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- The Lone Wolf Development Team
How long, Really?
- Thread starter Madmaxneo
- Start date
MNBlockHead
Well-known member
This. It is an old project-management joke, but it is true.
MNBlockHead
Well-known member
Simple. Go into business on your own.
RealmWorks has produced results. Results I was happy to purchase for what I think is a great deal.
Yes welcome...
Can I ask about the Spotlight Series? I love that series...
Ok, I'll ask... What's up with it?
When can we expect a new installment?
Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to look into the spotlight series. I've been swamped with the pending news updates, new marketing plans, and other internal items. Hopefully all that will settle down soon and we can see about it then!
Yeah, I'm happy with all my LWD purchases.
I'm just always amazed at some of the logic used to defend what is an incomplete and extremely late product. When the company comes out (and they have) said why they're late and have fallen behind where they expected to be, I respect that. When non-employees defend this incomplete and lateness with "you should just be quiet and wait, you don't know the complexities of this, etc...", It gets under my skin.
On the flip side, if I had a real beef with LWD, I'd be talking to them - not complaining about it on a forum.
I'm just always amazed at some of the logic used to defend what is an incomplete and extremely late product. When the company comes out (and they have) said why they're late and have fallen behind where they expected to be, I respect that. When non-employees defend this incomplete and lateness with "you should just be quiet and wait, you don't know the complexities of this, etc...", It gets under my skin.
On the flip side, if I had a real beef with LWD, I'd be talking to them - not complaining about it on a forum.
So you instead of adding anything constructive or useful, you just troll?
So it is OK to post whines and complaints, not OK to post positively?
Can't have your cake and eat it I am afraid, either its OK to post your opinion, or it is not. I freely believe both sides of the paying coin have the right to voice theirs.
However it is an open forum, do not like the responses? send privately.
Yes welcome...
Can I ask about the Spotlight Series? I love that series...
Ok, I'll ask... What's up with it?
When can we expect a new installment?
Agreed, they were very good!!! My watching them several times is what gave me such a great appreciation for RW and what can be done. with out them I am 100% I would not have near the work done I have so far.
Would love to see more! +10,000!
I6 Ravenloft RW entry now 100% completed, Just awaits a full QA pass now.
EVERYBODY READ THIS!!!
Whoa! Take a deep breath there, Exmortis.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and Kathorus is simply voicing his/hers, just like you and everyone else get to share your own. Kathorus didn't directly challenge anyone specifically on the forums, nor did s/he do any trolling from my perspective. You, on the other hand, just did (the direct challenge).
Soooo.....
Everybody here needs to take a minute and re-read their posts before pressing the submit button. If you've got any attitude, edit your post. If anyone fails to review and edit before posting, they will be given a "timeout" on the forums.
This is a contentious subject, with lots of different opinions that cover the whole spectrum. All of them are valid. Unlike lots of company sites, we allow everyone to voice those opinions here. But there are rules and limits. Most importantly, everyone MUST RESPECT the opinions of others, even if they don't agree. Failure to maintain decorum and respect is grounds for getting forcibly silenced. And if enough people can't maintain that decorum and respect, we'll need to rethink allowing everyone to voice their opinions. I don't want to have to do that, but I will if people can't play nice together here.
Consider this a shot across the bow. For everyone.
Relax. Breathe. Then discuss politely. And everybody is happy.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled sharing of different (often conflicting) opinions...
Thanks!!
Whoa! Take a deep breath there, Exmortis.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and Kathorus is simply voicing his/hers, just like you and everyone else get to share your own. Kathorus didn't directly challenge anyone specifically on the forums, nor did s/he do any trolling from my perspective. You, on the other hand, just did (the direct challenge).
Soooo.....
Everybody here needs to take a minute and re-read their posts before pressing the submit button. If you've got any attitude, edit your post. If anyone fails to review and edit before posting, they will be given a "timeout" on the forums.
