The feedback I've been reading since last week has made me see this more than ever. I'm a bit of a completionist, and was a Legendary Bundle buyer in DDB's early days, so owning everything was just something I knew I wanted to do, but I've read so many stories of players and DMs who buy to supplement their physical collections, and it's such a clever and awesome way to have used the feature, it makes me more frustrated than ever for y'all who can't use it like this anymore.
This is kind of a peripheral question, but is there anything you can say about bundles? Are they gone, or coming back or any news or planned announcements on that front?
And thank you for taking the time to engage with us on this. It's really good to see someone from Wizards actively trying to help, or at least, listen.
It's literally no problem at all; if I could split myself to answer every question about this I would, but I also think I'd try to get more sleep about it.
As I understand it, bundles are gone gone. I don't have any insight if they're coming back or being replaced with something else.
I would simply like to know if other changes to the site, and functionality as is, will from now on be preceded by two week notice before change implementation?
or simply will you give us a heads up of changes before you make them in the future?
[REDACTED] It can't be the case that you become a successful company who takes over a market who then starts cutting back on the features that made it successful to MILK the users.
This is clearly to force people to buy whole books now that D&DBeyond is the standard. I'm so done with this phase of corporate american laws that allow this ******* behavior to go unchecked.
can anyone enlighten me on how the removal of a micro-transaction (the piece-meal purchases) which takes what ever money a person is willing to spend for a tiny portion of the whole is a money hungry and greedy move??
how is it money hungry or greedy if people can still get those books they bought piece-meal from at a discount??
to my knowledge (possibly wrong) no other site offers piece-meal purchases for tiny portions of their books, so what is the appeal of other sites over dndbeyond just to be met with purchasing books in full anyway??
can anyone enlighten me on how the removal of a micro-transaction (the piece-meal purchases) which takes what ever money a person is willing to spend for a tiny portion of the whole is a money hungry and greedy move??
how is it money hungry or greedy if people can still get those books they bought piece-meal from at a discount??
to my knowledge (possibly wrong) no other site offers piece-meal purchases for tiny portions of their books, so what is the appeal of other sites over dndbeyond just to be met with purchasing books in full anyway??
Piecemeal purchases allow for a gentle ease into the more detailed and costly side of being on the DM side of the screen.
And as a player just starting, yes later having all the content when one would be ready to commit to full content made buying piecemeal worth the wait for a particular sale.
Now, that at this time is no longer available. Those just starting now have a higher, costlier entry in the one thing the game really could use now and thats becoming a DM/GM.
As a player, learning the game for the first time, and having a massive collection of specific options that one could easily choose piecemeal to use without need of fluff that at the particular time was like a bargain bin at walmart.
go back and read the whole thread again and see the discussion and displeasure with this decision. Not just this thread, but others in the feedback section.
On paper it sounds backwards, but in reality look and read how the community utilized it, how it tempted people into buying the whole when the price was right.
can anyone enlighten me on how the removal of a micro-transaction (the piece-meal purchases) which takes what ever money a person is willing to spend for a tiny portion of the whole is a money hungry and greedy move??
how is it money hungry or greedy if people can still get those books they bought piece-meal from at a discount??
to my knowledge (possibly wrong) no other site offers piece-meal purchases for tiny portions of their books, so what is the appeal of other sites over dndbeyond just to be met with purchasing books in full anyway??
1.) "Other sites" are more robust VTTs, virtual table tops, with features that DDB is just beginning to catch up to with its maps tool (which is in Alpha, unlike the full releases of the Roll20, Fantasy Grounds and Foundry). Those VTTs are also designed to be used with a number of different game systems. So there's the appeal of the other sites.
