Rise of the Runelords Package
 

Hi

I just wanted to check what the refund policy is on Marketplace content. I bought the Rise of the Runelords package recently and I have to say it is very disappointing and in some cases unusable without significant changes. As an example, the tags on the map of Foxglove Manor all seem to link to Fort Rannick locations.

Should I just email customer service with these issues as I really feel like I've thrown money away on something I could have put together myself to a higher standard.

Sorry, I love Realm Works and Hero Lab but I do feel like LWD has dropped the ball here.

Thanks

I apologize for the frustration, Medriev.

While we can't refund Realm Works content because once you own it you'll always have it, we'd definitely like to know what you would like to see that isn't included.

And if there are bugs, please report them to support@wolflair.com so we can take a look.

Thanks!

I heard another complaint about the structure of RotRL. I hope they take these seriously. I won't be buying it, even though I'd like to have it, until/unless I hear that the issues have been straightened out.

Yeah, that was me. It wasn't a complaint so much as a question, but I was disappointed, and I'm now hesitant about buying anything else without knowing the structure, first.

I'm attaching three files. One shows the structure of the official RotRL. You'll see that it's mainly a collection of scenes. There's an entry for Sandpoint which has all the content for Sandpoint within the topic. It doesn't have separate entries for all the locations.

Another one shows that when I entered it, I definitely used scenes and chapters. I understand the importance of those.

Then the other shows that in addition to scenes and chapters, I included a more detailed structure for Sandpoint (and other things, but this image only shows Sandpoint).

I cropped off the content to avoid copyright violation. I'm just showing the structure.

Hi

The structure is one of the issues. I had expected a much better organised package than this. Also, as I flagged above as an example, the map for Foxglove Manor has tags that link to Fort Rannick locations. That is a very basic problem but one that would be an absolute pain for me to correct. Considering the price I therefore don't really think "we don't do refunds" is good enough.

I can try and go through the package and catalogue all the issues but frankly I don't have the time and this has put me off using Realm Works for RotRL. Grateful if someone in LWD could offer a more constructive opinion than asking me to report bugs. These are not bugs, these are basic errors that anyone familiar with the content would not have included in the package (and certainly wouldn't have put it on sale). I will be emailing customer service asking for my money back I'm afraid as the response here just isn't good enough.

Thanks

Please forgive the imprecision of my reply, Medriev. I was rushing.

Rather than bug reports, what I should have asked for was a list of things you weren't liking about our Rise of the Runelords offering. Constructive criticism and feedback helps us improve our products. I'm closely monitoring this thread and I'm making a list of what it is people aren't caring for.

Hi

Just to add to this, I have emailed the support@wolflair.com address asking for a full refund. I have also confirmed I am happy for you to revoke my Realm Works license if you do not trust me to delete the RotRL package. The RotRL package is sub standard and not fit for purpose. I therefore regard it as having been mis-sold. For the quality of it it should have been priced at a much lower price point and labelled as a beta version.

I will be expecting a full refund for this package and will not now be purchasing any further content for Realm Works. The future of my HL Classic and HL Online accounts also depends on how the company deals with this issue. I am thoroughly disappointed and feel ripped off so I hope someone can deal with this constructively.

Thanks

Rone you might also want to get an answer to what the pricing is going to be for RW cloud subs. For most of us our cloud access ends on May 21. That's 11 days to get the data posted and have your store working to take payments and extend access.

@medriev
maybe you want to - before asking for a full refund - give them a chance to fix / improve the issues that you are having with the content? I think those bought content supports (somehow) updates, so maybe those maplinks and structure issues can be fixed?

Though Iam wondering, if users already bought it and use it happily what would happen if they are suddenly get a new structure after an update ^^

This content market thing is surely a bit complex...

I don't think they can offer a refund for a digital product, there is no way for them to verify that you actually deleted it. It would be like asking Amazon to refund you for am item but you don't send it back.

His offer of deleting the RealmWorks account would possibly work but you could still run it in offline mode. But I suspect this option would not satisfy him regarding future purchases of HLO/HL.

I think your option of reporting issues and seeing the fixes would be the best route at this time.

Amazon does this a lot, actually. (As do others using the Amazon platforms.)

ObTopic: Not much to say. I don't own RotR's RW content (though I suppose I could take it from the Kickstarter substitutions) so I don't know what it looks like. Refund discussions are for LWD and Medriev off-forum.

Admittedly, I'm only one voice.

