Lone Wolf - Please stop auto-adding free packages

Dear Lone Wolf,

I've tried to raise this issue before, and I believe the response was "we auto-activate stuff so people don't forget to do it."

This weekend I've been gaming with a Hero Portfolio that I haven't used for some time. I've had to spend time going through configure hero on every character in the portfolio turning off free packages that I don't want/use and resetting the default on each character.
On each hero I had to deactivate 7 packages that I haven't got outside HeroLab, and likely will never use - The Grande Temple of Jing, Kobold Quarterly, Midgard Players Guide, Ironfang Invasion, Return of the Runelords, Ruins of Azlant, War for the Crown.

I'm happy to see you advertise/publicize the fact that you do offer free content with updates (and it's great that you do), but can you please NOT auto-activate it on all our heroes. This seems to happen with nearly every pathfinder update. If I wanted any of these packages or options, I can activate them myself.

They auto-activate so that people don't complain that their new purchase isn't immediately available on their existing characters.

It would be good to have an option to switch between the two behaviours.

Farling said:

It would be good to have an option to switch between the two behaviours.

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As has been discussed here before...

I agree that I'd like a checkbox that says "auto-enable new content", because I would turn it off also.

I'm going to file a bug report right now. For anyone else who cares about this, do the same — they've said before that they rate importance by how much email they receive on various topics. Sending an email to support@wolflair is all you need to do. (That email address is obviously missing the .com for spam prevention purposes.)

Farling said:

They auto-activate so that people don't complain that their new purchase isn't immediately available on their existing characters.

It would be good to have an option to switch between the two behaviours.

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Considering how many posts I see from people who can't find stuff they have just purchased - I don't think LW is auto-activating all purchased content. Even so, its the FREE content that I'm repeatedly disabling.
A 'switch' would be great. +1 for that.

I have complained about the addition of new purchases to old portfolios before, because I also re-use portfolios prepared beforehand. It drives me bit batty to have to go through and turn off the undesired new content that is almost always irrelevant to the portfolios I am working with.

I think part of the issue, though, is that HeroLab is primarily a Player-based tool. Players would understandably want new content to be available for their characters most of the time. GMs, though, would usually NOT want NPCs prepared ahead of time to suddenly have access to new spells, feats, and such - that's just clutter on them.

And that's where my complaint comes from. I've prepared my NPCs ahead of time, sometimes years ahead of time, and re-use them when I re-run an adventure or campaign. For those, auto-enabling new content is just a hassle on my end.

It would be awesome if the default was to auto-enable anything purchased, and to not do so for free content.

Then maybe have toggles to change the behavior as well.

However, I'd rather their limited resources go towards Pathfinder and Realm Works.
But that's just me.

This is a situation we have to avoid - this is the main reason we don't turn on packages automatically:

A player who doesn't own many HL packages emails their character to the GM for approval - the GM owns more packages, opens the character, edits it a little, and sends it back - HL can't automatically turn on all the packages the GM owns, or the GM might accidentally add a feat or item that the player doesn't have the package for - the player would get errors when they opened the portfolio once it was sent back.

As a note, if you're careful with how you set up your defaults, you can avoid the problem Dami is describing in the OP - if your default profile has those sources turned off, and you open the portfolio, it will see there's a source in the portfolio it doesn't have a record of (because that portfolio didn't exist back when the portfolio was last saved), and it will look at the defaults to see what to do with that source. You can also relatively quickly enable/disable a set of sources for a set of characters by setting up the right defaults on the first one, and then just doing "use defaults" on the rest - it'll cut down on the clicks required to fix this up, since you won't need to find each book on each character.

Also, if you need different defaults in different situations, you can use Tools...Duplicate Game System - each copy maintains its own defaults.

Mathias said:

This is a situation we have to avoid - this is the main reason we don't turn on packages automatically <snip>

...if you're careful with how you set up your defaults, you can avoid the problem Dami is describing in the OP.

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But LW *is* turning on packages automatically, which is why I have concerns. I have 3 copies of the Pathfinder system, each with their own defaults. The auto-activation of free packages ignores my defaults - they still get turned on when I open a portfolio that I haven't used since a free package was added by an update. If this doesn't actually over-write my defaults then clicking on "use defaults" for each hero is going to help, but I still have to do it for EVERY hero.