2.) People are calling DDB's removal of piecemeal purchases "money hungry and greedy" because it's a common taunt used against a business when a customer loses access to an affordable feature of that business. I don't know what the rationale was for removing piecemeal purchases from the marketplace, though maximizing revenue from D&D has been more or less reported as desire by WotC. I'm not sure how removing piecemeal sales serves that desire. If anything I can see it working quite the opposite. To me, till now DDB has been the most accessible way to start playing D&D with official products/rules and the piecemeal system was a great way to convert those initial players using the free basic rules into paying players. Those players may buy now into D&D at a slower pace, or not at all, either moving onto different game systems with more affordable access or staying within friends' games and accessing through content sharing. Presumably WotC has some sort of data that would indicate this is not the case, but WotC is apparently in year two of what many critics of the company call a cycle of unforced errors.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Now, that at this time is no longer available. Those just starting now have a higher, costlier entry in the one thing the game really could use now and thats becoming a DM/GM.
As a player, learning the game for the first time, and having a massive collection of specific options that one could easily choose piecemeal to use without need of fluff that at the particular time was like a bargain bin at walmart.
Yeah, allowing players to purchase their own content piecemeal takes some pressure off of the GM to provide for everything. In most cases, established GMs will have whatever their player wants, but in the off chance that the GM does not have it, the player can just get it on their own. And since players often play for free and spend little money on the hobby, the piecemeal purchases eases players into it. It also helps players transition to being GMs, with the piecemeal purchases counting towards the discount of the full books later.
And since most players do not spend that much money, Wizards wants to make more money by giving players something to spend on. Character folders, various rule cards, campaign journals, minis, character sheets (I would never pay for blank character sheets since Wizards literally give those PDFs out for free for people to print out, but people can also buy blank physical sheets if they want to), etc. are nice products geared towards players. Beyond's à la carte purchases are the perfect digital extension of those physical tools. Taking away microtransactions is a step backwards, it is antithetical to the goal of making players spend more.
If the transaction cost is really the issue (I have no idea, I am just guessing at the reason), Beyond should just say that and try to work with the community, like increase the cost of individual purchases, or make individual purchases count less towards the full book. Worst case scenario it is both, and individual options cost $3 and it only discounts the book by $1. We will not be happy about it, but at least we will understand the reason and can empathize. I am sure some of us would rather have a crappier à la carte option than without that option at all.
This has come up multiple times, so I'm going to explain one last time why piecemeal purchasing shouldn't be compared to microtransactions.
What are microtransactions?
They are usually part of a game and are a method of selling small parts of the product for a reduced price. One.of the key features though that distinguishes them from, say, selling a game in parts (for example, selling expansion packs) is that they tend to lock the game if you don't buy them - you can't play the game with paying for them, or you will be stopped from progressing by a timer - or otherwise pressure you to buy them.
Why are microtransactions scummy?
They're "scummy" because they're designed to hide the true cost of the game in attempt to make you pay more for the product than you would if you saw the total amount in one go. To take a famous example, EA's Star Wars Battlefront charged you for the game, then locked the most desirable content,.and the main way to unlock it was to pay for loot boxes. You didn't see the game price as $100 (which you might not have paid for), but saw $60 then a bunch of $1ish loot boxes, and all of a sudden you've paid $100. There was that example of the guy who literally spent thousands on his FIFA game.
A more benign (or rather, less sinister) form is Fortnite, which is free and only charges for cosmetic stuff (last I checked, which admittedly has been a long while), but still leads into over paying for content because you see it as 50¢ for a shirt, rather than $90 for the game.
Microtransactions generally carve out parts of the product that you'd normally already consider purchased when you paid for the game itself, then tries to sell it to you. It encourages you to spend more for a product that you would with full knowledge of what you're getting.
Why shouldn't we compare piecemeal purchases to microtransactions?
Superficially, they're similar. You're paying a nominally smaller amount for a portion of the product. They're not the same thing though, not in the whole picture.
Piecemeal purchasing allowed you to buy products at your own pace, at no disadvantage to you. Outside of exceptional circumstances, you never paid more buying piecemeal than if you bought the product outright. This already means half the scumminess of microtransactions does not apply - it's not trying to hide the true cost and slide it past you.
Piecemeal purchasing did not encourage you to "rebuy" the product. You only ever paid for it once - if you wanted the Hexblade, you could buy the Hexblade piecemeal or as part of the book. You don't have to keep on buying it, nor did you buy Tasha's and then be told that you had to buy the Subclasses separately. You never paid more (with a few marginal exceptions) than if you just paid upfront. That's the other half of the scumminess of microtransactions.
