As I stated in another topic: I am officially not going to be purchasing anything DnD related until this change is reverted. I used this site for convenience, but I don't NEED it nor the books. I bought things to support DnD. No more if they are going to be anti-consumer like this.
At the time of this posting, most of the 5e Players at the gamestore I frequent and play at have canceled their DDB subscriptions, and the 6 Adventure's League Groups that were running have all canceled until ALC is brought back, and are all looking at more Consumer Friendly TTRPGs. The gamestore owner is already thinking about no longer selling D&D products or MtG, he makes more money off YuGiOh and the large selection of other TTRPG books out there. He is tired of the drama and bad business WotC/Hasbro keeps bringing, and has already refunded and cancelled most of the Vecna physical pre-orders he had at the store.
Hilariously enough, looks like prolly going to Pathfinder, as we can buy ALL the Pathfinder 1e books for less than $100 digitally, that is if the groups don't just decide to only use the 100% FREE OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED Database of info for Character Creation tools and info.
It is also sounding like even if they DO bring back ALC.. lot of these players just aren't coming back to D&D at all. Especially with this Eye of Vecna Early Access fiasco no top of the removing ALC.
All I have left is a singular D&D group that exclusively just uses ROLL20 which doesn't honestly require buying anying for D&D can just hand input/homebrew everything, and they are talking about quitting D&D and 5e as well.
So.. there is that. Way to go WotC/Hasbro you have killed your brand at one of the largest Gamestores in my county, which is a very big county, and honestly ******* sad as hell. Since it is in the county that WotC was created/established.
Wizards spend $143 million for D&D Beyond. They wouldn't have done that if it wasn't making at least multiple millions. However, I would not be surprised if D&D Beyond functions on a whales and minnows model and the people using the a la carte options are minnows.
This is kind of a weird distinction in digital though, as an "a la carte user" costs the exact same to host as a guest who buys absolutely nothing, and a user who buys entire books, as they're all accessing character sheets, reading the books they have access to, using the forums, creating homebrew etc. So if they only care about wales they'd need to ban guests.
If anything, "a la carte" users are paying more for what they have access to, because if you pay half the price of a book for individual items, you'll have a lot less than half the book unlocked.
It can't really be described as a loss leader because the cost of making a book is bound up in the physical book, converting it to a digital book is comparatively easy if you have access to all of the text. Users buying piecemeal should very quickly cover the cost of creating the digital content, let alone people buying the full thing, so in terms of the costs for digital content it's a lot lower.
If they axed the feature because it was costing them more money than it made, they could have published sales figures to prove that, or even just said so, but they haven't, so it's on them if we all assume the decision was pure greed, because it almost certainly is.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
What disgusting behaviour this is. Unadulterated greed at it's worst - They won't be getting any more from me or my group. As if it wasn't bad enough owning physical copies and then having to buy that same digital content. No more.
How much do you think they make in piecemeal purchases at DDB? I personally do not think they make a million a year in sales here.
Wizards spend $143 million for D&D Beyond. They wouldn't have done that if it wasn't making at least multiple millions. However, I would not be surprised if D&D Beyond functions on a whales and minnows model and the people using the a la carte options are minnows.
Why are you assuming categories like that? This is not a CCG. It does not function on luck, lockboxes, or any of the things that usually fit with a whales and minnows model.
Now, if you are arguing that their marketing department is looking at it that way, that is just another way of saying that they are making blind assumptions.
How much do you think they make in piecemeal purchases at DDB? I personally do not think they make a million a year in sales here.
Wizards spend $143 million for D&D Beyond. They wouldn't have done that if it wasn't making at least multiple millions. However, I would not be surprised if D&D Beyond functions on a whales and minnows model and the people using the a la carte options are minnows.
Why are you assuming categories like that? This is not a CCG. It does not function on luck, lockboxes, or any of the things that usually fit with a whales and minnows model.
Now, if you are arguing that their marketing department is looking at it that way, that is just another way of saying that they are making blind assumptions.
