Keep in mind that the developers have not explicitly stated what, exactly, the limitations will be, but it does seem that they are trying to address the needs of users like Davout_1806. From the post I linked to earlier in this thread:
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7. There will be two levels of web-access for players. There will be a free level that all players can access and the Player Edition. The free version will provide access to topics, maps, plots, and everything else. The difference is that the free version will only provide access to a subset of revealed information, while the Player Edition will provide access to the entire realm – just like it does on the desktop. The GM will be able to control what subset of information is made available to players through the free version, and it can morph as the game progresses. The focus is on something that casual players will find useful, and we expect this solution to work well for more than 50% of all players (based on our own experiences and the anecdotal data from numerous users).
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This quote is from item number 7 in Rob's first post at this thread:
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthrea...layers+version
My guess is that their thinking is that casual or trial players will only need access to a limited set of information the current and recent adventures. If they want all content, they need the full license.
Personally, I find this a bit awkward. I would rather that I be able to share all my content, but that freemium players will not have access to journals and other tools without paying for a player's license.
In practice, how happy I am with this depends on what "a subset of revealed information" is. At this point, the developers are not ready to provide further detail:
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I have to ask patience regarding further details on the free web-based player access. It's premature for us to be going into the details on that at this point in time. With the clock not expiring, nobody actually needs that information until further down the line, so we'll provide more info before it's actually needed.
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Given that the decision has been made that the free version of player's web access will be limited to a subset of your realm's revealed information, it is useful to consider *how* limited of a subset is acceptable/useful.
Some will demand "the whole" realm and all realms. The developers have already stated that this is not their plan.
Some may be happy with the whole realm for one realm, but are limited to one realm, so that if they want to play in multiple campaigns with one or multiple DMs they will have to pay for a license. I would be very happy with this as it would give casual players and new players free access to all my revealed information, but only for one game. More hard-core players would want to, and should, get a license. But it seems that this is not what the developers have in mind.
Limiting it to a specific view would only work if you couldn't share the default all-content views and if views were limited by number of topics. I wouldn't want to cripple view functionality for my own use, though, so I don't think this would work unless they create a special "Web view."
Limiting by number of topics is how I'm guessing the subset will be defined. But I have no idea how LWD could determine the appropriate number of topics. It would have to be a very generous number to keep most DM customers happy. If this is the approach taken, I would hope the number would be generous enough that for many DM's it would cover all of their realm's content and would really only be needed for realms with large volumes of content or DMs running multiple campaigns in multiple realms.
Another option would be to allow unlimited topics to be shared, but no articles. So you can share all the flavor but none of the crunch. I would be happy with this, but I'm sure many DMs would not like this.
Again, I would rather you limit free players to what they can do WITH the content and how they can interact with the DM and other players, rather than limit how much of my content they can access. Still, when I bought the program, I never expected that there would be ANY way for players to access my realm without a players license. The free player accounts to web access is something they just offered, unless there was some promise back in the kickstarter days (I was not a backer, so don't know).