Piecemeal purchases allowed you to buy what you needed and ignore a lot of what you didn't. Sure, the pricing was disproportional - you didn't get 10% of the book for 10% of the price - but that's fine and reasonable.
What's wrong with microtransactions in general doesn't apply to piecemeal purchases. It literally saved you money if it were a useful product, as opposed to microtransactions (which is essentially a euphemism for trying to trick you into overspending) which sought to make you overpay.
Please stop bringing up microtransactions as being comparable to piecemeal purchases. Piecemeal purchases were one of the strongest selling points of DDB over its competitors. You may not care about them, but complaining about them is like complaining about the shop selling individual chocolate bars when you only buy multi packs.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
They will not be able to do anything to DndBeyond, but they need to start becoming aware via complaints of this kind of practice.
Whether you liked this feature or not, this was part of what made DndBeyond dominate the VTT market.
Now they cut features to make more money. This type of scummy customer milking practice that adds NO value, ESPECIALLY after forcing other competitors OUT of the market and becoming the de-facto official option. This particular reply will probably be taken down, but if you're interested on adding noise to this issue please do.
They will not be able to do anything to DndBeyond, but they need to start becoming aware via complaints of this kind of practice.
Whether you liked this feature or not, this was part of what made DndBeyond dominate the VTT market.
Now they cut features to make more money. This type of scummy customer milking practice that adds NO value, ESPECIALLY after forcing other competitors OUT of the market and becoming the de-facto official option. This particular reply will probably be taken down, but if you're interested on adding noise to this issue please do.
I would never claim to be an expert in antitrust law - I studied it a bit back in law school, but it is such an absurdly complicated field of law that, unless one actually practices antitrust, expertise is nearly unreachable.
That said, I can say with an extremely high degree of confidence this is not an antitrust issue and is not something the FTC would care about. This is a change to a pricing model and not some kind of effort to promote unfair competition or which would otherwise implicate antitrust. In fact, if you read the thread, a whole lot of the posts boil down to “this will drive us into the hands of your competitors” - which, definitionally, is the opposite of an antitrust issue.
Feel free to make your opinions known here - staff is clearly monitoring this thread. And you can always take to social media if you want a different platform. But let us not waste the government’s time on something that does not fall within their purview.
They will not be able to do anything to DndBeyond, but they need to start becoming aware via complaints of this kind of practice.
Whether you liked this feature or not, this was part of what made DndBeyond dominate the VTT market.
Now they cut features to make more money. This type of scummy customer milking practice that adds NO value, ESPECIALLY after forcing other competitors OUT of the market and becoming the de-facto official option. This particular reply will probably be taken down, but if you're interested on adding noise to this issue please do.
I would never claim to be an expert in antitrust law - I studied it a bit back in law school, but it is such an absurdly complicated field of law that, unless one actually practices antitrust, expertise is nearly unreachable.
That said, I can say with an extremely high degree of confidence this is not an antitrust issue and is not something the FTC would care about. This is a change to a pricing model and not some kind of effort to promote unfair competition or which would otherwise implicate antitrust. In fact, if you read the thread, a whole lot of the posts boil down to “this will drive us into the hands of your competitors” - which, definitionally, is the opposite of an antitrust issue.
Feel free to make your opinions known here - staff is clearly monitoring this thread. And you can always take to social media if you want a different platform. But let us not waste the government’s time on something that does not fall within their purview.
I agree that this is 100% not antitrust, but the FTC do a lot of consumer-protection stuff beyond that.
That said, this is not something within the scope of their duties, and even if the mess of the discounts for a la carte purchases technically is, it's way too penny-ante for them to bother with. (Especially since they're making it possible to get them, it's just inconvenient. I'm pretty sure they just forgot them when scoping the marketplace rebuild.)
So, stepping outside the US, the dominance of D&D may be questionable, but if it is as dominant in Europe as it is in the US, then there are risks that could be applied there if a competent lawyer had some good arguments relating to the state of consumer interest laws and the internet there.
However, that could result in withdrawal from that market if pressed, harming the larger goals.