It probably does work on something close to a power-law distribution. You have the long tail who buy little or nothing, the people who buy one book, the people who buy a couple of books and a master subscription, all the way up to the ones who buy everything. Piecemeal buying probably smoothed out the graph some, but the bulk of it is whole-book purchases.
While it doesn't have the unlimited spend possibility of the typical "free" game, it's not dissimilar. (Though I bet "three books and a master subscription" is a significant bump in the graph.)
How much do you think they make in piecemeal purchases at DDB? I personally do not think they make a million a year in sales here.
Wizards spend $143 million for D&D Beyond. They wouldn't have done that if it wasn't making at least multiple millions. However, I would not be surprised if D&D Beyond functions on a whales and minnows model and the people using the a la carte options are minnows.
Why are you assuming categories like that? This is not a CCG. It does not function on luck, lockboxes, or any of the things that usually fit with a whales and minnows model.
Now, if you are arguing that their marketing department is looking at it that way, that is just another way of saying that they are making blind assumptions.
maybe decision makers are assuming a lootbox or subscription model that's not yet visible to all involved and may or may not ever become reality. user assumptions aside, it's not clear that the left hand of the company knows what the right hand is doing. this is dungeon mastering by committee and they're rolling all the dice behind several screens.
the uncertainty is unattractive, to say the least.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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!
How much do you think they make in piecemeal purchases at DDB? I personally do not think they make a million a year in sales here.
Wizards spend $143 million for D&D Beyond. They wouldn't have done that if it wasn't making at least multiple millions. However, I would not be surprised if D&D Beyond functions on a whales and minnows model and the people using the a la carte options are minnows.
Why are you assuming categories like that? This is not a CCG. It does not function on luck, lockboxes, or any of the things that usually fit with a whales and minnows model.
Now, if you are arguing that their marketing department is looking at it that way, that is just another way of saying that they are making blind assumptions.
It probably does work on something close to a power-law distribution. You have the long tail who buy little or nothing, the people who buy one book, the people who buy a couple of books and a master subscription, all the way up to the ones who buy everything. Piecemeal buying probably smoothed out the graph some, but the bulk of it is whole-book purchases.
While it doesn't have the unlimited spend possibility of the typical "free" game, it's not dissimilar. (Though I bet "three books and a master subscription" is a significant bump in the graph.)
This is probably close to it. They have said something like 20% of the player base (DMs, usually) does the vast majority of the purchasing.
I would note that another plausible cause for all of this is just staffing; the glacial pace of updates to the site strongly suggest that the development staff is quite small.
Now, it's important to note that they re-architected the store. That's not something you do to kill off an old product you don't like -- if you really object to a given product, you just stop selling it. It's also not something you do casually, because no matter how you do it, it's going to annoy your customers. Mostly, the reason you do something like that is because the old system needs some sort of update, and it's easier to write a new store than update the old one. Note that staffing comes into play here: if you've laid off the staff who understand how the old system worked, making those necessary updates on the old software may simply not be feasible. Another common trigger is that a key component is end-of-life and needs to be replaced.
Once you've decided that you're going to replace a component like that, you look at the features of the old store, prioritize them (based on how much you value them and how much work they are to implement), and implement as many of them as you can manage given your deadlines and available staff (if the deadline is sufficiently far in the future you may look at hiring new staff, that's generally not feasible in the near term). A la carte purchasing didn't make the cutoff. It's almost certainly not the only thing that didn't, it's just the one that the most people got upset about.
Now, does this mean that Wizards can be pressured into restoring the feature? In the short term, no: building and debugging a system like that takes time. On a longer time frame, maybe.
There's really no need for you to try and rationalise this to somehow being anything else; post-OGL they have no right to that kind of generosity. And in this case specifically there's one simple reason…
Now, it's important to note that they re-architected the store.
…and that reason is that there was absolutely zero need to re-architect the store. If their team is so tiny and over-worked, then re-architecting the storefront was a completely unnecessary project that has only wasted their limited staff time; it hasn't made any improvements to the marketplace, in fact it's made it universally worse.
Even if they had a legitimate reason to do it, and had another legitimate reason why they had to rush it out without fully re-implementing the full capabilities of the previous storefront, then that still doesn't excuse the fact that they haven't explained the loss of piecemeal, or mentioned plans to bring it back.
