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September 13th, 2024, 18:35 #51
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Note, I am not a SmiteWorks employee or representative, I'm just a user like you.
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September 13th, 2024, 23:28 #52
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September 14th, 2024, 00:21 #53
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- Jan 2021
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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.Last edited by BushViper; September 14th, 2024 at 00:37.
lol/no
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September 14th, 2024, 00:23 #54
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September 14th, 2024, 01:07 #55
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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.
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September 14th, 2024, 01:19 #56
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