Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 intentionallywrong Feb 08, 2010 18:53:38	Hello! My group plays D&D online using GameTable, because we've got players all over the world. (I'm in Wichita, Kansas, but we have players on both coasts... as well as one guy in Brazil, and another in Australia.) While we've all got one or two PHBs, I'm the only one with a D&D Insider account. I'd love to let my fellow players use my extra downloads, but it seems like the only way to do it is for me to physically do the installation myself—or give my friend my account username and password, which is a violation of the ToS, probably, in addition to being something you Just Don't Do in the age of identity theft, even between friends. Heck, I don't even know my fiancee's password for her Facebook account, much less her banking service. Is there a way for me to generate a single-use code to remotely update the Character Builder to the full version with a current update? Is this a feature I'm completely overlooking, or does this not exist yet? Thanks!
#2 mudbunny Feb 08, 2010 22:37:00	Just to make sure I understand what you are looking for: You want to b able to remotely download the CB on the computers of some of your friends, and then remotely update it, etc, from your computer? Unfortunately, what you are looking for is, if I am understanding it right, not possible from within the Character Builder.
#3 intentionallywrong Feb 08, 2010 23:32:41	Sort of. I kind of suspect the thing I'm looking for doesn't exist. Like, consider this scenario. During the summer, my group is local: we can all play together. We bring our laptops over to the DM's house and I keep everybody's CB up-to-date with the latest content. During the school year, everybody scatters—but thanks to the power of the internet and online game tables, we can still play. But I've got these extra updates just going to waste because there's no way to update remotely. It makes me to stop having an ongoing subscription and just subscribe the summer months. I would like to keep giving you my money, but you're giving me a reason not to. When you buy Popcap's Peggle Nights, you aren't actually buying the game. You're buying a 16-digit "activation number" that, when plugged into the demo, connects to the internet for authenticity and then unlocks the full game. The Character Builder already does something very similar, but it requires you to provide your name and password. In (what I would consider) an ideal world, if I'm signed up for D&D Insider, hitting the "download character builder" link would generate one of (up to?) four activation numbers for that month; actually signing in to the CB in order to update it would require the username and either the password or the activation number. This is wishful thinking on my part, I'm sure; the ability to update the program without putting account information into the system would lead to an enormous secondary market of free activation codes. Free isn't exactly right, since there's a convenience cost of tracking down a new code every month—and there's still no evidence that all those people abusing the system would actually have paid for the subscription, in the first place.  I guess what I'm proposing is that, by allowing more freeloaders to get access to your product (as World of Goo famously did to huge effect), you increase the desirability (and therefore profitability) of your product, often in surprising ways. But I don't suppose it's easy to sell that to the policymakers.