Because to be super generous in handing out benefit of the doubt, we would need to assume that piecemeal purchasing is only temporarily unavailable while they release this initial version of the new storefront, and that they'll bring the option back later; but if that's the case then why haven't they taken the two seconds it would have required to say so?
Their silence on the issue has made it abundantly clear that they don't give a shit about their customers, and had hoped to squeeze this out without anyone noticing. They have not earned our generosity or trust, and they are actively taking advantage of it right now by continuing to try to ignore us completely.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Now, it's important to note that they re-architected the store.
…and that reason is that there was absolutely zero reason to re-architect the store.
If there was zero reason to re-architect the store... they wouldn't have done it. It costs resources that they could instead use on something they could sell. It certainly wasn't needed to get rid of individual purchasing, removing them from the existing store would almost certainly have been completely trivial.
If there was zero reason to re-architect the store... they wouldn't have done it. It costs resources that they could instead use on something they could sell. It certainly wasn't needed to get rid of individual purchasing, removing them from the existing store would almost certainly have been completely trivial.
And yet they made a point of getting rid of piecemeal purchases while doing it, while changing nothing of value to the storefront; it's not any easier to use, in fact it's arguably a worse storefront all around.
Again (since you've ignored this twice now), if they had a good reason, why not state it? Why not do that most basic of things and communicate with customers so we know what's coming and why? Why just drop a steaming pile of storefront on us and expect us to be happy about it?
If they will not tell us why this has happened, then we are under no obligation to give them the benefit of the doubt here. Since they can't be arsed to take the two seconds to say something then I for one fully reserve my right to assume the change is for the worst of all possible reasons, because you don't try to hide the reasons unless they're shit reasons.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Now, it's important to note that they re-architected the store.
…and that reason is that there was absolutely zero reason to re-architect the store.
If there was zero reason to re-architect the store... they wouldn't have done it. It costs resources that they could instead use on something they could sell. It certainly wasn't needed to get rid of individual purchasing, removing them from the existing store would almost certainly have been completely trivial.
Adding to the above, Wizards does not owe us a reason why they made the change - we are really not entitled to know why they make financial decisions. That is an internal decision - it is one that we can be upset about, but Wizards does not owe us any real explanation as to why the change was made. That does not mean they did a good job at communicating and implementation - something like this should have been announced in advance and they really should have worked out some of the technical issues (no credit for past purchases without involving customer support, issues with PayPal, etc.).
Honestly, I get where Wizards is coming from. The community manager was monitoring this thread and doing a good job responding to people… and then the usual suspects came out of the woodworks. Those who try to turn every conversation into something about economic politics. Those who spread conspiracies and engage in baseless speculation. The racists who just want the game to fail because Wizards had the audacity to try and make it more welcoming, so they latch onto every controversy to fan flames of discontent. All the entitled members of the community who demand things of Wizards far beyond what any company would do.
There has been lots of great discussion on this thread - and, I want to be clear, the overwhelming majority of users, based on both comments and the upvotes thereon, have been incredibly respectful in voicing their discontent. But, that does not stop bad actors from being loud and trying to monopolize the conversation - and you’ll notice the shift away from polite dissent proceeded and, in all likelihood, precipitated, the reduction in staff interaction here.
Wizards should learn the lesson that better communication is desired by the majority of the community - but the lesson the community, or at least its loudest members, continues to teach Wizards is that, no matter how much Wizards tries to communicate, no matter what they do, they’ll get the same wrathful response. If we want Wizards to do better, we should stop providing them evidence to support a more fatalistic “why should we try communicating, it will end the same regardless” approach to public relations.
Now, it's important to note that they re-architected the store.
…and that reason is that there was absolutely zero reason to re-architect the store.
If there was zero reason to re-architect the store... they wouldn't have done it. It costs resources that they could instead use on something they could sell. It certainly wasn't needed to get rid of individual purchasing, removing them from the existing store would almost certainly have been completely trivial.
