reason why they are doing this, but I can also understand that they wouldn't want to have to track this for x1000 characters per account, especially as far as testing is concerned. I can just see the bug report now:
"If you make 945 characters, then you make a druid, then the CB crashes."
So when everyone in this thread is making assumptions about how big the character sizes are, you do realize that is an assumption based on the current iteration of the CB? If, for example, a future VTT product tracks every dice roll you make, monster you fight, loot you pick up or sell, movements you make in every combat, and every module you run, from level 1-30, then that is a bit more data.
Now I'm not saying that is the definitive reason why they are doing this, but I can also understand that they wouldn't want to have to track this for x1000 characters per account, especially as far as testing is concerned. I can just see the bug report now:
"If you make 945 characters, then you make a druid, then the CB crashes."
Sure, we realize that the file size might not be exactly the same, but it's the best starting point we have. I doubt it will be to different if they plan on making it exportable "soon." All of the other things you mentioned would indeed take more space. They also don't exist.
The 5 installs per month is a realisation that people often have a desktop at home, a desktop at work, and maybe an additional laptop that they would wish to keep up to date every month.
The terms actually specify that the software can be installed on one computer that you own or is under your control, so the 5 updates/month limit had nothing to do with updating multiple machines, either.
It was never an encouragement to share one account per 5 players - personally, I always thought that was obvious on its face - but I think it was simply a hedge against updates failing. In fact, IIRC the way the old system worked, every attempted update counted against the 5 (I seem to remember people having repeated failures put them over their limit).
Edited to add: however, in terms of a group sharing one account but not sharing the software or logins around - e.g., the DM (or whoever the subscriber is) makes the characters for people but never shares their account info - that should be expected. Wizards probably doesn't like that at all either - I'm sure they'd like to get paid every time we picture a character sheet in our heads - and so I think the 20-character limit has definite benefits for Wizards in that area, too.
Sure, we realize that the file size might not be exactly the same, but it's the best starting point we have. I doubt it will be to different if they plan on making it exportable "soon." All of the other things you mentioned would indeed take more space. They also don't exist.
This is true, they don't currently exist.
I assume that if they are smart (which I 100% believe they are), then they would build their architecture with a stable foundation from the ground up. If they are looking to mimic the success of WoW, or heck DDO (which from a quick google, has about 100k subs, and is technically based on 3.5), then they would start small, with a few characters that can easily be "standardized", then they can tack on features one by one. (Like a 4e MMO. You think they haven't been itching to start one?)
OTOH, if they are smart, and they have no intention of ever bringing out any sort of VTT, then they could let you have 1000 characters, and they wouldn't break a sweat with storage capacity. As you have done with your math. Then they would avoid us being annoyed that we can only have 20 characters, and have to eat this PR mess.
IMO, since they are not dumb, and they haven't given us 1000 characters, it leads me to believe the first speculation, and not the second. (Seriously, no one at wizards added up how much storage space each person would take up? Yeah right.)
The reason why they will cause a PR s*@#storm instead of release future details, is probably because of marketing's timetable, pushing out the current version, and they are all treading on glass at the moment, especially if higher ups are ticked off about profits. (Yay, we've been giving away $1000 of books for $10! Our heads will roll!")
Sure, we realize that the file size might not be exactly the same, but it's the best starting point we have. I doubt it will be to different if they plan on making it exportable "soon." All of the other things you mentioned would indeed take more space. They also don't exist.
This is true, they don't currently exist.
I assume that if they are smart (which I 100% believe they are), then they would build their architecture with a stable foundation from the ground up. If they are looking to mimic the success of WoW, or heck DDO (which from a quick google, has about 100k subs, and is technically based on 3.5), then they would start small, with a few characters that can easily be "standardized", then they can tack on features one by one. (Like a 4e MMO. You think they haven't been itching to start one?)
OTOH, if they are smart, and they have no intention of ever bringing out any sort of VTT, then they could let you have 1000 characters, and they wouldn't break a sweat with storage capacity. As you have done with your math. Then they would avoid us being annoyed that we can only have 20 characters, and have to eat this PR mess.
IMO, since they are not dumb, and they haven't given us 1000 characters, it leads me to believe the first speculation, and not the second. (Seriously, no one at wizards added up how much storage space each person would take up? Yeah right.)
The reason why they will cause a PR s*@#storm instead of release future details, is probably because of marketing's timetable, pushing out the current version, and they are all treading on glass at the moment, especially if higher ups are ticked off about profits. (Yay, we've been giving away $1000 of books for $10! Our heads will roll!")
Well, they tell us that it's because they're worried about DoS attacks or such things. So if I trust them to tell me the truth I have to think they haven't thought it through completely because as several people have pointed out the 20 character limit isn't really a good way to do that. Either that or that was not the truthful reason and you (or somebody else) is right. Keep in mind though that Paolo agreed that it was too small of a limit:
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
As a side note, if I'm going to pay now, it's for the service they have now, not what they might have in the future. So yeah, even if the plan was to expand as you suspect 20 characters is far too few for now.
The 5 installs per month is a realisation that people often have a desktop at home, a desktop at work, and maybe an additional laptop that they would wish to keep up to date every month.
The terms actually specify that the software can be installed on one computer that you own or is under your control, so the 5 updates/month limit had nothing to do with updating multiple machines, either.
I'm not that certain. Don't I get a license for the CB on each computer every time I install them on a machine that I've to click agree, when it comes to the software part of the license (instead of the account part)?
So when everyone in this thread is making assumptions about how big the character sizes are, you do realize that is an assumption based on the current iteration of the CB? If, for example, a future VTT product tracks every dice roll you make, monster you fight, loot you pick up or sell, movements you make in every combat, and every module you run, from level 1-30, then that is a bit more data.
One little problem. Almost none of that information would need to - nor should - reside in the character information database. The only thing that would go to the character database would be the loot that the character has. Most of the rest of it, if it was stored at all would just be dumped to a log or saved to a separate database linked to the character record.
It would be foolish to put all of that information in one monolithic database - Wow even separates the inventory from character information database (as in completely separate servers).
There is no reason to create a VTT database for every character, because not every character is going to be used online - so there is no good reason to not keep the databases separate, just link them with a uid and you are good to go. That way the VTT database getting slow would not cause a problem for the CB database.
So the space concerns for a VTT app have absolutely no relevance for the space concerns of a CB app.
The question of sharing accounts came out before the initial release of DDI. A lot of people said that there was no way they were going to pay for each player in a gaming group to have an account-the amount of money was (and is?) preposterous for what's being provided. WotC backed off of the 1 account per player rule at that time (tho' never officially).
The reason it would never work is that a lot of groups are a mixed bag financially-some can afford a solid internet connection and a DDI account and others can't. In my group, one player doesn't even have a reliable internet connection a lot of the time (only when he has the money). In their haste to deal with folks like him, DDI lost people like me, who have (up to now) bought every book (including Dark sUN: sucker!) and had a yearly sub as soon as the CB came out.
I have another comment on the threads about the new direction DDI is going: why is it wrong to call people fanboys or shills, when they can call those of us that are unhappy with this whiners, nerd-ragers, etc? There are people right on this thread who use catch-phrases like this every third post (and with the amount of posts they make, that's a lot.)
I'm not that certain. Don't I get a license for the CB on each computer every time I install them on a machine that I've to click agree, when it comes to the software part of the license (instead of the account part)?
My understanding of this is very limited. My assumption was that the EULA does not "re-instantiate" for each instance of the software, but I am not a lawyer, so I could definitely be wrong.
I have another comment on the threads about the new direction DDI is going: why is it wrong to call people fanboys or shills, when they can call those of us that are unhappy with this whiners, nerd-ragers, etc? There are people right on this thread who use catch-phrases like this every third post (and with the amount of posts they make, that's a lot.)
One of the two sides has to take the high road; might as well be us nerdragers.
The 5 installs per month is a realisation that people often have a desktop at home, a desktop at work, and maybe an additional laptop that they would wish to keep up to date every month.
The terms actually specify that the software can be installed on one computer that you own or is under your control, so the 5 updates/month limit had nothing to do with updating multiple machines, either.
It was never an encouragement to share one account per 5 players - personally, I always thought that was obvious on its face - but I think it was simply a hedge against updates failing. In fact, IIRC the way the old system worked, every attempted update counted against the 5 (I seem to remember people having repeated failures put them over their limit).
Edited to add: however, in terms of a group sharing one account but not sharing the software or logins around - e.g., the DM (or whoever the subscriber is) makes the characters for people but never shares their account info - that should be expected. Wizards probably doesn't like that at all either - I'm sure they'd like to get paid every time we picture a character sheet in our heads - and so I think the 20-character limit has definite benefits for Wizards in that area, too.
Ok, given this, I have a question. My husband has a subscription, I also play, and my teen son likes to build characters as a way to learn the ropes as it were. Even though we each have our own computer, we should *only* have it installed on my husband's (since he was the subscriber) OR purchase three subscriptions, even though the software would allow up to 5? (I ask this as a point of clarification, since in reality it was only installed on his computer)
The 5 installs per month is a realisation that people often have a desktop at home, a desktop at work, and maybe an additional laptop that they would wish to keep up to date every month.
The terms actually specify that the software can be installed on one computer that you own or is under your control, so the 5 updates/month limit had nothing to do with updating multiple machines, either.
It was never an encouragement to share one account per 5 players - personally, I always thought that was obvious on its face - but I think it was simply a hedge against updates failing. In fact, IIRC the way the old system worked, every attempted update counted against the 5 (I seem to remember people having repeated failures put them over their limit).
Edited to add: however, in terms of a group sharing one account but not sharing the software or logins around - e.g., the DM (or whoever the subscriber is) makes the characters for people but never shares their account info - that should be expected. Wizards probably doesn't like that at all either - I'm sure they'd like to get paid every time we picture a character sheet in our heads - and so I think the 20-character limit has definite benefits for Wizards in that area, too.
Ok, given this, I have a question. My husband has a subscription, I also play, and my teen son likes to build characters as a way to learn the ropes as it were. Even though we each have our own computer, we should *only* have it installed on my husband's (since he was the subscriber) OR purchase three subscriptions, even though the software would allow up to 5? (I ask this as a point of clarification, since in reality it was only installed on his computer)
Couldn't answer that - I am not a lawyer, so how that actually pans out is beyond me. Looking again at the ToS, it actually says your license is to personally use the software on 1 computer you own/control. So taking it at face value, I read it as only your husband should have used it - nobody else could even sit in front of it and poke its buttons.
Since that seems...draconian...I think it's probably just because that means something legalese rather than colloquial. But overall...I think WotC would have been overjoyed had you purchased 3 subscriptions.
One little problem. Almost none of that information would need to - nor should - reside in the character information database. The only thing that would go to the character database would be the loot that the character has. Most of the rest of it, if it was stored at all would just be dumped to a log or saved to a separate database linked to the character record.
It would be foolish to put all of that information in one monolithic database - Wow even separates the inventory from character information database (as in completely separate servers).
There is no reason to create a VTT database for every character, because not every character is going to be used online - so there is no good reason to not keep the databases separate, just link them with a uid and you are good to go. That way the VTT database getting slow would not cause a problem for the CB database.
So the space concerns for a VTT app have absolutely no relevance for the space concerns of a CB app.
So then please explain to me why every MMO on the planet limits the number of characters you can have, and please don't resort to "They are stupid and/or greedy."
So then please explain to me why every MMO on the planet limits the number of characters you can have, and please don't resort to "They are stupid and/or greedy."
How about that the MMO uses the VTT thing and therefore has a much larger data set. Additionally, some of it greed for example lots of MMOs let you buy more character slots.
That said I think they should limit it ut 50+ sounds better then 20. Maybe 100.
One little problem. Almost none of that information would need to - nor should - reside in the character information database. The only thing that would go to the character database would be the loot that the character has. Most of the rest of it, if it was stored at all would just be dumped to a log or saved to a separate database linked to the character record.
It would be foolish to put all of that information in one monolithic database - Wow even separates the inventory from character information database (as in completely separate servers).
There is no reason to create a VTT database for every character, because not every character is going to be used online - so there is no good reason to not keep the databases separate, just link them with a uid and you are good to go. That way the VTT database getting slow would not cause a problem for the CB database.
So the space concerns for a VTT app have absolutely no relevance for the space concerns of a CB app.
So then please explain to me why every MMO on the planet limits the number of characters you can have, and please don't resort to "They are stupid and/or greedy."
Lets see... regulate the number of characters associated with a single realm to allow for better load balancing. Promotion of community on the servers (having unlimited characters makes it much harder to know the person behind the character). User interface design - it is VERY difficult to write a user friendly interface that handles very large numbers of characters. And is some cases yes, it is "greed" given that there are MMO's that do charge for extra character slots.
Also I will note that almost no MMOs directly limit the number of characters you can have - they limit the number of characters you can have on a single server, but almost none of them directly limit the number of total characters you can have across all servers.
Also you ignored one of the reasons you would keep the character information separate in WotC's case. In an MMO it is assumed that all characters built will actually be played online. There is no such expectation for the D&D Character builder. I know for a fact that even if they had a VTT most of the characters I create would never be played on the VTT, as I prefer playing in person with my friends, and my characters for those games would never be used online.
Ok, given this, I have a question. My husband has a subscription, I also play, and my teen son likes to build characters as a way to learn the ropes as it were. Even though we each have our own computer, we should *only* have it installed on my husband's (since he was the subscriber) OR purchase three subscriptions, even though the software would allow up to 5? (I ask this as a point of clarification, since in reality it was only installed on his computer)
you were neither allowed to install it on your PC, nor allowed to use it on his PC, given the exact Statements of the EULA. Your teen son is fine, as he's currently not an adult, and thus can not do business with WOTC on his own. (strange enough - if you had 2 sons, they'd force you to have 2 subs for that.)
Depending on where you live, this might or might not hold in front of a court of law. Chances, however, are very slim they'd ever be able to bring you in front of a court anyway.
At least in europe, i know they would fail - this part of the EULA is highly likely to be considered "contra bonos mores" - an immoral contract, and thus illegit for claims in front of the court. (mind, this only concerns the part about using it only personally, not the stuff about using it on one computer.)
If, say, there was a way for me to be able to invite people to use my account for a smaller fee than the full sub - but they only got to use the CB, I suspect my players would be all over that. As it is they all agreed cancelling the sub was the way to go, seeing as I was perfectly happy to install the software on their PCs (because we all thought that was the point of the 5 PC limit) but they understand I'm not happy to give out my password or account. 20 characters per account then just killed it completely.
So, Wizards have won on the one hand; they've stopped the account sharing.
But they've lost on the other; they're not getting any ddi money from this group.
Ok, given this, I have a question. My husband has a subscription, I also play, and my teen son likes to build characters as a way to learn the ropes as it were. Even though we each have our own computer, we should *only* have it installed on my husband's (since he was the subscriber) OR purchase three subscriptions, even though the software would allow up to 5? (I ask this as a point of clarification, since in reality it was only installed on his computer)
you were neither allowed to install it on your PC, nor allowed to use it on his PC, given the exact Statements of the EULA. Your teen son is fine, as he's currently not an adult, and thus can not do business with WOTC on his own. (strange enough - if you had 2 sons, they'd force you to have 2 subs for that.)
Depending on where you live, this might or might not hold in front of a court of law. Chances, however, are very slim they'd ever be able to bring you in front of a court anyway.
At least in europe, i know they would fail - this part of the EULA is highly likely to be considered "contra bonos mores" - an immoral contract, and thus illegit for claims in front of the court. (mind, this only concerns the part about using it only personally, not the stuff about using it on one computer.)
Indeed, and I wonder how they interpret that in community property states in the US (what the husband owns, the wife owns as well and vice versa).
...and here's another thing. I've been thinking about all the other software I *own* (rent, license, insert term of preference here), and even when it does specify that I can install it on *one* computer, its licensed and registered and knows if I try to put it on another computer...well, I cannot think of another software suite that had a "your own individual personal use" absolutely no one else clause other than software of an employer for telecommuting.
So, here's a big question for me: export is "soon" (which is less than reassuring), but what format will the exported character be in? Will import be an option? If so, this can work with my existing use, although it adds complexity to the process.
I am wondering if the team might put themselves in the shoes of their much reviled customers (as unpleasant as that may seem) and think if there are any other artificial limitations that the new better (except for where it is much worse) CB brings to the game?
I can't even yell because I'm speechless.
Since I have an active account, I'll be looking at the new CB when it goes live and giving it 2 weeks, but if 20 characters is the actual limit I will be cancelling my 2+ year subscription and asking for a refund for the last 3 months.
1 - LFR - this is for Living Forgotten Realms characters. I have 15 LFR characters that I have actually played, ranging from one at 1st to 5 at Paragon (11-15 so far) levels, plus a couple more ready to use if I feel the need. All of these started at 1st level.
2 - Home - this is for characters used in home campaigns. I have several characters here also
3 - Planning - this is a copy of the LFR characters where I have advanced the characters to level 21 so I can plan out by level each characters new feats, powers, and ability increases.