This is a contentious subject, with lots of different opinions that cover the whole spectrum. All of them are valid. Unlike lots of company sites, we allow everyone to voice those opinions here. But there are rules and limits. Most importantly, everyone MUST RESPECT the opinions of others, even if they don't agree. Failure to maintain decorum and respect is grounds for getting forcibly silenced. And if enough people can't maintain that decorum and respect, we'll need to rethink allowing everyone to voice their opinions. I don't want to have to do that, but I will if people can't play nice together here.
Consider this a shot across the bow. For everyone.
Relax. Breathe. Then discuss politely. And everybody is happy.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled sharing of different (often conflicting) opinions...
Thanks!!
LWD has an open forum policy, people come on here from time to time and are unhappy with whatever. These already unhappy customers are almost always met by a group of other users that call them "whiners" and act as if they shouldn't feel the way they do. This group runs the risk of turning unhappy customers of LWD into former customers of LWD. That's my simple, succinct point.
I agree with Kathorus, I've learned to love Realmworks despite the glaring problems, deficiencies and continual delays.
However whenever I say anything less salutatory than "congrats!" the hardcore defenders/ apologists come out to silence any criticism.
It's trolling at it's worst imho.
However whenever I say anything less salutatory than "congrats!" the hardcore defenders/ apologists come out to silence any criticism.
It's trolling at it's worst imho.
You are all entitled to your opinions.
Not my fault that you're all wrong.
But I will try not to hold your wrongheadedness against you.
Or you.
You, though, make it very hard.
(That's what she said)
You're pretty awesome, in the other hand.
And you, yes, you, over there in the corner, you want calendars. You can stay.
You, on the other side of the curtain, don't care about calendars. You can stay, too.
We all want RW, fully functional and awesome, we just have differing ideas of how long we'll tolerate not getting it. And that's cool.
Not my fault that you're all wrong.
But I will try not to hold your wrongheadedness against you.
Or you.
You, though, make it very hard.
(That's what she said)
You're pretty awesome, in the other hand.
And you, yes, you, over there in the corner, you want calendars. You can stay.
You, on the other side of the curtain, don't care about calendars. You can stay, too.
We all want RW, fully functional and awesome, we just have differing ideas of how long we'll tolerate not getting it. And that's cool.
Lol, what a thread. So substance, much angry.
I still remember the first time I saw a preview of RealmWorks. I was blown away. There is no doubt that it is amazing software. It's designed to facilitate *world-building* after all, and that is a fantastically large endeavor from the get-go. Knowing that RW was still in development, I purchased it anyway, despite being unemployed and quite poor at the time. My eager anticipation mounted to excitement as I opened the program and started exploring around it's inner workings for the first time. My excitement soon turned to anxiety over the incredibly complex array of tools as I wondered if I would ever get the chance to understand and use them all. I overcame that anxiety by deciding to use and practice on what I could understand by inputting as much of my campaign setting as I could. As much work as that can be, it is rewarding to see the matrices that you once contained in your head being backed up onto a third party that you can see and use.
Whilst it would be possible to end the story there and leave it at 'wonderful software, awesome experience' etc, most, dare I say, all people are inclined towards wanting more and better and many of those people will subconsciously be thinking of process improvements as they use any software, or even, perform any action. It is a part of seeing the potential behind something rather than just accepting things at face value.
Similarly, even without a mind incapable of settling on something as finished, when one finds specific elements that they would consider core to their gaming experience that are not supported by RW, then a compromise of needs/wants sets in. The amount that one must compromise whilst using RW is weighed up, either subconsciously or actively, against alternative options for campaign management.
During the last year that I have been patiently inputting my campaign setting into RW, I have been playing in games with friends who have purchased licenses or subscriptions to other similar-yet-different pieces of game enhancing software; in one game we use Fantasy Grounds; in another we use roll20.net. I was continually impressed by what my friends were able to do using their respective gaming tools, and throughout every session, I could not help but subconsciously track which parts of what my friends were bringing to the table I would or would not be able to do with RW.