Adding to the above, Wizards does not owe us a reason why they made the change - we are really not entitled to know why they make financial decisions. That is an internal decision - it is one that we can be upset about, but Wizards does not owe us any real explanation as to why the change was made. That does not mean they did a good job at communicating and implementation - something like this should have been announced in advance and they really should have worked out some of the technical issues (no credit for past purchases without involving customer support, issues with PayPal, etc.).
Honestly, I get where Wizards is coming from. The community manager was monitoring this thread and doing a good job responding to people… and then the usual suspects came out of the woodworks. Those who try to turn every conversation into something about economic politics. Those who spread conspiracies and engage in baseless speculation. The racists who just want the game to fail because Wizards had the audacity to try and make it more welcoming, so they latch onto every controversy to fan flames of discontent. All the entitled members of the community who demand things of Wizards far beyond what any company would do.
There has been lots of great discussion on this thread - and, I want to be clear, the overwhelming majority of users, based on both comments and the upvotes thereon, have been incredibly respectful in voicing their discontent. But, that does not stop bad actors from being loud and trying to monopolize the conversation - and you’ll notice the shift away from polite dissent proceeded and, in all likelihood, precipitated, the reduction in staff interaction here.
Wizards should learn the lesson that better communication is desired by the majority of the community - but the lesson the community, or at least its loudest members, continues to teach Wizards is that, no matter how much Wizards tries to communicate, no matter what they do, they’ll get the same wrathful response. If we want Wizards to do better, we should stop providing them evidence to support a more fatalistic “why should we try communicating, it will end the same regardless” approach to public relations.
Blaming upset customers for wizbro's choices is a sad argument, if the community manager's solution is to ignore upset members of this community, well that isn't managing, it is ignoring, and if wizbro is happy with that level of performance and the community is not, then what else is there to do but complain more. Silencing complainers by force doesn't work very well on forums either. wizbro is gonna have to address this or ride it out, looks like they have saddled up so hang on for the ride!
Now, it's important to note that they re-architected the store.
…and that reason is that there was absolutely zero reason to re-architect the store.
If there was zero reason to re-architect the store... they wouldn't have done it. It costs resources that they could instead use on something they could sell. It certainly wasn't needed to get rid of individual purchasing, removing them from the existing store would almost certainly have been completely trivial.
Adding to the above, Wizards does not owe us a reason why they made the change - we are really not entitled to know why they make financial decisions. That is an internal decision - it is one that we can be upset about, but Wizards does not owe us any real explanation as to why the change was made. That does not mean they did a good job at communicating and implementation - something like this should have been announced in advance and they really should have worked out some of the technical issues (no credit for past purchases without involving customer support, issues with PayPal, etc.).
Honestly, I get where Wizards is coming from. The community manager was monitoring this thread and doing a good job responding to people… and then the usual suspects came out of the woodworks. Those who try to turn every conversation into something about economic politics. Those who spread conspiracies and engage in baseless speculation. The racists who just want the game to fail because Wizards had the audacity to try and make it more welcoming, so they latch onto every controversy to fan flames of discontent. All the entitled members of the community who demand things of Wizards far beyond what any company would do.
There has been lots of great discussion on this thread - and, I want to be clear, the overwhelming majority of users, based on both comments and the upvotes thereon, have been incredibly respectful in voicing their discontent. But, that does not stop bad actors from being loud and trying to monopolize the conversation - and you’ll notice the shift away from polite dissent proceeded and, in all likelihood, precipitated, the reduction in staff interaction here.
Wizards should learn the lesson that better communication is desired by the majority of the community - but the lesson the community, or at least its loudest members, continues to teach Wizards is that, no matter how much Wizards tries to communicate, no matter what they do, they’ll get the same wrathful response. If we want Wizards to do better, we should stop providing them evidence to support a more fatalistic “why should we try communicating, it will end the same regardless” approach to public relations.
I'm sorry, but the idea that companies aren't beholden to their customers and "don't owe" us an explanation about money absolutely isn't true. Customers are why they have money in the first place.
A lot of the conspiracy and speculation are purely because of the lack of communication, because the only explanation they thought we were worth being given was "It's no longer possible" with no reason why. I'll admit that I could have been nicer in tone at some points, but a core function of my use and enjoyment of the website has been removed without warning and without explanation, and it feels time would be better spent trying to communicate rather than policing customer's tones.
