When I saw the survey banner at the top of the page today, I jumped at the chance to share some feedback. I got the impression that the survey was trying to figure out what keeps people, or would keep them, visiting D&D Beyond. Mostly, it seemed to focus on videos and articles.

I consider those two things to be incredibly periphery to D&D Beyond. What keeps me visiting the site is the constant, and often futile, hope that when I click on the Changelog button, I'll see that some work has been done to support features on the site that facilitate playing D&D.

How long have things like the Encounter Builder been in a Beta state, with no updates? Has the character sheet changed materially from the last major update over a year ago? D&D Beyond has the advantage of being basically the only name in the game, but the lack of progress on features is what fuels my dissatisfaction with the service, not the quality of articles or video content.

It's thanks to 3rd-Party developers that D&D Beyond sees any use at the table in these stay-at-home, social-distancing times. For these 3rd-Party developers, D&D Beyond isn't even providing proper tools, and instead they're relying on scraping the HTML. One of D&D Beyond's only "official" features that can be said to be intended to work for remote games, Avrae, doesn't even support homebrew content without jumping through a lot of hoops.

If D&D Beyond's aim with this survey was to try to figure out how to keep people using the service, and to ensure the overall longevity of the platform, I wanted to provide this perspective: focus more on the features, have a consistent update schedule, and provide more transparency into on-going efforts.

I'll happily give credit where it's due, and say that D&D Beyond has done some incredible things with their digital character sheet and hyperlinked compendium content. That said, the slack that I gave D&D Beyond for lacking key features in the early years while they were launching and getting up to speed has been long gone, and it's turning what once was an outlook full of admiration and excitement into one of fatalism and discontent.

Because they have realized they don't have the resources to spare on feature updates. They need the resources on money makers like the digital dice and on trying to figure out how to jury rig the new features from Tasha's onto their less-than-flexible current system. For years there has been talk of 'upcoming updates' to various systems. But those turn out to be very resource intensive and not profitable at all. Because let's face it, nobody is hesitating to buy a book at this point due to the inability to filter your search by purchased content, or the inability to homebrew a sword with a +1 to hit but not damage. They might be losing a few sales due to their poor implementation of Theros, but they aren't exactly upfront about the fact that you can't use half the features in the book. (In fact, I think they might lie about it and say it's all available on the character sheet).

This is all my opinion and speculation. I don't know any of the devs, I don't know anything not said in dev updates. But it seems, as a long time observer, that site feature updates that can't make money have been pushed to the bottom of the pile if they are even in the pile. And this is not to disparage any of the devs, I'm sure they are working hard on whatever it is they are working on, and I'm sure they are good people who wish they could make everything as perfect as possible.

I agree about the survey. It focused almost entirely on 2 things I either never (videos) or hardly ever (articles) use on DDB. The articles are often way too specific for me to bother with, although I did find the Legend Lore one mildly helpful (even that, mainly was helpful by bringing that spell to my attention before my players get their hands on it, so I am ready for how to deal with it -- the suggestions of how to deal with it in the article were basically useless in and of themselves). But encounters of the week/month do nothing for me, other than maybe to skim as a curiosity... and deep dives on subclasses of characters no one at my table plays are a patent waste of my time to read. The videos are similarly of little to no interest.

Heck in the options of why do you come to DDB, the one reason that I come here day in and day out they didn't provide, as far as I could see -- to read the forums. If it weren't for the forums I would only come here at times when I am "stocking" a dungeon, or maybe while DMing (though while DMing I mostly use Foundry).

Yup. What keeps me coming every day? Forums and homebrew.

I point blank do not watch videos. Not here, not on some other D&D site; heck if I were to go to YouTube my view history would be a barren wasteland. You couldn't pay me to watch videos.

I expect they were purposely trying to get information on usage of those specific parts of the site, but if you say 'hey, please fill out our survey about our video and text articles,' you'd only get people who really feel strongly one way or the other, whereas the wording they did use would garner a wider range of opinions, from people who wouldn't otherwise answer the survey (which had some issues with its wording on several questions -- also, I don't think it ever asked me why I didn't read/watch them).

I don't think it ever asked me why I didn't read/watch them

Which is way more important than that you do or don't.

Exactly.  Dropped out of the Survey as I realized they were only asking about the videos, which don’t matter to me one way or the other, though I use the site every day.  Wasted opportunity for feedback.  Perhaps even counterproductive.  Felt like it was sponsored by a third-part video producer.

As I was taking the survey I felt like it was written by someone who has very little familiarity with the website, and has only visited the front page a couple of times. The person saw the articles and videos on the front page and assumed that these were the main reasons why people would visit this site, and asked only questions about those. I'm sure that's not what happened, but that's what it felt like.

Remember that scene in Galaxy Quest, when they see the "cute little aliens" and Sigourney Weaver's character, Gwen, wants to go out and say hi to them? And "Guy," the extra, grabs her and pulls her back, and says, "Did you guys ever actually watch the show?"

That's what I felt like taking the survey. I was thinking, "Do you guys actually use your own website?"

Different teams are focused on different elements; One survey does not need to encompass the entirety of development efforts across the platform.  The team addressing the website content desires feedback - if you dropped out of the survey because you don't care about said content, then shouldn't this make a difference?  Wouldn't your feedback be valuable so that more relevant content could be presented instead?  Perhaps I'm failing to see the logic behind "I don't like it, so I'll refrain from offering the feedback that will help change it."

Just my 0.02

I submit that the wording of the survey questions was at fault here, and that the taker of the survey should not be blamed for becoming frustrated and stopping the taking of a badly-worded survey, or a survey that seems, to the person taking it, not to be relevant to them.

My university administration does this all the time -- they beg us (faculty) and the students to take surveys about things and they get a terrible response rate for the same reasons as are being stated here -- they are asking the wrong questions, in the wrong way, and badly worded. And then, they blame faculty and students for the low response rate.

A badly-written or poorly-designed survey cannot produce useful data, ever. It doesn't matter how many people take it or stop taking it.