RW Cloud Service

[Viking2054]

I was just curious how and when the clock for Cloud Service is going to start back up. What I mean is that the clock on a lot of peoples Cloud Service started to count down and then the clock was suspended. Will those of us that lost some time on Cloud Service start back right where we left off or will it be reset to six months of service?

It would be nice to know before the clock starts back up so I and others can plan the use of our Cloud Service for RW appropriately.

Also, nice to see you back on the forums Rob. Hope your feeling better and the doctors have you up for a clean bill of health.

[Merion]

Indeed it would be nice to have this information. Also the pricing of the cloud service would interest me very much, at least a general scale of what LWD is aiming at.

[Acenoid]

From the LWD Website:
Get started for only $49.99! GM Edition also includes 6 months of free standard tier cloud service (a $24.99 value).

So ~4$ per month

[Zortek]

From the LWD Website:
Get started for only $49.99! GM Edition also includes 6 months of free standard tier cloud service (a $24.99 value).

So ~4$ per month
Which further maths out to $49.98/year.

So, basically, the product engine has a $25.00 base buy-in + $3,000,000.00 est. marginally useful content that any good GM will need to butcher + $49.98/yr cloud to exploit downtime utility.

Forget college... and pony up the retirement funds too... its gonna be an adventure.

[daplunk]

I'll happily pay my $49.98/yr to know that my data is safe and enable me to move the data between the two machines I use.

$3,000,000.00... lol...

[kbs666]

Which further maths out to $49.98/year.

So, basically, the product engine has a $25.00 base buy-in + $3,000,000.00 est. marginally useful content that any good GM will need to butcher + $49.98/yr cloud to exploit downtime utility.

Forget college... and pony up the retirement funds too... its gonna be an adventure.
$50 is what I spend on dry cleaning in a month. I think I can make room in my budget for that annually. As to the rest, pulling made up numbers out of your nether regions doesn't impress anyone.

[MNBlockHead]

I read the 3 mil as tongue in cheek. I have a feeling that I'll have trouble refraining from buy stuff on impulse. I'll probably feel like I"m spending a small fortune. But I would otherwise spend it at DTRPG, Patreon, and Kickstarter.

[Viking2054]

I'm not really concerned about the cost for cloud service, but rather how much time I'm going to have to try before I decide to anti-up for additional cloud service. Once my gaming group decides to get back together anyway. Pricing and capacity tiers would be nice to know, although I don't expect that information until much closer to the content market launch.

[Merion]

From the LWD Website:
Get started for only $49.99! GM Edition also includes 6 months of free standard tier cloud service (a $24.99 value).

So ~4$ per month

Ah, good catch! Thanks!

50$ a year sounds reasonable

[Exmortis]

I cannot wait for this to begin. Frankly $50 for full back up, full sync features, and unlimited storage?

Cheap. at $4 a month, that's two coffees at the local Tim's, all you get from that is a free trip to the other cubicle.

I run RW on 4 systems, keeping them up to date would be a nightmare even with my OneDrive. Not only that I can work offline, and sync up another time. Great for those rainy crappie days at the lake when I work on RW.

RW offers far more then cable, and you sure cant get cable for $4 a month.

[Dr_Automaton]

Are you sure about the "unlimited storage" bit? Everything we've seen so far suggests that the intent is to offer multiple tiers of service.

[Acenoid]

I think LWD has not decided on different tiers. I suppose the standard tier will have some size limitation included. I would prefer in general that the cloud would completely auto-sync (if configured to do so). Wouldn't it be much better if RW - while you entereing topic 2 - topic 1 is synced in the background to the cloud?

Recently bought a NAS and iam very satisfied with the syncing capabilities offered by the backup & file system options. Still not as intelligent as the dropbox sync but it offers versioning and I can see that it quickly syncs down my stuff :)

[daplunk]

It would be amazing if that occurred but that would require another rebuild of the back-end. Personally I agree the focus needs to be on functionality that people use to run their games for now.

Market Place > Web View > Journals > Calendars

Give the people the core functionality and then work on improving the way it works and the way it looks.

[MNBlockHead]

I cannot wait for this to begin. Frankly $50 for full back up, full sync features, and unlimited storage?

Cheap. at $4 a month, that's two coffees at the local Tim's, all you get from that is a free trip to the other cubicle.

I run RW on 4 systems, keeping them up to date would be a nightmare even with my OneDrive. Not only that I can work offline, and sync up another time. Great for those rainy crappie days at the lake when I work on RW.

RW offers far more then cable, and you sure cant get cable for $4 a month.

