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.
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.
The optics to admitting it was financially motivated would be very bad, but it's the only reasonable explanation for what they're up to given the refusal to properly communicate for this long. Hoping it will blow over is essentially admitting that this is the case, because otherwise they wouldn't need to do so.
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.
Oh please... That was a marketing decision, the kind that happens all over the world every day of the year. Sometimes the decisions are good, sometimes not so good. There is always a reason but the reason is not always well reasoned. No matter how big or successful the company is otherwise.
And marketing is always a separate budget from production in any company of that size.
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.
Except this excuse doesn't fly in the slightest.
They already had a working storefront with all the functionality, yet they chose to replace it; normally you do that in order to improve it. Instead they've released a storefront that is worse in every conceivably way and is lacking some of the most basic features upon which their customer base was built.
If they absolutely must move to some premade storefront for some reason, they had two very simple options:
Keep working on it until it was actually a replacement, instead of rushing out a half-assed botch job that doesn't replace what was there already.
Release without piecemeal purchases but with a clear announcement (in advance) making clear that the feature is coming later.
Two simple options, yet they chose option 3) get rid of piecemeal purchases and hope their customers will just accept it and hurl more money at them.
They knew full well they were axing a feature, because they released an article specifically mentioning how we now have to e-mail customer service just to get them to respect discounted prices from the old storefront. Oh and tough luck anyone who doesn't realise they could have paid less, they'll just be taking that money kthxbye.
And the difficulty of development is a piss-poor excuse too; piecemeal purchasing already works behind the scenes with the content unlocking, so all they needed to do for a premade storefront is list the items as products in their own right (categorised to avoid clutter) and buying them also buys a discount on the corresponding book product(s). If they've wasted our money on a storefront that can't handle per-product discounts then that's not our ******* fault now is it? If it does support discounts then it's dead easy, it only takes a little extra time, especially since it should be easy to automate the changeover (since the data they need to do-so was in the old system).
So either they're incompetent, lazy, greedy, or all of the above and worse. Which is it?
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.
Oh please... That was a marketing decision, the kind that happens all over the world every day of the year.
While marketing would normally be involved in prioritizing which features of the old store were to be re-implemented, the decision to have a new store is very unlikely to be a marketing decision, because marketing fundamentally does not care about the underlying tech. If it was just a marketing issue... they would have removed individual purchasing and kept the old store.
Honestly... the way this was rolled out suggests a security problem with the old store, because otherwise you would roll it out slowly, with a nice pretty announcement explaining how this new store is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we should be happy about the change.
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.
Except this excuse doesn't fly in the slightest.
They already had a working storefront with all the functionality, yet they chose to replace it; normally you do that in order to improve it...
it's not beyond the pale to imagine their main goal was just to add the "Physical" button so more wizard merch can be sold from here and to increase the quantity of pretty book art pictures. and they did that. once you realize the good information isn't missing just hidden under a clickable "PRODUCT DETAILS" bar, it's not so dysfunctional. storefront change pushed through with low resources (time, testing, communications, etc) yes. entirely unnecessary change, no. let's not get bogged down on the storefront.
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!
Oh please... That was a marketing decision, the kind that happens all over the world every day of the year.
While marketing would normally be involved in prioritizing which features of the old store were to be re-implemented, the decision to have a new store is very unlikely to be a marketing decision, because marketing fundamentally does not care about the underlying tech. If it was just a marketing issue... they would have removed individual purchasing and kept the old store.
Honestly... the way this was rolled out suggests a security problem with the old store, because otherwise you would roll it out slowly, with a nice pretty announcement explaining how this new store is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we should be happy about the change.
Then where are the details on a security issue where payment and personal information may be compromised?
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.
Except this excuse doesn't fly in the slightest.
They already had a working storefront with all the functionality,
Except digital-physical bundles, which are a much bigger deal to them, especially in the run-up to the new core books.
If they absolutely must move to some premade storefront for some reason, they had two very simple options:
Keep working on it until it was actually a replacement, instead of rushing out a half-assed botch job that doesn't replace what was there already.
Release without piecemeal purchases but with a clear announcement (in advance) making clear that the feature is coming later.