Rather than a hard and fast 20 character limit, I suggest allowing us to set up multiple subfolders in our account and only applying the 20 character limit to each subfolder.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
So set limits for requests per second and storage space.
I currently have 50 character data files in my Saved Characters folder that total 8.1 MB of space. Apply some compression, and that drops to 885 KB. Those numbers shouldn't scare you at all with cost of storage these days.
You gotta come up with a better limit than number of characters.
The limit on characters is fine (once the export feature arrives). How many characters can you actually modify SIMULTANEOUSLY? Just export the one's you're finished working on and clear the space for a new import. People have said this is a clunk work-around, but it's not. Unless you are some kind of tentacled horror with eyestalks all over the place and more than 20 computers you are biologically incapable of modifying more than 20 characters at once.
the problem is rather that saving offline defeats the reasons for it being online entirely...
The limit on characters is fine (once the export feature arrives). How many characters can you actually modify SIMULTANEOUSLY? Just export the one's you're finished working on and clear the space for a new import. People have said this is a clunk work-around, but it's not. Unless you are some kind of tentacled horror with eyestalks all over the place and more than 20 computers you are biologically incapable of modifying more than 20 characters at once.
the problem is rather that saving offline defeats the reasons for it being online entirely...
Not really. The purpose (IMO) for making it an online tool is so WotC can get regular subscription revenues; as compared to people paying for a month, updating, and then letting their subscription lapse.
Not really. The purpose (IMO) for making it an online tool is so WotC can get regular subscription revenues; as compared to people paying for a month, updating, and then letting their subscription lapse.
that may be the corporate reason - however it's not the reason given to the customers...
Not really. The purpose (IMO) for making it an online tool is so WotC can get regular subscription revenues; as compared to people paying for a month, updating, and then letting their subscription lapse.
that may be the corporate reason - however it's not the reason given to the customers...
In all likelihood the corporate reason is probably the actual reason (the other one, which I haven't heard, is probably how they chose to spin/sell their corporate decision).
just look at the latest ampersand.. there are quite some reasons given, which most of make no sense.
Quoting from the article you referred me to:
The first place we decided to make changes was to move from a client-based to a web-based tool set. We are moving to a web-based solution to make the tools accessible to multiple platforms.
So far, it makes sense. Under the new web-based version each member of a player group can access a fully updated version of the new CB from every computer they have (as opposed to the previous limit of 5 updates per account).
The web-based solution makes it easier for us to react to new technology opportunities, such as tablets and mobile devices.
Again, this makes sense; especially in the context of the previous point.
We also wanted to move to a solution that promotes individual account ownership and hinders piracy. Finally, we wanted a solution that would more easily interact with our community site and Facebook, for example.
I don't know much about these latter points. I've never been as computer dependent (and thus not as computer savvy) as other people my age. That being said, this sounds like the part of the explanation where they ran out of things to say other than "we want regular, mothly revenues".
The idea that I will have to decide which 20 characters, for an LFR event, or a Con, or our home game, each time I leave my home PC where they are exported is rediculous.
If it's online, make my characters available to me online.
If the characters are offline, let me use it offline.
This way, it's neither. And has less function then it does now.
You can keep trying to make an argument but the fact is the moment you have a character limit and the export feature, you are no longer utilizing the cloud feature.
The idea that I will have to decide which 20 characters, for an LFR event, or a Con, or our home game, each time I leave my home PC where they are exported is rediculous.
If it's online, make my characters available to me online.
If the characters are offline, let me use it offline.
This way, it's neither. And has less function then it does now.
Screw cloud (I don't know what it means anyway). And once you can export characters, then you can export them to a flash drive and take it to the LFR, or Con, or specific game you're going to.
The fact is that the new CB will not have less function than the old one. The old CB didn't even give you a place to store a single character. You had to store it on your computer. Now you have a choice of storing it on your computer or on the new CB's memory. That is more options not less.
@mechapilot, but we canmt export yet. so currently that point is incorrect. also people will say that it being online makes it less featured, bit that horse is well past dead.
"Yet" being the operative word. Regardless of what one's individual opinion is of WotC's promise that an export feature is coming, they have promised it.
"Yet" being the operative word. Regardless of what one's individual opinion is of WotC's promise that an export feature is coming, they have promised it.
"WOTC" has promised nothing of the like. one dev said that it got pushed up the priority list, but that's far from "promised by the company".
yeah, it will come, eventually. maybe even this year. maybe not.
like many other promised features may come sooner or later.
fact is: there's no timeline, no schedule, no promises.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can have as many characters as they want, saved to their own harddrive, or thumbdrive, or floppy disk even.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder can only save 20 characters.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will allow you to export characters.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can not access characters away from home.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder can.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder can.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can use it on the train.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can send his character to his DM to look over.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be able to do that.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will.
A DM with the Classic Character Builder can update characters during play, adding XP and Gold then sending the characters to their owners.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not allow this.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder may or may not allow this.
The Classic Character Builder can not be used on a Mac, in its native OS.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can use iplay4e through an iphone or ipad or android device.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be able to do that.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be able to do that.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can have a house-ruled feat or item.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder can not.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will be able to do that "soon".
That's enough for now.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can use it on the train.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
Why, exactly?
A user of the Classic Character Builder can use it on the train.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
Why, exactly?
i assume they mean w/o using 3g/4g wireless.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can use it on the train.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
Why, exactly?
i assume they mean w/o using 3g/4g wireless.
I thought that might be the case. To assume that the person using the old CB has all the technology they need to access it while not making the same assumption about the person using the new CB is like comparing apples and oranges to me.
Hopefully they will answer my question. ;)
Therefore, one can use the Current offline CB on the train.
But one can not, however, use the "Upgraded" CB.
And if one factors in having "all the technology they need to access it" then one could also access all characters with the Current CB since, in my experience, all my characters are on my laptop.
I <3 Ignore.
And if one factors in having "all the technology they need to access it" then one could also access all characters with the Current CB since, in my experience, all my characters are on my laptop.
I don't recall anyone saying you couldn't access all your characters with the current CB. Did I miss that somewhere?
20 characters seems to me to be an impossibly low limit to work with in the long term. I am just mentioning that to add my voice to the complaints.
I currently have 53 characters in my local CB directory. I will break them down.
2 are my active characters in games I play in.
7 are active characters that other people play in games I play in, that I have had to sub in to play at one time or another. (This doesn't quite cover the whole party in each game.)
4 are my player's active characters in the game I run, so I can provide copies for last-minute subs or check details.
9 are backup characters for the games I play in (I try to keep a current backup of each role ready for each game, because if multiple people die, we often swap roles to give people something different to do)
6 are characters I have made/am making for a one-shot I want to run someday with pre-made characters.
6 are characters I have made/am making for a different one-shot.
6 are abandoned characters or duplicates.
13 are idle experiments with new classes, different builds, or optimizations.
I include this breakdown so that people who are shocked at how many character slots people use can understand where the space goes. I look at this list and I say "How can I pare that down to 20?" and I can't figure out how to do it without seriously changing the way I use the CB, particularly since I want to use the CB to make the characters for a Dark Sun one-shot, and keep space for other ideas and games.
And I don't WANT to change the way I use the CB. I bought and paid for a service, and now I am being told that the service will become less useful but not cheaper. Yes, perhaps someday I will be able to export characters back out to save them locally, but I don't know when that will be or how that will work, so I can't plan for it to be a suitable workaround.
So now, onto the question of why the limit is in place.
Is it the DoS/flooding concern? I cannot possibly believe that. There are too many ways to protect the service from that kind of problem for this to be the motivating reason. Remember, only paying customers can save characters at all. Assigning some total storage quota, or a velocity limit on new characters saved, or a hard cap that was 5 or 10 times larger could handily prevent that, and if someone abuses the system, you can suspend their account and they're gone.
Is it the cost of database/storage? I don't think so, as several people have argued that file storage is cheap and the database could be kept small, but more importantly, I don't care. Wizards has demanded to save my characters themselves, as opposed to letting me do it. I expect them to solve the problem of how to do so. If it is too expensive for them, well, they should have let me keep doing it.
Is it an artificial limit to make it more difficult for me to share my account with other people? (which I do not do.) This, quite frankly, is offensive. Let me explain why. If the "average" user only uses one or two characters, then this measure doesn't help with account sharing, since 10-20 average users can use the same CB login. This only helps if the average user uses most of the slots, leaving none left over to share, which means that BY DESIGN, many users will come near to or hit the cap. For this to help with sharing wizards needs to have chosen a limit that they expect a single user to fill. I find this offensive because that means they are deliberately crippling the functionality for a single user in order to cripple it even further for multiple users.
Is it a lowballed starting point that will be raised as the kinks in the system are ironed out? Well, I hope so, but that doesn't make me feel better. Given the quality and timeliness of tools development at Wizards, I don't expect the kinks to be fixed in this new CB for a very long time. And, as it is the only way to access the freely-flowing errata and new material, I am expected to switch to it now. And saying to me "Well, maybe someday the new tool we have forced you to switch to will do what the old tool did" is not a compelling argument.
So, what does this mean to me? Well, I will hold final judgment for ten days to see what the web-CB can do. But if it can't handle even the limited houserule support of the offline-CB, is as buggy as the CB was in its early days, and has an unreasonable (for my usage) cap on the number of characters, I'll have to think long and hard about whether I think DDI is worth it for the Compendium.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can use it on the train.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
Why, exactly?
i assume they mean w/o using 3g/4g wireless.
Even if you are assuming that they are, the scenario would still be mostly accurate.
As someone that very frequently travels by train, I can tell you that cell phone signals are seldom accessible. Mostly because between cities, the rails don't need to be anywhere near civilization.
And, trains aside, you most certainly can't use the new CB when you're in an airplane anymore.
i think ill just let the sub lapse and sit good n tight with the real character builder
just friggen lame
ill just make due with the character builder classic. i got well over 60 characters and i use about 20 of them in games.
i think ill just let the sub lapse and sit good n tight with the real character builder
just friggen lame
They're both "real" character builders (and trying to paint the new one as false is, to quote you, "just friggen lame"). The old CB will continue to grow farther and farther out of date while the new CB remains current. Since the primary draw of the CB is the convenience it offers, I imagine this difference will eventually draw some people back once the old CB gets far enough out of date.
That gives me pause.
On top of everything else, this is absolutely horrific news!!!! 20 characters? How can people even bother to pay for that service? I'm easily at 30 and I'm far lower than any of my other friends.
And no, I'm sorry, but I don't think it's an arbitrary number. I thinks its an intentional number for controlling the situation. They realize that people can just share their username/password, so they're going to limit the number of characters to a very nominal amount to prevent the piracy - at the expense of realistic usefullness of their customer.
Definitely, people like to concept out many characters. One of the great things about the current character builder is the way you could use to to spend time just trying things out and creating synergy. Create various characters of different roles for various 'tiers' and 'bands' (H1, H2, H3) so you always had one prepared. Or creating a version of every class to see what works for you.
What drives me crazy about this approach is the service. I understand that there is a Product-model and a Service-model. But, when I pay Comcast to deliver me their content as a service, me and my entire family as a household are able to enjoy all of that service together. You don't pay an extra fee for every member of the family. Same thing when I buy a video game or a movie. When I buy a movie, the screen that comes up before the movie plays doesn't say that each member on the couch also has to contribute fees or they're conducting copyright infringement.
I realize it is not appropriate to share your account with the rest of the players in your play-group, but what about the family level?
With this approach, I am expected to purchase an seperate account for my 11 year old son if he wants to have a couple of characters built as well? And if my wife wants one or two characters, well, I'd better spin up an extra account for her too because I want have the room in my account.
They are so freaked out about piracy that they're going to go too far in the other direction and alienating the people who do pay them well.
You never want to support customers that are causing you to lose money, but you never want to lose the customers that are making you money.
Agreed...simply put - You can use the "people might cheat the system" or "It makes Piracy easier" for almost anything...why because unsavory people will ALWAYS find a way to cheat the system or pirate it somehow anything to try and stop that only makes things worse for the paying customers. I wouldn't be suprised if said unsavory people to figure out how to cannabilize the online CB and make an offline version. Hell If I was a betting man I'd bet that they'd get a nice bug free pirated oflline version done LONG before WotC releases the ability to "export" stuff (which we all know will be as difficult and time-consuming as WotC can make it)
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Ok first off my paragraph earlier is this post applies to you too but I needed to add more to your specific post.
Is this really how you, your team and WotC views their customer base, as little bloodsucking leeches that will suck you dry if you let us? no wonder you never get anything right/done on time you spend all your time either thinking up new ways to make things difficult for us "evil" customers so we can't hurt your "poor innocent" company.
Oh and btw if your "New" CB was offline you wouldn't have to worry about DDOS attacks on your servers nor would their be an argument over storage space as most people have at lease 500GBs on their PC...just an idea.
Frankly it seems you guys are deliberately TRYING to make dumb decisions...one of your higher-ups either wants this abomination to die or he enjoys watching the chaos for some strange reason.
I will definitely need more than 20. And I'm sure I'm not even an extreme case.
If limit was something like 100, I think that would work for me with enough room to maneuver, as long as they eventually get in an export feature, so I can store retired characters. I think that would be under 20 megs of space per subscriber. If they have 50,000 subscribers, that would be a terrabyte, which is a modest and reasonable amount of storage for client data. The limit could be significantly higher (like 1000 characters) if they made the character save files a bit more efficient, or with a small bit more investment.
I would also like to see an organizational feature (like folders) to store the characters. Currently I have characters for each campaign in their own campaign folder, my RPGA characters in one folder, etc.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Mr. DevelopEment (sic) Manager,
I run four campaigns and play in one.
I have 82 character files in my active campaigns. There are admittedly some duplicates, but even original characters - including two NPCs I've statted as full PCs - come to 26 characters.
Which six characters should I delete and re-create each time I need them?
Should I instead rotate through them, deleting a new one each time I hit the 20 character limit?
I look forward to your answer. Perhaps you've already given it, but there are 28 pages of posts since your announcement of 20 characters as a limit.
This (combined with no sharing of characters at launch and, for that matter, ever since it's vaporware until it's written and deployed) is really making me question whether to continue paying for the service. It's a loss of functionality.
- Ket
My subscription is up Nov. 21. I just canceled my auto-renew.
Not saying I won't reup, but if the New CB doesn't blow my socks off, I'll be happy to not continue to be a subscriber.
You can keep trying to make an argument but the fact is the moment you have a character limit and the export feature, you are no longer utilizing the cloud feature.
The idea that I will have to decide which 20 characters, for an LFR event, or a Con, or our home game, each time I leave my home PC where they are exported is rediculous.
If it's online, make my characters available to me online.
If the characters are offline, let me use it offline.
This way, it's neither. And has less function then it does now.
Screw cloud (I don't know what it means anyway). And once you can export characters, then you can export them to a flash drive and take it to the LFR, or Con, or specific game you're going to.
The fact is that the new CB will not have less function than the old one. The old CB didn't even give you a place to store a single character. You had to store it on your computer. Now you have a choice of storing it on your computer or on the new CB's memory. That is more options not less.
Mecha Pilot is either a shill or willfully ignorant - this is not an insult, it is a statement of fact:
WotC explained what "cloud" means. If not, Google is your friend. The fact is that the new CB will have fewer features to start (no exporting, which means no sharing and no storing, and now has a character limit, which means choosing characters to delete to make room for new ones). To argue otherwise is why I say Mecha Pilot is either a shill or willfully ignorant.
edit: How, exactly, will we use characters saved on an off-line "flash drive" with an online Character Builder at a con or game that doesn't have an online connection?
- Ket
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
The fact that you choose this as a method to protect yourselves against DOS attacks really makes me doubt your team's experience in building enterprise level applications.
This. The Developement (sic) Manager can describe a system he did not ensure his team can defend against... and it's not even the most severe sort of attack possible. Why isn't there basic flood control? Why isn't there a way to automatically brake an account that's uploading an excessive amount of characters simultaneously, in batches, or over the course of a day?
Why is the Developement (sic) Manager unable to calculate how long it would take to fill 1 TB of storage?
Wait, not curious, the other thing.
Idiotic. That's it.
Now I'm just hoping that the CB won't crash the day it goes active like the updates always ****ing do.
A user of the Classic Character Builder can use it on the train.
On release, the "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
The "Upgraded" "Upgraded" Character Builder will not be useable.
Why, exactly?
i assume they mean w/o using 3g/4g wireless.
have you ever actually tried using 3g on a train? there are 3 major issues to this:
1) cell-switching. Everytime you enter a new cell, you'll have a bit of lag or even outright disconnects.
2) train-interference. quite likely, your train will not have a signal repeater, and thus it will be likely very weak. add to that possibly 200 people trying to access it simultaneously - severe performance issues arise.
3) hinterlands (where trains usually go) are rarely top priority for cellphone companies. so, count yourself lucky if you even get 3G in those places. 4G - no way.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
This might be covered in another aspect of this thread, or one of the others that have popped up.
