sadly our group will not be able to continue with your products.

Because I think its fair to you to explain why:

1. No full offline functionality is a killer. You may tell us to "program it ourselves" so we'll just skip it and manually build our character and use any of the many many PDF creators. We play at a camp once a year. No internet.

2. The subscription model totally kills it. We play with 2 college students and 2 father's. Sorry, ttrpgs aren't getting any of their budget

3. It feels like we don't own what we purchase

But most importantly, it's obvious lone wolf has lost the spirit of the game entirely. TTRPGS are accessible, they cross boundaries and bring people together. This online only subscription model just alienates the poorest. My cousins in South America make $800/mo USD as engineers. They have bandwidth limited internet that's shaky at best. This plus a subscription hurts us.

I understand the economy is shifting to subscriptions as a service, but it's downright anti consumer (this isn't just you, it's happening everywhere).

You claim that HLO is betting on internet connectivity increasing all over. Quick reminder that in the U.S. we are still waiting on 1994s multibillion dollar investment into fibre optic across the u.s.

Question then; why aren't you betting on local processing becoming cheaper and more efficient? Everyday mobile devices and consumer PCs are released at lower pricepoints with greater power.

In the end, we don't understand the financial health of your company, which is what ultimately drives these decisions. It's a shame that a cosmetic DLC wasn't adopted instead for HLC... Skins for the client, simple character model builders with a cosmetic item store, small QoL client modules, etc.

And to those thinking I'm bitter, or cheap, or don't understand the reality of Dev - I'm asking you to consider the opposite; who this alienates

-the college student
-the single parent
-the deployed military member
-the citizen from outside the "1st world"
-the rural resident
-the metered internet user
-the kids, who are genuinely just kids and play out in the world! in forests camping, in school basements, under Bridges... Doesn't anyone here remember this? Playing in an environment that resembles your in-game world even just a little is a magical experience.

Meziroth, we are very sorry the product isn't working for you and wish you happy gaming in the future.

HLC will alienate the same group, it's not like it was cheap either. Someone with a limited budget probably really shouldn't be spending it on HLC.

Also I do not think you understand LWD reasoning for HLO at all, your reasoning is not any where near what their intent is.

I would understand your post if LWD was going exclusively to a subscription model, but they're not. They're still supporting Hero Lab Classic. They even just released a 64-bit version to fix the memory bug. I have some reservations about the subscription model as well. I may or may not subscribe. I'll make that decision when it comes time to do so. But I will happily continue to use HLC offline.

While this is true, it doesn't require a large initial investment. You can buy a core system and still have fun with that. The real expense comes when you start investing in expansions and multiple systems. But you don't have to buy everything at once.

It looks like LWD *is* going to an exclusively online model. From what I've read here on the Forums, Starfinder, Pathfinder 2.0 and Shadowrun 6 will only be available online, no HLC version. If they continue this trend with other new games and versions, HLC will soon be obsolete because it won't support any current games.

I've been using HLC for a long time and will continue to use it as long as I'm playing or running the games it supports; it's by far the best character generator I've used in 40 years of gaming (including ones I've written). I'm not a big fan of online-only services of any kind, but I use them if I don't have another option so I'll probably use HLO if I start playing something only available there.

Exclusively online would mean migrating everything to HLO and HLO only. OP says that they will not be able to continue using LWD products. Maybe I'm reading that context wrong, but it suggests previous use which suggests HLC. If you've already purchased products for HLC, it doesn't make any sense to me to stop using it just because HLO is subscription.

As long as they are supporting the older systems, I think many people will be fine as long as they're playing those older systems. Unfortunately, that's not always the case, them supporting those older systems. I have a list outstanding bugs in Mutants and Masterminds, for example. 3E, some of them have been closed, but I have others that have been open over two years. 2E... I'm not holding my breath.

And I get it. Mutants and Mast is pretty much releasing new material once every year or so, and there isn't a good model for Lone Wolf to get any more money from us who've already bought it, unlike things like Pathfinder which are constantly releasing new material to sell in chunks. I'm almost at the point of understanding the Authoring Kit enough that I think I could fix some of those errors by modifying source files, but they're not fixable via the Editor.

Just out of curiosity, what are some of the bugs in Mutants and Masterminds?

I have a list of 3E defects at http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=55225 which I need to go through and see whether some got fixed, but the bug didn't get closed. For 2E, http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=55226.

I have no intention of using HLO at all at this time.
1) It doesn't support the original Pathfinder.
2) It doesn't support D&D 5E.
3) I will never play Pathfinder 2. I absolutely hate what they have done to races in it. The rest of PF2 is ok, but the feelign I get from tests I have ran and played is that it fells like D&D4E and I hated that game with a cold, hard passion. It's why I went t the original Pathfinderin tyhe first place.
4) Though I have had to slow done due to illness, I love the customization options available in HLC (scripting, homebrew option, etc.) I am nowhere as good as someone like ShadowChemosh, but I tend to hold my own. I just don't see that campability becoming avbailable in HLO.
5) Quite a few places where I run my games, or play, don't have wireless and its much to great an effort to run an ethernet cable to the game room. My mother doesn't even have Internet (shudder), so when I visit I am without except when visiting my sister nearby (not wwithin Internet leeching range).

So far, I still make heavy use of HLC for all my gaming sessions. For only access, where available, I make heavy use of DnDBeyond. They also have an app for my iPad that allows offline access to all my purchased D&D 5E source material. Something that HLO doesn't allow.

The only reason I switched from Pathfinder to D&D 5E originally is my groups mu7ch prefer the simplicity. Those of my players who have played with PF2 took one look at the builder and told me if we play PF again, they want to stay with PF and not PF2.