Two simple options, yet they chose option 3) get rid of piecemeal purchases and hope their customers will just accept it and hurl more money at them.
You may not like option three, but it's totally a thing they can do.
And I doubt they expect to get more money by people buying whole books instead. I just suspect it's a small enough amount of money that it's not worth it in either time or cost to support it.
And the difficulty of development is a piss-poor excuse too; piecemeal purchasing already works behind the scenes with the content unlocking, so all they needed to do for a premade storefront is list the items as products in their own right (categorised to avoid clutter) and buying them also buys a discount on the corresponding book product(s). If they've wasted our money on a storefront that can't handle per-product discounts then that's not our ******* fault now is it? If it does support discounts then it's dead easy, it only takes a little extra time, especially since it should be easy to automate the changeover (since the data they need to do-so was in the old system).
Not a software developer, are you? I admit to not having any experience with e-commerce systems, but it sure doesn't look "dead easy, it only takes a little extra time" to me. (See previous post.)
So either they're incompetent, lazy, greedy, or all of the above and worse. Which is it?
Given that the marketplace dropped without PayPal support, my guess is "on a tight deadline". It does, I admit, also seem to be kind of crap; very much built on a "all items for purchase are completely independent of each other" paradigm. Which is probably pretty normal for off-the-shelf e-commerce platforms, but it doesn't say great things about whoever scoped the project and chose the tooling.
But the whole "they dropped piecemeal to make us buy the whole books to extract more money!" thing just doesn't ring true to me.
The optics to admitting it was financially motivated would be very bad, but it's the only reasonable explanation for what they're up to given the refusal to properly communicate for this long. Hoping it will blow over is essentially admitting that this is the case, because otherwise they wouldn't need to do so.
To be fair on that, companies do not normally announce in advance if they are doing a new marketing campaign or simply changing the design of their website.
This whole thing could still be an embarrassing oversight that they decided to pretend was deliberate or decided was too expensive to fix (which could also explain the lack of announcement and the lack of clear response).
Honestly... the way this was rolled out suggests a security problem with the old store, because otherwise you would roll it out slowly, with a nice pretty announcement explaining how this new store is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we should be happy about the change.
Then where are the details on a security issue where payment and personal information may be compromised?
That's very speculative, and many, many, many companies keep quiet about security holes, especially those that haven't been exploited to the best of their knowledge. (And the laws that require disclosure of breaches are, IIRC, a state-by-state patchwork.)
Even if it's a security problem, which is still speculation, it might be:
Something reported to them by somebody who found it
Something they found internally
The old code relied on some library that's no longer being supported, and thus won't get security fixes going forward
The old code wasn't in compliance with the auditing requirements that the credit card companies require
I still think the most likely reason is "the old code was an unmaintainable mess, and digital-physical bundles are way more important to WotC than piecemeal purchases". Only the weirdness of the launch makes me wonder if it had to be pushed out the door before it was fully baked.
Honestly... the way this was rolled out suggests a security problem with the old store, because otherwise you would roll it out slowly, with a nice pretty announcement explaining how this new store is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we should be happy about the change.
Then where are the details on a security issue where payment and personal information may be compromised?
That's very speculative, and many, many, many companies keep quiet about security holes, especially those that haven't been exploited to the best of their knowledge. (And the laws that require disclosure of breaches are, IIRC, a state-by-state patchwork.)
Even if it's a security problem, which is still speculation, it might be:
Something reported to them by somebody who found it
Something they found internally
The old code relied on some library that's no longer being supported, and thus won't get security fixes going forward
The old code wasn't in compliance with the auditing requirements that the credit card companies require
I still think the most likely reason is "the old code was an unmaintainable mess, and digital-physical bundles are way more important to WotC than piecemeal purchases". Only the weirdness of the launch makes me wonder if it had to be pushed out the door before it was fully baked.
All terrible reasons to do what they did how they did it, and if there was a security issue how long was any data compromised, why are we not told?
All valid reasons for concern and wanting an explanation whether or not they have to legally provide one. It all smells of shady business.
I also want to note I am not the one that posted security issues speculation, but it is a valid concern as those that know refuse to address these concerns.
