Realm Works Feature Survey – Charting the Future

[Vargr]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

The way I look at this is RW needs to focus on what will best help it grow its user base and increase profit so it can grow and afford to continue developing the product.

[SNIP]

I do wonder, however, if the focus on keeping the current user base happy is creating a feedback loop and overlooks what may be keeping larger numbers from buying the software?

I wonder how many people have turned away from buying the program because they would not be able to export or print their content. As much as I REALLY want calendars, I can see the inability to export/print being a more common deal breaker.

As for calendars versus journal—I don't know—I would think lack of custom calendars would be a bigger turn off for potential buyers than lack of journaling. But this may just be a blind spot I have, as lack of journal features is not something I've missed in months of heavy use for how I use the tool.


[SNIP]

The good news is that after the initial frustration, I started using the tool and have found it immensely useful. I have not seen anything that comes close to RW for what I use it for. The bad news is that it wouldn't take much for me to change allegiances. If a campaign-management tool came along that offered a decent content-management system with a workable solution for multiple calendars, and an ability to export/print, I would switch. Hours of cutting and pasting would seem like a worthwhile investment.

This, ultimately, is what the RW team needs to focus on. I think that is what they are trying to do with their survey, but when putting myself back into the shoes of a hypothetical GM who is informed about the product's features and limitations, I can see that, yes, the Marketplace is red-hot critical, but I have a difficult time seeing the existence or lack of journaling to be a deal breaker for a potential buyer. It seems to be more about making the existing user base happy.

I think what is being conveyed here is very important and very accurate.

I, too, would say that it is questionable whether I would buy RW today if I was given a list with calendars and export listed as "Not implemented".

I did - however - buy it, and what it does, it does very well indeed.

Would I change product if another tool came along?

It is hard to say, but I would definitely actively test the new product to find out - even going so far as buying it just for testing.

Am I pleased with RW today?
Yes, it does a hell of a good job - but I always - deep down - consider it to be beta software as long as it lacks export and calendars.

[Vargr]

Originally Posted by Exmortis

Excellent post, and something I will touch on. GMs and custom worlds, we are at least in a realm of 100 to 1 in favor of pre-purchased content GMs. To this day, I have played D&D/Pathfinder from grade 6 (so what 12?) to now at 45, that's 33yrs give or take, and in that time I have met/played with exactly two GMs that made their own custom world and content, and one is me.

With exception to my current group and the other person I know who does this incedently in my current group), every single group I joined starred in wonder when I pulled out my own game world and adventures as a GM. None, exactly none had ever seen that before.

Interesting observation.

My experience is, that the split between commercial worlds and home-grown worlds is 50-50 - possibly 60-40.

My impression is also, that in the US commercial worlds are widely used, where as - at least in Scanadinavia - it is more 50-50.

But that should probably be in a different thread...

[Nemesis]

Maybe I should explain in a bit more detail why I've stopped using RW as it seems my response came of as trollish (which it wasn't intended to be). The missing export/printing option and the survey results aren't the only reasons, they're just the final nails in the coffin for me, paired with one more main reason I'll explain below.

I bought RW about 6 months ago as a regular customer (didn't back the KS) and initially I was very excited about it (you can tell because I bought a Windows software to run it on my Mac - something I usually don't do). The videos were impressive and the feature list looked great. When I first started experimenting with it, I couldn't find the export option. Bit of googling and it learned there wasn't any - this immediately put me on the fence (I've explained my reasons already in my previous post). More experimenting over the course of several months made me realize that the interface just doesn't work for me. I'm still confused by the way the data is presented and even after several months (and a lot of work with categories and snippets) I feel it's not intuitive at all. And the list of feature's that I felt were missing kept growing (calenders are currently terrible to use, no options to change the layout of the software itself, no easy way to reorganize your data etc.), while a lot of the cloud based features were just not what I was interested in. I'm sure a lot of people find these very useful but I'm not one of them, so news about adding these feature left me cold. And all these tiny bits kept piling up until my dissatisfaction with RW in its current form was just too much. And with the survey results now in it seems that the issues I have with RW will not be fixed in the foreseeable future.