A limit of 20 Characters will do nothing to protect you from a DDOS. The reason for this is if I plan to take you down I will hit an external page that does not require authentication. So for me the prime target would be main login page. I would also prefer a target that is dependent on a lot of calls to other locations for information, such as dndinsider.com
For me to target the 20 characters deposited on DDI I would need to find either a security flaw, or have an account that I can access. You put a check in that limits concurrent logins from a user to 2 or 3, then you would make a DDOS against an authenticated section impossible, unless every user was compromised, then you have a bigger issue.
If you have a proper DDOS mitigation plan in place you might lose the external service for a couple of hours, if you dont, your ISP can probably have you protected within 48 hours.
If your concerned about the script filling up the storage, your looking at it in a more complicated way then most hackers would consider. In order to fill up storage I need an active DDI account. If I am creating a character that quick put a limit to it. For example, there is no way a human could build a character in 10 seconds. Put logic in your firewalls/IPS/IDS to state something like:
if account builds 4+ characters in 2 minutes then block for 30 mins. This will block people from a DDOS using authenticated account. You could then set policy that if it continues the account is permabanned until it is resolved, this will mean the user will have to contact Customer Service.
If your concern is with a DDOS via FTP/Upload then you should limit them to how many connections via upload they can do, I would also make sure that your new online DDI knows how to handle incorrect files, so when accessed they do not fire off a script that compromises the database.
Let's see, 10 computers, each making one 200 kb character every 10 seconds works out to a total of 720 MB/hour... so about 58 days.
If you can not see this in your logs, and take an active approach it is not our fault that you fail a DDOS attack. Again this can be mitigated based on # of concurrent logins. If you limit it to 3, then the hacker needs 4 compromised accounts to pull this off.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
This might be covered in another aspect of this thread, or one of the others that have popped up.
A limit of 20 Characters will do nothing to protect you from a DDOS. The reason for this is if I plan to take you down I will hit an external page that does not require authentication. So for me the prime target would be main login page. I would also prefer a target that is dependent on a lot of calls to other locations for information, such as dndinsider.com
For me to target the 20 characters deposited on DDI I would need to find either a security flaw, or have an account that I can access. You put a check in that limits concurrent logins from a user to 2 or 3, then you would make a DDOS against an authenticated section impossible, unless every user was compromised, then you have a bigger issue.
If you have a proper DDOS mitigation plan in place you might lose the external service for a couple of hours, if you dont, your ISP can probably have you protected within 48 hours.
If your concerned about the script filling up the storage, your looking at it in a more complicated way then most hackers would consider. In order to fill up storage I need an active DDI account. If I am creating a character that quick put a limit to it. For example, there is no way a human could build a character in 10 seconds. Put logic in your firewalls/IPS/IDS to state something like:
if account builds 4+ characters in 2 minutes then block for 30 mins. This will block people from a DDOS using authenticated account. You could then set policy that if it continues the account is permabanned until it is resolved, this will mean the user will have to contact Customer Service.
If your concern is with a DDOS via FTP/Upload then you should limit them to how many connections via upload they can do, I would also make sure that your new online DDI knows how to handle incorrect files, so when accessed they do not fire off a script that compromises the database.
Let's see, 10 computers, each making one 200 kb character every 10 seconds works out to a total of 720 MB/hour... so about 58 days.
If you can not see this in your logs, and take an active approach it is not our fault that you fail a DDOS attack. Again this can be mitigated based on # of concurrent logins. If you limit it to 3, then the hacker needs 4 compromised accounts to pull this off.
Heh..see WotC this is won't you don't seem to get the majority of people who play DnD are highly intelligent...it's just the nature of the game. Were not your usually bunch of morons who will just bend over and accept it like your word is gospel.
Still it's funny that a single user came up with this is in a couple minutes yet all you guys came up with was to a stupid char limit in SIX MONTHS!!!!
So let's see the tally.....reduced portability (which is funny since you claim this new CB is More portable) reduced functionality (no export, no homebrew. no control over errata, no mixing settings ie. no Genasi Artificers, no offline access), reduced storage space despite your advertisement of no worry about storing our toons, Usage not poses a higher risk due to being online the same weaknesses in your sytem that make you vunerable will effect users as well and from your sloppy and frankly amateur handling of it..I'm actually worried about connecting).....shall I go on?
Note: I'm not saying there's NOTHING positive about the new builder...but everything positive about it could have been done with an offline version anyway.
Heh..see WotC this is won't you don't seem to get the majority of people who play DnD are highly intelligent...it's just the nature of the game. Were not your usually bunch of morons who will just bend over and accept it like your word is gospel.
Still it's funny that a single user came up with this is in a couple minutes yet all you guys came up with was to a stupid char limit in SIX MONTHS!!!!
So let's see the tally.....reduced portability (which is funny since you claim this new CB is More portable) reduced functionality (no export, no homebrew. no control over errata, no mixing settings ie. no Genasi Artificers, no offline access), reduced storage space despite your advertisement of no worry about storing our toons, Usage not poses a higher risk due to being online the same weaknesses in your sytem that make you vunerable will effect users as well and from your sloppy and frankly amateur handling of it..I'm actually worried about connecting).....shall I go on?
To be fair... I have been doing this for 5 years... so I have some exposure on limiting malicious attacks against my network... but anyone in the cloud should have a capable IT Security staff to mitigate this attack vector.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
Actually, I'm not following this logic... The system is only accessible to subscribers, and you have an order of magnitude for that. Even if they are attackers, they need to give you $15 per increment to launch it.
Since you have a sense of scaling on the subscribers, it's really easy to understand the upper bounds of space utilization. Were you to have 200,000 subscribers (crazy high), and each character is 1 MB in space (crazy high), and you had a limit of 200 characters (10x the current), that's 40,000,000 MB, 40,000 GB, 40 TB. 40 TB is not bad at all as an theoretical upperbound. You can start applying utilization expectation calculations (what % of accounts will sit at 1,000 characters, what % of characters will hit the 1 MB theoretical max, etc) to bring that down, just like you would for any disk quota system.
I bet you'd be well under 10 TB and still be able to handle 10% increase in accounts at the max (an attack)... and then you're sitting on 20,000 * $15 from the attackers. I can think of more vulnerable systems than that
What are the other caps? Disk I/O, but since you're using an online-only solution you can control how many times an account is logged in at once, so the max # of characters accessible in one time frame is also a known factor. It seems very unlikely you'd hit bandwidth limitations but that's also controlled... again it's not like a single attacker could load all 200 of their characters at once, and you could have very high internal limits on your web services or whatever API the CB is accessing from silverlight like other online services have.
Heh..see WotC this is won't you don't seem to get the majority of people who play DnD are highly intelligent...it's just the nature of the game. Were not your usually bunch of morons who will just bend over and accept it like your word is gospel.
Still it's funny that a single user came up with this is in a couple minutes yet all you guys came up with was to a stupid char limit in SIX MONTHS!!!!
So let's see the tally.....reduced portability (which is funny since you claim this new CB is More portable) reduced functionality (no export, no homebrew. no control over errata, no mixing settings ie. no Genasi Artificers, no offline access), reduced storage space despite your advertisement of no worry about storing our toons, Usage not poses a higher risk due to being online the same weaknesses in your sytem that make you vunerable will effect users as well and from your sloppy and frankly amateur handling of it..I'm actually worried about connecting).....shall I go on?
To be fair... I have been doing this for 5 years... so I have some exposure on limiting malicious attacks against my network... but anyone in the cloud should have a capable IT Security staff to mitigate this attack vector.
Yes but even if their DDi team is a bunch of kids fresh out of college/univeristy they should be able to handle at least something close to what you suggested...they had six months and a team of what 7? vs. a single experienced person in about 5 minutes besides at least the head developer HAS to have a decent amount of experience....mind you WotC does seem kinda cheap so maybe they just hired a bunch of Highschool self-proclaimed hackers...I dunno.
Which six characters should I delete and re-create each time I need them?
Should I instead rotate through them, deleting a new one each time I hit the 20 character limit?
You wouldn't be able to rotate through them, as there's no export functionality at launch.
At launch, your only real option is to build them all, get printouts/PDFs for them, and try to pick up to 19 characters you actually are going to have to level up within the system routinely, and then how ever many slots are left are your swap slot.... you'd recreate any characters you need to modify, put them in your extra slot, upgrade them, re-print/PDF them, and clear them out for the next set you'll swap in.
Or keep using the offline version for all of the characters that aren't using the 4e content that wasn't updated in the CB.
(or wait for the export feature)
It's unacceptable. Anything less than 75 is unacceptable in my opinion. I want unlimited. At the very least is should allow for every Build / Race / Class combinations.
The only way I'd accept something in the 100 range is if they increased the number by ~35 with each new book that adds a build, class, race or something.
draco, you already have this, your pcs are saved on your cpu. as many as your heart desires. and they will have pcs able to be saved soon so you wont even need to use their site for storage at all, you can only save 20 to the site but would you rather have them saved to wizards site or to your hard drive? honestly
You're making a few assumptions here.
1) One of the few customer-facing features they've been touting is that your characters are now in the cloud and accessible from anywhere... so if your reasoning is the correct one, then you have to also accept a reduction in value as to what having characters accessible in the cloud is. If he's running more than one game or running one and playing one, I could see how 20 starts becoming limiting, even in an only-the-ones-I-need-online setting.
2) Not to be obvious, but you're putting more stock in "soon" than most people would at this point, which is fine, just realize which buttons you're pressing.
3) You're assuming that you can load a character from the disk, as oppose to importing/exporting them which is what has actually been discussed so far. Yes, there's more than a pedantic difference there. Issue #1 aside, I bet a number of people might be okay with using an online tool with a locally-stored file. But I bet they won't be okay with doing x steps to import it into the cloud, work on it, and then y steps to export it. For someone worried about more than 20 characters, that would be very tedious.
Now, they could make this nice enough that it shows all of your local files alongside your online characters, so you can seamlessly use the tool simultaneously for exported characters and cloud characters, but I very much doubt that is what they have in mind. No one is going to get excited to constantly import/export characters to get around a 20 character limit.
ill just make due with the character builder classic. i got well over 60 characters and i use about 20 of them in games.
i think ill just let the sub lapse and sit good n tight with the real character builder
just friggen lame
They're both "real" character builders (and trying to paint the new one as false is, to quote you, "just friggen lame"). The old CB will continue to grow farther and farther out of date while the new CB remains current. Since the primary draw of the CB is the convenience it offers, I imagine this difference will eventually draw some people back once the old CB gets far enough out of date.
Every DM I've ever dealt with (and most players) like to have copies in their systems of the people their playing with...Primarily I play Controllers or Leaders so I really need to know the other players capabilities and frankly I can barely memorize everything I have let alone every one else so I use the current CB to roll all of them up using the Summary function...either by hand or some sort of transfer cable/flash drive.
On top of every one else's toons I have my active toons, experiments, a bunch of favorites that I don't want to lose, a bunch that I keep on hand in case someone forgets theirs or is new so they don't need to use a WotC Pre-Made (another example of their prowess eh?) or take forever making one themselves. Than of course there's my NPCs I don't DM much for Wednesday encounters games but I'm constantly trying to get my friends into DnD or even just geekdom in general so I always have my NPCs, My books and some toons ready for when they come over if I can get a game going.
As far as forcing us to Sub...at all...let alone year round is stupid I currently purchase as many books as I can/want AND on top of that they want me to pay for the builder which is why I've suggested a linking between book purchase and use of the builder (something like whats in my quote below) and to drop the MMO style P2P model.
While I can sorta understand while your wresting control from your loyal players in hopes of stopping miscreants like pirates from using your product in an unauthorized manner, I propose an alternative that will make people happy (aka customers aka money)..well most people
Anyways I think it would work well if to get the content added to your builder (or other tools) you need to buy a book which will have a disc in it with a code (code is applied to >>>account<<< not the PC and is only usable once) and possibly a PDF version of the book (this is not an uncommon thing these days) this is SIMILAR to pay as you go cell phones, room service, some MMOs and a few other things and they work exceedingly well. I hate to drop company names but this worked wonder for Turbine with DDO and recently LOTRO they went from money eating monstrosities to cash cows by switching from forced monthly payments to an a-la-carte style so much so that well a huge company bought it out IIRC it was Warner Brothers (Note: Both Hasbro and WotC logos show at the bottom of their main page...but I'm not sure why)
Note: Stuff like DRM,Online use only, Limited installs etc. only causes more people to become pirates them selves because that version is LESS restrictive. Heck some even see it as a challenge (See Spore). Even Steam's seemingly unpirateable program got re-engineered to bypass it's measures.
Note2: Please relocate this if it's not in the correct forum area...I wasn't sure where it fit best.
You know what Mecha I'm gonna ask you this question seriously...do you work for WotC...PR or marketing department maybe....or do they just give you free stuff...because otherwise I have no idea why you willingly bend and take anything WotC does than you fervently defend it. Please answer honestly.
Since the primary draw of the CB is the convenience it offers, I imagine this difference will eventually draw some people back once the old CB gets far enough out of date.
Wizards knows what the valuable part of the DDI subscription is - content in the tools - and that's what they're selling. Everything else is trivial compared to that value. I am positive that this will retain/recapture lots of people, since the alternatives are "add it to the old builder yourself," "write a new builder," or "live without."
The first is against the rules, the second is hard, and the third is annoying.
In the meantime, the exporter (and the importer) will not exist on 16 November. Such features - Hell, the entire thing, really - are "vaporware."
Many have mentioned the VTT as a reason for limiting characters, and describe a Golden Age in which we're all playing via VTT. However, no one in an official context has even mentioned the VTT, and to assume one is or even is not in development is at best speculative, at worst utterly foolish if one is basing an argument on that since there's no way to know what that feature set will include beyond the basics.
In the meantime, the VTT will not exist on 16 November.
The most astounding basis for an argument I'm hearing is that they're morphing D&D 4E into an MMO. Assuming this development team (of 7, really?) is capable of such things, this is even more specious than the other two arguments - an MMO is constantly updating character data (XP, position, phat lewts, etc) during play, whereas the CB only has to update when the user makes a change to the character. Although I for one cannot wait to see the round trip latency incurred when adjusting a stat that modifies lot of other factors (say, level), this is still not a lot of data per second compared to even the slowest MMO.
In the meantime, a 4E MMO will not exist on 16 November.
Given that information... why is any of it being used by the shills to justify the neutering of a piece of software that itself doesn't exist yet?
- Ket
Kalex the Omen (whose name is cut off by the bulletin board software - niiiice) and Mech Pilot and one or two other shil- I mean, members of the community seem to think/know both that the exporter (note: not an importer) will be here right away and how it works (they both reference that the exporter will be able to "store files on your CPU" and you can swap them in and out of the online-only CB). However, no one in this entire thread has mentioned an import tool design that allows for that sort of swapping - not even the developement (sic) manager nor Mudbunny.
In the meantime, the exporter (and the importer) will not exist on 16 November. Such features - Hell, the entire thing, really - are "vaporware."
Many have mentioned the VTT as a reason for limiting characters, and describe a Golden Age in which we're all playing via VTT. However, no one in an official context has even mentioned the VTT, and to assume one is or even is not in development is at best speculative, at worst utterly foolish if one is basing an argument on that since there's no way to know what that feature set will include beyond the basics.
In the meantime, the VTT will not exist on 16 November.
The most astounding basis for an argument I'm hearing is that they're morphing D&D 4E into an MMO. Assuming this development team (of 7, really?) is capable of such things, this is even more specious than the other two arguments - an MMO is constantly updating character data (XP, position, phat lewts, etc) during play, whereas the CB only has to update when the user makes a change to the character. Although I for one cannot wait to see the round trip latency incurred when adjusting a stat that modifies lot of other factors (say, level), this is still not a lot of data per second compared to even the slowest MMO.
In the meantime, a 4E MMO will not exist on 16 November.
Given that information... why is any of it being used by the shills to justify the neutering of a piece of software that itself doesn't exist yet?
- Ket
So I'm assuming you are talking at me, which I find hilarious that you call me a shill, when A) I'm not currently a subscriber, and B) I won't be a subscriber on Nov. 16th if they only have the current version of the CB in online form with only 20 character slots.
What my point was, which you and others ignored, was that from a development standpoint, that limiting people to 20 characters makes sense if they plan on eventually making a VTT (which is doable with their resources), and that in their minds, nothing they do is vaporware.
Do I like the change? No way, it completely sucks from my perspective. However, I am not currently a subscriber of DDi (by definition, I'm not a customer if I don't pay them money), so they have no reason to care about my opinion.
All I am trying to point out is a possible reason they may have limited the number of character slots, which doesn't make me a shill. So please cool it and read the stickied thread about civility. Thanks.