Except digital-physical bundles, which are a much bigger deal to them, especially in the run-up to the new core books.
They've been selling digital physical bundles since soon after WotC bought them out, I forget which book was the first, but they were selling them for a while already.
You may not like option three, but it's totally a thing they can do.
Did I say they couldn't? I said it's what they did. Because they did.
And I doubt they expect to get more money by people buying whole books instead. I just suspect it's a small enough amount of money that it's not worth it in either time or cost to support it.
In which case they could have said so, e.g- "Unfortunately piecemeal purchasing only accounts for a fraction of sales on D&D Beyond so has not been prioritised at this time" blah blah blah. It's not hard to keep your customers informed.
Not a software developer, are you? I admit to not having any experience with e-commerce systems, but it sure doesn't look "dead easy, it only takes a little extra time" to me. (See previous post.)
I am a software developer, and the bulk of the work I do is in websites these days (mostly back-end stuff in PHP, SQL-ish databases, and increasingly clients wanting to integrate ChatGPT into everything because it's the latest fad).
Any decent off-the-shelf e-commerce software should support everything you'd need to do this as we're not talking anything overly fancy; it's just listing feats etc. as products under their own category/categories you can link from the books, and issuing product discounts to the customer who buys them (which again should be possible in any decent system, or can be issued separately if it doesn't support bundled items). Then it's a bit of automation to make it easier/port it across (any good e-commerce system should have an API, as these are intended to be integrated with existing systems).
It would still be worse than the old system (no pretty integrated single page where you can do everything) but it would mean the capability to buy what we want, how we want, and have it apply as a discount for completing books. Again, ditching the feature is a conscious choice, if it wasn't they would have told us why.
But the whole "they dropped piecemeal to make us buy the whole books to extract more money!" thing just doesn't ring true to me.
It's true until proven otherwise, because that's still exactly what they've done.
Paying customers are now forced to either pay full price, or not at all, as those are literally the only two choices left. I'm very much in the "not at all" bracket, and given the way they've handled this whole situation I frankly don't think them rolling back the change would even be good enough anymore – I no longer trust the service or company one bit.
I'll only be staying on the site until my groups have finished moving to another system; as much as I loved D&D, I don't give a shit about the actual rules system itself, and they can't stop me using the artwork I own and setting I started my campaigns in even if I move to another system. And as I've said before, there's no shortage of 5e compatible alternatives these days thanks to the OGL scandal, so their previous steps have only made it easier to switch.
Might not be any sites as accessible to use as D&D Beyond, but then that's now true of D&D.
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.
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
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.
Free Content: [Basic Rules],
[Phandelver],[Frozen Sick],[Acquisitions Inc.],[Vecna Dossier],[Radiant Citadel], [Spelljammer],[Dragonlance], [Prisoner 13],[Minecraft],[Star Forge], [Baldur’s Gate], [Lightning Keep], [Stormwreck Isle], [Pinebrook], [Caverns of Tsojcanth], [The Lost Horn], [Elemental Evil].Free Dice: [Frostmaiden],
[Flourishing], [Sanguine],[Themberchaud], [Baldur's Gate 3], [Lego].The optics to admitting it was financially motivated would be very bad, but it's the only reasonable explanation for what they're up to given the refusal to properly communicate for this long. Hoping it will blow over is essentially admitting that this is the case, because otherwise they wouldn't need to do so.
Oh please... That was a marketing decision, the kind that happens all over the world every day of the year. Sometimes the decisions are good, sometimes not so good. There is always a reason but the reason is not always well reasoned. No matter how big or successful the company is otherwise.
And marketing is always a separate budget from production in any company of that size.
Except this excuse doesn't fly in the slightest.
They already had a working storefront with all the functionality, yet they chose to replace it; normally you do that in order to improve it. Instead they've released a storefront that is worse in every conceivably way and is lacking some of the most basic features upon which their customer base was built.
If they absolutely must move to some premade storefront for some reason, they had two very simple options:
Two simple options, yet they chose option 3) get rid of piecemeal purchases and hope their customers will just accept it and hurl more money at them.