At this point I would respect them more if they just came out and said "Yes we did this on purpose, yes it was for money reasons, no we're not changing it back".
It would at least be standing by something rather than blatantly ignoring the customer base.
If there was zero reason to re-architect the store... they wouldn't have done it. It costs resources that they could instead use on something they could sell. It certainly wasn't needed to get rid of individual purchasing, removing them from the existing store would almost certainly have been completely trivial.
And yet they made a point of getting rid of piecemeal purchases while doing it, while changing nothing of value to the storefront; it's not any easier to use, in fact it's arguably a worse storefront all around.
They didn't "make a point of" getting rid of them -- they didn't reimplement them. Having them is not just "put more items on sale". There's a hierarchy of things on sale, and buying things higher up the tree removes the lower items, while buying the lower items reduces the price of the higher ones. (The bundles present the same problems.) Whatever preexisting e-commerce package they're working with would require heavy customizing to make it work. And it also might have weird interactions with the digital-physical bundles. (It's even possible they did implement them, but they were conflicting with the bundles in a way that was non-trivial to fix, and they decided the bundles were more important.)
And they probably had to replace the marketplace to get the bundles added. If it was an easy change, they would've just done that, maybe with a graphic redesign as well. But there's considerable evidence that a lot of the DDB back-end code is... not good.
(It's pure speculation on my part, but, based on the suddenness, lack of communication, and general chaos around the rollout, it's not impossible that they had to rush out the new marketplace because of some sort of back-end security problem in the old one. (Even if this were so, piecemeal purchases are probably still gone forever.))
Again (since you've ignored this twice now), if they had a good reason, why not state it? Why not do that most basic of things and communicate with customers so we know what's coming and why? Why just drop a steaming pile of storefront on us and expect us to be happy about it?
They're very well documented as having awful communication policies, but also, if the answer was "this is penny-ante stuff, and it's not worth it to us to keep it", do you think the yelling would be better or worse? (And it's by far the most likely reason.)
Again (since you've ignored this twice now), if they had a good reason, why not state it? Why not do that most basic of things and communicate with customers so we know what's coming and why? Why just drop a steaming pile of storefront on us and expect us to be happy about it?
They're very well documented as having awful communication policies, but also, if the answer was "this is penny-ante stuff, and it's not worth it to us to keep it", do you think the yelling would be better or worse? (And it's by far the most likely reason.)
As I just said, I would respect that infinitely more than ignoring us. I still wouldn't be happy, and I still would likely stop purchasing their products, but at the very least it would be something. If they're going to be yelled at either way, they might as well take the option that at least has some integrity.
Adding to the above, Wizards does not owe us a reason why they made the change - we are really not entitled to know why they make financial decisions. That is an internal decision - it is one that we can be upset about, but Wizards does not owe us any real explanation as to why the change was made. That does not mean they did a good job at communicating and implementation - something like this should have been announced in advance and they really should have worked out some of the technical issues (no credit for past purchases without involving customer support, issues with PayPal, etc.).
Honestly, I get where Wizards is coming from. The community manager was monitoring this thread and doing a good job responding to people… and then the usual suspects came out of the woodworks. Those who try to turn every conversation into something about economic politics. Those who spread conspiracies and engage in baseless speculation. The racists who just want the game to fail because Wizards had the audacity to try and make it more welcoming, so they latch onto every controversy to fan flames of discontent. All the entitled members of the community who demand things of Wizards far beyond what any company would do.
There has been lots of great discussion on this thread - and, I want to be clear, the overwhelming majority of users, based on both comments and the upvotes thereon, have been incredibly respectful in voicing their discontent. But, that does not stop bad actors from being loud and trying to monopolize the conversation - and you’ll notice the shift away from polite dissent proceeded and, in all likelihood, precipitated, the reduction in staff interaction here.
