Realm Works Feature Survey Lobbying

The Realm Works Feature Survey is now live! You can learn more and take the survey by heading to our website!

This thread is your opportunity to lobby and campaign for your favorites. Any separate threads for this purpose will be deleted, and all posts will be moved into this thread. Please be civil and respectful of your fellow forum users.

If you have any questions about the survey, check to see if we've already answered your question in the in the "Realm Works Feature Survey Information" thread. Got a question that you don't see answered here? Ask it here.

Don't forget, the survey ends on Sunday, January 11 at 11:59 pm PST!

I like the presence of a streamlined UI and bulk operations in the survey. All this will help us to enter data faster, work with RW more efficiently and getting more done in less time. So I believe that this would be a good corner stone to put some priorities on.

For important additional features, I am sure every group has it's own needs, therefore it is difficult to lobby for something Anyways just for your information I put some prios beside the issues above, on import/export , printing, relationship diagramming, simplify & streamline interface, bulk operations.

A lot of critical topics are in the survey, so I'm excited what the results will be

I put this in the survey, but I want to say it here, too. Whenever I've recommended Realm Works to other gamers, someone invariably brings up the fact that it's a closed product. Once your data goes in, it never comes out.

My personal experience in recommending your product has been that this has been the single most common criticism, and has kept you off the radar of many potential customers.

It appears that most users are asleep and didn't see the survey in their inbox so I will be the first to say, CALENDAR!! :-D

I was asleep, and then busy filling in the survey...

Having said that, calendars, journals, print, export. Please, folks! These things are so important to making RW everything it can be.

Not really lobbying, but critique on the survey (and I mean it in the correction for next time sense, not in the hate you sense...)
Users can rarely give good results on a 1-10 scale, especially when its a one off answer, with no corrections (i.e. question 35 in the survey is the opposite of question 1 and the answers are compared). I think in the case of the major features a 1-18 grade should have been used with every grade appearing only once. So each user needs to decide on the absolute order in which he wants things to be implemented.

ruhar said:

It appears that most users are asleep and didn't see the survey in their inbox so I will be the first to say, CALENDAR!! :-D

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I agree - custom calendars.

There are many awesome things besides custom calendars, but those can wait for after the custom calendars.

Custom Calendars

The inability to create my own custom calendars is the single biggest block to my making full use of the tool. Having to manually convert dates from Gregorian to my campaign's calendar is a major pain point. There are many other features that I would welcome, but nothing impacts my enjoyment and use of the product as much as the lack of custom calendars.

Avi said:

Not really lobbying, but critique on the survey (and I mean it in the correction for next time sense, not in the hate you sense...)
Users can rarely give good results on a 1-10 scale, especially when its a one off answer, with no corrections (i.e. question 35 in the survey is the opposite of question 1 and the answers are compared). I think in the case of the major features a 1-18 grade should have been used with every grade appearing only once. So each user needs to decide on the absolute order in which he wants things to be implemented.

Click to expand...

We planned to do that originally. Unfortunately, the survey tools available are really clunky when you have that many different options to rank. So we had to go back and revise our approach. The 1-10 scale was the only approach that worked well within the survey tools and would give good results. We only need to identify the top few items for now.

FYI, Tried utilizing the survey at the airport as I waited on flight home, It is NOT user friendly on an Iphone.... the format does some unusual wrapping with the text versus the "check dot" about a third of the way threw I simply gave up. I revisited it this morning on my desktop machine.. SOOOOOO MUCH BETTER....

DLG

Colored mouse pointers. It's all about being able to change your mouse color depending on the mood of the plotline!

I think Avi made some legit points on his survey evaluation but I do think that by and large, you guys did a nice job putting this together.

I sincerely hope everyone follows your voting guidelines on the major features.

I only put one question as a '10'. Wanna guess which one?