Now, at this point I know a lot of you are thinking 'but those tools are different to RW, they are tabletop management, and RW is campaign management, they were never designed to be compared.' I am aware of this, but the truth of it is, that whilst RW is almost exclusively campaign management with a few tools which could be tweaked for tabletop management, those other 2, whilst being predominantly about tabletop management, still contain campaign management elements, limited but robust. And my friends have been using them and still making amazing, surprising, deep campaigns. They started off playing in them for free, and enjoyed them enough to decide to invest and our gaming groups have certainly reaped the benefits.
The reason I mention this essentially comes down to brand loyalty and marketing in general. Whilst RW may be the deepest, richest, most versatile tool for campaign management on the market at the moment, if points of customer inaccessibility prevent enough people buying into its development, it can easily get left behind by a leaner, more accessible approach which draws better funding to the point that it will eventually completely overtake RW even in its own domain. If it seems like I am painting a gloomy picture there, let me make myself clear, I am not suggesting this is currently happening or on the brink or anything like that.
What I am saying is that for most people, there is inevitably going to be a compromise that goes on in their heads with any software they decide to use to run an RPG. That compromise can for all intents and purposes be measured, and gets weighed against other options. Already the lack of tabletop management functionality in RW is a compromise which most of my friends are unwilling to make. Whilst of course purely anecdotal, it gives me personally the idea that I might be in the minority in preferring an intricate, powerful, subtle yet expansive campaign manager over a flashy tabletop dice roller++ program.
I think for me, seeing my friends run such amazing campaigns with what I had built up in my head to be inferior gaming software really got to me, and still does. No fault of LWD or RW, but I also have an added problem of having built my campaign premise around a function that does not even exist yet in RW(topic reveal by individual player), unbeknownst to me at the time of getting into this. So, scrap the campaign I've been working on, and run something simpler, or try to find a work around that keeps the same premise are two options. The former is not appealing to me, and if I did I would likely resort to just using roll20 so that I at least had the tabletop element built in, and well, the latter is where I run into people telling me that my feature request has already been mentioned, thanks, we're getting to it... in a few years. Of course that is not to say that there may not be other workarounds, but compared to what people grow accustomed to in terms of updates from larger companies, the pace of LWD updates requires a bit of getting used to.
Nevertheless, I am still building my campaign setting in RW in the belief that I will get some amazing play out of this tool. I have no doubt that once I have a critical mass of data entered, even without the feature that I need in order to play a particular game, I will find it within myself to let that desire go, as many have suggested I do, and find one of the many many other ways to enjoy RW. Ultimately though, that would be another big compromise, and by that point may well be accompanied by regret.
I appreciate that RW is still in development, I think most people here do. But everyone has different patience thresholds and tolerances for compromise. On top of that, everyone will express those varying opinions in further varying ways. Although there are forums where there are trolls just 'whinging' about anything and everything devs do or dont do, and those places are usually quite toxic with a terrible signal/noise ratio, the contrary, where people have forced happiness and get flamed for any perceived criticism by zealously apologetic users is no less welcoming.
People have the same right to criticize as they do to compliment, particularly if they have paid for a product. Criticism need not be the negative thing that many make it out to be. I for one have seen Rob take constructive, and subjectively nonconstructive criticism both equally calmly and objectively. Its as if he were a grown adult trained in PR with a stake in what he does. Unfortunately not all forum members will react to each other with such pragmatic objectivity, in fact many invest themselves emotionally and subjectivize criticism against something they believe in. This is a big barrier to letting all be heard in a civilized and respectful way. If people really want to help the company or the product and invest time into defending them online, then at least familiarize yourself with how customer criticism can work in a market environment; criticism can be opportunity, just receiving it is market intelligence. There are companies that will pay their customers to 'give feedback' aka criticize them.
If you find yourself thinking that someone else is being negative or 'criticising' and you find yourself wanting to get angry at them for that, just chill out, take a step back, think to yourself that there could be any number of reasons why they sound that way, from language differences, to having been through different experiences. Put your 'constructive lens' glasses on, and just filter out what you don't like and take the good because censuring doesn't help anyone.