Wizards should learn the lesson that better communication is desired by the majority of the community - but the lesson the community, or at least its loudest members, continues to teach Wizards is that, no matter how much Wizards tries to communicate, no matter what they do, they’ll get the same wrathful response. If we want Wizards to do better, we should stop providing them evidence to support a more fatalistic “why should we try communicating, it will end the same regardless” approach to public relations.
And the community does not owe them the benefit of the doubt either. The reason baseless speculation is rampant here is precisely because of the lack of communication on their end, and it can still be quelled should they communicate now. They choose not to, continuing to leave everyone in the dark to speculate. They forfeit the right to complain about customers reactions when they do nothing to engage with said customers. As far as I'm aware you're not a member of staff nor do you speak for the staff, so any reason you provide to defend their lack of engagement here is... baseless speculation.
As I stated in another topic: I am officially not going to be purchasing anything DnD related until this change is reverted. I used this site for convenience, but I don't NEED it nor the books. I bought things to support DnD. No more if they are going to be anti-consumer like this.
At the time of this posting, most of the 5e Players at the gamestore I frequent and play at have canceled their DDB subscriptions, and the 6 Adventure's League Groups that were running have all canceled until ALC is brought back, and are all looking at more Consumer Friendly TTRPGs. The gamestore owner is already thinking about no longer selling D&D products or MtG, he makes more money off YuGiOh and the large selection of other TTRPG books out there. He is tired of the drama and bad business WotC/Hasbro keeps bringing, and has already refunded and cancelled most of the Vecna physical pre-orders he had at the store.
Hilariously enough, looks like prolly going to Pathfinder, as we can buy ALL the Pathfinder 1e books for less than $100 digitally, that is if the groups don't just decide to only use the 100% FREE OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED Database of info for Character Creation tools and info.
It is also sounding like even if they DO bring back ALC.. lot of these players just aren't coming back to D&D at all. Especially with this Eye of Vecna Early Access fiasco no top of the removing ALC.
All I have left is a singular D&D group that exclusively just uses ROLL20 which doesn't honestly require buying anying for D&D can just hand input/homebrew everything, and they are talking about quitting D&D and 5e as well.
So.. there is that. Way to go WotC/Hasbro you have killed your brand at one of the largest Gamestores in my county, which is a very big county, and honestly ******* sad as hell. Since it is in the county that WotC was created/established.
"Not getting cut into bloody littles slices, That's the key to a sound plan."
This is kind of a weird distinction in digital though, as an "a la carte user" costs the exact same to host as a guest who buys absolutely nothing, and a user who buys entire books, as they're all accessing character sheets, reading the books they have access to, using the forums, creating homebrew etc. So if they only care about wales they'd need to ban guests.
If anything, "a la carte" users are paying more for what they have access to, because if you pay half the price of a book for individual items, you'll have a lot less than half the book unlocked.
It can't really be described as a loss leader because the cost of making a book is bound up in the physical book, converting it to a digital book is comparatively easy if you have access to all of the text. Users buying piecemeal should very quickly cover the cost of creating the digital content, let alone people buying the full thing, so in terms of the costs for digital content it's a lot lower.
If they axed the feature because it was costing them more money than it made, they could have published sales figures to prove that, or even just said so, but they haven't, so it's on them if we all assume the decision was pure greed, because it almost certainly is.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
D&D Beyond a joke.
What disgusting behaviour this is. Unadulterated greed at it's worst - They won't be getting any more from me or my group. As if it wasn't bad enough owning physical copies and then having to buy that same digital content. No more.
Why are you assuming categories like that? This is not a CCG. It does not function on luck, lockboxes, or any of the things that usually fit with a whales and minnows model.
Now, if you are arguing that their marketing department is looking at it that way, that is just another way of saying that they are making blind assumptions.
It probably does work on something close to a power-law distribution. You have the long tail who buy little or nothing, the people who buy one book, the people who buy a couple of books and a master subscription, all the way up to the ones who buy everything. Piecemeal buying probably smoothed out the graph some, but the bulk of it is whole-book purchases.