Now, does that mean I think RW is bad? Not at all, I think it's a good concept that just needs more polish and work. Why am I still moving away from it then? Because in the end I realized it just doesn't suit my personal campaign and session prep style - it just doesn't work for me in its current incarnation while the combination Scrivener/Scapple/OmniOutliner/Aeon Timeline does (@Rob: and it's not a hassle at all to use different apps, they all support OPML export and import so moving data between them is fairly easy). My games are mostly storygames often bordering on free form, so my prep is very lightweight with almost no maps (which means smart images are not that important) and statblocks, not the encounter driven games that RW currently seems to support best.

But that doesn't mean I'll never look at RW again. I still own a license and I will keep an eye on future developement. Maybe one day it'll be what I'm looking for. It just isn't right now.

[Dubya]

I bought Realmworks at Gencon last year and the custom calendars the salesman showed me blew my mind. Granted there are other things RW does, but the reason I bought the software was that it would make possible things that I have always wanted to have in game but which would be impractical to track on paper. These things include a campaign where lunar cycles and seasonal changes in constellations affect the story, magic use and character abilities. Also, I would love to run a campaign which spans a solar system while tracking the dates and seasons on the various bodies as players traverse between them. That may not be your thing or anyone else's but they are compelling enough to me to make the decision to buy the game. Hopefully, you can understand why I am a little disappointed to find that they have been indefinitely postponed. It would be nice to know when LWD plans on releasing custom calendars. I have plenty of someday projects of my own so without an estimate I really don't have much faith in their completion. I'm only asking for a vague this or that quarter of such and such year here. That shouldn't be too much to ask.

[Chemlak]

I feel your pain, Dubya, but it won't happen. Basically because it is too much to ask.

The short version: the course of software development never runs smooth.

The long version: RW has historically suffered numerous delays due to the complexity of the software. The initial estimates for early access and release given in the Kickstarter were WAAAAAY generous. This is not LWD's fault, except as far as refusing to release buggy and error-ridden software is their fault. They want to do a good job for their users (folks like you and I) and eliminate as many showstoppers as they can before releasing updates. As a result of this desire, any estimate they put on the current "to do" list will probably be wrong. This is not a bad thing. Calendars come after that. So any estimate they put on calendars will be woefully wrong, and will kick up an almighty stink when they can't achieve their target.

[Dubya]

I understand your point, but I respectfully disagree. Saying something like, we hope to release custom calendars in some form in mid 2016 at least puts it on the map. Excuses only get you so far. I'm willing to be patient but I'm going to be sorely disappointed if this feature is ignored indefinitely. This is what the salesperson sold me on, the only reason I spent money on this software. If we're going on two years without the feature that I put money on... Let's just say I'll be walking by the LWD booth a little more quickly in future.

[Chemlak]

Clearly you're not alone in feeling the way you do: Dark Lord Galen (one of the major champions for calendars here) is likewise severely disillusioned about calendars being on the back-burner for the time being.

Some things we know: calendars are ranked 4 or 5 on the survey's most-desired list. Calendars are either a "must have" feature or a "don't care" feature for users, with very little middle ground. Creating calendars basically sucks balls right now ("clunky and cumbersome" is the nicest thing I've seen written about it, and that was by Liz). Making calendars usable will take a hefty chunk of UI work. There are other features that are more broadly desired by the users. The LWD development team want to get calendars into our hands (seriously, they really, really do, not least so they can show off the work they've done already that's currently hidden from the users).

Taken all together, that means that calendars are going to be a huge deal to deliver, and Rob will be the first to admit that quality trumps providing capability.

Now, myself and some others have been loudly clamouring for calendars. To the extent that I'm surprised LWD haven't told me to shut up about them (if you don't believe me, take a look at the calendar thread in the requests forum, or the lobbying thread here).

