I honestly hope they don't offer extra licenses. With an online model it is really not needed, unless you are trying to steal from LWD by buying 1 copy and distribute licenses to the rest of your gaming group.
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- The Lone Wolf Development Team
Down right Mad!!!
- Thread starter Qkzap
- Start date
I honestly hope they don't offer extra licenses. With an online model it is really not needed, unless you are trying to steal from LWD by buying 1 copy and distribute licenses to the rest of your gaming group.
ShadowChemosh
Well-known member
I am repeating info from the Official HLO FAQ. Of course some people will steal or find a way to exploit it. But many others want it for using in the correct way which is to not be required to have multiple accounts for people living in the same house.
HLO FAQ said:
I think that's just an extension of the HLC history. They sold extra licenses and so many people have purchased them that they want to offer some value to the people that transfer over.
I just hope they update their terms and agreements to allow the DM to purchase the licenses and share with their table. That just makes sense given a lot of DMs will purchase the technology they want their players to use at their table.
I just hope they update their terms and agreements to allow the DM to purchase the licenses and share with their table. That just makes sense given a lot of DMs will purchase the technology they want their players to use at their table.
no we are asking for concurrent licensing I know i covered this in another post but they could make a group product make it cost 60 dollars to purchase and 9 dollars a month for continues access for a group of six (25 percent discount on access.) the system logs the email addresses you want to assign and only those email addresses can access. which is a legitimate way to deal with sort of thing ... you don't believe me look at adobe, google,dropbox,and microsoft they all offer similar options.
I have no problems with an online subscription model ... if online works. I play Starfinder once every two weeks on Tuesday night, and last night I couldn't use my character. We had a late outage notification, and zero explanation of why. If we're paying for an online model, I'd like to see a certain level of online service.
I agree with this statement. Paying for online means that certain usage levels should be expected. Outages and planned maintenance should be well communicated as well.
I absolutely understand your frustration Zarberg! You can learn more about what happened on Tuesday here.
While this was an isolated incident, once we get offline view properly implemented it should help eliminate some of the frustration for maintenance times. Also, be sure to keep an eye on our announcements area as we do post when we will be doing our scheduled maintenance.
While this was an isolated incident, once we get offline view properly implemented it should help eliminate some of the frustration for maintenance times. Also, be sure to keep an eye on our announcements area as we do post when we will be doing our scheduled maintenance.
As you guys move more and more into the "Online" model, I hope you guys grow and learn. Hopefully we'll start hearing words like Load Balancing, Disaster Recovery, and Multi-site High Availability.
I don't necessarily mind monthly "server" fees but in this day and age, I don't want to hear about maintenance windows. We're spoiled now and 0 downtime is somewhat expected.
I know this was a one off with your provider but still "avoidable".
PS Please don't take this as an angry post, I'm not. Read this as a friendly post as encouragement and hope that your experience will be growing over the next year as you manage your 24/7 server farm.
I don't necessarily mind monthly "server" fees but in this day and age, I don't want to hear about maintenance windows. We're spoiled now and 0 downtime is somewhat expected.
I know this was a one off with your provider but still "avoidable".
PS Please don't take this as an angry post, I'm not. Read this as a friendly post as encouragement and hope that your experience will be growing over the next year as you manage your 24/7 server farm.
As you guys move more and more into the "Online" model, I hope you guys grow and learn. Hopefully we'll start hearing words like Load Balancing, Disaster Recovery, and Multi-site High Availability.
I don't necessarily mind monthly "server" fees but in this day and age, I don't want to hear about maintenance windows. We're spoiled now and 0 downtime is somewhat expected.
I know this was a one off with your provider but still "avoidable".
PS Please don't take this as an angry post, I'm not. Read this as a friendly post as encouragement and hope that your experience will be growing over the next year as you manage your 24/7 server farm.
Even with load-balancing and high-availability, up-time is guaranteed up to a certain number of nines. Let's say it's five nines, 99.999% up-time. There's still a 0.001% chance of things going down.
Disaster recovery, if we're separating that out from multi-site high-availability, have recovery-point and recovery-time parameters, meaning that things won't necessarily be back up instantly, and won't necessarily be back up with up-to-the-second data, or even up-to-the-minute.
