Originally Posted by nodice
Lol, what a thread. So substance, much angry.
I still remember the first time I saw a preview of RealmWorks. I was blown away. There is no doubt that it is amazing software. It's designed to facilitate *world-building* after all, and that is a fantastically large endeavor from the get-go. Knowing that RW was still in development, I purchased it anyway, despite being unemployed and quite poor at the time. My eager anticipation mounted to excitement as I opened the program and started exploring around it's inner workings for the first time. My excitement soon turned to anxiety over the incredibly complex array of tools as I wondered if I would ever get the chance to understand and use them all. I overcame that anxiety by deciding to use and practice on what I could understand by inputting as much of my campaign setting as I could. As much work as that can be, it is rewarding to see the matrices that you once contained in your head being backed up onto a third party that you can see and use.
Whilst it would be possible to end the story there and leave it at 'wonderful software, awesome experience' etc, most, dare I say, all people are inclined towards wanting more and better and many of those people will subconsciously be thinking of process improvements as they use any software, or even, perform any action. It is a part of seeing the potential behind something rather than just accepting things at face value.
Similarly, even without a mind incapable of settling on something as finished, when one finds specific elements that they would consider core to their gaming experience that are not supported by RW, then a compromise of needs/wants sets in. The amount that one must compromise whilst using RW is weighed up, either subconsciously or actively, against alternative options for campaign management.
During the last year that I have been patiently inputting my campaign setting into RW, I have been playing in games with friends who have purchased licenses or subscriptions to other similar-yet-different pieces of game enhancing software; in one game we use Fantasy Grounds; in another we use roll20.net. I was continually impressed by what my friends were able to do using their respective gaming tools, and throughout every session, I could not help but subconsciously track which parts of what my friends were bringing to the table I would or would not be able to do with RW.
Now, at this point I know a lot of you are thinking 'but those tools are different to RW, they are tabletop management, and RW is campaign management, they were never designed to be compared.' I am aware of this, but the truth of it is, that whilst RW is almost exclusively campaign management with a few tools which could be tweaked for tabletop management, those other 2, whilst being predominantly about tabletop management, still contain campaign management elements, limited but robust. And my friends have been using them and still making amazing, surprising, deep campaigns. They started off playing in them for free, and enjoyed them enough to decide to invest and our gaming groups have certainly reaped the benefits.
The reason I mention this essentially comes down to brand loyalty and marketing in general. Whilst RW may be the deepest, richest, most versatile tool for campaign management on the market at the moment, if points of customer inaccessibility prevent enough people buying into its development, it can easily get left behind by a leaner, more accessible approach which draws better funding to the point that it will eventually completely overtake RW even in its own domain. If it seems like I am painting a gloomy picture there, let me make myself clear, I am not suggesting this is currently happening or on the brink or anything like that.
What I am saying is that for most people, there is inevitably going to be a compromise that goes on in their heads with any software they decide to use to run an RPG. That compromise can for all intents and purposes be measured, and gets weighed against other options. Already the lack of tabletop management functionality in RW is a compromise which most of my friends are unwilling to make. Whilst of course purely anecdotal, it gives me personally the idea that I might be in the minority in preferring an intricate, powerful, subtle yet expansive campaign manager over a flashy tabletop dice roller++ program.
I think for me, seeing my friends run such amazing campaigns with what I had built up in my head to be inferior gaming software really got to me, and still does. No fault of LWD or RW, but I also have an added problem of having built my campaign premise around a function that does not even exist yet in RW(topic reveal by individual player), unbeknownst to me at the time of getting into this. So, scrap the campaign I've been working on, and run something simpler, or try to find a work around that keeps the same premise are two options. The former is not appealing to me, and if I did I would likely resort to just using roll20 so that I at least had the tabletop element built in, and well, the latter is where I run into people telling me that my feature request has already been mentioned, thanks, we're getting to it... in a few years. Of course that is not to say that there may not be other workarounds, but compared to what people grow accustomed to in terms of updates from larger companies, the pace of LWD updates requires a bit of getting used to.
Nevertheless, I am still building my campaign setting in RW in the belief that I will get some amazing play out of this tool. I have no doubt that once I have a critical mass of data entered, even without the feature that I need in order to play a particular game, I will find it within myself to let that desire go, as many have suggested I do, and find one of the many many other ways to enjoy RW. Ultimately though, that would be another big compromise, and by that point may well be accompanied by regret.
I appreciate that RW is still in development, I think most people here do. But everyone has different patience thresholds and tolerances for compromise. On top of that, everyone will express those varying opinions in further varying ways. Although there are forums where there are trolls just 'whinging' about anything and everything devs do or dont do, and those places are usually quite toxic with a terrible signal/noise ratio, the contrary, where people have forced happiness and get flamed for any perceived criticism by zealously apologetic users is no less welcoming.
People have the same right to criticize as they do to compliment, particularly if they have paid for a product. Criticism need not be the negative thing that many make it out to be. I for one have seen Rob take constructive, and subjectively nonconstructive criticism both equally calmly and objectively. Its as if he were a grown adult trained in PR with a stake in what he does. Unfortunately not all forum members will react to each other with such pragmatic objectivity, in fact many invest themselves emotionally and subjectivize criticism against something they believe in. This is a big barrier to letting all be heard in a civilized and respectful way. If people really want to help the company or the product and invest time into defending them online, then at least familiarize yourself with how customer criticism can work in a market environment; criticism can be opportunity, just receiving it is market intelligence. There are companies that will pay their customers to 'give feedback' aka criticize them.
If you find yourself thinking that someone else is being negative or 'criticising' and you find yourself wanting to get angry at them for that, just chill out, take a step back, think to yourself that there could be any number of reasons why they sound that way, from language differences, to having been through different experiences. Put your 'constructive lens' glasses on, and just filter out what you don't like and take the good because censuring doesn't help anyone.
Also, apologies for wall of text, lol.
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