Lets see... regulate the number of characters associated with a single realm to allow for better load balancing. Promotion of community on the servers (having unlimited characters makes it much harder to know the person behind the character). User interface design - it is VERY difficult to write a user friendly interface that handles very large numbers of characters. And is some cases yes, it is "greed" given that there are MMO's that do charge for extra character slots.
Okay so, assuming future VTT, load balancing, check. Promotion of community, check. UI design, check. (Greed, check. But since we don't ding MMOs for this, we can't ding DDi.)
Also I will note that almost no MMOs directly limit the number of characters you can have - they limit the number of characters you can have on a single server, but almost none of them directly limit the number of total characters you can have across all servers.
So what if DDi has 1 server? Would make sense if DDi has 1/300th the numbers of WoW, which has many, many servers. So in WoW you can have 10 characters across many servers, because they have 300 times the number of players. DDi you get 20 characters across one server. Same thing.
Also you ignored one of the reasons you would keep the character information separate in WotC's case. In an MMO it is assumed that all characters built will actually be played online. There is no such expectation for the D&D Character builder. I know for a fact that even if they had a VTT most of the characters I create would never be played on the VTT, as I prefer playing in person with my friends, and my characters for those games would never be used online.
What if that's their plan? What if the goal is for whatever characters you make with their CB be used with their VTT, and if you want, you can print them out and use them in a tabletop game, but their real priority is for online play?
Afterall, they realize they will lose the "old school" players that don't care about computers, but for the up and coming generations of kids with their iPhones and Farmvilles and Kinects, they need a way to stay relevant with that group of internet savvy users.
Except for the reason you're giving for the character limit directly contradicts what Paolo said was the reason. You wouldn't want to claim that he was lying about that and that the reason was actually something completely different. We've seen how poor the reaction is to that.
Just because one is true doesn't mean the other is false.
If I have a blue, polka dot ball, and you ask, "Why do you like this ball?" and I say, "Because it is blue," and later on I say, "I like this ball because it is polka dot," that doesn't mean I was lying with the original statement.
So I'm assuming you are talking at me, which I find hilarious that you call me a shill, when A) I'm not currently a subscriber, and B) I won't be a subscriber on Nov. 16th if they only have the current version of the CB in online form with only 20 character slots.
What my point was, which you and others ignored, was that from a development standpoint, that limiting people to 20 characters makes sense if they plan on eventually making a VTT (which is doable with their resources), and that in their minds, nothing they do is vaporware.
Do I like the change? No way, it completely sucks from my perspective. However, I am not currently a subscriber of DDi (by definition, I'm not a customer if I don't pay them money), so they have no reason to care about my opinion.
All I am trying to point out is a possible reason they may have limited the number of character slots, which doesn't make me a shill. So please cool it and read the stickied thread about civility. Thanks.
(Written via iPhone... I have no idea if this will even work.)
Naw, concrete_bu(ddha), I had you as a disgruntled customer who was considering the alternatives. I read your posts without flipping the "idiot bit" like I did on the very obvious shills.
As for civility, I may be on the edge (YMMV) but I am within the limits. I note you didn't call out "the Extraordinary Dungeonmaster," though, so rather than make this an inconsistent argument about civility (rolleyes) focus on either the arguments or the issues.
I, for one, realized last night that with an updated local monster builder, updated local CB, and the Essentials Rule Compendium, I don't need DDI except the items database. I've been having trouble with that since I use the DDI Compendium to bookmark monsters for my encounters. However, I started recently running all monsters through the M Builder to ensure damage and the like is "modern." Since I then copy the monster as RTF, paste into Word and save as HTML, I don't need the DDI Compendium for that.
I also don't NEED the future updates, I don't NEED new monsters, so after two years of DDI I can walk away before I have to deal with needing an always-present Internet connection, limits to the number of characters... And whatever other restrictions we haven't been told about in their run up to a VTTMMOOMGWTF. I suppose I don't need item rarities, so there goes that dependency.
The first is against the rules, the second is hard, and the third is annoying.
Breaking the rules? On the internet? Since when did that happen? :O
The first is against the rules, the second is hard, and the third is annoying.
Breaking the rules? On the internet? Since when did that happen? :O
It is the province of hooligans and ruffians. I for one disapprove of such shenanigans; they excite the blood overmuch.
I just want to be able to use the devise without hassle, I don't go anywhere without internet so offline is meaningless to me.
The 20 Character slot is different in that I'm paying for a program that only builds characters, it's singular reason for existence is to make characters. It would be like Google Docs only allow 20 files, before you had to erase Gram ma's recipes. Picasa, only 20 photos, Facebook only 20 friends and online service has to be a little generous with the reason it exists, you have to give more space then you think the majority can use.
Paolo mentioned DDoS attacks, limit the characters to "ANY" 3 digit number and that's solved.
Someone mentioned VTT, it doesn't exist I hope it does. If it did, it would only open 1 character from one account at a time, that's not intensive.
Someone mentioned people sharing accounts, I could save 5 slots and build all my friends characters and level them and still have 14 slots to give out at the store and 1 for myself, if I was desperate to share. People are going to share, they'd share 1 slot if you only provided one. Give discounts and bonuses and prizes to memberships, give signup bonuses to people who get their friends on, there are better ways besides a stick to drive up membership.
There is a possible reason, maybe they're worried about 42,000 accounts all logging in and uploading 100 characters day one and then making Dark Sun and Essential Characters and slamming the system so solidly that everything disintegrates. I would accept that, but then provide information, simply say, "Hey guys we're starting with 20 characters and will increase the cap by 5 or 10 characters a day/week, we're aiming for 'N' characters but depending on stability and people gaming the system we may fall short but we'll tell you what the cap is well before we hit it."
Information is good.
Except for the reason you're giving for the character limit directly contradicts what Paolo said was the reason. You wouldn't want to claim that he was lying about that and that the reason was actually something completely different. We've seen how poor the reaction is to that.
Just because one is true doesn't mean the other is false.
If I have a blue, polka dot ball, and you ask, "Why do you like this ball?" and I say, "Because it is blue," and later on I say, "I like this ball because it is polka dot," that doesn't mean I was lying with the original statement.
That is because your second statement does not conflict with the first. That is not the case here.
A. They have made a statement.
B. Any person competent in the field can tell that the statement is incorrect.
Since both A and B are true statements then either the person making the statement is not competent in the field or they knew they were making an incorrect statement.
Also I will note that almost no MMOs directly limit the number of characters you can have - they limit the number of characters you can have on a single server, but almost none of them directly limit the number of total characters you can have across all servers.
So what if DDi has 1 server? Would make sense if DDi has 1/300th the numbers of WoW, which has many, many servers. So in WoW you can have 10 characters across many servers, because they have 300 times the number of players. DDi you get 20 characters across one server. Same thing.
Obviously, one has never played Guild Wars. They have a limit on how many characters you can have, though you can buy more character slots, and get two more for the other two games (Factions and Nightfall) when attached to the same account. The difference here is that one pays for the game, then the playing of said game is free. DDi wants us to pay for this on a monthly basis instead, and has stricker limit compared to generating characters vs. playing a graphical game.
It must be said that the comparison to an MMO is grossly unfair, to the MMO. DDi is an aid for the game, not an immersive enviroment designed for play using avatars going to graphical locations. That wizards used the MMO design for the Subscription service for pricing doesn't mean that the comparison in value should be made, as DDi fails miserably in this respect.
I will say it again, in a given group playing D&D, the only person with DDi will typically be the DM. Nothing that Wizards does here will change that.
Peace.
MechaPilot is absolutely right about one thing:Since the primary draw of the CB is the convenience it offers, I imagine this difference will eventually draw some people back once the old CB gets far enough out of date.
Wizards knows what the valuable part of the DDI subscription is - content in the tools - and that's what they're selling. Everything else is trivial compared to that value. I am positive that this will retain/recapture lots of people, since the alternatives are "add it to the old builder yourself," "write a new builder," or "live without."
The first is against the rules, the second is hard, and the third is annoying.
The problem is, and I know this is just my experience, but right now there are 3 groups of people I know personally that this was the last straw for them. They have stopped palying D&D 4. It is the entire thing, not just one. Everythign piles up after a while and they strat to look for another company that gets how they want to play.
All are looking at Pathfinder now.
In the meantime, a 4E MMO will not exist on 16 November.
- Ket
When people say MMO, that means they are TREATING it like an MMO. Not that it is one. Rules updates, online character storage limit. Adjustments to classes, rules, etc that you have to use, etc.
The blue polka dot ball defense has been made...that's so awesome.
I will continue to endeavor to bring such witticisms to this thread for as long as they are deemed appropriate.
I just want to be able to use the devise without hassle, I don't go anywhere without internet so offline is meaningless to me.
*snip stuff I agree with*
Information is good.
Everything you said I agree with. If they aren't planning a VTT, and they have zero reason to limit character slots from a server defense perspective, and the amount of data is trivial, then I 100% agree that they should expand the number of characters we can have.
I also agree that more information would be super, because some of us feel that the current service is not something we will pay for as described. Some of us feel the opposite, and that's to be expected.
There is no "but" there.
Since both A and B are true statements then either the person making the statement is not competent in the field or they knew they were making an incorrect statement.
See, that's where I think you are making an assumption about what they are doing. I have no idea what their entire product looks like, because I don't work for WotC. None of us here, except for the people who actually work there, have any idea what their current build entails, what every single feature is, or any real information besides "Hey, they are using computers" and "Hey, they are using Silverlight and something to do with the Internet."
People are using the old CB as a basis for what the new CB will look like, and every tacked on feature in the future, and I'm sorry, that is a fauly comparison.
Maybe he's telling the truth, and if some other reason comes along and is also equally valid, then it doesn't invalidate the previous statement, because maybe the first one is true too. So before I go saying, "This guy is a liar!" I'd rather wait and see what their product is like when they release it.
Obviously, one has never played Guild Wars. They have a limit on how many characters you can have, though you can buy more character slots, and get two more for the other two games (Factions and Nightfall) when attached to the same account. The difference here is that one pays for the game, then the playing of said game is free. DDi wants us to pay for this on a monthly basis instead, and has stricker limit compared to generating characters vs. playing a graphical game.
Guild Wars you pay for a game. Now divide that cost into how many months in between each expansion pack, which you also pay for. So the game was $50-60, you wait a year, you pay another $50-60, wait a year, pay another $50-60, wait a year...see a pattern here? I love the "OMG Guild Wars is Free!" hype. They just handwaved the cost into one lump sum instead of over time.
It must be said that the comparison to an MMO is grossly unfair, to the MMO. DDi is an aid for the game, not an immersive enviroment designed for play using avatars going to graphical locations. That wizards used the MMO design for the Subscription service for pricing doesn't mean that the comparison in value should be made, as DDi fails miserably in this respect.
DDi as in its current incarnation is "an aid to a board game". I'm not talking about the current version of DDi, I'm speculating on a future product that could or could not be "an immersive environment designed for play using avatars going to graphical locations." That could be where DDi is heading. Think of what a Facebook-Dungeons-and-Dragons app would look like (not this one), where we can move our little minis around on a Farmvile type grid.
That type of program would be fair to compare to an MMO, because it would be, in fact, an MMO.
If say, DDi is not going to be an MMO, then it is also fair to compare it to one, just as how you compare an MMO to the price of a movie ticket, a meal at McDonald's or anything you buy with money, because that is how value works. $10 is $10 is $10, and we compare unlike things all the time, using money, because that is what money is for.
All are looking at Pathfinder now.
I hate to get off topic but why does everyone play pathfinder? What about Shadowrun, Battletech, Dragon Age, Gurps, Hero System, or the thousands of other good rpgs out there. An attachment to the d20 system?
Just curious. Cause if i stopped doing 4th ed (new 4th ed anyway my old books work just fine as far as I can tell.) Beyond Star wars Saga I wouldn't be playing another d20 game.
However, no one in this entire thread has mentioned an import tool design that allows for that sort of swapping - not even the developement (sic) manager nor Mudbunny.
I didn't mention it because it totally and completely slipped my mind. I guess I just assumed that if you were to give an update with Exporting functionality, Importing would be there too.
But I am glad that people are finally bring up good responses to the people (Mech Pilot and Kalex the Omen) that I couldn't necessarily get across. As a matter of fact, someone in this thread... mentioned that the fundamental purpose of the character builder is to make characters. With a game that has:
25 Classes (+1 For Hybrid)
~300 Hybrid Combinations
36 races
At least 2 Builds per class
(Math may be completely and utter fail. Be warned.)
20 characters doesn't encompass anything in there. By that I mean you can't have 1 of everything on that list. Classes, races, although you could possibly get away with builds!
You can get all three guild wars game for around 40 bucks right now, though they did sell them for 50 when first released. One could, thus far, have spent 300 bucks on the DDi so far. It doesn't compare at all, DDi is overpriced.
Yes, I can get all three right now for $40 (aren't there three expansion packs?), which is not the point, because I can't buy the previous years of use that came with those games. I can't time travel to 2005 and buy that time back.
Just like I can get DDi for $10 right now, and I can't get the time back for that service either.
Even if DDi is more expensive than Guild Wars, that doesn't make Guild Wars free. Especially when you take into account Guild Wars 2, and the inevitable expansion packs that will come out with that game, year after year.
All are looking at Pathfinder now.
I hate to get off topic but why does everyone play pathfinder? What about Shadowrun, Battletech, Dragon Age, Gurps, Hero System, or the thousands of other good rpgs out there. An attachment to the d20 system?
Just curious. Cause if i stopped doing 4th ed (new 4th ed anyway my old books work just fine as far as I can tell.) Beyond Star wars Saga I wouldn't be playing another d20 game.
Becuase it is basically still D&D and everyone has a base understanding of the rules. We play all sorts of game systems. This would be the replacement for when we play D&D.
All are looking at Pathfinder now.
I hate to get off topic but why does everyone play pathfinder? What about Shadowrun, Battletech, Dragon Age, Gurps, Hero System, or the thousands of other good rpgs out there. An attachment to the d20 system?
Just curious. Cause if i stopped doing 4th ed (new 4th ed anyway my old books work just fine as far as I can tell.) Beyond Star wars Saga I wouldn't be playing another d20 game.
After 2e (which was an awesome system, not insulting it, since that's where I started) they made it more awesome by fixing all sorts of things that most of us thought sucked. (THAC0, multiclassing, level limits, different XP charts, horrible magic item system, I'm looking at you.)
3e was super. Not to knock 2e or 4e, but 3e came along at the right time with the right system, and hooked a lot of us. You can pretty much play it forever and never get bored if you keep switching classes/DMs/worlds, and people still do.
You can get all three guild wars game for around 40 bucks right now, though they did sell them for 50 when first released. One could, thus far, have spent 300 bucks on the DDi so far. It doesn't compare at all, DDi is overpriced.
Yes, I can get all three right now for $40 (aren't there three expansion packs?), which is not the point, because I can't buy the previous years of use that came with those games. I can't time travel to 2005 and buy that time back.
Just like I can get DDi for $10 right now, and I can't get the time back for that service either.
Even if DDi is more expensive than Guild Wars, that doesn't make Guild Wars free. Especially when you take into account Guild Wars 2, and the inevitable expansion packs that will come out with that game, year after year.
Guild Wars didn't do expansions like WoW did, though they did have one after Nighfall called Eye of the North, which is serving to be a preview for Guild Wars 2 and has Gwen from the beginning of the first game is all grown up and a major character that the player interacts with. It doesn't matter that you didn't spend a lot of time on GW or just buying it now, you can play the game at your own pace since your not paying a monthly fee to do so. You can buy powers for the PVP, extra character slots and other things from the store in the log in page, but you don't have to.
There was three games, each on a different contentent and a full game on it's own, you didn't need the other two to play the third.
Sorry, but DDi pales in comparison, only having a Character Generator, a monster platen, and a rules look em up, along with a downgraded magazine that is a pale imatation to what they were before. (Is there gonna be more previews, Wizards?)
Here they are (In order of preference starting with least preferred)
A) Make adding content a micro transaction type thing where you pay by book to have it added to your account and it doesn't have to be in order preferably with a free book ot two like PHB1 (Everyone buys that one anyway) as the "Demo"...errata should probably be free & optional.
B) Connect the purchase of the actual books to getting content in the builder somehow (See my thread in the future releases section for my idea)
C) Make offline capable again (FULL FUNCTIONING)
D) A&C
E) B&C
Note: C) I would pay monthly for but i didn't include it because D&E arn't monthly payment suggestions...
[sarcasm]...and now for F) I'll be entirely content to pay monthly, deal with stupidity of an online online system...hell I'd even irrationally defend your major flaws and lack of redeeming quality...IF you gave me new books for free since I'm paying for the content anyway.....the old ones would be nice too...at least any released since I've been an Insider...oh oh I also want pie...and minis yeah i like those....yeah that's what it would take if you didn't do A,B,C,D or E....you know the rational ones....F...well I channeled the minds of the WotC decision makers to come up with that one.[/sarcasm]
Finally I'd like to point out that Stuff like DRM,Online use only, Limited installs/characters, etc. only causes more people to become pirates themselves because the pirated version is LESS restrictive. Heck some even see it as a challange (See Spore). Even Steam's seemingly unpirateable program got reengineered to bypass it's measures.