Also, apologies for wall of text, lol.
I still remember the first time I saw a preview of RealmWorks. I was blown away. There is no doubt that it is amazing software. It's designed to facilitate *world-building* after all, and that is a fantastically large endeavor from the get-go. Knowing that RW was still in development, I purchased it anyway, despite being unemployed and quite poor at the time. My eager anticipation mounted to excitement as I opened the program and started exploring around it's inner workings for the first time. My excitement soon turned to anxiety over the incredibly complex array of tools as I wondered if I would ever get the chance to understand and use them all. I overcame that anxiety by deciding to use and practice on what I could understand by inputting as much of my campaign setting as I could. As much work as that can be, it is rewarding to see the matrices that you once contained in your head being backed up onto a third party that you can see and use.
Whilst it would be possible to end the story there and leave it at 'wonderful software, awesome experience' etc, most, dare I say, all people are inclined towards wanting more and better and many of those people will subconsciously be thinking of process improvements as they use any software, or even, perform any action. It is a part of seeing the potential behind something rather than just accepting things at face value.
Similarly, even without a mind incapable of settling on something as finished, when one finds specific elements that they would consider core to their gaming experience that are not supported by RW, then a compromise of needs/wants sets in. The amount that one must compromise whilst using RW is weighed up, either subconsciously or actively, against alternative options for campaign management.
During the last year that I have been patiently inputting my campaign setting into RW, I have been playing in games with friends who have purchased licenses or subscriptions to other similar-yet-different pieces of game enhancing software; in one game we use Fantasy Grounds; in another we use roll20.net. I was continually impressed by what my friends were able to do using their respective gaming tools, and throughout every session, I could not help but subconsciously track which parts of what my friends were bringing to the table I would or would not be able to do with RW.
Now, at this point I know a lot of you are thinking 'but those tools are different to RW, they are tabletop management, and RW is campaign management, they were never designed to be compared.' I am aware of this, but the truth of it is, that whilst RW is almost exclusively campaign management with a few tools which could be tweaked for tabletop management, those other 2, whilst being predominantly about tabletop management, still contain campaign management elements, limited but robust. And my friends have been using them and still making amazing, surprising, deep campaigns. They started off playing in them for free, and enjoyed them enough to decide to invest and our gaming groups have certainly reaped the benefits.
The reason I mention this essentially comes down to brand loyalty and marketing in general. Whilst RW may be the deepest, richest, most versatile tool for campaign management on the market at the moment, if points of customer inaccessibility prevent enough people buying into its development, it can easily get left behind by a leaner, more accessible approach which draws better funding to the point that it will eventually completely overtake RW even in its own domain. If it seems like I am painting a gloomy picture there, let me make myself clear, I am not suggesting this is currently happening or on the brink or anything like that.
What I am saying is that for most people, there is inevitably going to be a compromise that goes on in their heads with any software they decide to use to run an RPG. That compromise can for all intents and purposes be measured, and gets weighed against other options. Already the lack of tabletop management functionality in RW is a compromise which most of my friends are unwilling to make. Whilst of course purely anecdotal, it gives me personally the idea that I might be in the minority in preferring an intricate, powerful, subtle yet expansive campaign manager over a flashy tabletop dice roller++ program.
I think for me, seeing my friends run such amazing campaigns with what I had built up in my head to be inferior gaming software really got to me, and still does. No fault of LWD or RW, but I also have an added problem of having built my campaign premise around a function that does not even exist yet in RW(topic reveal by individual player), unbeknownst to me at the time of getting into this. So, scrap the campaign I've been working on, and run something simpler, or try to find a work around that keeps the same premise are two options. The former is not appealing to me, and if I did I would likely resort to just using roll20 so that I at least had the tabletop element built in, and well, the latter is where I run into people telling me that my feature request has already been mentioned, thanks, we're getting to it... in a few years. Of course that is not to say that there may not be other workarounds, but compared to what people grow accustomed to in terms of updates from larger companies, the pace of LWD updates requires a bit of getting used to.
