Quote:
Originally Posted by Lj Stephens
Oh, wow. I must have been super tired when I wrote that. I apologize. The demos are of Campaign Theater. I'm really sorry for the mistake.  |
TLDR;
Respectfully, LJ, one of the biggest beefs from the community of RW users is that LWD is spending so much time and effort with HLO that it feels like RW is stagnating. Features promised many years ago have not come to fruition (for one example, the player web view teaser video was published 4.5 years ago). Your comment above kind of emphasizes that, as apparently GenCon isn't going to feature anything new for RW. It is concerning, quite frankly, that it seems like one small team is working on
all of the projects at LWD rather than having a team focused on each major project. HLO and RW seem like vastly different animals where work on one should not slow down work on the other. I know that LWD is a small company, and that gets thrown out in defense of LWD every time these conversations pop up, but that excuse can't fly for much longer.
If HLO is going to be the cash cow that gets LWD the ability to start hiring enough staff to actually work on RW again, even that would be considered "some" news that we could at least digest with the hope that our product isn't going to the curb. Of course, the Content Market was presented as being that income source, but I don't think we have heard anything on that front, either, since launch. (If we have, please point me there. I don't spend that much time slogging though all of these forums.)
You have to understand that there are many of us who have invested hundreds and hundreds of hours, each, to make RW the tool we need at our game table. But a lot of that time was done on good faith that the tool would continue to evolve and get better. Frankly, RW is THE most powerful tool on the market for what it does, but it still has so many little imperfections and quirks and there are other newer shinier products out there that actually seem to have active ongoing product development and signs that the developers actually respond to their users desires.
One of the reasons I personally started this thread is that every time I sit down to use RW, I find that I am fighting those little imperfections that others seem to be doing better. Custom Calendars? competitors have those. Web view for players? Other tools are designed from the ground up with that built in. So I keep looking for something to grab hold of that will keep me using RW. I don't want to scrap the hundreds of hours I have spent inputting my campaign world into this tool, but if it isn't evolving with the times and getting better, if features that were promised are still years off, well....
Rob and company need to realize that letting us know the truth, rather than nothing at all, would still improve retention of customers by a huge factor. I personally would probably stop looking at all the shiny alternatives out there if there was any inkling that RW was being actively worked on, at all. But I see no evidence of that. A stray forum post every few months with all the reasons why nothing has happened is not good enough. There was a flurry of activity surrounding the Content Market, but now what?
Help us out here, LJ. Please provide some transparency as to what LWD is really doing with our beloved RealmWorks. Please help us by being proactive with your customer relationships, rather than reactive. The newsletters are not good enough. Take some lessons from companies like DnDBeyond or Arkenforge, who publish roadmaps and trello pages to keep their user base in the loop on what is coming, and what is further off, and what is simply not on the table.
As someone who has been actively looking at other tools, I can tell you that their forums and user groups are FULL of people who have given up on RW for the very reasons I mention above. I truly do not wish to join their ranks. I just desperately want RW to fulfill the needs it promised to fill. I want to love it again.
Rant over.