Would I like them to make the option available again? Yes.
But Hasbro only answers to me as a shareholder, and most players are not shareholders (most shareholders are large funds). I will make my tiny complaint, but I doubt it will sway much.
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The feedback I've been reading since last week has made me see this more than ever. I'm a bit of a completionist, and was a Legendary Bundle buyer in DDB's early days, so owning everything was just something I knew I wanted to do, but I've read so many stories of players and DMs who buy to supplement their physical collections, and it's such a clever and awesome way to have used the feature, it makes me more frustrated than ever for y'all who can't use it like this anymore.
This is kind of a peripheral question, but is there anything you can say about bundles? Are they gone, or coming back or any news or planned announcements on that front?
And thank you for taking the time to engage with us on this. It's really good to see someone from Wizards actively trying to help, or at least, listen.
It's literally no problem at all; if I could split myself to answer every question about this I would, but I also think I'd try to get more sleep about it.
As I understand it, bundles are gone gone. I don't have any insight if they're coming back or being replaced with something else.
I would simply like to know if other changes to the site, and functionality as is, will from now on be preceded by two week notice before change implementation?
or simply will you give us a heads up of changes before you make them in the future?
I am doing my best to make sure this will be the case.
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I think removing the piecemeal purchase options makes the experience of DDB's marketplace unsatisfactory. I don't think a company removing an a la carte menu constitutes extortion.
I also think belittling D&D/WotC staff's participation in this thread and claiming them complicit in the injury you're claiming is a bit much. It's unreasonable to expect a representative to do more than develop an understanding of your feelings and experience as a consumer, and report that back to the company. I'd say WotC/DDB staff is doing a better job at engaging in dialogue with the community than they have when they've made mistakes in the recent past, in that they're actually engaging as opposed to the silence the community received for months after the OGL fiasco (they're different scenarios, one WotC was caught via a leak and likely had gone into crisis mode, here a decision to change the marketplace has occurred and people attached to the old market are understandably upset). A community manager should be seen as someone there to listen to you, not your rhetorical punching bag.
i'm a little surprised i haven't seen a "let them eat cereal" reference in fourteen pages. some people are choosing not to spend money, but they're doing it without a clever hashtag. missed opportunity, really.
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unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: providefeedback!
NOW, however, they have become THE most popular and de-facto official D&D Digital platform
No, it isn't "de facto" anything. DDB was purchased by Hasbro so it is literally the official platform, but in addition, alternatives like Roll20 etc. still exist and are just as viable
Also, this
now after I spent all these years reliably using this service to hoard character options, now they scratch that and I have to buy the whole book.
makes no sense. You haven't lost your existing purchases. Your "hoard" remains completely intact. You just have fewer ways to add to it
As for this
And you employees who don't speak out about this and hide it in cutesy "haha the store options have changed!" messages are complicit.
Yikes, my dude. Just yikes. Especially considering the responses the one employee who is in these threads has been giving you
Maybe step away for a minute and take a breath rather than continuing to double/triple down and fall further down this rabbit hole you've found yourself in
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I think removing the piecemeal purchase options makes the experience of DDB's marketplace unsatisfactory. I don't think a company removing an a la carte menu constitutes extortion.
I also think belittling D&D/WotC staff's participation in this thread and claiming them complicit in the injury you're claiming is a bit much. It's unreasonable to expect a representative to do more than develop an understanding of your feelings and experience as a consumer, and report that back to the company. I'd say WotC/DDB staff is doing a better job at engaging in dialogue with the community than they have when they've made mistakes in the recent past, in that they're actually engaging as opposed to the silence the community received for months after the OGL fiasco (they're different scenarios, one WotC was caught via a leak and likely had gone into crisis mode, here a decision to change the marketplace has occurred and people attached to the old market are understandably upset). A community manager should be seen as someone there to listen to you, not your rhetorical punching bag.
[REDACTED]
This product is worse now.
How should I move my business elsewhere? How do I take my purchases under the previous model and move to a different company's model that I prefer?
If I bought books at one store I can buy books at the next store and use them with my previous books.
This isn't the case for digital products and consumers have no protections.
