Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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You greatly overrate the competence of Wizards at communicating. Hanlon's Razor really does apply here. This is not to say that incompetence and stupidity shouldn't be criticized.
They have so many simple avenues for communication at this point that incompetency on that level stretches disbelief a bit.
Yeah, it's by design. DDB is pretty clearly set up to replicate the usual table experience, where only one person has the core books, maybe with an extra copy of the PH running around. This is why piecemeal buying likely isn't that big a deal to WotC -- the game's culture doesn't encourage building characters with stuff only you own, so it mostly sells only to people who build characters outside of games, and groups that have the print books and don't want to buy them digitally as well. (And various other relatively small populations.)
You greedy bastards. lol. Do you think we're going to dish out for the full-price books now instead? Short-sightedness is your class speciality now isn't it WOTC? You just fail your customers again and again. Unbelievable.
Be welcome, but be wary.
The fact it’s been two weeks and the only person who has said anything is one community manager makes this whole situation a lot worse. The longer they wait the less likely we are to continue supporting them even if they make this right.
The longer they take to say this wasn't motivated by greed, the more motivated by greed it looks.
To me, that doesn't even seem like a good business model. It seems like they would want to find ways sell products to both DM's and players, espeically since, at least at indiviual tables, the players outnumber the DM.
Ok, step back a moment. Perspective.
This is a for profit company. This is not a charity. D&D is a luxury product, not a necessity. They do not owe any of us anything, nor are any of us going to starve or go without water or shelter if their products are not available at the prices we prefer.
There is no moral high ground here on our parts.
The main risk at pricing too high or too inconveniently is theirs, not ours. It is their bottom line at risk, not ours. It is they who risk going without food or shelter if their products fail, not us. Note that does not make any of us charities, either! None of us have any obligation to purchase, either.
Personally, I think this is a horrid business decision on their part, but 'greed' is not a term that applies to such situations in any conventional sense.
"They do not owe us anything" is such a sign of complacency in lieu of blatant anti-consumer tactics. Even if they are doing financially well the greed of upper management and shareholder's short term profit will be first in consideration of the worker bee in the company. We're seeing it happen all over, companies with record high profits laying of people in large swaths to 'restructure'. Yes, the do owe us because without us they don't get to keep operating. Piss off your entire fanbase and watch as the revenue dwindle.
You say there's no moral high ground but parade with it in your first sentence.
This is a change that NEEDS to be reverted. It is absolutely ridiculous that after WOTC bought them things got to this level. I am considering switching to and entire platform altogether. There are so many great platforms that provide the same service. The only reason I was using DDB is because I was supporting the game through it but if they treat their customers like this (considering all the issues they had the past 2 years) I don't think they are worth the consideration I am giving them. Both me and my players used the individual purchases whenever we needed something new just for the convenience and for providing support back to the creators but everyone in my group just about had it with this last straw. I an genuinely considering making my own private character sheet and automation app just out of spite at this point.
The website is harder to navigate, there are so many ribbon bars that cover the screen. I did some math and 23% of the page is covered in the 4 ribbons that are on the marketplace page. Everything got cluttered. Functionality got removed from multiple places in the website. Features that were promised a while ago were never implemented. Things have gotten more expensive. The books provide less useful materials than they used to. What's even the point in providing support anymore? Actually now that I think about it after writing all this I realize that I should not even care about it anymore I think I'm done.
Thing is though, that's essentially what a la carte purchasing was; even if your DM owns a lot of the books, and you have access via content sharing in a campaign, you only have access via content sharing in that campaign.
If you want to privately create some characters as possible back-ups, or for future use, or just try out builds etc. then you need to unlock any content you require for yourself, which a la carte purchasing made significantly more accessible. This is also true for any players who just prefer to use a digital tool for their character sheet, rather than doing it with pen and paper; there will be plenty of groups where DMs are not really interested in double dipping for digital content, but players might still prefer to use the digital tools.
Another common case mentioned is what if you'd like to use a race or sub-class from an adventure or campaign book that your group doesn't need, because you've no plans to run Spelljammer for example? A la carte made it easy to just pick up the one or two you needed, or buy all the races just so you have access should you ever need it.
Put it's not as if that method of purchasing costs anything significant; once a digital book is made it's pretty much 100% profit aside from hosting fees and support staff costs, but divided amongst millions of sales those are negligible, meanwhile a la carte is enabling players who wouldn't otherwise purchase anything to spend a few dollars here and there, and doing that adds up when you have millions of users playing campaigns lasting months or years. If a la carte was actually some kind of loss, D&D Beyond can feel free to publish some evidence backing that up, until then we have no reason to assume otherwise considering that's the model the site has used pretty much from its creation (certainly for years before Wizards of the Coast bought it for a substantial sum of money).
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.
There is no moral high ground on their part, either.
Why are you assuming there will be even short term profit from this for them?
That they need sales to stay in business does not mean they owe us. It means they need to offer product we are willing to buy at the price they ask or else we will simply not purchase it. That is not the same as 'owing us.' Someone else's property remains theirs until it is sold and they are not normally obligated to set any given price nor to sell it at all. They can actually simply choose to stop selling the product at all. Personally, I think that would be even more foolish than this decision to drop a la carte, but they can. We are not owed the existence of this game, at all, let alone at any pricing we think should be.
When they set the price higher than people are willing to pay for the product, people will stop buying the product. This is one of the most basic principles of economics. It is very likely they are doing that here.