For a product you didn't like? Or for a product that was physically broken?

Plus Amazon probably was a bad example, they can write off millions of dollars for returns without it affecting their bottom line.

Better example, asking for a refund from Paizo for a PDF. They do not.

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2uo11?refund

There are two issues in this, for one of which reporting the problem as a bug report is more appropriate than the other.

Issue #1: Some content links are connected to incorrect locations.

This is something that should be reported so that LWD can make corrections to the product for future downloads; the affected users can then download the corrected product and re-import to have the corrections made.

Issue #2: Having seen the way the data is organized, not everyone agrees this is the best way for it to be organized.

This one is something that is a matter of opinion. I happen to agree that the organization is awful. I had previously done my own version of Rise of the Runelords. MY Sandpoint has an "Individual" entry for every named NPC in Sandpoint (50+), now updated to include those in the Sandpoint: Light of the Lost Coast sourcebook. Likewise, my Sandpoint has separate Location entries for every keyed Location.

Why? Because I can't predict which NPC the Players will warm up to, nor which businesses might be destroyed or change ownership, over the course of a campaign. Separate entries allow me more flexibility to respond to how the Players make their choices.

If the conversion process was simply to cut-and-paste from the PDF (or an automated version of that), then I can understand why the incorrect links are there. Locations named "Kitchen","Pantry", and "Storeroom", repeat across multiple locations in the overall Adventure Path.. and sometimes even within one 'parent' location (there is one adventure site, for example, that has 3 rooms named Storeroom in its key). An automated tool is quite likely to be confused by this, and even a manual process is likely to get some of them wrong. Someone who knows the content will make fewer errors, but even someone very familiar with it will make some. I know; I've had to go back and fix errors I made in my own process.

At the same time, because the original work was written to be read by the GM, and for the GM to share selected details from it orally or in his/her own handouts, there are paragraphs which mix information for the GM to run the campaign with information to be shared, and sometimes information that could likely be revealed in several steps. I have previously give the example of a single paragraph which, during my conversion, I broke up into 7 separate snippets that needed to be moved to multiple separate Topics. 3 of those also had some of the content of that one paragraph also made into GM Directions attached to them. That's one paragraph separated into 10 discrete nuggets of information (a snippet is supposed to be one "unit" of information).

It is arguable that I have made too much of separating the content. But that's the point of internal hyper-linking it.

Either; it could happen with any refund request where a factor (like the shipping cost or item personalization) makes it not worth recovering the item.

True. :)

The issue with how Sandpoint was handled shows a serious lack of insight into how the player's will act during the AP. Sandpoint is the home base for the PC's for the whole campaign, essentially first level through the high teens besides being an iconic location not just in Pathfinder but in all of FRPG's. They're going to spend a lot of time in Sandpoint interacting with the NPC's and locations in the town. If they're all broken out as separate topics then it isn't that hard to make additions as the players interact with things. Which is what RW is shines at.

It seems pretty obvious that RotRL was primarily, if not exclusively, entered using LWD's automated tool. I get that that is a lot easier, faster and cheaper than having someone read the whole AP, get familiar with it and then copy and paste the material into a format appropriate to RW but the results seem to speak for themselves.

Thanks for all the replies.

I have taken this up directly with LWD through email correspondence but what I would say here is that there are enough issues with the RotRL package for it not to be worth anywhere near the $34.99 it cost me. I could wait for the issues there are with the package to be addressed and if I had paid something like $10-15 and been warned this was a Beta version I might but at this price point I expect a finished product professionally executed. I have been a LWD customer for more years than I can reliably say here and spent literally hundreds on products. During all that time I have never asked for a refund for an electronic product because I have never been disappointed before. I genuinely feel ripped off and I expect a full refund regardless of whether LWD can trust me to delete the package or not.

To borrow the Amazon analogy above I feel like I ordered something from Amazon and it arrived in pieces in the box. Now, Amazon could insist I return the wreckage but why would they bother (and as some have noted above they probably wouldn't)? Incidentally, as a Paizo customer since their inception, their policy has, in my experience, been similar for wrongly shipped physical products at least (ie. they ship a replacement or refund me and don't expect me to return the incorrectly shipped product). The equation for LWD really is whether my continued custom is worth $34.99 or not.

It seems better to equate it with a digital product. Some games that you can download at release time are full of bugs; over time they update the digital product with fixes and this moves towards a better product.