I'm expected to start buying complete books, instead of the single options that lured me in the first place, if I want to use the product I already purchased to be compatible with future expansions of the same game.
This is a recurring theme of modern digital products and unless we start complaining to politicians there will be no legislation to curtail this behavior.
This whole thing is just so anti-consumer. How is removing ways for people to spend money on specific items they are willing to spend money on supposed to encourage us to spend any more money when we can't buy what we want anymore?
I was so happy to spend money on the product I wanted but now I can't so I just don't want to spend money on your product anymore, it's so insane.
I was happy of just purchasing individual items such as subclasses and race options. But now I have to buy the whole book just to even gain access to it. Sometimes we don't want to get the whole product and made it easier for new players to get into the game such as myself at the time.
Due to spending small amounts and enjoy the content that I purchase, gave me enough courage to purchase whole books and even bundles. This will not be health in the short or long term. This might kill the platform in the foreseeable future. I do hope that the people who made the changes realise how bad it is as they don't seem to care about a long term health business. Just money quickly.
Knowing what's good for businesses, this isn't the way.
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I would simply like to know if other changes to the site, and functionality as is, will from now on be preceded by two week notice before change implementation?
or simply will you give us a heads up of changes before you make them in the future?
[REDACTED]
[REDACTED] It can't be the case that you become a successful company who takes over a market who then starts cutting back on the features that made it successful to MILK the users.
This is clearly to force people to buy whole books now that D&DBeyond is the standard. I'm so done with this phase of corporate american laws that allow this ******* behavior to go unchecked.
Boy, this company really knows how to keep people perpetually upset with their product.
Can we please get some kind of timeline until this unacceptable change is reverted? Some of us have campaigns to run.
can anyone enlighten me on how the removal of a micro-transaction (the piece-meal purchases) which takes what ever money a person is willing to spend for a tiny portion of the whole is a money hungry and greedy move??
how is it money hungry or greedy if people can still get those books they bought piece-meal from at a discount??
to my knowledge (possibly wrong) no other site offers piece-meal purchases for tiny portions of their books, so what is the appeal of other sites over dndbeyond just to be met with purchasing books in full anyway??
Piecemeal purchases allow for a gentle ease into the more detailed and costly side of being on the DM side of the screen.
And as a player just starting, yes later having all the content when one would be ready to commit to full content made buying piecemeal worth the wait for a particular sale.
Now, that at this time is no longer available. Those just starting now have a higher, costlier entry in the one thing the game really could use now and thats becoming a DM/GM.
As a player, learning the game for the first time, and having a massive collection of specific options that one could easily choose piecemeal to use without need of fluff that at the particular time was like a bargain bin at walmart.
go back and read the whole thread again and see the discussion and displeasure with this decision. Not just this thread, but others in the feedback section.
On paper it sounds backwards, but in reality look and read how the community utilized it, how it tempted people into buying the whole when the price was right.
And for what I simply ask, for what?
1.) "Other sites" are more robust VTTs, virtual table tops, with features that DDB is just beginning to catch up to with its maps tool (which is in Alpha, unlike the full releases of the Roll20, Fantasy Grounds and Foundry). Those VTTs are also designed to be used with a number of different game systems. So there's the appeal of the other sites.
2.) People are calling DDB's removal of piecemeal purchases "money hungry and greedy" because it's a common taunt used against a business when a customer loses access to an affordable feature of that business. I don't know what the rationale was for removing piecemeal purchases from the marketplace, though maximizing revenue from D&D has been more or less reported as desire by WotC. I'm not sure how removing piecemeal sales serves that desire. If anything I can see it working quite the opposite. To me, till now DDB has been the most accessible way to start playing D&D with official products/rules and the piecemeal system was a great way to convert those initial players using the free basic rules into paying players. Those players may buy now into D&D at a slower pace, or not at all, either moving onto different game systems with more affordable access or staying within friends' games and accessing through content sharing. Presumably WotC has some sort of data that would indicate this is not the case, but WotC is apparently in year two of what many critics of the company call a cycle of unforced errors.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Yeah, allowing players to purchase their own content piecemeal takes some pressure off of the GM to provide for everything. In most cases, established GMs will have whatever their player wants, but in the off chance that the GM does not have it, the player can just get it on their own. And since players often play for free and spend little money on the hobby, the piecemeal purchases eases players into it. It also helps players transition to being GMs, with the piecemeal purchases counting towards the discount of the full books later.
