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Parody, I'm not sure how artificial is artificial. Poor word choice on my point. Just curious as to whether the decision was primarily to encourage subscriptions or if there are significant technical, legal, or cost involved in allowing purchased content to be part of your realm if you are only using it locally and are not a cloud subscriber.
Overall RW's explanations and announcement were all good news and should ease many of the concerns folks have expressed in the past. But I am a little concerned about the contraints placed on content bought from the CM market for non-subscribers. These constraints would make a lot of sense if the subscription gave you access to all content for use while you are a subscriber, but much less if you have to pay additionally for the content and if that cost is similar to what you would pay for the PDF or print versions of that content.
The model as outlined makes a lot of sense for folks that want to buy pre-created campaigns and adventure modules. You would save a lot of time entering content from paper/PDF can use it again and again with different parties. Cool stuff.
But it is much less useful for world builders who want to selectively add content to their worlds. For example, if a bestiary is made available for purchase from a content market, or a collection of side adventures, a fully fleshed out village or town, or an NPC collection. These are the things that must interest me. I like to create my own adventures, but it would be helpful to have sources of NPCs, creatures, villages to help in that process. It would be a time saver. But as soon as I stop subscribing—what happens?
Assuming your guess of how they would handle this is correct, ("The content is still integrated in your realm, but is no longer updated from its source. Links will be maintained for items as long as you don't change them, so if you get cloud service again then it would resume updating."), I would be happy with that.
I would assume that I wouldn't be able to print purchased content if printing would ever be added as a function. I'm okay with that as well. I just want to make sure that if I use a village purchased in my mostly homebrew world, that I would still have it in my realm if I am no longer a subscriber—understanding that I would no longer get updates on that village from the CM and would not be able to integrate the pristine version of the village in another realm.
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