Hey Roll20! - here are some notes in regard our first night at the table
Generally - you guys blew their socks off :D I was super impressed with the initial videos showing the project (obviously, because I ended up becoming a backer) but it took me some time to convince my gaming buddies (who've I've been gaming with since high school and are spread all over North America now). most of them were Skeptical, with one even telling me "it wouldn't work." In the end, we were connected for 2.5 hours and had a blast :) Video/Voice and a great table setup that let's us see the maps/characters etc... fantastic!
I took some notes of my own, and they came up with some ideas as well that I'd like to share. Note that NONE of these are truly "game breaking" and that when with a group you trust there is no concern at all...
Important
1) Video/Voice chat at the start of the night (8pm Eastern) was choppy and unusable at some points. We had to resort to text and there was talk of renting a cheap Vent server for the voice at least. This, however, totally cleared up later in the evening and things were fantastic. It made us wonder if you guys are still sizing/learning about bandwidth or load. We see that you've purchases an application "Tokbox" to deal with it - not sure if it is their servers or yours. We figured the lag at the start of the night might have been due to demand fro Roll20 users... whereas as the evening went on demand dropped and things ran smoothly (starting around 9:15pm Eastern or so). Our group had players from Southern Ontario and the Northern Central US. Video is key (as we discovered). It's amazing what "adults" will do on camera while playing D&D late at night! Nothing like seeing people cast spells, stick their tongues out, or stare into the camera when someone else does something they don't like. Great job with adding video guys :D
2) Video - one of our users could hear everyone but me for some reason. I ended up going into my setting and disabling my video & audio and then re-enabling it and he suddenly could hear me again. For some reason it's almost like the initial connection failed and after that it was never renegotiated again.
3) We had one person who could not bring the site up on his laptop. When he tried to connect (using IE) it was suggested he download Chrome, which he did, and after he did that it still wouldn't let him in. I've asked him to provide me with the details of him machine (IE version, O/S version) all I know right now is that it was MS based. He moved to his wife's MAC and all was good after that.
Somewhat important
1) The May 8th change to indicate that someone was typing was an interesting change I thought - I liked it. But when I was explaining to someone how to use the "whisper" option to talk to me about something they didn't want to share with the party someone else pointed out that they can see when the GM and Someone else are talking in whisper via that notification! Smart buggers! before you display the "so and so is typing" message you should always check the first two characters that are typed... if it is "/w" you should block the showing of that notification
2) The Pen tool - personally I was surprised that players had access to the drawing tools in the game. I can understand them having access to the ruler and magnifying glass - but the pen and shape tool? Ok, maybe the pen tool if they want to illustrate something - but the shape tool? :P One thing we all agreed is that there should be a button to erase ALL the pen marking on a map, instead of having to try to right-click and clear each individual mark - that really slows the game down. Would be great to be able to hit an "erase" and just wipe all pen tool marks off the screen.
Nice to Haves
1) We all know how much our characters move and such, but we were wondering if that could be something added to the tokens as well. Two fields - a "Min" and a "Max" for movement. That way when it is someone's turn to move their token, they can only move as far as the "Max" distance away from where they are now. If we could somehow show on the hex map the two ranges when someone picks up their token it would be great as well. So when they pick up their token you can see the max "walk" distance and max "run" distance in an "aura" on the map - it'll also make it easy to see where they started from :)
Other than that - it was a great night. Way beyond even what I was expecting - thanks very much for the product!
