Various questions
 

So, this site is utterly atrocious for actually giving information. Fairly key information at that.

So, some questions on Herolab online

1) What is the monthly fee once the free server space time runs out?
2) Can I print a character/save it to pdf/something else for those times when I'm gaming at a site without internet access?

1. $24.99 per year.

2. Yes; it generates a PDF for you that you can download (and then print if you want).

The Hero Lab Online FAQ answers both of these questions, but it may have been unlinked from the website.

Thank you. If there was any link to that FAQ it was sufficiently well hidden that I failed to find it (certainly was NOT in any if the obvious places)

So you have to continually pay $24 a year to use it. Even without paying for additional "packages"

One of the developers mentioned in another thread about HLOnline - "The key restriction is that a character can’t be further edited if it’s beyond a “starting” character"

SO you'll basically be paying $24 to edit your characters? As a regular PFS player that frankly kinda sucks. You're basically paying for editing privileges and NOT new data packs.

You're paying for the cloud/web access that allows you to access the character on any device anywhere that you need it, without needing to carry around a large laptop (e.g. for HL classic).

you mean "anywhere that has reliable internet access". at a convention? nope, cell network is overwhelmed. on a road trip? sorry, no 3G out here. at your friendly local game store but their wifi is down again? you're SOL.

the "offline mode" will help a bit once it's released (someday), but it'll still have very limited functionality. maybe in 10 years internet access will be truly ubiquitous and servers will never go down. until then...

How easy is it to switch between devices? I have not tried it but I already get errors about wrong device name and I've only used it on one device.

I was having issues with this, and I think one of the reasons was that I was just closing the web browser on the previous device/browser. I wasn't explicitly logging out before closing the browser.

I just double checked and confirmed that this is the case. If you just close the web browser, you are NOT logged out. You have to explicitly log out of your previous session (which means you have to go back to your previous device and reconnect to the web site).

I've submitted a request to the support email to address this issue, either by closing the session when someone closes their web browser, or by offering an option to log out the previous session when attempting a new logon.

Hero Lab Online will log you out when you log in on another session, if you've entered a different Device Nickname on each device+browser combination. (That's what it's asking you to do with the "Wrong device name" error.)

For example, I might have "ParodyComp Vivaldi" and "ParodyComp Firefox" on my computer and "ParodyPhone Chrome" on my Android phone. (Each in their respective browsers.)

When you log in on a different device+browser combo, one of the notifications will be "You have reached your device limit, and your least-recently used devices will be automatically logged out soon: (nickname)". When you go back to that machine, you'll get "Your session has expired and you will need to log in again."

It isn't easy to detect when a user has finished, since "closing the web browser" needs to be detected separately from "closing the tab showing HLO", since I might have several tabs open for HLO (I assume it works across multiple tabs though).