Screw cloud (I don't know what it means anyway). And once you can export characters, then you can export them to a flash drive and take it to the LFR, or Con, or specific game you're going to.
The fact is that the new CB will not have less function than the old one. The old CB didn't even give you a place to store a single character. You had to store it on your computer. Now you have a choice of storing it on your computer or on the new CB's memory. That is more options not less.
Mecha Pilot is either a shill or willfully ignorant - this is not an insult, it is a statement of fact:
It is a statement of your opinion. If it were fact, then you could furnish me with proof of its factuality (which you cannot).
WotC explained what "cloud" means. If not, Google is your friend. The fact is that the new CB will have fewer features to start (no exporting, which means no sharing and no storing, and now has a character limit, which means choosing characters to delete to make room for new ones).
You're not being accurate. There is storage, out in the aether that is the servers which support the online CB. Up to 20 characters worth of storage. You are correct that there will be no export at launch (I never stated otherwise), but we have been told that it is a coming feature.
To argue otherwise is why I say Mecha Pilot is either a shill or willfully ignorant.
The only thing in your quote I remain ignorant of is the exact definition of the "cloud". I'm not a tech junkie however (I don't even own a cell phone), so the only definition of cloud that matters to me is the meteorological one.
edit: How, exactly, will we use characters saved on an off-line "flash drive" with an online Character Builder at a con or game that doesn't have an online connection?
- Ket
If the con or game doesn't have an online connection (and thus you don't have access to the new character builder) then you print it out beforehand (the way you would if you wouldn't have access to the old CB). I mean, I know I'm old school here, but I don't think using one's common sense is such a difficult thing to do.
Guild Wars you pay for a game. Now divide that cost into how many months in between each expansion pack, which you also pay for. So the game was $50-60, you wait a year, you pay another $50-60, wait a year, pay another $50-60, wait a year...see a pattern here? I love the "OMG Guild Wars is Free!" hype. They just handwaved the cost into one lump sum instead of over time.
I realize this is offtrack, but let's be fair here. Yes, if you bought each campaign as it came out, it worked out to about a year's subscription fee for a standard MMO. BUT- not only do you get boatloads of NEW content over that year compared to an MMO that didn't have an expansion, if an expansion DID come out for an MMO, you had to pay for that as well.
You have to buy WoW. Then also subscribe. Then you subscribe the whole time that no new content comes out (or not much anyway). Then Burning Crusades hits, and you have to buy that as well, and continue subscribing. Ditto the next one and the one coming out soon. It isn't like you get expansions in subscription MMOs for free because they have been using your money to develop a sequel, you have to buy those as well. The Guild Wars model forces them to come out with content that people want and that is entertaining so that they can continue their revenue stream, just like DnD books are if you don't have the CB. The subscription model allows them to go long periods of time without having done any significant or good work (that the consumer will see anyway) because people want to keep their stuff that they already have.
Furthermore, if you want to walk away from Guild Wars for 4 months then come back, you can (much like the CB Classic... CBC). You didn't have to pay a dime either way in the intervening time, nor did you have to to pick it back up and use it again.
The reason that Guild Wars is a good analogy is that while mathematically it may work out to similar amounts, you are buying goods that you have forever. If you don't want a new campaign, you don't have to buy it. Guild Wars never raised its level cap, nor did it raise its gear stats, so a player from the original Guildwars was at least somewhat on par with someone with other campaigns. To some extent there was some power creep, but much like 4e, much of it is option creep that results in better synergies. Subscription games merely rent out the game as long as you pay them, and then when you don't want to pay for a given period of time, you can't play all the stuff you have been paying for all along. Overall this is a far less satisfying model to consumers (even if one game is better than the other, the model can be worse; I won't get into an argument about which MMO is best). People like ownership. People like to feel like they can buy something and come back and use it whenever they want. Finally, I am still playing Guild Wars, and enjoying is, and if I had been playing WoW or similar for the same period of time, I would have paid astronomically more money.
From a business perspective however, the licensing subscription model is far more enticing because you can basically get people attached, and then string them on for long periods of time regardless of what new work you do because people want to keep using the old. Forcing people to subscribe constantly to keep using what they already have gives you more breathing room if you feel like putting things to the side, taking longer, etc. because people want to keep their stuff. I truly understand why WotC has moved this direction. Understanding however does not necessarily lead to approval or satisfaction. In the end, people will have to judge if they are ready to let go or not. I'm fairly certain that everyone who is upset with WotC understands why they have done this, so arguing about their motivations will be fruitless.
Side note- I hope I don't sound mad or anything, I find that people seem to think I am angry when I write long posts when I don't intend to. Sorry in advance if I seemed aggressive.
in the argument that MMOs have better value i disagree if you play wow i want you to think of how much time you spend being raged at/raging about incompetence of players how many jerks you have trolling and scamming and how people treat each other.
DDi is a better product then MMOs its not going to screw with your life.
D&D is a good product sold by bad marketers this 20 character limit is evidence of this
dont waste your money on MMOs like guildwars or wow. you can spend god knows how many hours to run a guy to max level to be called a noob and told you suck for untold more hours until you get decent equipment where you will then be told you have no life because the game has taken all life from you, you will spend all your time working yourself up you will have no fun and your life will suffer.
I won't get into a debate about which is better, but in GW you can get to max level in a matter of hours (5-10), by design (not just cheesing or powerleveling), and get max gear in the same amount of time. The philosophy is based around team play and skill rather than grinding out levels and raids until you have sword of uber-awesome-sauce +2 instead of your sword of uber-awesome-sauce +1. All rare items merely have different cosmetics.
Obviously you can tell I am a guild wars fan, haha... Love DnD too though, don't get me wrong XD
Thank you.
So then please explain to me why every MMO on the planet limits the number of characters you can have, and please don't resort to "They are stupid and/or greedy."
Maybe this is because they also limits the number of game you can play to one (1)?
Guild Wars you pay for a game. Now divide that cost into how many months in between each expansion pack, which you also pay for. So the game was $50-60, you wait a year, you pay another $50-60, wait a year, pay another $50-60, wait a year...see a pattern here? I love the "OMG Guild Wars is Free!" hype. They just handwaved the cost into one lump sum instead of over time.
I realize this is offtrack, but let's be fair here. Yes, if you bought each campaign as it came out, it worked out to about a year's subscription fee for a standard MMO. BUT- not only do you get boatloads of NEW content over that year compared to an MMO that didn't have an expansion, if an expansion DID come out for an MMO, you had to pay for that as well.
You have to buy WoW. Then also subscribe. Then you subscribe the whole time that no new content comes out (or not much anyway). Then Burning Crusades hits, and you have to buy that as well, and continue subscribing. Ditto the next one and the one coming out soon. It isn't like you get expansions in subscription MMOs for free because they have been using your money to develop a sequel, you have to buy those as well. The Guild Wars model forces them to come out with content that people want and that is entertaining so that they can continue their revenue stream, just like DnD books are if you don't have the CB. The subscription model allows them to go long periods of time without having done any significant or good work (that the consumer will see anyway) because people want to keep their stuff that they already have.
Furthermore, if you want to walk away from Guild Wars for 4 months then come back, you can (much like the CB Classic... CBC). You didn't have to pay a dime either way in the intervening time, nor did you have to to pick it back up and use it again.
The reason that Guild Wars is a good analogy is that while mathematically it may work out to similar amounts, you are buying goods that you have forever. If you don't want a new campaign, you don't have to buy it. Guild Wars never raised its level cap, nor did it raise its gear stats, so a player from the original Guildwars was at least somewhat on par with someone with other campaigns. To some extent there was some power creep, but much like 4e, much of it is option creep that results in better synergies. Subscription games merely rent out the game as long as you pay them, and then when you don't want to pay for a given period of time, you can't play all the stuff you have been paying for all along. Overall this is a far less satisfying model to consumers (even if one game is better than the other, the model can be worse; I won't get into an argument about which MMO is best). People like ownership. People like to feel like they can buy something and come back and use it whenever they want. Finally, I am still playing Guild Wars, and enjoying is, and if I had been playing WoW or similar for the same period of time, I would have paid astronomically more money.
From a business perspective however, the licensing subscription model is far more enticing because you can basically get people attached, and then string them on for long periods of time regardless of what new work you do because people want to keep using the old. Forcing people to subscribe constantly to keep using what they already have gives you more breathing room if you feel like putting things to the side, taking longer, etc. because people want to keep their stuff. I truly understand why WotC has moved this direction. Understanding however does not necessarily lead to approval or satisfaction. In the end, people will have to judge if they are ready to let go or not. I'm fairly certain that everyone who is upset with WotC understands why they have done this, so arguing about their motivations will be fruitless.
Side note- I hope I don't sound mad or anything, I find that people seem to think I am angry when I write long posts when I don't intend to. Sorry in advance if I seemed aggressive.
Agreed I personally play DDO for similar reasons its completely free to buy AND play, you can play the entire game without spending a dime but theirs some fun extras you can buy if you want to. Recently the same goes for LOTRO. Both I could walk away from for a year and when come back I click the icon and the game starts..no money needed..
Say I'm level 6 Cleric, I am halfway through my level and want to make a level 7 cleric to get ready but dont want to lose my information.
I know there are people out there that plan their characters like this for multiple levels in advance. Thats REALLY going to hurt them.
There is absolutely no reason for the 20 character limit. All it will be is a vehicle for them to charge you a premium fee for more storage access.
Question - Whats this do for some people like me who like to pre make their characters in advance and save them?
Say I'm level 6 Cleric, I am halfway through my level and want to make a level 7 cleric to get ready but dont want to lose my information.
I know there are people out there that plan their characters like this for multiple levels in advance. Thats REALLY going to hurt them.
There is absolutely no reason for the 20 character limit. All it will be is a vehicle for them to charge you a premium fee for more storage access.
No it's ok their is a reason like Paulo said its to protect from piracy/using a script because their programmers couldn't hack their way out of a paper bag so they decided to do that instead.
Question - Whats this do for some people like me who like to pre make their characters in advance and save them?
Say I'm level 6 Cleric, I am halfway through my level and want to make a level 7 cleric to get ready but dont want to lose my information.
I know there are people out there that plan their characters like this for multiple levels in advance. Thats REALLY going to hurt them.
There is absolutely no reason for the 20 character limit. All it will be is a vehicle for them to charge you a premium fee for more storage access.
No it's ok their is a reason like Paulo said its to protect from piracy/using a script because their programmers couldn't hack their way out of a paper bag so they decided to do that instead.
If the programmers can not defend against a web attack, then maybe the should look at their resources that configure the firewalls, load balancers, account threshhold, IDS/IPS, and other possible mitigation points beyonf the software.
************
Please return discussion to the topic of the thread, or it may need to be closed.
Yes, those are two big IFs, but I'd rather the programmers spend their time working on those changes than trying to up the limit on online character storage.
As long as they get the option to save locally and share characters with other accounts, then I am ok with a 20 character limit.
Yes, those are two big IFs, but I'd rather the programmers spend their time working on those changes than trying to up the limit on online character storage.
Well they have said it's coming SOON but we all know what that means around here...so don't hold your breath.
[Half-Joking]On the other hand this could all just be a giant ruse and there's actually someone with a brain at WotC who thought hey people might get upset at our >Fifty< Char limit so why don't we say that it's only >Twenty< than when we actually unleash "Project Money Grab" we'll also announce due to customer feedback we've "increased" the limit to 50 with a possibilty of further increase "Soon" and than we'll be applauded[/Half-Joking]
However, no one in this entire thread has mentioned an import tool design that allows for that sort of swapping - not even the developement (sic) manager nor Mudbunny.
I didn't mention it because it totally and completely slipped my mind. I guess I just assumed that if you were to give an update with Exporting functionality, Importing would be there too.
But I am glad that people are finally bring up good responses to the people (Mech Pilot and Kalex the Omen) that I couldn't necessarily get across. As a matter of fact, someone in this thread... mentioned that the fundamental purpose of the character builder is to make characters. With a game that has:
25 Classes (+1 For Hybrid)
~300 Hybrid Combinations
36 races
At least 2 Builds per class
(Math may be completely and utter fail. Be warned.)
20 characters doesn't encompass anything in there. By that I mean you can't have 1 of everything on that list. Classes, races, although you could possibly get away with builds!
Once the export feature is in place, you will be able to make as many characters as you want with the new CB and save them all on your hardware. The 20 character limit is only a limit to how many can be stored out on the cloud. Not that it really matters though. The spaces on the CB are like a workbench, they are a place to work on your characters; but it's not a place intended for long-term storage of finished work.
And yes, I know people have complained about the inconvenience of having to save a character to their hardware, delete it from the cloud, then import another character to work on (something I liken to putting away a finished work and cleaning off your workbench before starting another project). To those people I say try it by hand. Search through a pile of printed character sheets for every character you have generated (and for some of you, especially the poster who said he has 240 characters, that's a forest worth of paper) to locate the character you want to work on.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
However, no one in this entire thread has mentioned an import tool design that allows for that sort of swapping - not even the developement (sic) manager nor Mudbunny.
I didn't mention it because it totally and completely slipped my mind. I guess I just assumed that if you were to give an update with Exporting functionality, Importing would be there too.
But I am glad that people are finally bring up good responses to the people (Mech Pilot and Kalex the Omen) that I couldn't necessarily get across. As a matter of fact, someone in this thread... mentioned that the fundamental purpose of the character builder is to make characters. With a game that has:
25 Classes (+1 For Hybrid)
~300 Hybrid Combinations
36 races
At least 2 Builds per class
(Math may be completely and utter fail. Be warned.)
20 characters doesn't encompass anything in there. By that I mean you can't have 1 of everything on that list. Classes, races, although you could possibly get away with builds!
Once the export feature is in place, you will be able to make as many characters as you want with the new CB and save them all on your hardware. The 20 character limit is only a limit to how many can be stored out on the cloud. Not that it really matters though. The spaces on the CB are like a workbench, they are a place to work on your characters; but it's not a place intended for long-term storage of finished work.
And yes, I know people have complained about the inconvenience of having to save a character to their hardware, delete it from the cloud, then import another character to work on (something I liken to putting away a finished work and cleaning off your workbench before starting another project). To those people I say try it by hand. Search through a pile of printed character sheets for every character you have generated (and for some of you, especially the poster who said he has 240 characters, that's a forest worth of paper) to locate the character you want to work on.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
I am not really trying to sound rude here but I would not argue about stuff that you don't really know anything about. You have said above that you don't really know anything about computers.
The whole point of a character builder is to make the process easier. Why would someone use something that is HARDER to use, supports less features, changes the way they do things and maybe someday it will be fixed? People use all kinds of things differently. What people are complaining about is it makes it harder for them to do stuff. To be honest, everything above is nothing but a work around for a poorly planned project. This is a business, people are paying for this. This is not some guy working in his garage on a 3x3 workbench building you a bunkbed in his spare time.
However, no one in this entire thread has mentioned an import tool design that allows for that sort of swapping - not even the developement (sic) manager nor Mudbunny.
I didn't mention it because it totally and completely slipped my mind. I guess I just assumed that if you were to give an update with Exporting functionality, Importing would be there too.
But I am glad that people are finally bring up good responses to the people (Mech Pilot and Kalex the Omen) that I couldn't necessarily get across. As a matter of fact, someone in this thread... mentioned that the fundamental purpose of the character builder is to make characters. With a game that has:
25 Classes (+1 For Hybrid)
~300 Hybrid Combinations
36 races
At least 2 Builds per class
(Math may be completely and utter fail. Be warned.)
20 characters doesn't encompass anything in there. By that I mean you can't have 1 of everything on that list. Classes, races, although you could possibly get away with builds!
Once the export feature is in place, you will be able to make as many characters as you want with the new CB and save them all on your hardware. The 20 character limit is only a limit to how many can be stored out on the cloud. Not that it really matters though. The spaces on the CB are like a workbench, they are a place to work on your characters; but it's not a place intended for long-term storage of finished work.
And yes, I know people have complained about the inconvenience of having to save a character to their hardware, delete it from the cloud, then import another character to work on (something I liken to putting away a finished work and cleaning off your workbench before starting another project). To those people I say try it by hand. Search through a pile of printed character sheets for every character you have generated (and for some of you, especially the poster who said he has 240 characters, that's a forest worth of paper) to locate the character you want to work on.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
I am not really trying to sound rude here but I would not argue about stuff that you don't really know anything about. You have said above that you don't really know anything about computers.
And if I were making an argument related to the technology itself, I would indeed be talking about something I don't understand. As it is however, I'm speaking about the use of a technology; which requires considerably less knowledge of how it works on a scientific level.
The whole point of a character builder is to make the process easier. Why would someone use something that is HARDER to use, supports less features, changes the way they do things and maybe someday it will be fixed? People use all kinds of things differently. What people are complaining about is it makes it harder for them to do stuff.