Nevertheless, I am still building my campaign setting in RW in the belief that I will get some amazing play out of this tool. I have no doubt that once I have a critical mass of data entered, even without the feature that I need in order to play a particular game, I will find it within myself to let that desire go, as many have suggested I do, and find one of the many many other ways to enjoy RW. Ultimately though, that would be another big compromise, and by that point may well be accompanied by regret.
I appreciate that RW is still in development, I think most people here do. But everyone has different patience thresholds and tolerances for compromise. On top of that, everyone will express those varying opinions in further varying ways. Although there are forums where there are trolls just 'whinging' about anything and everything devs do or dont do, and those places are usually quite toxic with a terrible signal/noise ratio, the contrary, where people have forced happiness and get flamed for any perceived criticism by zealously apologetic users is no less welcoming.
People have the same right to criticize as they do to compliment, particularly if they have paid for a product. Criticism need not be the negative thing that many make it out to be. I for one have seen Rob take constructive, and subjectively nonconstructive criticism both equally calmly and objectively. Its as if he were a grown adult trained in PR with a stake in what he does. Unfortunately not all forum members will react to each other with such pragmatic objectivity, in fact many invest themselves emotionally and subjectivize criticism against something they believe in. This is a big barrier to letting all be heard in a civilized and respectful way. If people really want to help the company or the product and invest time into defending them online, then at least familiarize yourself with how customer criticism can work in a market environment; criticism can be opportunity, just receiving it is market intelligence. There are companies that will pay their customers to 'give feedback' aka criticize them.
If you find yourself thinking that someone else is being negative or 'criticising' and you find yourself wanting to get angry at them for that, just chill out, take a step back, think to yourself that there could be any number of reasons why they sound that way, from language differences, to having been through different experiences. Put your 'constructive lens' glasses on, and just filter out what you don't like and take the good because censuring doesn't help anyone.
Also, apologies for wall of text, lol.
You used grammar, punctuation, sentences and paragraphs. It may have been long, but it wasn't a "wall of text." I reward you with 2,000 XP.
If you think this has taken a while, be glad you aren't in the Mekton Zero KS...three years and ZERO to show for it...
This is a program, and one that involves external entities. Anytime you are dealing with groups outside of your organization, it will take longer. Plus, it is refreshing to have a company take the line of "do it right the first time" instead of rushing something out and then spend (sometimes) years pushing out patches to fix it. I'm happy with what has been provided so far. Sure, it would be great to have the Content Market now, but the functionality provided to this point has impressed me.
This is a program, and one that involves external entities. Anytime you are dealing with groups outside of your organization, it will take longer. Plus, it is refreshing to have a company take the line of "do it right the first time" instead of rushing something out and then spend (sometimes) years pushing out patches to fix it. I'm happy with what has been provided so far. Sure, it would be great to have the Content Market now, but the functionality provided to this point has impressed me.
Viking2054
Well-known member
You actually read all that and didn't reward yourself with a Klondike bar? 
Honestly I pay enough money for all the books and enough time to enter my own campaign data, I also play only offline, it would be enough for me if the standalone tool RW would work nicely with showing the maps and images to players. I posted this in the past (like a super quick reveal without confirmation , full screen ecetera) but Iam in the minority I think. I wouldnt like to administer , pay and work with an online vtt as well (that nobody of my players use)
For me it's most important that everything is easy to enter / edit / work with. I would also like to customize the icons a bit...
But I agree , that I will put my votes on the next survey on the next feature that is most important to me. Distributing my votes in the way I did, seemed to return results that I did not really like
Also I wanted to add: The features that help RW In the long run should be implemented, I would not like to see this project fail after all that time.
For me it's most important that everything is easy to enter / edit / work with. I would also like to customize the icons a bit...
But I agree , that I will put my votes on the next survey on the next feature that is most important to me. Distributing my votes in the way I did, seemed to return results that I did not really like
Also I wanted to add: The features that help RW In the long run should be implemented, I would not like to see this project fail after all that time.