Dami said:

But LW *is* turning on packages automatically, which is why I have concerns.

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Perhaps Mathias meant that the program _shouldn't_ be turning them on, and maybe he thinks it doesn't because it shouldn't?

In any case, if he hasn't misspoken, then he's confirmed the bug!

Two issues are being discussed in this thread. In the original post, Dami has an issue with free packages defaulting to being turned on, and in #6, Ualaa is talking about another source-related issue - that if you have already saved a character while a purchasable package exists, that that package does not automatically turn on for that character if you purchase it later. So I began by answering Ualaa's question (the one right before mine), and then in the third paragraph, I discuss a workaround that will hopefully help minimize the trouble with the issue Dami's encountering.


Dami - you're certain you're setting up and saving your defaults before opening these portfolios? What you're describing is not the behavior I'd expect.

@Mathias - that makes more sense.
Yes, I have defaults set on my Pathfinder system copies. I opened a portfolio that I'd set up defaults on before, but hadn't used for months and had free packages activate. I've just opened the same system in HL and tried another "old" portfolio (only a month since using it) and at least 4 packages had activated on it.

Then is there a way to disable the free ones from showing up at all? Deleting, removing, whatever?

Even if my default and my portfolios are "correct", when I use the encounter builder or encounter libraries, they get turned back on because LW builds those with everything on.
And then suddenly I have to worry about turning them off again before saving anything.

Dami, you mention an "old" portfolio as being only 1 month old, but our last update of Pathfinder was November 9th, so a little over a month ago, and the last update did not add any new free sources - all that release added were paid sources. So is this a portfolio that you had opened since the last update, edited the sources for it, and then opened it again within the last day or two, and sources had turned on again for it?


If that's what's happening, something is going wrong, and could you please find an old portfolio that should have several sources turned off, and open it, but don't save it over the old version - save it as a new file, and then send me both the old version and newly saved version, so that I can compare the sources in both cases.


I just tested creating a new portfolio, turning off every adventure path source, saving it, and then closing and re-opening it, and the adventure paths were still turned off, so the behavior you're describing (if I understand correctly what you're doing) is not what I'm encountering.

What problems is this causing you, Duamatef, since you say you "...worry about turning them off..."? I thought the only issue would have been clutter in the various tables, from content you don't want to accidentally use.

Mathias said:

What problems is this causing you, Duamatef, since you say you "...worry about turning them off..."? I thought the only issue would have been clutter in the various tables, from content you don't want to accidentally use.

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That's the one. Once one of those is on, I have to worry about whether some spell is now showing as an option when it shouldn't be, some feat or .. etc.

If I'm building an encounter, for example, or modifying one, in a game that is "no third party", I have numerous times thought "Done", only to suddenly notice that some spell on an NPC isn't valid because those options are turned on because the imported creature or NPC has those features enabled, and it enables it for the whole encounter portfolio.

So each creature you add causes the settings to change away from the default.

As a GM/DM, I want to be able to open a portfolio and have it tell me "This includes things you don't have/allow" rather than the onus being on me to go and see if something changed my preferences without permission.

I would have to give this a +1 as well.

For instance, I'm GM'ing RotRL and for #reasons I've limited my players to CORE book only (and 1 campaign setting book).

So when there is an update, there's a chance that my players are adding spells/feats/items that are illegal in my campaign.

As a side note, something as a wishlist for PFO, it would be great if there was a "campaign" option online that would let a GM set options/books/etc and other players could subscribe/link to and would lock in those settings for a given character...

If the user experience and overall management of the sources in each profile was not so painful, I don't think this would be as big of a problem. It would be nice to be able to lock source packages, compare other valid source lists from players, and manage more than one "default" option at a time.

Having to scroll through 20 tiny screen-fulls to get a bunch of random check-boxes through-out is a classic example of UI/UX design that did not appropriately consider scale effecting.

I agree that he UI needs work given the number of sources now available. There are multiple ways to attack this that I can see — use a "collapsible tree" structure with checkboxes at each level that turn on.off the sublevel items, or a search bar that filters sources based on text that is entered AND allows the word "new" to find sources that weren't there the last time the portfolio was saved, or use some type of "scrolling tabs" layout that can handle a large number of source groupings.

Personally, I like the tree approach best, particularly if it could be combined with the search filter...