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evildmguy
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: Des Moines, IA
Posts: 349

Old November 21st, 2014, 04:09 AM
Unfortunately, they were not impressed. Some of that is on me, some of it was what they saw in the program.

Installation: Installation did not start out well. The player downloaded RW just fine and started it but then couldn't tell what he was supposed to do for the Player's Edition. After trying to log in using his Hero lab information, he tried register and that's when we saw the place for the serial number. After that, the rest of the installation went fine.

I had to look up how to do the invitation and I missed a bit from his side. If it came into his message area and all he had to do was click accept, that was great! (If not, he didn't like the time it took for emails to arrive and then moving info over but I thought it was by invitation.)

And then the real trouble started.

I synched the Realm I had shared and he pushed the synch button. It then acted strange. The player told the Realm to synch, it reported successful, but when he went to open it, it said it was unsuccessful and gave four options, including resynching, opening as is, and two others. After attempting to resynch twice and then just open it twice, with nothing working, he finally completely shut it down and started it back up. If he had to do more, I missed it, but then he was able to view it.

I have talked about how slow the program is to run during the game. After reading a response by rob on another thread, it sounds like RW was never intended to be used in real time to enter information but instead to have entered information be revealed during game play. (That's unfortunate for my style of play but RW still helps me prep for the game and track things a lot better than paper and other options I have found.) However, the two players who were watching it at this time really didn't like what they saw.

First, they wanted real time updates. They really didn't like that I had to synch and then that they had to synch, especially with the problems of synching that they had.

Second, if this was going to be the mechanism of choice, they didn't like that they had no way of knowing they had to synch. In other words, they wanted a message or something to pop up to say there was more data out there.

The last thing they didn't like was my own fault in terms of knowing my players and presenting the system. They aren't the best about doing stuff outside of the sessions, no matter how much I ask, beg and bribe them to. Because of that, they weren't sure with what they saw, how much would be useful to them. In part, because they couldn't add notes as well, they really didn't understand what they would use it for. Again, rob's example in another post was good but it's probably more detail than I would do and while I do hope to enter more, I don't see me ever getting to the level he described.

So some of the first impressions are on me but some is on the program. I'm really bummed as I was hoping this would get them excited about doing wiki entries because I once again forgot they aren't great about doing them after the first month of play.

I'm sharing all of this not only for the tech side but so that other DMs remember to know their players in terms of what to present and how!

edg
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