And since most players do not spend that much money, Wizards wants to make more money by giving players something to spend on. Character folders, various rule cards, campaign journals, minis, character sheets (I would never pay for blank character sheets since Wizards literally give those PDFs out for free for people to print out, but people can also buy blank physical sheets if they want to), etc. are nice products geared towards players. Beyond's à la carte purchases are the perfect digital extension of those physical tools. Taking away microtransactions is a step backwards, it is antithetical to the goal of making players spend more.
If the transaction cost is really the issue (I have no idea, I am just guessing at the reason), Beyond should just say that and try to work with the community, like increase the cost of individual purchases, or make individual purchases count less towards the full book. Worst case scenario it is both, and individual options cost $3 and it only discounts the book by $1. We will not be happy about it, but at least we will understand the reason and can empathize. I am sure some of us would rather have a crappier à la carte option than without that option at all.
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This has come up multiple times, so I'm going to explain one last time why piecemeal purchasing shouldn't be compared to microtransactions.
What are microtransactions?
They are usually part of a game and are a method of selling small parts of the product for a reduced price. One.of the key features though that distinguishes them from, say, selling a game in parts (for example, selling expansion packs) is that they tend to lock the game if you don't buy them - you can't play the game with paying for them, or you will be stopped from progressing by a timer - or otherwise pressure you to buy them.
Why are microtransactions scummy?
They're "scummy" because they're designed to hide the true cost of the game in attempt to make you pay more for the product than you would if you saw the total amount in one go. To take a famous example, EA's Star Wars Battlefront charged you for the game, then locked the most desirable content,.and the main way to unlock it was to pay for loot boxes. You didn't see the game price as $100 (which you might not have paid for), but saw $60 then a bunch of $1ish loot boxes, and all of a sudden you've paid $100. There was that example of the guy who literally spent thousands on his FIFA game.
A more benign (or rather, less sinister) form is Fortnite, which is free and only charges for cosmetic stuff (last I checked, which admittedly has been a long while), but still leads into over paying for content because you see it as 50¢ for a shirt, rather than $90 for the game.
Microtransactions generally carve out parts of the product that you'd normally already consider purchased when you paid for the game itself, then tries to sell it to you. It encourages you to spend more for a product that you would with full knowledge of what you're getting.
Why shouldn't we compare piecemeal purchases to microtransactions?
Superficially, they're similar. You're paying a nominally smaller amount for a portion of the product. They're not the same thing though, not in the whole picture.
What's wrong with microtransactions in general doesn't apply to piecemeal purchases. It literally saved you money if it were a useful product, as opposed to microtransactions (which is essentially a euphemism for trying to trick you into overspending) which sought to make you overpay.
Please stop bringing up microtransactions as being comparable to piecemeal purchases. Piecemeal purchases were one of the strongest selling points of DDB over its competitors. You may not care about them, but complaining about them is like complaining about the shop selling individual chocolate bars when you only buy multi packs.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Complain.
File a complaint to the FTC.
https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/report-antitrust-violation
They will not be able to do anything to DndBeyond, but they need to start becoming aware via complaints of this kind of practice.
Whether you liked this feature or not, this was part of what made DndBeyond dominate the VTT market.
Now they cut features to make more money. This type of scummy customer milking practice that adds NO value, ESPECIALLY after forcing other competitors OUT of the market and becoming the de-facto official option. This particular reply will probably be taken down, but if you're interested on adding noise to this issue please do.
I would never claim to be an expert in antitrust law - I studied it a bit back in law school, but it is such an absurdly complicated field of law that, unless one actually practices antitrust, expertise is nearly unreachable.
That said, I can say with an extremely high degree of confidence this is not an antitrust issue and is not something the FTC would care about. This is a change to a pricing model and not some kind of effort to promote unfair competition or which would otherwise implicate antitrust. In fact, if you read the thread, a whole lot of the posts boil down to “this will drive us into the hands of your competitors” - which, definitionally, is the opposite of an antitrust issue.