While it doesn't have the unlimited spend possibility of the typical "free" game, it's not dissimilar. (Though I bet "three books and a master subscription" is a significant bump in the graph.)
maybe decision makers are assuming a lootbox or subscription model that's not yet visible to all involved and may or may not ever become reality. user assumptions aside, it's not clear that the left hand of the company knows what the right hand is doing. this is dungeon mastering by committee and they're rolling all the dice behind several screens.
the uncertainty is unattractive, to say the least.
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!
This is probably close to it. They have said something like 20% of the player base (DMs, usually) does the vast majority of the purchasing.
Glad to see a YouTube video getting decent views on this: The INSANE D&D Leaks were TRUE (youtube.com)
I would note that another plausible cause for all of this is just staffing; the glacial pace of updates to the site strongly suggest that the development staff is quite small.
Now, it's important to note that they re-architected the store. That's not something you do to kill off an old product you don't like -- if you really object to a given product, you just stop selling it. It's also not something you do casually, because no matter how you do it, it's going to annoy your customers. Mostly, the reason you do something like that is because the old system needs some sort of update, and it's easier to write a new store than update the old one. Note that staffing comes into play here: if you've laid off the staff who understand how the old system worked, making those necessary updates on the old software may simply not be feasible. Another common trigger is that a key component is end-of-life and needs to be replaced.
Once you've decided that you're going to replace a component like that, you look at the features of the old store, prioritize them (based on how much you value them and how much work they are to implement), and implement as many of them as you can manage given your deadlines and available staff (if the deadline is sufficiently far in the future you may look at hiring new staff, that's generally not feasible in the near term). A la carte purchasing didn't make the cutoff. It's almost certainly not the only thing that didn't, it's just the one that the most people got upset about.
Now, does this mean that Wizards can be pressured into restoring the feature? In the short term, no: building and debugging a system like that takes time. On a longer time frame, maybe.
…or, it's because Hasbo are giant arseholes.
There's really no need for you to try and rationalise this to somehow being anything else; post-OGL they have no right to that kind of generosity. And in this case specifically there's one simple reason…
…and that reason is that there was absolutely zero need to re-architect the store. If their team is so tiny and over-worked, then re-architecting the storefront was a completely unnecessary project that has only wasted their limited staff time; it hasn't made any improvements to the marketplace, in fact it's made it universally worse.
Even if they had a legitimate reason to do it, and had another legitimate reason why they had to rush it out without fully re-implementing the full capabilities of the previous storefront, then that still doesn't excuse the fact that they haven't explained the loss of piecemeal, or mentioned plans to bring it back.
Because to be super generous in handing out benefit of the doubt, we would need to assume that piecemeal purchasing is only temporarily unavailable while they release this initial version of the new storefront, and that they'll bring the option back later; but if that's the case then why haven't they taken the two seconds it would have required to say so?
Their silence on the issue has made it abundantly clear that they don't give a shit about their customers, and had hoped to squeeze this out without anyone noticing. They have not earned our generosity or trust, and they are actively taking advantage of it right now by continuing to try to ignore us completely.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
If there was zero reason to re-architect the store... they wouldn't have done it. It costs resources that they could instead use on something they could sell. It certainly wasn't needed to get rid of individual purchasing, removing them from the existing store would almost certainly have been completely trivial.
And yet they made a point of getting rid of piecemeal purchases while doing it, while changing nothing of value to the storefront; it's not any easier to use, in fact it's arguably a worse storefront all around.
Again (since you've ignored this twice now), if they had a good reason, why not state it? Why not do that most basic of things and communicate with customers so we know what's coming and why? Why just drop a steaming pile of storefront on us and expect us to be happy about it?
If they will not tell us why this has happened, then we are under no obligation to give them the benefit of the doubt here. Since they can't be arsed to take the two seconds to say something then I for one fully reserve my right to assume the change is for the worst of all possible reasons, because you don't try to hide the reasons unless they're shit reasons.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Adding to the above, Wizards does not owe us a reason why they made the change - we are really not entitled to know why they make financial decisions. That is an internal decision - it is one that we can be upset about, but Wizards does not owe us any real explanation as to why the change was made. That does not mean they did a good job at communicating and implementation - something like this should have been announced in advance and they really should have worked out some of the technical issues (no credit for past purchases without involving customer support, issues with PayPal, etc.).