But the crux of the matter is that LWD are in business to make money, and making the most people possible happy (even at the expense of alienating a vocal minority) is one way to do that. The survey results showed that the calendar supporters were a vocal major minority (enough to get it into the top 5, but not enough to get it in the top 3).

As a long-time user, I was here for the "dark times" when we were waiting for Early Access (which was delayed a full quarter or more from the original Kickstarter timeframe) and didn't learn anything substantive. I've seen what unexpected delays do to this user group. It's divisive, and not pretty. However, LWD have delivered, and generally blown all expectations away.

So, really, IF journals, web access, and the content market all work to schedule, THEN calendars will deliver, and will be great. If I had to take a stab in the dark, latter half of 2015, possibly early 2016. I have no real insight, here, other than knowing that the content market is monetisable (and therefore really high priority) and journals and web access are in the background code already so are "just" a matter of tidying up and switching on. Then come calendars, which will take some serious dedicated time to get right.

As usual I will caution patience. It's all I can do.

[Nemesis]

Originally Posted by Chemlak

There are other features that are more broadly desired by the users. [...] The survey results showed that the calendar supporters were a vocal major minority (enough to get it into the top 5, but not enough to get it in the top 3).

Except that we haven't actually seen the survey results. That's what LWD tells us what the results are. We're just have to take their word for it. Which I don't.

[rob]

Originally Posted by Nemesis

Except that we haven't actually seen the survey results. That's what LWD tells us what the results are. We're just have to take their word for it. Which I don't.

I'll strive to carve out the time to respond to a few other comments above in the next day or two. I've been in crunch mode all weekend to get some new features into place for the release this week. However, I need to stop and address this particular assertion now.

We collectively spent multiple weeks culling everything together and creating the survey, followed by multiple days going through the survey results and assessing the implications. We still have more days left to go through the remaining open-ended questions. If I'm understanding your statement correctly, it's your belief that we invested all of that time as an elaborate ruse to intentionally mislead everyone and ultimately justify focusing on features that will NOT make the majority of users happy with the product. In other words, we invested weeks of time to hurt the product's success. That's definitely what it sounds like, and I'm quite confused by it.

If you truly think our objective in investing all this effort is duplicity, there's little we can do on our end to change your views. However, I have to ask one question. If our ultimate goal is to ignore the survey, wouldn't it have been better for us to (a) NOT hold the survey, (b) announce nothing concrete, (c) proclaim whatever we felt like regarding what users want, and (d) spend all that time on actually getting more features into the product instead?

Heck, even if we changed our minds after seeing the survey results or didn't like what we saw, wouldn't it have been better for us to never say anything about the results or at least drag out the process as long as possible? To me, that sure seems like a much smarter way of handling things if, as you imply, the survey was merely intended as a ruse. At a minimum, not sharing any results or stating anything about the survey would have completely avoided giving everyone this opportunity to criticize what we're doing, which I can assure you is NOT fun on this end.

In any case, please enlighten me on exactly how everything we've done supports the idea that this is all just a ruse. I don't see it, so I'm apparently missing something important here.

Thanks!

[Vargr]

Originally Posted by rob

At a minimum, not sharing any results or stating anything about the survey would have completely avoided giving everyone this opportunity to criticize what we're doing, which I can assure you is NOT fun on this end.

Well, if I for one might have come through as rather harsh I would like to re-phrase

It is no secret that calendars are important to me and I feel that is the one missing tool which keeps me back.

I was really hoping (and expecting) that the calendars would be one of the first things to be worked on, so obviously I was disappointed to learn that was not the case; and that disappointment has probably shown.

Having had time to cool down I realize (as others have stated) that the calendars are still very much on, just a little further down the road. I just wish we were already that far down the road

So I guess I just wanted to say to Rob and the team, that I still think RW is a great program that I enjoy using.