Cutting cable was one of the best decisions I made. Even after the amount I spend on HBO Now and other on-demand content, I the savings are still more than enough to pay for a lot of hobby material.

[mazzy]

Market Place > Web View > Journals > Calendars

Give the people the core functionality and then work on improving the way it works and the way it looks.

Hallelujah, praise Jeebus!! :D

[rob]

The clock on server access (aka cloud service) will resume a little while after the Content Market goes live. It will resume and not restart. However, I'm pretty sure that it's only been a matter of weeks that have run off thus far, so even someone that started with six months should probably have over four months left.

We've definitely been telling everyone there will be multiple tiers from pretty much the beginning. We don't want anyone to be surprised if we introduce more than one. However, we'll initially only have one tier. That being said, it's probable that we'll need to add another (and perhaps a third) to better accommodate the outliers. We originally expected to be able to profile the space being used by everyone and come up with good profiles and thresholds for tiers. However, with the switch to the export/import mechanism as the way things are handled, some key variables have changed, so we need to get real data AFTER the Content Market launches. Once we have that data, we'll reassess everything and figure out how best to proceed. And we'll give everyone advance notice before we institute any changes.

[Bidmaron]

Rob, what about the issue where realms are growing and you cannot free up unused records? Won't this ultimately cause everyone's storage to bloat? Especially if they do backups.

[daplunk]

18.9 GB (20,322,807,808 bytes) and counting. The bloat is on my mind.

[Parody]

However, I'm pretty sure that it's only been a matter of weeks that have run off thus far, so even someone that started with six months should probably have over four months left.
Obviously we don't know what the servers think, but LWD's messages have stated that those who owned RW before November 19, 2014 have used approximately 4½ months (http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?p=223852#post223852) of their Cloud Service time. (Cloud Service timers were started on November 19, 2014 (https://web.archive.org/web/20150222122002/http://www.wolflair.com/realmworks/2014/11/19/rw-player-edition-now-available/) and suspended on April 30, 2015 (https://web.archive.org/web/20180402072304/http://www.wolflair.com/realmworks/2015/04/30/realm-works-important-news-cloud-service/).)

[Silveras]

Rob, what about the issue where realms are growing and you cannot free up unused records? Won't this ultimately cause everyone's storage to bloat? Especially if they do backups.

Backups are local files on the machine where you use Realm Works. I would not expect them to affect the cloud storage at all.

Cloud service users can recover empty space, though it may be a time-consuming process for truly large realms. Unfortunately, I don't know of a process for those who do not have cloud service.

The process is to remove your local MASTER.realm database file and re-sync from the cloud. In my case, that shrunk my footprint from 16.7 GB to 1.3 GB.

The process steps
Make sure your data is all sync'd to the cloud.
Make sure you know what your password is (if you've chosen "remember my password")
Close Realm Works if it is running.
Find the MASTER.realm file.
Move that file to another drive/location (for safety; you can delete it once the process is completed).
Start Realm Works. You will be prompted to log in, and your saved password will be gone. When you log in, you will also be prompted as if this were a new installation.
Realm Works creates a new, empty, MASTER.realm file where the old one was.
After logging in, all Realms will need to be sync'd down from the server.
Once completed, you can delete the old MASTER.realm file from wherever you moved it to.

[Bidmaron]

Thanks. So the cloud version is already compacted it sounds like. That is all I care about. Disk doesn't matter

[rob]

Rob, what about the issue where realms are growing and you cannot free up unused records? Won't this ultimately cause everyone's storage to bloat? Especially if they do backups.

That bloat is ONLY on the desktop client. It is NOT on the server. We're using a completely different database engine on the server, and it's been configured to be smart about this stuff since the beginning. Since we've got everybody's material on there together, it had to be smart, else we'd have all the desktop bloat times 10,000. :)

The size of your local database is almost always going to be larger than what's on the server (there could be rare exceptions with very non-standard realms). And that's after going through the extreme process that @Silveras outlined above to pare the local database down to its absolute smallest footprint.

[rob]

Obviously we don't know what the servers think, but LWD's messages have stated that those who owned RW before November 19, 2014 have used approximately 4½ months (http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?p=223852#post223852) of their Cloud Service time. (Cloud Service timers were started on November 19, 2014 (http://www.wolflair.com/realmworks/2014/11/19/rw-player-edition-now-available/) and suspended on April 30, 2015 (http://www.wolflair.com/realmworks/2015/04/30/realm-works-important-news-cloud-service/).)

Then it sounds like I got my "4.5 months" number flip-flopped in my head from the reality. Hmm. Alright, we'll discuss it on this end and see if we can figure out something. Thanks for the correction!