Should SW look into adding key extension features?

[LordEntrails]

When I use no other filters, the most subscribed extension that comes up when searching on the forge is the Aura Effect extension at 5390 subscribers. Player agency shows up as the 9th most popular extension. I quickly looked through 5 pages of results (50 items) and each item still had above 1000 subscribers. Granted, some of the items were map/portrait packs but there were still many more than 7 extensions to be found in the top 50 items. I am not sure how to exclude maps from the search results.

EDIT: Upon closer inspection it may be more accurate to say the 8th most popular extension on the forge as out of the top 10 items one is a skin rather than an extension. I also noticed that Played Agency is the only item in the top 10 with the "any ruleset" tag. The rest are specific to certain rulesets.

Interesting. Not sure why I got different results, but won't argue I do know I filteres only on extensions so I would not get modules or themes or art packs.
The point is simple though and anyone can do the desired math, most GMs do not use extensions.

[madman]

Most GMs do not use extensions.

I would love to see the results of a poll on that.

[BushViper]

I use a number of TTRPG systems in real life, but online I exclusively play D&D.

That said, there are a handful of extensions that would result in me outright abandoning Fantasy Grounds if one of them stopped working. The additional functionality/quality-of-life that they provide are that high. Combat Highlighter is a prime example of an extension I refuse to play without. Tuning all the options to fit your taste can be a little annoying but once you get it tuned, it's like using a different platform. There was a two-week period when the extension was hosed and I came this <-> close to never logging in again.

Beyond that handful there are another dozen+ that would cause me an enormous amount of irritation if they no longer worked.

I'm not only one who feels that way. In fact, there are quite a number of us.

Extensions are written for a lot of reasons, but one of the primary goals is to provide a solution for a problem. FGU (despite how much I enjoy the platform) has a lot of mind-boggling inadequacies. Fortunately, extension creators have improved (or solved) many of those problems, but maintaining the solutions is a MASSIVE headache for both creators and users.

I know Smiteworks is a small company with relatively limited resources but addressing problems/shortcomings that the vast majority of the users agree upon would be a lot more useful than features like the recent work on the new map perspective. Every single person I have spoken to about it (roughly 35) has said it's "neat," but only 2 said they intended to use it. That feature is requiring a lot of precious manhours to develop and it isn't particularly valuable to the userbase. There are literally dozens of issues that would objectively improve the platform and require significantly fewer manhours to develop than video-gamifying TTRPGs and there's absolutely no debate about that. Creating a new feature is a lot harder than looking at someone else's working design and tweaking it so that it fits within your own framework.

I see a lot of excuses being made as to why more features from extensions aren't implemented and that's what they are - excuses. Of course, there are always exceptions, but no one is getting rich writing extensions and the vast majority of the developers would be over the moon to have their solution (potentially improved) and integrated into the base client. It's a win for everyone involved. Obviously, I'm not saying every extension needs to be added. Far from it. The cost/benefit needs to make sense.

P.S. I don't have the data to back it, but I suspect that the people that use extensions aren't the majority of users. I know a lot of people feel that they're too much trouble or they simply don't understand how they work. Some may not even know that they exist. Regardless, that's even more incentive to improve the base client because the plethora of solutions written by creators aren't being utilized by the bulk of users and it's a fact that the base FGU client is inferior to one with even a handful of the most useful extensions.

[damned]

I would love to see the results of a poll on that.

The pool would be skewed because most gms also don't use the forums much.

[johnecc]

I have been playing in a 5e game since Dec last year, and the GM does not use any extensions, and it has run just fine. I personally have around 50 extensions/mods, but don't really miss them in the game I am playing.

[BushViper]

I have been playing in a 5e game since Dec last year, and the GM does not use any extensions, and it has run just fine. I personally have around 50 extensions/mods, but don't really miss them in the game I am playing.

I don't think many people would disagree that a lot of extensions provide more benefit to a DM than a player. Looking at my list, more than half of the 80ish that I use don't directly benefit players, at all.