But just as I am saying to you, they do not owe us, I am also saying to them, we do not owe them, either. They decide the price at which they are willing to sell, we decide the price at which we are willing to purchase, and where and when and if our limits overlap enough for there to be agreement, there will be sales. No owing involved on either side.
And if a seller, any seller, is setting their price higher than a buyer is willing to pay, that is simply the limits of each. The seller is no more being greedy wanting to receive more in return for their product than the buyer is wanting to pay less for what they purchase. At least, where luxuries are concerned.
It's the business model they had. When you're working with paper books, there's nothing you can do to stop people passing them around, and that's the competition when you try to introduce online tools. Convenience is not going to win out over "now everybody has to buy the books".
If they'd gone with keeping piecemeal buying, but removed content sharing, the yelling would be orders of magnitude worse, and justifiably so. That would collapse the DDB business model. The groups I'm in, who are scattered across multiple time zones, would be migrated to google docs within weeks. It'd be annoying AF, but we'd do it. Within a few months, there'd be unofficial tooling being circulated. You'd have to fill in the data yourself, but somebody would have a good enough character sheet built in google sheets or something. I think such things already exist, but they don't see much use because they're way less convenient.
Despite what you see some people claiming, WotC do actually understand how people play this game.
the Kellogs cereal CEO had a bad interview that led to a boycott. the metgala embraced a tone-deaf expression of inequity that led to sharp criticism and wide-ranging ad revenue disruption. the suits know about this stuff even if you guys don't follow it. simple solution or not, they aren't going to release a statement now without a good long think first. and anyway it's important to note who a potential statement would be directed at: fans, a vocal minority. so if they haven't made a statement by this friday (the classic day to dump unflattering news), then it's either because that minority is of low value (already own the product, not the target of ads) or the statement would put at risk the expected continued influx of new users (wouldn't look good in gotcha headlines) or both.
i'm saying we might not get to know why this happened, but it is not coming across as being on the low-brain-use side of hanlon's.
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!
What on earth gave you the impression Wizards was competent at PR? They've had multiple debacles over the years. The reality is that their management of this situation is incompetent regardless of their motivation, so it doesn't tell you anything more than that they're bad at PR.
Purposely making a product worse in order to squeeze more money out of it's customers is objectively greedy, acting like the only form of greed is the kind related to resources is so blatantly disingenuous it's unreal.
Acting like they're going to fail and go hungry tomorrow because we didn't all buy overpriced books is also incredibly disingenuous.
Overall it just feels like you're playing Devil's Advocate for people who don't deserve it.
This. Let us not forget, this is a company that failed to respond to the biggest crisis in recent D&D’s history - the OGL leak - for, what, ten days? That is not entirely PR’s fault - legal and management would have to be part of the conversation… but, guess what? If you are having a problem big enough that the Washington Post reports on the story, you work round the clock to get your message out as quickly as possible… and you try to make a message that doesn’t seem dismissive of your community’s concerns.
As far as I can tell, the only competent community-facing person Wizards has on the D&D side of things is LaTiaJacquise - they at least listen, respond, and clearly use language players understand (no easy feat - we are the community that threw a fit when folks forgot the meaning of the word “draft). But the rest of their team? Consistently (and nearly universally) making problems far worse than they are through slow, often tone-deaf responses.
So the former WoTC president wanted to bring micro-transactions to the D&DB. This makes no sense. This was a fantastic use of micro-transactions on the site; where players could beef up their characters as they test the waters to see if they wanted to dive deeper into that content or into D&D in general. Now we have to lay out 40 or 50 bucks if we want to try a new feat. I think this is a money loser for WoTC because most of the people who shopped using these micro-transactions will not cross the line and purchase the books.
And can I add that the new Marketplace is poorly designed? Why are the images so big? Why is everything divided up in so many different ways? I got used to the old Marketplace but I cringe when I go there now.
Let's just say this update robbed us of the only good micro-transactions that WoTC could offer and really makes you work to find what you want to buy from WoTC.
Hey, WoTC do you ever talk to your customers? Do you even have a clue of who we are?
Purposely making a luxury product worse seems like a horrible plan for getting more money from anyone.
And you are really twisting my words when you read "tomorrow" in or read that as any obligation on our part to buy at any given price. In fact I clearly pointed out, we have no such obligation. We do not owe them, either.
I am not rushing out to buy anything from them. I am not advocating anyone buy anything from them. However rhetoric like "They owe us" is not very helpful. They simply do not.
The mainly just selling to DM the business model was dictated by the technology of physical books and paper charcter sheets filled out with pencil. That's old.
With digital a better business model is possible.
Players want to buy things too, at least I do. The adventure books are usually kind of inapproperate purchases for players, but it occassional made sense, as a player to buy something specific a la carte, but mainly it was just fun to buy and have/have access to bundles of indivudual items from within books (spells, races, subclasses, feats, backgrounds, magic items, etc . .. also Monsters in order to get beasts that a druid could wildshape into), books that I didn't need or want to own the whole thing. I think people enjoy spending money on their hobbies (assuming there is something to purchase that suits their needs at a price that isn't unreasonable); players are D&D hobbyest too. It seems like they would want to offer products that would be geared towards players in order to make players, into customers. Offering indivdual purchases seemed like a good way to do that. And I'm pretty sure that a la carte buyers were paying something of a premium price for what they got for the luxury of being able to pick and choose what they wanted to buy.
Subscritions, unfortuntatlly for the consumer, are the way of the present and very likely the way of the future too, perhaps more and more. I don't foresee them getting rid of the subscrition model, or the premium teir that allows content sharing. I think they rather like that stream of income.