"HARDER" compared to what? The new CB is still supposed to be a far cry better than doing it by hand. Of course, the same was said of the old CB and I personally found it worthless. Whenever a technology, especially a computer program, is "upgraded" there are always issues (even those of us without a background in programming know that). I can't tell you how many people I've heard talking about how they bought the latest OS for their computer only to find it's all buggy, or that the UI feels clunky compared to what they're used to. In time, people adapt to new technology. Sometimes, they even come to like it better than the old stuff.
To be honest, everything above is nothing but a work around for a poorly planned project. This is a business, people are paying for this. This is not some guy working in his garage on a 3x3 workbench building you a bunkbed in his spare time.
The workbench comparison was to users of the CB, not it's makers. When a person creates/edits a character they do it on the "workbench" (the CB). Finished projects are not meant to be stored on your workbench (although, unfortunately, that will be the situation until the export feature is added). A person's workbench only needs to be large enough for the one or two projects they're working on; not large enough that they can stack all of their projects on it at once. Also, I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that they can simulaneously modify/create more than 20 characters at one time. Until I see this done, I contend that the CB really only needs 5-10 character slots; and that's frankly being generous.
Once the export feature is in place, you will be able to make as many characters as you want with the new CB and save them all on your hardware. The 20 character limit is only a limit to how many can be stored out on the cloud. Not that it really matters though. The spaces on the CB are like a workbench, they are a place to work on your characters; but it's not a place intended for long-term storage of finished work.
And yes, I know people have complained about the inconvenience of having to save a character to their hardware, delete it from the cloud, then import another character to work on (something I liken to putting away a finished work and cleaning off your workbench before starting another project). To those people I say try it by hand. Search through a pile of printed character sheets for every character you have generated (and for some of you, especially the poster who said he has 240 characters, that's a forest worth of paper) to locate the character you want to work on.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
And until the export feature is in place (which will be when again?), it's a crippling problem.
Once the export feature is in place, you will be able to make as many characters as you want with the new CB and save them all on your hardware. The 20 character limit is only a limit to how many can be stored out on the cloud. Not that it really matters though. The spaces on the CB are like a workbench, they are a place to work on your characters; but it's not a place intended for long-term storage of finished work.
And yes, I know people have complained about the inconvenience of having to save a character to their hardware, delete it from the cloud, then import another character to work on (something I liken to putting away a finished work and cleaning off your workbench before starting another project). To those people I say try it by hand. Search through a pile of printed character sheets for every character you have generated (and for some of you, especially the poster who said he has 240 characters, that's a forest worth of paper) to locate the character you want to work on.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
And until the export feature is in place (which will be when again?), it's a crippling problem.
It's a problem, yes, I've never said it wasn't. How "crippling" a problem it is depends on how dependent one has become upon the CB. Some people just gotta run a USB cable full of CB straight into their veins, and others don't.
And until the export feature is in place (which will be when again?), it's a crippling problem.
It's a problem, yes, I've never said it wasn't. How "crippling" a problem it is depends on how dependent one has become upon the CB. Some people just gotta run a USB cable full of CB straight into their veins, and others don't.
Sorry, I'll clarify: it's a crippling problem for the software. Sure you can get around it by not using the software at all, but that hardly speaks for the problem being not-so-bad.
And until the export feature is in place (which will be when again?), it's a crippling problem.
It's a problem, yes, I've never said it wasn't. How "crippling" a problem it is depends on how dependent one has become upon the CB. Some people just gotta run a USB cable full of CB straight into their veins, and others don't.
Sorry, I'll clarify: it's a crippling problem for the software. Sure you can get around it by not using the software at all, but that hardly speaks for the problem being not-so-bad.
How is it crippling? The CB can still be used to create and print characters. That means it's most basic function is fulfilled. That people find the lack of an export feature at launch to be a significant inconvenience is something I can sympathize with; but it doesn't cripple the software.
As I have said before, I believe the lack of updates for the old CB has been due to WotC working on the transition to the new CB (it would be foolish to launch a new CB w/o exclusive content). If we were to wait for the new CB to have the export function, that would likely mean at least one more month without any updates to the CB. WotC made a business decision to implement an unfinished version of the new CB; quite likely in an attempt to quell the anger felt by those who have been upset by the lack of updates. I believe it came down to a choice of what would be less offensive to DDI's customers: a) no new updates while the new CB is finished, or b) a new CB that lacks all of the functions they intend for it to have.
It's crippling because it leaves no work-around for people who need access to more than 20 characters without doing something like not using the CB for some or all of it. That impacts DMs more than people who are solely players, but it's still a huge issue that should never have been an issue. I understand wanting to have some initial limit, but 20 is plainly ludicrous.
Wait. Your post was unclear on the issue. Which are you saying is "crippling"? The 20 character limit? Or the lack of an export feature at launch? Neither of these are crippling, but I do agree that (together) they add up to a bad situation. Once the export feature is in place however, the issue completely disappears.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
Until the export feature is more than just something they are working on it is most certainly not a moot point.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
Until the export feature is more than just something they are working on it is most certainly not a moot point.
I have already stated that the export feature needs to be completed. I have likewise stated the reason why I believe the new CB is being released without it. Until the export feature is in place, there is a problem (exactly how crippling it is depedns on one's level of dependance upon the CB). Once the xport feature is in place, the character limit is moot. Unless, of course, you wish to meet me at a public place where you can show me how you go about making/editing more than 20 characters simultaneously.
However, no one in this entire thread has mentioned an import tool design that allows for that sort of swapping - not even the developement (sic) manager nor Mudbunny.
I didn't mention it because it totally and completely slipped my mind. I guess I just assumed that if you were to give an update with Exporting functionality, Importing would be there too.
But I am glad that people are finally bring up good responses to the people (Mech Pilot and Kalex the Omen) that I couldn't necessarily get across. As a matter of fact, someone in this thread... mentioned that the fundamental purpose of the character builder is to make characters. With a game that has:
25 Classes (+1 For Hybrid)
~300 Hybrid Combinations
36 races
At least 2 Builds per class
(Math may be completely and utter fail. Be warned.)
20 characters doesn't encompass anything in there. By that I mean you can't have 1 of everything on that list. Classes, races, although you could possibly get away with builds!
Once the export feature is in place, you will be able to make as many characters as you want with the new CB and save them all on your hardware. The 20 character limit is only a limit to how many can be stored out on the cloud. Not that it really matters though. The spaces on the CB are like a workbench, they are a place to work on your characters; but it's not a place intended for long-term storage of finished work.
And yes, I know people have complained about the inconvenience of having to save a character to their hardware, delete it from the cloud, then import another character to work on (something I liken to putting away a finished work and cleaning off your workbench before starting another project). To those people I say try it by hand. Search through a pile of printed character sheets for every character you have generated (and for some of you, especially the poster who said he has 240 characters, that's a forest worth of paper) to locate the character you want to work on.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
Judging from the amount of back and forth going on between you and I, along with several other forum posters, I'm just going to say that you don't understand the problem fully, at least from my perspective.
So with my last attempt at trying to reason, I'm just going to say that any argument putting its full backing on the export feature is moot because the export feature doesn't exist. Until someone can come up with a reason why the 20 character limit is beneficial or superior to the Character Builder Classic [That doesn't have to do with exporting], there is not much more to be said.
So with my last attempt at trying to reason, I'm just going to say that any argument putting its full backing on the export feature is moot because the export feature doesn't exist. Until someone can come up with a reason why the 20 character limit is beneficial or superior to the Character Builder Classic [That doesn't have to do with exporting], there is not much more to be said.
The reason for coming up with the 20 character limit is benificial to WotC because...
A. It forces the use of single user accounts (or more accurately, trys)
B. It allows for expansion at a later date for a cost increase (Want another ten characters? Just pay an extra $5.99 per month)
In terms of benifit to the user, there is none.
It's crippling because it leaves no work-around for people who need access to more than 20 characters without doing something like not using the CB for some or all of it. That impacts DMs more than people who are solely players, but it's still a huge issue that should never have been an issue. I understand wanting to have some initial limit, but 20 is plainly ludicrous.
Wait. Your post was unclear on the issue. Which are you saying is "crippling"? The 20 character limit? Or the lack of an export feature at launch? Neither of these are crippling, but I do agree that (together) they add up to a bad situation. Once the export feature is in place however, the issue completely disappears.
What I had said is that until the export feature is added (which will be when again?) the 20-character limit is a crippling problem.
Or at least that's what I meant to say, my apologies if it was unclear.
That being said, I will not renew until we get that export feature.
"HARDER" compared to what? The new CB is still supposed to be a far cry better than doing it by hand. Of course, the same was said of the old CB and I personally found it worthless. Whenever a technology, especially a computer program, is "upgraded" there are always issues (even those of us without a background in programming know that). I can't tell you how many people I've heard talking about how they bought the latest OS for their computer only to find it's all buggy, or that the UI feels clunky compared to what they're used to. In time, people adapt to new technology. Sometimes, they even come to like it better than the old stuff.
So your arguement is, it's better then nothing for the same price. Brilliant!
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
Until the export feature is more than just something they are working on it is most certainly not a moot point.
I have already stated that the export feature needs to be completed. I have likewise stated the reason why I believe the new CB is being released without it. Until the export feature is in place, there is a problem (exactly how crippling it is depedns on one's level of dependance upon the CB). Once the xport feature is in place, the character limit is moot. Unless, of course, you wish to meet me at a public place where you can show me how you go about making/editing more than 20 characters simultaneously.
How exactly does working on 20 chars simultaneously figure into the equation? The whole idea behind this new CB is all your stuff is "in the cloud", NOT on your computer. It's one of the top selling points. You assumption of a 20 char workbench is silly. No self respecting developer would build something like that. If that were in fact the case, they would have built the whole thing around local storage and not bothered with a cloud based solution.
If your going to be a apologist, stick to a subject your familair with. Else your just making yourself sound silly to those of us who do this for a living.
Previously all my characters were synced via DropBox or a flash drive. When traveling to a convention, I had access to all of them. At a convention, I never know what I will play.
Characters in my home campaigns are at about 15 right now, but those are not good for conventions. My stable of Organized Play characters far exceeds the 20 limit. These are also the characters that would gain any (even minimal) utility from the cloud.
It is ridiculous to constantly Import and Export characters as I want to work on them. That is not a feature, it is a series of extra steps that I have to take now. It also completely defeats the purpose of a cloud. It shows that this cloud feature is clearly not for our benefit.
So now, onto the question of why the limit is in place.
Is it the DoS/flooding concern? I cannot possibly believe that. There are too many ways to protect the service from that kind of problem for this to be the motivating reason. Remember, only paying customers can save characters at all. Assigning some total storage quota, or a velocity limit on new characters saved, or a hard cap that was 5 or 10 times larger could handily prevent that, and if someone abuses the system, you can suspend their account and they're gone.
Is it the cost of database/storage? I don't think so, as several people have argued that file storage is cheap and the database could be kept small, but more importantly, I don't care. Wizards has demanded to save my characters themselves, as opposed to letting me do it. I expect them to solve the problem of how to do so. If it is too expensive for them, well, they should have let me keep doing it.
Is it an artificial limit to make it more difficult for me to share my account with other people? (which I do not do.) This, quite frankly, is offensive. Let me explain why. If the "average" user only uses one or two characters, then this measure doesn't help with account sharing, since 10-20 average users can use the same CB login. This only helps if the average user uses most of the slots, leaving none left over to share, which means that BY DESIGN, many users will come near to or hit the cap. For this to help with sharing wizards needs to have chosen a limit that they expect a single user to fill. I find this offensive because that means they are deliberately crippling the functionality for a single user in order to cripple it even further for multiple users.
Is it a lowballed starting point that will be raised as the kinks in the system are ironed out? Well, I hope so, but that doesn't make me feel better. Given the quality and timeliness of tools development at Wizards, I don't expect the kinks to be fixed in this new CB for a very long time. And, as it is the only way to access the freely-flowing errata and new material, I am expected to switch to it now. And saying to me "Well, maybe someday the new tool we have forced you to switch to will do what the old tool did" is not a compelling argument.
So, what does this mean to me? Well, I will hold final judgment for ten days to see what the web-CB can do. But if it can't handle even the limited houserule support of the offline-CB, is as buggy as the CB was in its early days, and has an unreasonable (for my usage) cap on the number of characters, I'll have to think long and hard about whether I think DDI is worth it for the Compendium.
And if I were making an argument related to the technology itself, I would indeed be talking about something I don't understand. As it is however, I'm speaking about the use of a technology; which requires considerably less knowledge of how it works on a scientific level.
The use of technology is suppose to make it easier to do what you want to do and to facilitate the way you want to do it.
"HARDER" compared to what? The new CB is still supposed to be a far cry better than doing it by hand. Of course, the same was said of the old CB and I personally found it worthless. Whenever a technology, especially a computer program, is "upgraded" there are always issues (even those of us without a background in programming know that). I can't tell you how many people I've heard talking about how they bought the latest OS for their computer only to find it's all buggy, or that the UI feels clunky compared to what they're used to. In time, people adapt to new technology. Sometimes, they even come to like it better than the old stuff.
Compared to the CURRENT PRODUCT. That is the POINT of the entire discussion. There is a current CB that works and fits this need. If there was not, then you comparison would work.
The workbench comparison was to users of the CB, not it's makers. When a person creates/edits a character they do it on the "workbench" (the CB). Finished projects are not meant to be stored on your workbench (although, unfortunately, that will be the situation until the export feature is added). A person's workbench only needs to be large enough for the one or two projects they're working on; not large enough that they can stack all of their projects on it at once. Also, I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that they can simulaneously modify/create more than 20 characters at one time. Until I see this done, I contend that the CB really only needs 5-10 character slots; and that's frankly being generous.
Yea, 5-10 Characters should be enough for anyone. I can't believe those greedy people who like to use our product!
I have heard that a number of times from people that did not think ahead.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
Until the export feature is more than just something they are working on it is most certainly not a moot point.
I have already stated that the export feature needs to be completed. I have likewise stated the reason why I believe the new CB is being released without it. Until the export feature is in place, there is a problem (exactly how crippling it is depedns on one's level of dependance upon the CB). Once the xport feature is in place, the character limit is moot. Unless, of course, you wish to meet me at a public place where you can show me how you go about making/editing more than 20 characters simultaneously.
The only thing you have stated is your complete lack of understanding that people where using the current CB differently than you.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
Until the export feature is more than just something they are working on it is most certainly not a moot point.
I have already stated that the export feature needs to be completed. I have likewise stated the reason why I believe the new CB is being released without it. Until the export feature is in place, there is a problem (exactly how crippling it is depedns on one's level of dependance upon the CB). Once the xport feature is in place, the character limit is moot. Unless, of course, you wish to meet me at a public place where you can show me how you go about making/editing more than 20 characters simultaneously.
How exactly does working on 20 chars simultaneously figure into the equation? The whole idea behind this new CB is all your stuff is "in the cloud", NOT on your computer. It's one of the top selling points. You assumption of a 20 char workbench is silly. No self respecting developer would build something like that. If that were in fact the case, they would have built the whole thing around local storage and not bothered with a cloud based solution.
If you have a 20 character limit, then (quite clearly) all your stuff is not intended to be on the cloud. Only as many as 20 characters are intended to be on the cloud, because that is the limit they've set.
If your going to be a apologist, stick to a subject your familair with. Else your just making yourself sound silly to those of us who do this for a living.
I'm not an apologist, but I have expected to get called that from the D&D fanbase (the single most ungrateful fanbase I've ever seen in my entire life). I've admitted several times already that the lack of an export feature at launch is a problem. I have likewise said that this problem becomes compunded when taken in conjunction with the character limit. You are more than welcome to continue using the old CB, for free, and opting to suspend your DDI sub until the export feature is added to the new one. That's a perfectly reasonable course of action if the new CB is not immediately to your liking. And you won't find me calling you anti-capitalist (or any other name) for doing so, although you have opted to hurl the apologist label at me for stating my own personal opinion.
"HARDER" compared to what? The new CB is still supposed to be a far cry better than doing it by hand. Of course, the same was said of the old CB and I personally found it worthless. Whenever a technology, especially a computer program, is "upgraded" there are always issues (even those of us without a background in programming know that). I can't tell you how many people I've heard talking about how they bought the latest OS for their computer only to find it's all buggy, or that the UI feels clunky compared to what they're used to. In time, people adapt to new technology. Sometimes, they even come to like it better than the old stuff.
So your arguement is, it's better then nothing for the same price. Brilliant!
My arguement is that (as of the 16th) the new CB is the only game in town so to speak (if you want a fully updated CB, that is). The old CB will never get any more updates, and it will grow more and more out of touch with the most current rules of the game. If you're content to make do with a CB that will get progressively farther out of date, then please continue to use the old one to your heart's content.
