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gcpeart
Junior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2012
Posts: 26

Old August 21st, 2018, 01:38 PM
I want to challenge 7 (ubiquity of internet access) and 8 (internet access in special circumstances like GenCon)

I post this from my commuter train, where I have more or less "ubiquitous internet access." For the first half of my commute I was bombarded by session issues, and needed to reload the app multiple times, and for the second half I was only aggrieved by long latency. More over through out my day I connect, reconnect, disconnect, move, and so on through multiple internet zones, and every time my session is lost, my place in my work lost, and I must reset my context.

My commute time is my prep time for game, as player and GM, I've invested heavily in PF in HL Classic, and now in trying to just "play with character builds" on HLO for PF2, I'm stymied immediately by the Online Model.

With respect to 8, I was also in the Sagamore, and I'm glad one end of the room had good access, I found myself frequently unable to even send a text message to a phone in the room, never mind other internet activities like SRD rule checks. GenCon is a relatively good con with respect to technology, probably its biggest issue is volume, not availability. But it was inconsistent, and if I can't access my characters reliably, I can't game. My generalized con experience, is that most convention spaces are veritable faraday cages, so even if you have a good mobile internet plan, it just won't work for you, and many cons either don't have WIFI. I acknowledge this is ameliorated by plans for an offline viewer, but that make tedious the act of re-updating a character, or tracking consumables between sessions.

I know I'm coming off as hostile, and it is probably diluting my message, but it is really frustrating, I have spent hundreds on classic, and sold at least 3-4 friends on it, it is a staple for us because of its utility. This isn't a plight about the cost model, this is raw usability, and it is driving me back to community build macro driven excel spreadsheets.
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