Thanks. As I've noted above, as a digital product this is worth perhaps $10 as long as users are warned it is a beta with a lot of issues. I paid $34.99 with no warning of issues provided so I am asking for a refund. I don't think that's in any way unfair.

I guess it's a case of a release, potentially with some bugs that will be fixed over time or possibly as a partial product and the rest released over time.

Versus waiting a few weeks (more or less) for the entire product to be released, in a more final stage.

I know I preferred the partial release of the Spheres of Might files, with a few bugs the user base has found (that get squished in updates) and the Technology class coming in a future update.
I could see some preferring the final release a few months later, but that's not me nor my group.

@Rone - hopefully you're still monitoring this thread.

I have no real beef with the organization of the realm. In the end, that's a choice that y'all had to make, and if the flexibility of RW has shown us anything it's that no two people's ideas of how to organize an adventure will be quite the same.

But, I can't seem to find the map for the first encounter, labeled "The Swallowtail Festival" in the pdf. Maybe I'm just missing it. If so, if someone could point me to it that would be great. If I'm not missing it, if it's really not there, then that makes me wonder what else is in the adventure that somehow didn't make it into the realm.

For $35 for the RW file on top of the $42 for the pdf, it seems to me like every bit of information in the pdf should be included somewhere in the RW file.

Maidhc O Casain, I am still monitoring. Everything written here is being seen and relayed for consideration.

Thanks, Rone! Just to be clear, I like the RW version of the AP, and am glad I chose it.

Hi all! Sorry for the delay, the material had to be reviewed amidst getting prepped for Paizo Con.

That being said, I'd like to personally apologize for any issues you may have with Rise of the Runelords. We certainly never intended for users to be unhappy with it. We've now done a thorough review of the material and our team is working on getting it up to par with the other content right now. We will release an updated version as soon as that work is complete.

I have not seen that module, but if the product digital or whatever does not meet the description or so, I would think that you can get your money back. (At least here). But that is not after the company had the option to fix the situation. How one is enforcing this right is another subject.

Of course you didn't intend for us to be unhappy! That would make zero sense. And again, I'm quite happy with Rise of the Runelords - I just happened to notice that first map that's missing and wanted to point it out :). Y'all's readiness to make it even better is awesome.

Damn, I didn't notice that, but then I am not using those maps for players - I have other tools for that.

FWIW - after seeing that there was the problem last night, I went through "book 1" as far as I can tell the only links that are wrong are the Foxglove Manor ones... The one thing I did notice is that its slow to open some topics - probably because of the size... Sandpoint in particular is very slow to open, and at times you have to click out of it and back into make it appear.

But it has saved me months of data entry, considering we start in 3 weeks time, and I only had up to end of book 2 entered manually.

We’ve made a variety of changes to the Rise of the Runelords realm today. Be sure to sync updates for improved organization!

The missing map should now be available and we apologize again for removing it from existence. We promise the offending party has had their gauntlet privileges removed. ;)

Well here's hoping that Sandpoint has also been changed.

BTW, downloading now at a blistering 70-100 KB/s.
You should get your servers looked at.

EDIT: Sandpoint pins are now functioning, thank you.

how do i "sync updates"?

You download the latest version (update) from the CM and then install over the top of your older one.

I am not sure if anybody else had the same problem but RW crashed at 27% when trying to import into the realm where it was...

Can't remember the error, something about an object not set.

I logged a crash report - but seems to be working ok into a fresh realm

I have the exact same issue, it crashes at 27%. I had the system send a crash report, as well.

Had you made modifications to the material you imported? When I was actively working on Nibirium this was the sort of error we got if we tried to import over a modified realm.

Actually yes I did... I remapped the foxglove manor map pins to the right locations.... didnt actually think of that.

I did select overwrite everything tho.

Back then that sort of thing would keep a new import from working. I know bug reports were submitted but it was during one of the dark eras of bug reporting/fixing.

I didn't change a thing in my RotR package.

If you haven't already done so and you're still experiencing crashes please submit a report to support@wolflair.com so the devs can be looking into the issue.

BJ, when the error occurs, there is a message asking if I want to send a "report" (I don't recall the exact verbiage) to Lone Wolf and whether or not I want to include my email address. Does this not constitute submitting a report?

That's the crash dialog. It sends some debugging information, but isn't the same as opening a ticket via support@wolflair.com or the Realm Works Bug Report page. A ticket gives them a good way to track your issue and lets you work with them by, for example, giving them a copy of your local database.