"HARDER" compared to what? The new CB is still supposed to be a far cry better than doing it by hand. Of course, the same was said of the old CB and I personally found it worthless. Whenever a technology, especially a computer program, is "upgraded" there are always issues (even those of us without a background in programming know that). I can't tell you how many people I've heard talking about how they bought the latest OS for their computer only to find it's all buggy, or that the UI feels clunky compared to what they're used to. In time, people adapt to new technology. Sometimes, they even come to like it better than the old stuff.
Compared to the CURRENT PRODUCT. That is the POINT of the entire discussion. There is a current CB that works and fits this need. If there was not, then you comparison would work.
As of the 16th, there is no more current product (there is, but it will grow ever increasingly out of date with the most current D&D rules). The old CB is being put to bed, like a vehicle line that will no longer be produced. You still have your car from the old line, but it will receive no more support from the company that made it and it will grow ever older and less capable of fulfilling your needs over time. Because the old CB is no longer fully up to date and will never get more updates, it is a sunk cost and therefore irrelevant. If you are content with the old CB, in spite of it not being fully updated, then please continue to use it as you see fit. I'm not trying to say that anyone must retain their DDI sub, or that they must renew it at a later time (though they may wish to after the export feature or the next update is added). By all means, make the choice that is right for you and your gaming group.
The workbench comparison was to users of the CB, not it's makers. When a person creates/edits a character they do it on the "workbench" (the CB). Finished projects are not meant to be stored on your workbench (although, unfortunately, that will be the situation until the export feature is added). A person's workbench only needs to be large enough for the one or two projects they're working on; not large enough that they can stack all of their projects on it at once. Also, I have yet to see anyone demonstrate that they can simulaneously modify/create more than 20 characters at one time. Until I see this done, I contend that the CB really only needs 5-10 character slots; and that's frankly being generous.
Yea, 5-10 Characters should be enough for anyone. I can't believe those greedy people who like to use our product!
I have heard that a number of times from people that did not think ahead.
I'm not saying people are being greedy by wanting more character slots. People always want more convenience. Since the CB is itself a convenience-based product, it's not unreasonable to expect people to want it to become more convenient over time. The thing is though, that convenience usually comes in that way: over time. The new CB is a new product. It has had no time to develop more convenience.
Until someone shows me that they are biologically capable of simultaneously creating/editing more than 20 characters at a time, the character limit argument is a moot point.
Until the export feature is more than just something they are working on it is most certainly not a moot point.
I have already stated that the export feature needs to be completed. I have likewise stated the reason why I believe the new CB is being released without it. Until the export feature is in place, there is a problem (exactly how crippling it is depedns on one's level of dependance upon the CB). Once the xport feature is in place, the character limit is moot. Unless, of course, you wish to meet me at a public place where you can show me how you go about making/editing more than 20 characters simultaneously.
The only thing you have stated is your complete lack of understanding that people where using the current CB differently than you.
I do understand that people are using the CB differently than I am. They kind of have to be using it differently than I am, because I am not using it (its inability to support homebrew material makes it useless to me). If the old CB is more appropriate to your needs than the new on is, then (again) please continue to use the one that makes the most sense for you.
End of story, complete, end of line...
....then announce the new character builder offering no new updates to the old builder
Q: Can I export my character file to share with others?
A: While this feature won’t be available at launch, we understand that this is important to our players and are working on rolling this functionality out soon. For now, you can import your characters into the new tool, modify and save them to your subscription profile.
Q: Can I still use my previously created characters on the new Character Builder?
A: Yes, you can. The new Character Builder has an import button that can be used to take character files saved on your hard drive and import them into the web-based Character Builder application.
Q: If I end my subscription, what happens to the characters I’ve created or imported to the Character Builder?
A: Characters you’ve created on the new version or imported from the older version of the Character Builder will remain in our database for twelve months after the subscription expires. If you renew your subscription within that twelve month period, you will be able to access your characters again.
34. Will we be able to save data(characters, monsters, etc) to your servers, so we can access them from anywhere?
Yes. That's the whole point 
I reject your premise, whole cloth, that the character builder is not intended as a permanent storage space.
Import is intended to import old character builder files. Export is a 'feature' that 'players' care about - not integral to the program. If your sub runs out, you're not "totally fine because you only have them up there temporarily while you're working on them", you "lose them until you resubscribe". /THE WHOLE POINT/ is cloud STORAGE so you can access characters from anywhere.
However, no one in this entire thread has mentioned an import tool design that allows for that sort of swapping - not even the developement (sic) manager nor Mudbunny.
I didn't mention it because it totally and completely slipped my mind. I guess I just assumed that if you were to give an update with Exporting functionality, Importing would be there too.
But I am glad that people are finally bring up good responses to the people (Mech Pilot and Kalex the Omen) that I couldn't necessarily get across. As a matter of fact, someone in this thread... mentioned that the fundamental purpose of the character builder is to make characters. With a game that has:
25 Classes (+1 For Hybrid)
~300 Hybrid Combinations
36 races
At least 2 Builds per class
(Math may be completely and utter fail. Be warned.)
20 characters doesn't encompass anything in there. By that I mean you can't have 1 of everything on that list. Classes, races, although you could possibly get away with builds!
And that doesn't even take into consideration that you might have similar characters only slightly different at different levels.
Jeesh.
This is the Character Vault disscussion all over again. Give us the ability to save to our own computers, right from the "client" instead of this export/import stuff. Have the 20 character Cloud Nine for "portability" and our own HD for our convinience. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Jeesh.
While I completely agree with that idea, you will (no doubt) find people whining about how 20 chars is still too low a number.
This is the Character Vault disscussion all over again. Give us the ability to save to our own computers, right from the "client" instead of this export/import stuff. Have the 20 character Cloud Nine for "portability" and our own HD for our convinience. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Jeesh.
That is certainly an idea that would work just fine for me. I'd still say 20 characters is too small to use "cloud storage! yay!" as one of the selling points though.
This is the Character Vault disscussion all over again. Give us the ability to save to our own computers, right from the "client" instead of this export/import stuff. Have the 20 character Cloud Nine for "portability" and our own HD for our convinience. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Jeesh.
Unfortunately, because they are running Silverlight in a browser the character builder won't be able to directly access your hard drive (much like Java web apps, Silverlight runs in a sandbox and is restricted from doing certain things on your computer). The export/import stuff is going to be the only way they can do it.
That is certainly an idea that would work just fine for me. I'd still say 20 characters is too small to use "cloud storage! yay!" as one of the selling points though.
This is the part I'm looking at.
Don't shine us on with "Look how cool this rock is. Look it can sit. It can stay. It can bark (though it's a silent bark). Don't you want a pet rock too? It's so much better then that lousy dog you have."
"But I can play fetch with my dog."
"Yes, but can you take your dog to the library? No. But you can sure take your pet rock with you. See how much better the pet rock is?"
Just sell us what you really have, don't try to make it seem so much better, because on-release, it won't be. It will literally be worse then what we have now. Many missing features does not equal access "anywhere"*
*anywhere being anywhere you have reliable internet access.
1) I let my D&Di subscription expire (and, in fact, despite the fact I turned off auto-renew, it renewed today, though it was a glitch with a previous subscription, so no biggie.)
2) I am going to create my characters using... pen/pencil and paper.
Ta-da! No character limit, no worrying about bugs or missing features. I only need to worry that my (a) math is correct and (b) I keep up-to-date on the rules.
Beyond that, the CB (whether stand alone on my machine or web-based) does nothing for me that I cannot do for myself. If I felt so inclined, I'd just do what I did for 3.x and make an excel spreadsheet that did all this stuff, but it really isn't necessary. With the appropriate card designer (and you can find a billion of them on-line), I can make my own power cards.
And the best part? It's FREE.
No, this isn't the solution for everyone - I get that. But, if the strictures of the web-based (or heck, even the downloadable version) are too much for you, just go back to the way people have always done it. It works just fine (sort of like telling my students they cannot use laptops in class - hey, people have taken notes for centuries with a writing instrument and writing surface - surely today's students can do that, too.) :-)
I am going to create my characters using... pen/pencil and paper.
Glad you found something that works for you.
I am going to create my characters using... pen/pencil and paper.
Glad you found something that works for you.
Don't get me wrong - if I had my druthers, I'd use a computer to do it - it IS more efficient, less prone to error, and looks better than my handwriting (although I print everything in block letters, so it's pretty clean anyway.)
But, at the enc of the day, WotC's solution seems like a far bigger headache than it's worth (at the present.)
Of course, I never have more than 3 to 4 characters at a time, so the 20 character limit doesn't bother me.
WotC's solution seems like a far bigger headache than it's worth (at the present.)
Fair enough. I'm going to wait until the new builder is out before I pass judgement. I'll give it a fair chance, and then decide what to do.
Though I know this won't help many, I have settled on the solution that will work best for me (and, frankly, for my group):
1) I let my D&Di subscription expire (and, in fact, despite the fact I turned off auto-renew, it renewed today, though it was a glitch with a previous subscription, so no biggie.)
2) I am going to create my characters using... pen/pencil and paper.
Ta-da! No character limit, no worrying about bugs or missing features. I only need to worry that my (a) math is correct and (b) I keep up-to-date on the rules.
Beyond that, the CB (whether stand alone on my machine or web-based) does nothing for me that I cannot do for myself. If I felt so inclined, I'd just do what I did for 3.x and make an excel spreadsheet that did all this stuff, but it really isn't necessary. With the appropriate card designer (and you can find a billion of them on-line), I can make my own power cards.
And the best part? It's FREE.
No, this isn't the solution for everyone - I get that. But, if the strictures of the web-based (or heck, even the downloadable version) are too much for you, just go back to the way people have always done it. It works just fine (sort of like telling my students they cannot use laptops in class - hey, people have taken notes for centuries with a writing instrument and writing surface - surely today's students can do that, too.) :-)
you know what. i did that last night, 3 times. and it was a major pain in the butt. I spent 90 mins on 3 chars. With the CB I'd be done in 15 mins and on to something more productive.
This is the Character Vault disscussion all over again. Give us the ability to save to our own computers, right from the "client" instead of this export/import stuff. Have the 20 character Cloud Nine for "portability" and our own HD for our convinience. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Jeesh.
Unfortunately, because they are running Silverlight in a browser the character builder won't be able to directly access your hard drive (much like Java web apps, Silverlight runs in a sandbox and is restricted from doing certain things on your computer). The export/import stuff is going to be the only way they can do it.
how about they use the same export/import ability that was in the original character builder? Put the data on the screen and let me copy and paste it into notepad.
you know what. i did that last night, 3 times. and it was a major pain in the butt. I spent 90 mins on 3 chars. With the CB I'd be done in 15 mins and on to something more productive.
Well, in all honesty, I don't mind taking longer to make my character. In fact, when making a character in the current CB, I spend 30 minutes to an hour or more making one character. It isn't because it's difficult or cumbersome (from a technical perspective, I mean), but because I spend a lot of time reading over options, thinking about those choices, and so on. The CB doesn't really make the process markedly FASTER for me, but it is more efficient in that I have all the stuff I need in one place, that's true.
But, that's just my experience. YMMV.
you know what. i did that last night, 3 times. and it was a major pain in the butt. I spent 90 mins on 3 chars. With the CB I'd be done in 15 mins and on to something more productive.
Well, in all honesty, I don't mind taking longer to make my character. In fact, when making a character in the current CB, I spend 30 minutes to an hour or more making one character. It isn't because it's difficult or cumbersome (from a technical perspective, I mean), but because I spend a lot of time reading over options, thinking about those choices, and so on. The CB doesn't really make the process markedly FASTER for me, but it is more efficient in that I have all the stuff I need in one place, that's true.
But, that's just my experience. YMMV.
On paper you'd be taking 90 mins. Just so you know I was building Essentials characters too, which have alot less options. it's just cumbersome once youve been using a tool after a while. And honestly I have better thing to do then slowly cultivate my character. I wanna play and have fun not analyze.
you know what. i did that last night, 3 times. and it was a major pain in the butt. I spent 90 mins on 3 chars. With the CB I'd be done in 15 mins and on to something more productive.
Well, in all honesty, I don't mind taking longer to make my character. In fact, when making a character in the current CB, I spend 30 minutes to an hour or more making one character. It isn't because it's difficult or cumbersome (from a technical perspective, I mean), but because I spend a lot of time reading over options, thinking about those choices, and so on. The CB doesn't really make the process markedly FASTER for me, but it is more efficient in that I have all the stuff I need in one place, that's true.
But, that's just my experience. YMMV.
On paper you'd be taking 90 mins. Just so you know I was building Essentials characters too, which have alot less options. it's just cumbersome once youve been using a tool after a while. And honestly I have better thing to do then slowly cultivate my character. I wanna play and have fun not analyze.
I think that's really why it's taking you longer: that you're accustomed to the builder. If you had been making characters by hand, you would have continually reinforced in your mind what things are in what sections of what books. It becomes a lot easier to find stuff in the books if you've been using them for a while.
I know where everything is in the books, and I know what I need. The problem is it's all over the place. And all the math is a pain. I don't want to think about that, I want to play the game. CB is 5 mins and I have a char. Gaming for me about having a fun RP experience, not theorycrafting my chars.
Gaming for me about having a fun RP experience, not theorycrafting my chars.
I enjoy both.
When a character dies and I know he isn't coming back I delete it. I also don't have crap in my basement or in my garage. My vehicle is clean and I only have cloths that I wear/fit me in my closet.
I am starting a hoarders show for RPG's. I will come to your house with a film crew and we will go over the books you have and the games you "really play" and then we will sift through your charaters.
It will sound like this;
"Really, you need the Al Qadim box set. You still have a hankering to play a Barber character... Oh its a collectors item, I see. Well I know it has value to your local gaming store because the guy has a rack of this crap that hasn't sold an item in years. I am doing my Christmas episode at his store."
I see you have 23 barbarians in you character files. Were you aware you make the same feat and at-will choices 83% of the time? The names seem to change but the build lives on..."
This is crazy, I have 6 chars on my builder right now. The one I play and the ones I made as pre-gens for a game I run.
When a character dies and I know he isn't coming back I delete it. I also don't have crap in my basement or in my garage. My vehicle is clean and I only have cloths that I wear/fit me in my closet.
I am starting a hoarders show for RPG's. I will come to your house with a film crew and we will go over the books you have and the games you "really play" and then we will sift through your charaters.
It will sound like this;
"Really, you need the Al Qadim box set. You still have a hankering to play a Barber character... Oh its a collectors item, I see. Well I know it has value to your local gaming store because the guy has a rack of this crap that hasn't sold an item in years. I am doing my Christmas episode at his store."
I see you have 23 barbarians in you character files. Were you aware you make the same feat and at-will choices 83% of the time? The names seem to change but the build lives on..."
I don't have 20 characters either - but I am not assuming that other people don't. Just becuase you don't doesn't mean that other people don't. Stop assuming everyone plays the same as you do.
20 character limit is stupid. And their "reasons" for this are as well.
I also don't have crap in my basement or in my garage. My vehicle is clean and I only have cloths that I wear/fit me in my closet.
I am starting a hoarders show for RPG's. I will come to your house with a film crew and we will go over the books you have and the games you "really play" and then we will sift through your charaters.
It will sound like this;
"Really, you need the Al Qadim box set. You still have a hankering to play a Barber character... Oh its a collectors item, I see. Well I know it has value to your local gaming store because the guy has a rack of this crap that hasn't sold an item in years. I am doing my Christmas episode at his store."
Wow. Is it fun to de-value the fact that some people have been playing for many years and don't feel like parting with their collection? I don't normally respond to trolls, but I will in this one instance just to ask what you think people SHOULD do with their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition books? On second thought, never mind. I don't actually care what you think about it.
I just don't think that the majority of people really have more than 20 characters in their builders because they need thatmany. I think they have them because they simply never bothered to get rid of the ones they never used/look at/ or care for.
I also think its lame to put such a small bandwith tether on folks in this day and age. Its so much cheaper for my workplaced to buy more storage than it is for them to create and implement an email storage policy and then spend man hourse enforcing it and man hours actually deleting things that its funny.
We are all gamer hoarders, I just think its funny we have nobody to to call us on it.
btw (where do think I got the spelling for Al Qadim? Off the box on the shelf right beside me. The box that has been unopened for almost 12 years. Until tonight.
Hahah it was just a joke. I thought it was funny... That would be a great show. So don't de-value my innovative enterprises.
I just don't think that the majority of people really have more than 20 characters in their builders because they need thatmany. I think they have them because they simply never bothered to get rid of the ones they never used/look at/ or care for.
I also think its lame to put such a small bandwith tether on folks in this day and age. Its so much cheaper for my workplaced to buy more storage than it is for them to create and implement an email storage policy and then spend man hourse enforcing it and man hours actually deleting things that its funny.
We are all gamer hoarders, I just think its funny we have nobody to to call us on it.
btw (where do think I got the spelling for Al Qadim? Off the box on the shelf right beside me. The box that has been unopened for almost 12 years. Until tonight.
