Data from the following published materials are new this month:
Books
Primal Power™
Adventure
E3 Prince of Undeath
Online Magazines
Dragon® Issue 379
Dungeon® Issue 170
Debut material from Player’s Handbook® 3
Monk Class
Wilden Race
Enjoy!
That's how it's always* worked, despite countless threads griping about the delay.
[*always except for when the updates used to be on last Tuesdays of the month, in which case it would have been February 23 instead. There was some speculation that when they moved to first Tuesdays, we'd get content faster, but instead it turned out to just be pushing things back a week without giving anything extra or faster to the consumers.]
For November, December and January, WotC has pushed the update schedule back two months, so that as opposed to the 1st Tuesday of the month, the Character Builder, Compendium and Adventure Tools get updated on the third tuesday of the month. Come February, the updates are to resume to the first tuesday of the month.
I think you might mean to say "two weeks," rather than two months. I suspect the confusion here is less about the holiday update schedule, but just amazement over how long it takes dragon/dungeon info to get into the compendium. (Which, one has to admit, is a pretty long time.)
Is that right?
The article originally published Friday, October 2 will be in the Tuesday, December 15 update. 74 days later.
Oh nice, the completed Wilden! That was a pleasant surprise. Kind of a bummer that you guys didn't include any racial feats or the racial PP, but for now this is all I need to make me a new Druid with all the neat new Primal Power stuff. Thanks!
So Wilden are LFR legal now?
Damon
asoka, yes.
The article originally published Friday, October 2 will be in the Tuesday, December 15 update. 74 days later.
74 days is way too much...ok...I feel better after saying that...
Let's say that an article comes out on Wednesday, January 27, 2010. We all know there's no new content for the last 2 weekdays of a month at least (used to be 3, I'm giving them the day now that we're on 5-days-a-week).
It will appear in the March 2, 2010 update. Working in its favor: Feburary is only 28 days instead of 30 or 31, and March starts on a Monday, which is the 2nd-best you can do for reaching the first Tuesday of a month in a hurry.
Total time: 4 (more) days in January, 28 in Feburary, 2 in March is 34 days.
More realistic scenario...
Article comes out Wednesday, February 27, 2010. CB update: April 6, 2010. Distance: 1 in February, 31 in March, 6 in April, 38 days.
Monday March 29 -> May 4, 2010: 2 in march, 30 in April, 4 in May: 36 days.
Wednesday May 26 -> July 6: 5 + 30 + 6 = 41 days. [A very bad case for the first article too, May 3 adds 23 for a total of 64 days later.]
Whether you think 36-41 days (best case) is reasonable, I can't judge.
The theoretical worst case, barring delays, happens with the July 1 article (if they don't just decide it's a holiday and skip it): 30 days to the end of july, 31 in august, and 7 more to the first tuesday in september is 68 days.
#1 -In regards to perceived delays of content in DDI, ... blame me. Ultimately, I'm the guy to blame for the release schedule. (In fact, you can pretty much blame me for just about everything in the DDI studio realm.)
#2 - Articles get written, posted, then revised one more time before we get them in the studio. Then they get coded. Coding takes time. A few weeks to code, a few weeks to QA the code, a week to release, etc. For a code world with a small team, we go pretty fast. And for an app like the Character Builder, it gets more complex every time we update it, so maintaining it gets more complex and changes create more chance of change, ripple effects and bugs.
#3- We're working on narrowing that gap and lag in a variety of ways, and it is an area of internal focus for our 2010 project plans. We don't like it either, but it's not a simple system we have here at the moment.
Having said all that, I admit we tend to think in months around here. And it can be easy to forget that when a customer reads an article they find really cool and directly affects their character, ... waiting 74 days to see it integrated into the tool can be a very long time. So thank you for reminding me of that, and I'll ponder more on #3 listed above. Until next, I truly appreciate your patience and your continued feedback.
Someone should be working on getting as much of a buffer of pre-written articles like adventures ready at least a couple of months in advance, so there isn't this last minute pressure on the team working on coding them. If it isn't happening, them someone at management level needs to carefully consider how well they're managing their digital magazines. Last minute mad rushes happen sometimes, but if they're the norm, there's something wrong with how things are being run. It's not the DDi programmers and coders fault either, but on the shoulders of whoever is commissioning the articles and allowing such short intervals between submission and publication.
As a developer, I can see where WOTC_Champagne is coming from - i'm currently working on a system for cancelling items from an order that we'd assigned half a day to do... 3 days later and it's still not working correctly... Delays happen, and like he said, the more complex a system gets, the more special rules, and knock on effects there are.
As a subscriber however, the delay annoys the crap out of me - I want the cleric items from 380 for my cleric, and the stuff in this months Dragon is going to totally change my pre-gens that I use for my 4th ed intro games. I agree with Paulon that there shouldn't be a mad rush to get content in, and having worked on fanzines where that was the case, I can say that it usually ends in tears... poor proofreading, unbalanced crunch, conflicting fluff...
Something to consider - issue 379 was the assassin and skill powers issue, and as such, half of the dragons content was already in the CB. Of the remaining information to code up, there was warden essentials, cleric essentials, fighter great weapons and adventurers of the realms... 19 pages worth of feats, powers and paragon paths.. The new content to code from issue 380 is 33 pages, with large chunks of that being text about magic items...
So, what could be done to speed things up:
1. Better homebrew support - I know that the CB will auto-replace homebrew powers with matching names when the official data comes out - but the ability to add powers and have them recognised correctly as at-will/encounter/daily/utility would let us add some of the content ourselves
2. The ability to get the data as and when it's added, maybe via an rss feed, and maybe only available to DCI gm's, with a requirement to comment on it if its used. Heck, even if this was restricted to powers/feats/items that didn't require special coding, it would be great
3. Work with the writers, layout teams etc, thus improving proofreading, and getting access to the new info sooner - combine this with Paulons' suggestion of getting a content buffer, and you could be a month ahead in coding already