This shouldn't have happened. They've admitted that. They've isolated the issue. They've addressed it.
dungeonguru
Well-known member
Going fully online even with distributed DNS or multi-site hosting can't prevent the occasional outage, it just limits the number of people that might get affected with an outage, especially malicious hacks and denial of service attacks that might only deny a particular ISP or region. It's good to see that offline viewing is "in the plan" though.
I'm just hoping that if I do decide to pay a sub for HLO, that I don't get hit with a throttle or paywall down the road due to the slow death of net neutrality. My current ISP throttles netflix and sling already when they can get away with it. I would hate to pay a sub for software and an additional sub for tolerable access to the same software.
I'm just hoping that if I do decide to pay a sub for HLO, that I don't get hit with a throttle or paywall down the road due to the slow death of net neutrality. My current ISP throttles netflix and sling already when they can get away with it. I would hate to pay a sub for software and an additional sub for tolerable access to the same software.
Hockyman68
New member
So I get there is a business to be ran but at the same time, these costs are down right outrageous. First of all I have to pay $34 to upgrade my account. Then I have to pay $24.99 a year. AND THAT IS JUST FOR THE CORE PACKAGE. Then I have to pay or each subsequent package. That is outrageous.
I was pissed when you all decided to raise the prices on HeroLab classic. $4.99 for 3 packages, then its 4.99 for 2 packages. Now $5.99 per 3 packages. While it wasn’t a huge deal it was still annoying. Then with as many errors and inconsistencies and not up to date with current rule set.
I feel so cheated right now and I will not support this anymore.
I was pissed when you all decided to raise the prices on HeroLab classic. $4.99 for 3 packages, then its 4.99 for 2 packages. Now $5.99 per 3 packages. While it wasn’t a huge deal it was still annoying. Then with as many errors and inconsistencies and not up to date with current rule set.
I feel so cheated right now and I will not support this anymore.
Down for less than 1 hour per year requires a reliability of 0.0114155%
It would be down for longer due to periodic program updates.
Planned, scheduled maintenance isn't considered downtime when tracking a KPI though. So program updates done during that maintenance is ok.
Lets be honest here guys. Every online company does maintenance and far more business that Wolflair ever will be. I don't see people screaming when MS, Apple, Amazon, etc are running their planned maintenance, so why would anyone EVER expect Wolflair to maintain a five-9 stability rating.
If your gaming group can't accommodate planned maintenance, I think you all need to get out more.
When the planned maintenance coincides with your regular weekly gaming session (which you might have been doing for the past 30 years) then you have no character sheets for that game session.
(Just check out the RW mandatory updates which are published just prior to a gaming session as reported in other forums to see what a hassle it causes.)
MNBlockHead
Well-known member
Well, yes, sure. But this is all a bit of a tangent from the far more common issue of poor or no connections at game stores, conventions, and homes.
I love "cloud"-based tools and don't mind paying subscriptions for services and software. But anything important needs to have offline.
I run my business on G Suite. I have offline access to critical documents.
Other services I use include:
Evernote - I can use on or offline and on multiple platforms.
DnD Beyond - On iOS devices, all my rules, and adventure content is available offline. The character sheet will be after they've revamped the online version.
Apple Music
Podcasts (I just use the default one on the iPhone but afaik all the major podcast applications support downloading for offline consumption)
My task-management service
Actually, the more that I think about it, the harder it is to think of online services I use that DON'T have offline capabilities.
About the only thing that comes readily to mind for fully online is streaming video services like Amazon TV, HBO Now, Netflix, and Hulu.
Gaming isn't a cheap hobby, if you can't afford it you probably should find a different hobby (or a second job).
It can be. All depends. There are free offerings, not the least of which are GURPS Lite and the D&D 5E equivalent (whatever it's called). There are freely available SRDs for various systems, and there are pay-what-you-want systems.
There are quite a few choices and resources for someone who wants to engage in gaming as a low-cost hobby.
I agree. However HeroLab Online isn't one of those free options. As for low-cost, that is in the eye of the consumer. Some have already said that the cost they are charging for their online functionality is minor(less than a cup of joe a month), while others are outraged by that cost. As such, I would add that HeroLab Online isn't a tool for those looking for the free/low-cost path either.
And this is the point that Hockyman68 was trying to make. So we've kind of gone in a circle now. His point was criticized with an argument that gaming, in general, is a necessarily expensive hobby, so if you can afford the hobby, you can afford Hero Lab Online.
My point was that this is demonstrably untrue.
Then your point is again that Hero Lab Online is not cheap. And that closes the circle.