First... I still have my origional white box. I've played D&D longer than most of you have been alive. I have every iteration of the game, and still have all my books and box sets. I keep every one of them around for the same reason. Ideas. Almost every book has an adea in it. be it a plot point, magic item, monster, etc. But theres always something I can grab and make into something new for my campaign.
We are not hoarders, the 20 chatacter limit is nothing but a vehicle for the future. WotC's vehicle to squeeze more money out of their dwindling customer base. It will be their first micro transaction. Extra character slots for extra money. There is no answer to why there is a 20 character limit. and no reason for there to be a limit so low.
Unfortunately, because they are running Silverlight in a browser the character builder won't be able to directly access your hard drive (much like Java web apps, Silverlight runs in a sandbox and is restricted from doing certain things on your computer). The export/import stuff is going to be the only way they can do it.
If it is going to have export capability (albeit not at launch), it has to be able to write to the hard drive. An export is really no different than "Save as..." in the long run.
This type of statement is what makes me think they are shooting for a graphically intensive character builder. Not unlike an MMO, where you can choose not just the feats and class, but also what your character looks like in 3D. Think about something like the City of Heroes character creation, and it makes a lot more sense if we are talking about 20 characters.
Or...they could just be completely arbitrary.
Yeah actual 3D models take up almost no space. Its the textures that take up massive amounts of space, and they would obviously be shared or even a one time download to the client.
I'm sure there is a plan to increase the maximum number of characters that can be stored. The way I imagine it goes along the following lines:
Nov - Character Builder is online with 20 slots
Dec/ Jan - while a lot of subscribers actually cancelled their subscription, the majority still uses the service and comes to like the tool
Feb - some new features/ additions will make a lot of people happy and the online CB will become an invaluable tool for gamers
Mar - WotC offers a new subscription for a small fee increase: "D&D Insider Premium" that let gamers store up to 50 characters
This is how I see it:
- Dec / Jan - The character builder is either late "soon" or it arrives on time with hundreds of bugs that make it nearly impossible to use.
- Feb - They fix 50% of the bugs, but introduce another 50 bugs in the update (from new content or whatnot).
- Mar - WotC offers another "perk" that does nothing for 75% of subscribers and increases the fee (which is already way beyond the initial offering).
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
Math quiz: after how many hours will I fill 1TB of space? 10TB? 40TB?
Twenty characters seems incredibly low, and I would tend to agree, but we can monitor average usage and ramp it up as needed. We just have to protect ourselves (and the service you depend on) from DDOS and other types of attacks.
I know you can't answer this, but what's to stop the same person from putting something into that script that deletes a character, and creates a new one thus tying up your bandwidth all the time.
Unfortunately, because they are running Silverlight in a browser the character builder won't be able to directly access your hard drive (much like Java web apps, Silverlight runs in a sandbox and is restricted from doing certain things on your computer). The export/import stuff is going to be the only way they can do it.
If it is going to have export capability (albeit not at launch), it has to be able to write to the hard drive. An export is really no different than "Save as..." in the long run.
Actually, that is not entirely correct. You could have an export feature where the server creates the file and gives you a URL link to the file - then when you click and save it is your web browser accessing your hard drive, not the silverlight application. You may not notice a difference, but the difference is there - and that difference is why they will not be able to do things like see characters stored on your hard drive (which is what I was responding to) You may be able to upload and export characters from the system, but the application will not be able to manipulate characters stored on your local machine.
yeah but are you really gonna make more than 20 new pcs in the month or so it takes hem to do that? that need essentials and dark sun? so once you can save pcs then you agree this is meaningless?
Your not familiar with WotC definition of "soon" then are you?
Soon - Pronounciation (Sune)
- When we have time between lay-offs, playing our own games, and naps.
- One day in the next few years.
- When we feel like it.
- In the next month or two, if your lucky. (depreciated)
Though I know this won't help many, I have settled on the solution that will work best for me (and, frankly, for my group):
1) I let my D&Di subscription expire (and, in fact, despite the fact I turned off auto-renew, it renewed today, though it was a glitch with a previous subscription, so no biggie.)
2) I am going to create my characters using... pen/pencil and paper.
Ta-da! No character limit, no worrying about bugs or missing features. I only need to worry that my (a) math is correct and (b) I keep up-to-date on the rules.
Beyond that, the CB (whether stand alone on my machine or web-based) does nothing for me that I cannot do for myself. If I felt so inclined, I'd just do what I did for 3.x and make an excel spreadsheet that did all this stuff, but it really isn't necessary. With the appropriate card designer (and you can find a billion of them on-line), I can make my own power cards.
And the best part? It's FREE.
No, this isn't the solution for everyone - I get that. But, if the strictures of the web-based (or heck, even the downloadable version) are too much for you, just go back to the way people have always done it. It works just fine (sort of like telling my students they cannot use laptops in class - hey, people have taken notes for centuries with a writing instrument and writing surface - surely today's students can do that, too.) :-)
I'd bring a digital voice activated SD sound recorder...
Second why are the DM’s bitching about storage space you have your players store their own characters and as for NPC most of the time all you need to do is make it than print it up why save it to the server? Use some common sense.
Third how many for these 100’s of characters are you playing or are you just creating one character after another if so get your self a printer and a Hard File. This is why the limit is about 20 because not only will most of you create character after character but you will never delete them so they will eventually over run the server.
Fourth have any of you who are complaining thought about the fact that you have not even tried it yet? I remember when 4th came out as well as when 3rd come out and the biggest complainers were the one that love it best. Save your complaints until it been out and you have tried it for a week or 2.
Afraid of Change anyone!!
First off as someone I the IT field 20 characters sounds about right to start with. Many of you do not understand the difference between a personal system and a company server. I suspect that the number will go up and settle around a 100 per person.
I don't know what part of the IT field you come from, but I can get unlimited storage space on a business server for $100 or less. We did the calculations already for every subscriber to have 100 per person is only 80GB or so... Easily accomplished in this day and age for pennies per customer.
Second why are the DM’s bitching about storage space you have your players store their own characters and as for NPC most of the time all you need to do is make it than print it up why save it to the server? Use some common sense.
This assumes that players are going to pay $10 per month for nothing useful but an online CB and a crappy Dragon magazine that most DMs don't allow in their games because of errata and balance issues. A compendium which is now worthless to players because the CB is online. Most don't think MMO prices are worth it for an online only CB. Since originally we were supposed to get everything for this price (VTT, CV (visualizer), CB, MB, CP (compendium), D&D magazines and whatever else there were gonna roll out).
Third how many for these 100’s of characters are you playing or are you just creating one character after another if so get your self a printer and a Hard File. This is why the limit is about 20 because not only will most of you create character after character but you will never delete them so they will eventually over run the server.
What so we have to re-enter everything each time we level one of our non-20 characters? No thanks, my time is co-opted for other things than messing with a simple program.
Fourth have any of you who are complaining thought about the fact that you have not even tried it yet? I remember when 4th came out as well as when 3rd come out and the biggest complainers were the one that love it best. Save your complaints until it been out and you have tried it for a week or 2.
Afraid of Change anyone!!
Yeah, except they have a video demo out and the features are shown working in the video. So we do actually know what it will do.
First off as someone I the IT field 20 characters sounds about right to start with. Many of you do not understand the difference between a personal system and a company server. I suspect that the number will go up and settle around a 100 per person.
Second why are the DM’s bitching about storage space you have your players store their own characters and as for NPC most of the time all you need to do is make it than print it up why save it to the server? Use some common sense.
Third how many for these 100’s of characters are you playing or are you just creating one character after another if so get your self a printer and a Hard File. This is why the limit is about 20 because not only will most of you create character after character but you will never delete them so they will eventually over run the server.
Fourth have any of you who are complaining thought about the fact that you have not even tried it yet? I remember when 4th came out as well as when 3rd come out and the biggest complainers were the one that love it best. Save your complaints until it been out and you have tried it for a week or 2.
Afraid of Change anyone!!
First, as someone in the IT field, I can tell you that 20 characters is absolutely absurdly low if we are talking about what the company can afford easily given our sub fees. For the number of actual DDi subscribers, we are talking about a pitifully low amount of space on a corporate scale.
Second, just because you don't like to run your games a certain way doesn't invalidate the desired uses of others. As a DM, I like to be able to examine my PCs at my leisure, but seeing as I only see them at sessions, making them re-copy everything for me whenever they change anything and put it in paper format for me to store and have to find would be an extremely irritating activity.
Third, most importantly of all, people play this game (and all others) differently. Have you ever been to CharOp? The amount of good that community has done for this edition is absolutely astounding, between helping new players not fall into horrible pitfalls, creating fun combinations to help imagine people's goals, finding the broken material and not only providing extensive math to back it up, but also suggesting many decent solutions to keep the feel alive. Do you know how we do that? By testing new content, by making new characters to see the combinations, by using the CB to have access to all legal material so we don't have to guess or overlook things. Let me ask you this- how many characters do most people play with at any given time? Rarely more than 3. So why not set the CB limit to 3 or 4 then? You are arguing that your way of doing things is better than everyone else, and that anyone who disagrees is lazy, and doesn't deserve consideration, even though accommodating their usage patterns would be ridiculously easy and cheap. The assumption that anyone who doesn't act or think the same way as you does not deserve consideration because they are greedy, lazy, idiotic, or whatever other pejorative is used is a fairly weak point of argument.
Fourth, I am not complaining about the look and feel, or the concept of this product. I am complaining about the lack of functionality it will 'ship' with at its launch. Not supporting houserules of any sort, and not allowing more than 20 characters are not issues of game design principle, they are matters of usability and they are plain to see for argument as to whether they are going to be hindrances until remedied. They will be to thousands of gamers.
And finally, GOD WHY AM I STILL READING AND ARGUING IN THESE THREADS???
Second why are the DM’s bitching about storage space you have your players store their own characters and as for NPC most of the time all you need to do is make it than print it up why save it to the server? Use some common sense.
Some of us like creating characters just to see how they might work.
Some of us are DMs who like having local copies of their players' PCs for quick reference while planning games.
I have 36 characters in the CB right now. 10 of them are my players PCs. The rest are either old characters I've converted to 4e but don't ever expect to play, RPGA characters that I do/have play/ed, or characters that I made because a) I found some cool art and wanted to make a character based on it, b) had an idea for a rules combo for a character and wanted to make it even if I never get a chance to play it.
NPCs don't get made in the CB. NPCs are Monster Builder creations.
First off as someone I the IT field 20 characters sounds about right to start with. Many of you do not understand the difference between a personal system and a company server. I suspect that the number will go up and settle around a 100 per person.
I'm also in the IT field, I'm a software engineer. And my largest ddi file is 547Kb. So on a 1Tb drive I could create just over 1.7 million characters.
If there are 40,000 DDi subscribers, that's about 44 characters each. And this is only 1, 1Tb drive. I assume they have a server farm.
Second why are the DM’s bitching about storage space you have your players store their own characters and as for NPC most of the time all you need to do is make it than print it up why save it to the server? Use some common sense.
As a DM I like to have a copy of my player's characters. Not only for my own review, but what if I'm playing a session and the one player can't make it at the last minute. I will have a copy of the character so I can run it.
Are you willing and are your players willing to give you their credentials to log in so you can inspect their character when it levels up.
Third how many for these 100’s of characters are you playing or are you just creating one character after another if so get your self a printer and a Hard File. This is why the limit is about 20 because not only will most of you create character after character but you will never delete them so they will eventually over run the server.
Keep the 20 character limit as a players active characters and allow the players to save the character's locally. This way I can have 50, 75, or even 200 characters. They would useless without the CB, but it frees up server space on WotC servers. Then we can easily hand a character to another player or DM via USB drive. And they can be easily uploaded to the server if I need to swap it.
Fourth have any of you who are complaining thought about the fact that you have not even tried it yet? I remember when 4th came out as well as when 3rd come out and the biggest complainers were the one that love it best. Save your complaints until it been out and you have tried it for a week or 2.
The reason we are complaining before it came out is because we are being told right off the bat that we have a 20 character limit, we can't export character's, amoung other things we currently get in CB.
Yes, essentials & Dark Sun were both added. If I was starting a new campaing great. I'm in the middle of running a campaign right now. I don't see the players needing either of these.
Afraid of Change anyone!!
Given the track record of WotC. Hell yeah we are scaried.
Unfortunately, because they are running Silverlight in a browser the character builder won't be able to directly access your hard drive (much like Java web apps, Silverlight runs in a sandbox and is restricted from doing certain things on your computer). The export/import stuff is going to be the only way they can do it.
If it is going to have export capability (albeit not at launch), it has to be able to write to the hard drive. An export is really no different than "Save as..." in the long run.
Actually, that is not entirely correct. You could have an export feature where the server creates the file and gives you a URL link to the file - then when you click and save it is your web browser accessing your hard drive, not the silverlight application. You may not notice a difference, but the difference is there - and that difference is why they will not be able to do things like see characters stored on your hard drive (which is what I was responding to) You may be able to upload and export characters from the system, but the application will not be able to manipulate characters stored on your local machine.
Possible but very inelegant. There are a lot easier ways out of the Silverlight sandbox and there is no reason that the same trick couldn't be done in the background for a Save. As far as the user interface is concerned (i.e. the front end), it is the same thing.
The fact of the matter is that an export generally only differs from "Save As..." in respect to the formats it can save to. A "Save As...", for example, might save the character as a .dnd4e character while the export feature allows you to save it as a PDF. The export requires that extra conversion step which is what makes it an export.
I shouldn't do this, but I want to help you guys out there to understand.
I could write a script in about 10 minutes that automates the new Character Builder and then creates a new level 20 character. I could run this on a number of machines (10? 20?) and let it go overnight creating, say, one character every 10 seconds.
So Paolo, how would one go about creating a new char every 10 sec? You can't even assign the ability scores in 10 sec...
This is a simple math issue from an infrastructure point of view.
I just nosed at one of my campaign folders with my players characters in... The 15th level wizard (for example) has a file size of about 350kb.
20 Characters comes in at about 7MB.
About 40,000 subscribers, comes in at about 267GB.
Remember that enterprise storage isn't quite as cheap as home storage space. Remember that it will likely be being stored in multiple mirroring and load balancing machines across multiple clusters.
Remember that they have to have backup solutions that can cope with the quantity of data involved as well.
Remember that they will want to allow for storage for other upcoming tools as well, so some of the available storage space has to be allocated for future growth.
Finally, they've no idea how many people will store 1 character or 3 dozen. So if they set a limit of 100 and everybody suddenly uploads 100 characters, they will be running at high capacity right away.
I believe the 'initially' in the statement absolutely. Its something that will change over time, based on demand, usage and their experience with the service.
So while 20 might seem small, in the broader picture of offering a new service, I can understand where they're coming from.
Additionally, once they offer external storage (or expot/import or however they do it) this issue goes away.
Actually enterprise storage of memory vs dollar is quite cheap...nonetheless the limit should be removed...or they should let you export....with that limit it is practically unusable with all my npcs...
This is a simple math issue from an infrastructure point of view.
I just nosed at one of my campaign folders with my players characters in... The 15th level wizard (for example) has a file size of about 350kb.
20 Characters comes in at about 7MB.
About 40,000 subscribers, comes in at about 267GB.
Remember that enterprise storage isn't quite as cheap as home storage space. Remember that it will likely be being stored in multiple mirroring and load balancing machines across multiple clusters.
Remember that they have to have backup solutions that can cope with the quantity of data involved as well.
Remember that they will want to allow for storage for other upcoming tools as well, so some of the available storage space has to be allocated for future growth.
Finally, they've no idea how many people will store 1 character or 3 dozen. So if they set a limit of 100 and everybody suddenly uploads 100 characters, they will be running at high capacity right away.
I believe the 'initially' in the statement absolutely. Its something that will change over time, based on demand, usage and their experience with the service.
So while 20 might seem small, in the broader picture of offering a new service, I can understand where they're coming from.
Additionally, once they offer external storage (or expot/import or however they do it) this issue goes away.
Actually enterprise storage of memory vs dollar is quite cheap...nonetheless the limit should be removed...or they should let you export....with that limit it is practically unusable with all my npcs...
I believe the podcast mentions exporting in the next update or two.
I have a lot of characters at any given time – How many characters can I save to the web-based Character Builder?Currently, the limit for saved characters is set to 20. This is something we may increase in the future.
We only get 20 characters? We can't even have one character of each class? (Completely ignoring essentials there are 26 classes currently available)
Combine that with the lack of any ability to save a character to local storage and I really have to wonder what exactly is going on in the heads of the people at WotC...
20 character limit is way dumb. It is just low enough to be bothersome. It would only cost them 10x as much storage space to make it 200, and that is just high enough to be fine by most anyone's standards. NAS storage is actually pretty cheap. 20 TB vs. 200 TB, is not really that big a deal, all things considered.
Of course, it turned out that all of the other ways the new character builder sucked made the 20 character limit kind of not such a big deal.
Its really too bad, because the old CB was quite good.