Hopefully the same one I did, too. I'm aware that it might skew the data somewhat to have very consciously chosen to only give one specific subject a 10, and the best anything else got was a 9, but I was pretty generous with my high-importance flagging (honestly, "not interested" was almost impossible to assign to anything, so almost everything was at least a 2, and things only dropped below 5 for me if they were covered by other software I already have).

I don't think it's going to matter in the aggregate; there's just too many people who use too many ranking styles for one person's methods to make that much of a difference. There's also redistribution options if they want to play with the data: if "ExampleGuy" ranks most things from 6-10, they can rescale his data to 1-10 and see how doing that to each person affects the rankings. (I used to do stuff like that for Con of the North's pop survey.)

I tried my best to spread things out, since I think that gives them more useful information, but I suspect I skew low. There are a bunch of features in the two big clumps that I just don't care about, so they got appropriate rankings.

Someone mentioned ranking them 1-18; I would find that annoying because after a point you don't really care about the specific order. (1-2-3-4-5, then 6-10 sorta care, then 11-18 don't really care.) I wonder if it'd be better to just have three rankings ("want/kinda want/don't care") and then a choice for your favorite.

Amateur statistics! :)

I want to start by adding my voice to the vote for custom calendars. I only have one game that uses the Gregorian calendar.

I am really, really looking forward to the Content Market. I've been manually copying things from my various settings and rulebooks since I purchased RW, and it's a little tiring. Not to mention that RW organizes things completely differently than any sourcebooks, and the 'best practices' guide is still incomplete; the end result is that I don't feel confident in how I'm using RW. I find myself wondering if I could arrange things better, or if I'm wasting space.

I'd like to see something from an official source that gives me a very clear example on how to set up a realm and a story. I'm hoping that the established settings make some of their content free to pick up, particularly those that already have a lot of material freely available. (It's not that I'm being a cheapskate; I'm poor.)

LonePaladin said:

I want to start by adding my voice to the vote for custom calendars. I only have one game that uses the Gregorian calendar.

I am really, really looking forward to the Content Market........ . I'm hoping that the established settings make some of their content free to pick up, particularly those that already have a lot of material freely available. (It's not that I'm being a cheapskate; I'm poor.)

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Don't hold your breath for the "free" part. The initial expense for the market place and the "licensing" for distrebution costs will have to be addressed first, otherwise the labor alone to maintain would make it to costly to be effective.
Free is more likely to occur if-when shared market items from community users come into effect... And that will still be some distance away from when market opens

while i think a lot of items on there sounded great and will make great additions the lack of questions about the content market was disappointing.

It's the one feature that really sold me on this product and from a users perspective its still no closer to appearing in the program and when as a Gm you only run published adventures its a right pain to add them to realm works to make use of it at the moment.

The PDF importer tool would help enormously with this but right now this program is basically just a waste of money for me as its makes my job as a gm harder not easier as I have to spend so much time importing content. sure you have a coming in 2015 line on the product page but realm works has been out for 9 months now and our 6 months free cloud service time is ticking and we still don't have one of the main features that is advertised for the program.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great powerful tool, and excellent for making your own settings. But right now I just can't justify loading it up and doing anything with it because the one must have feature for running published adventures is still missing entirely. This makes it a little hard to get excited over adding other features that can mostly be worked around by the user while this remains outstanding.

Philderbeast said:

while i think a lot of items on there sounded great and will make great additions the lack of questions about the content market was disappointing.

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I think that's generally because the Content Market is one of the "we don't need to survey that because we already know that's next" types of things. The survey is to help guide the LWD folks about what to work on when they have some opportunities while working on the two next big items: the Content Market, and Web-based access.

See this thread for the most recent discussion on that point, including input from Liz.

Silveras said:

I think that's generally because the Content Market is one of the "we don't need to survey that because we already know that's next" types of things. The survey is to help guide the LWD folks about what to work on when they have some opportunities while working on the two next big items: the Content Market, and Web-based access.

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Yep. That fact is explicitly what the first page of the survey spelled out. Er, let me rephrase that. That fact is what the first page was INTENDED to explicitly spell out. It seems we failed in that effort for at least one user.