Feel free to make your opinions known here - staff is clearly monitoring this thread. And you can always take to social media if you want a different platform. But let us not waste the government’s time on something that does not fall within their purview.
I agree that this is 100% not antitrust, but the FTC do a lot of consumer-protection stuff beyond that.
That said, this is not something within the scope of their duties, and even if the mess of the discounts for a la carte purchases technically is, it's way too penny-ante for them to bother with. (Especially since they're making it possible to get them, it's just inconvenient. I'm pretty sure they just forgot them when scoping the marketplace rebuild.)
So, stepping outside the US, the dominance of D&D may be questionable, but if it is as dominant in Europe as it is in the US, then there are risks that could be applied there if a competent lawyer had some good arguments relating to the state of consumer interest laws and the internet there.
However, that could result in withdrawal from that market if pressed, harming the larger goals.
Would I like them to make the option available again? Yes.
But Hasbro only answers to me as a shareholder, and most players are not shareholders (most shareholders are large funds). I will make my tiny complaint, but I doubt it will sway much.
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I think removing the piecemeal purchase options makes the experience of DDB's marketplace unsatisfactory. I don't think a company removing an a la carte menu constitutes extortion.
I also think belittling D&D/WotC staff's participation in this thread and claiming them complicit in the injury you're claiming is a bit much. It's unreasonable to expect a representative to do more than develop an understanding of your feelings and experience as a consumer, and report that back to the company. I'd say WotC/DDB staff is doing a better job at engaging in dialogue with the community than they have when they've made mistakes in the recent past, in that they're actually engaging as opposed to the silence the community received for months after the OGL fiasco (they're different scenarios, one WotC was caught via a leak and likely had gone into crisis mode, here a decision to change the marketplace has occurred and people attached to the old market are understandably upset). A community manager should be seen as someone there to listen to you, not your rhetorical punching bag.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
i'm a little surprised i haven't seen a "let them eat cereal" reference in fourteen pages. some people are choosing not to spend money, but they're doing it without a clever hashtag. missed opportunity, really.
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
No, it isn't "de facto" anything. DDB was purchased by Hasbro so it is literally the official platform, but in addition, alternatives like Roll20 etc. still exist and are just as viable
Also, this
makes no sense. You haven't lost your existing purchases. Your "hoard" remains completely intact. You just have fewer ways to add to it
As for this
Yikes, my dude. Just yikes. Especially considering the responses the one employee who is in these threads has been giving you
Maybe step away for a minute and take a breath rather than continuing to double/triple down and fall further down this rabbit hole you've found yourself in
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Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
[REDACTED]
This product is worse now.
How should I move my business elsewhere? How do I take my purchases under the previous model and move to a different company's model that I prefer?
If I bought books at one store I can buy books at the next store and use them with my previous books.
This isn't the case for digital products and consumers have no protections.
I'm expected to start buying complete books, instead of the single options that lured me in the first place, if I want to use the product I already purchased to be compatible with future expansions of the same game.
This is a recurring theme of modern digital products and unless we start complaining to politicians there will be no legislation to curtail this behavior.
This whole thing is just so anti-consumer. How is removing ways for people to spend money on specific items they are willing to spend money on supposed to encourage us to spend any more money when we can't buy what we want anymore?
I was so happy to spend money on the product I wanted but now I can't so I just don't want to spend money on your product anymore, it's so insane.
(apologies for last blank post)
I was happy of just purchasing individual items such as subclasses and race options. But now I have to buy the whole book just to even gain access to it. Sometimes we don't want to get the whole product and made it easier for new players to get into the game such as myself at the time.
Due to spending small amounts and enjoy the content that I purchase, gave me enough courage to purchase whole books and even bundles. This will not be health in the short or long term. This might kill the platform in the foreseeable future. I do hope that the people who made the changes realise how bad it is as they don't seem to care about a long term health business. Just money quickly.
Knowing what's good for businesses, this isn't the way.
G Slayer105