I've been a loyal Hero Lab for Pathfinder user. I can't imagine playing the game without it. I've purchased every book, companion, and campaign data file. I have hundreds of dollars invested in Hero Lab. When deciding on feats, spells, etc. it's so much easier to have everything in front of you than flipping through tons of books. Oh, and I make my book purchases based on the characters I build in Hero Lab.
A few weeks ago I decided I wanted to start paying ShadowRun 5e. One of the reasons I decided on ShadowRun versus other games was I knew Hero Lab supported it. I started buying the 5e books, purchasing the 5e Hero Lab modules, and building my first characters. However, I was rather displeased to find that some of the recent handbooks were not available yet in Hero Lab.
I understand your company's economics and the fact that Pathfinder brings in more revenue than ShadowRun. However, if you can't support all products at the same pace and timing regarding product releases then I struggle with that. I'd like to remain a loyal Hero Lab user, but I expect the same great customer service across all platforms. Please!
It's more like Paizo sends LW the text of their new books early, so that LW can input the data into HL.
Catalyst doesn't. As in, when you can get the book, so can Rob et all.
Now, let's pretend we're putting in a quality. Nothing difficult, just a simple quality like say....Otaku to Technomancer. It's easy enough. A little text, a quick modification to drain. Takes all of....5 minutes. Okay. So there's 20 new qualities in the book that just came out. There's 100 minutes. Assuming they're all simple qualities with only one level, rather than multiple, only hit one or two stats, doesn't require changing a base calculation (like say Type O system from Augmentation).
So, 100 minutes of work. No big deal, right? under 2 hours work, yeah?
Okay, so there's your qualities. Next, we have new gear. Well, that's a BIT more difficult to input, just because each piece is slightly different and may affect multiple dice pools, and you don't want to miss any. We'll say it takes about 10 minutes at the longest to put into the software. There's about 50 new pieces of gear to add in, so you're looking at 500 minutes, bringing us to 600 minutes of work total, or 6 hours.
Not bad, right? That's like a day's work. No big deal.
Spells? Echoes? Programs? Each of these take anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes to put in. We'll be nice and say in the end, you're only inputting 100 new things into the database from the book. Let's take an average of 8 minutes per thing, for 800 minutes. Bringing our new total to 1400 minutes, or 23.33 hours work, we'll round it to 24 (something always breaks) and say that's only 3 days work. WTF? why isn't the book package out yet???
Well.....let's talk about other systems in the book. What if there's an optional rule? What if there's a section that contradicts another rule in the core book, or another supplement? What then? THEN you get into the ugly part about this software. Crap, okay, let's do it.
Let's talk about alternate character generation systems, shall we? Do you know how to put that into HL? I don't. In fact, I can't. Nobody but LW can. It's hard coded into the program and it breaks all manner of things to try to integrate it. Are you a programmer? Can you code? Have you ever built a SR character generator in any kind of format? I have. I did it in Excel for 4th edition. It was a MASSIVE undertaking to add in alternate generation systems. Each one took the same time to put into the code as building it in the first place. It's a pain in the ass. I'll be nice, and say that the LW team (being gods at programming) can recreate the wheel in multiple systems in just under 2 weeks, bug free. It takes a LONG time. So we're now at 2 1/2 weeks of work for one person to get everything in.
Okay, so that's still not too bad right? Wrong. What about errata? I mean, SR5 has to have errata for its errata at this point, it's so badly written and proofed. So, what's a dev to do but make a call to Catalyst asking for official clarification. Well, in a perfect world, they'd pick up the phone and get an answer in 10 minutes.
This is not a perfect world. This world sucks. Let's call it 2 weeks to get that answer. So, now we're at a month.
A MONTH. Of not doing ANYTHING but SR5 for Hero Labs. No RW developing, no Paizo support, no new system for HL being put in. Nothing.
EACH book takes a MONTH to get from "ah, rules!" to "here, give us your money." And I'm being generous with how fast these guys can work. In a real world situation, it's more like 6-8 weeks PER BOOK.
Now, I know what you're thinking, "but Pathfinder products are available, like, the day they come out, and there's a TON more rules and stuff in there than in SR5..." Yeah, we went over that. LW gets advanced copies so they can get their MONTH of work done before the book comes out. Catalyst doesn't do that. Catalyst makes LW basically wait for the street date before getting them the rules, and I wouldn't be shocked to hear that the rules they get are the same PDF's that we get. Meaning, instead of being able to look over a file and grab each part separately, they have to go through all the flavor text to find each nugget of crunch from each book. For fuck's sake, in SR5 there are multiple instances of the cost for something being 50 pages later/earlier than the actual item description. It's a pain in the dick to work with SR. Hell, it's hard to play. Oh, and all that searching for crunch for Hero Labs is like another 3 or 4 hours work on top of the MONTH it takes to get done with a single book.
NOW, that being said, LW does a great job of passing around the work load so that Guy A is doing Cyber, and Guy B is doing PACKS and Guy C is doing Qualities, etc.. So the work is actually only taking 3-4 weeks to do. But it still has to be finished and checked for accuracy before it's released, so there's your extra time on top of that.
FINALLY (yes, I know, wall of text here), don't forget that LW JUST got back from GenCon. That is a TON of frickin' work to go to GenCon for your company. It takes months of planning and preparation, during which, you ain't coding HL, you're booking flights and hotels. You're packing, you're planning, you're setting up and practicing demos so that people know how your software works in the first place.
Seriously bro, cut them some slack.
tldr; We're behind on books because it takes a fuckload of time for each book to be programmed into HL + Catalyst doesn't give enough if any lead up time for LW to work out the plug-ins + GenCon + Coding is hard.