Honestly, I get where Wizards is coming from. The community manager was monitoring this thread and doing a good job responding to people… and then the usual suspects came out of the woodworks. Those who try to turn every conversation into something about economic politics. Those who spread conspiracies and engage in baseless speculation. The racists who just want the game to fail because Wizards had the audacity to try and make it more welcoming, so they latch onto every controversy to fan flames of discontent. All the entitled members of the community who demand things of Wizards far beyond what any company would do.
There has been lots of great discussion on this thread - and, I want to be clear, the overwhelming majority of users, based on both comments and the upvotes thereon, have been incredibly respectful in voicing their discontent. But, that does not stop bad actors from being loud and trying to monopolize the conversation - and you’ll notice the shift away from polite dissent proceeded and, in all likelihood, precipitated, the reduction in staff interaction here.
Wizards should learn the lesson that better communication is desired by the majority of the community - but the lesson the community, or at least its loudest members, continues to teach Wizards is that, no matter how much Wizards tries to communicate, no matter what they do, they’ll get the same wrathful response. If we want Wizards to do better, we should stop providing them evidence to support a more fatalistic “why should we try communicating, it will end the same regardless” approach to public relations.
Blaming upset customers for wizbro's choices is a sad argument, if the community manager's solution is to ignore upset members of this community, well that isn't managing, it is ignoring, and if wizbro is happy with that level of performance and the community is not, then what else is there to do but complain more. Silencing complainers by force doesn't work very well on forums either. wizbro is gonna have to address this or ride it out, looks like they have saddled up so hang on for the ride!
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
I'm sorry, but the idea that companies aren't beholden to their customers and "don't owe" us an explanation about money absolutely isn't true. Customers are why they have money in the first place.
A lot of the conspiracy and speculation are purely because of the lack of communication, because the only explanation they thought we were worth being given was "It's no longer possible" with no reason why. I'll admit that I could have been nicer in tone at some points, but a core function of my use and enjoyment of the website has been removed without warning and without explanation, and it feels time would be better spent trying to communicate rather than policing customer's tones.
At this point I would respect them more if they just came out and said "Yes we did this on purpose, yes it was for money reasons, no we're not changing it back".
It would at least be standing by something rather than blatantly ignoring the customer base.
They didn't "make a point of" getting rid of them -- they didn't reimplement them. Having them is not just "put more items on sale". There's a hierarchy of things on sale, and buying things higher up the tree removes the lower items, while buying the lower items reduces the price of the higher ones. (The bundles present the same problems.) Whatever preexisting e-commerce package they're working with would require heavy customizing to make it work. And it also might have weird interactions with the digital-physical bundles. (It's even possible they did implement them, but they were conflicting with the bundles in a way that was non-trivial to fix, and they decided the bundles were more important.)
And they probably had to replace the marketplace to get the bundles added. If it was an easy change, they would've just done that, maybe with a graphic redesign as well. But there's considerable evidence that a lot of the DDB back-end code is... not good.
(It's pure speculation on my part, but, based on the suddenness, lack of communication, and general chaos around the rollout, it's not impossible that they had to rush out the new marketplace because of some sort of back-end security problem in the old one. (Even if this were so, piecemeal purchases are probably still gone forever.))
They're very well documented as having awful communication policies, but also, if the answer was "this is penny-ante stuff, and it's not worth it to us to keep it", do you think the yelling would be better or worse? (And it's by far the most likely reason.)
As I just said, I would respect that infinitely more than ignoring us. I still wouldn't be happy, and I still would likely stop purchasing their products, but at the very least it would be something. If they're going to be yelled at either way, they might as well take the option that at least has some integrity.
And the community does not owe them the benefit of the doubt either. The reason baseless speculation is rampant here is precisely because of the lack of communication on their end, and it can still be quelled should they communicate now. They choose not to, continuing to leave everyone in the dark to speculate. They forfeit the right to complain about customers reactions when they do nothing to engage with said customers. As far as I'm aware you're not a member of staff nor do you speak for the staff, so any reason you provide to defend their lack of engagement here is... baseless speculation.
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