They knew full well they were axing a feature, because they released an article specifically mentioning how we now have to e-mail customer service just to get them to respect discounted prices from the old storefront. Oh and tough luck anyone who doesn't realise they could have paid less, they'll just be taking that money kthxbye.
And the difficulty of development is a piss-poor excuse too; piecemeal purchasing already works behind the scenes with the content unlocking, so all they needed to do for a premade storefront is list the items as products in their own right (categorised to avoid clutter) and buying them also buys a discount on the corresponding book product(s). If they've wasted our money on a storefront that can't handle per-product discounts then that's not our ******* fault now is it? If it does support discounts then it's dead easy, it only takes a little extra time, especially since it should be easy to automate the changeover (since the data they need to do-so was in the old system).
So either they're incompetent, lazy, greedy, or all of the above and worse. Which is it?
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.
While marketing would normally be involved in prioritizing which features of the old store were to be re-implemented, the decision to have a new store is very unlikely to be a marketing decision, because marketing fundamentally does not care about the underlying tech. If it was just a marketing issue... they would have removed individual purchasing and kept the old store.
Honestly... the way this was rolled out suggests a security problem with the old store, because otherwise you would roll it out slowly, with a nice pretty announcement explaining how this new store is the greatest thing since sliced bread and we should be happy about the change.
it's not beyond the pale to imagine their main goal was just to add the "Physical" button so more wizard merch can be sold from here and to increase the quantity of pretty book art pictures. and they did that. once you realize the good information isn't missing just hidden under a clickable "PRODUCT DETAILS" bar, it's not so dysfunctional. storefront change pushed through with low resources (time, testing, communications, etc) yes. entirely unnecessary change, no. let's not get bogged down on the storefront.
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!
Then where are the details on a security issue where payment and personal information may be compromised?
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
Except digital-physical bundles, which are a much bigger deal to them, especially in the run-up to the new core books.
You may not like option three, but it's totally a thing they can do.
And I doubt they expect to get more money by people buying whole books instead. I just suspect it's a small enough amount of money that it's not worth it in either time or cost to support it.
Not a software developer, are you? I admit to not having any experience with e-commerce systems, but it sure doesn't look "dead easy, it only takes a little extra time" to me. (See previous post.)
Given that the marketplace dropped without PayPal support, my guess is "on a tight deadline". It does, I admit, also seem to be kind of crap; very much built on a "all items for purchase are completely independent of each other" paradigm. Which is probably pretty normal for off-the-shelf e-commerce platforms, but it doesn't say great things about whoever scoped the project and chose the tooling.
But the whole "they dropped piecemeal to make us buy the whole books to extract more money!" thing just doesn't ring true to me.
To be fair on that, companies do not normally announce in advance if they are doing a new marketing campaign or simply changing the design of their website.
This whole thing could still be an embarrassing oversight that they decided to pretend was deliberate or decided was too expensive to fix (which could also explain the lack of announcement and the lack of clear response).
It is their company. There is a long list of things they can 'totally do' completely legally.
Simply being a thing that one can do in no way, in and of itself, makes that thing a wise thing to do.
That's very speculative, and many, many, many companies keep quiet about security holes, especially those that haven't been exploited to the best of their knowledge. (And the laws that require disclosure of breaches are, IIRC, a state-by-state patchwork.)
Even if it's a security problem, which is still speculation, it might be:
I still think the most likely reason is "the old code was an unmaintainable mess, and digital-physical bundles are way more important to WotC than piecemeal purchases". Only the weirdness of the launch makes me wonder if it had to be pushed out the door before it was fully baked.
All terrible reasons to do what they did how they did it, and if there was a security issue how long was any data compromised, why are we not told?
All valid reasons for concern and wanting an explanation whether or not they have to legally provide one. It all smells of shady business.
I also want to note I am not the one that posted security issues speculation, but it is a valid concern as those that know refuse to address these concerns.
CENSORSHIP IS THE TOOL OF COWARDS and WANNA BE TYRANTS.
They've been selling digital physical bundles since soon after WotC bought them out, I forget which book was the first, but they were selling them for a while already.
In which case they could have said so, e.g- "Unfortunately piecemeal purchasing only accounts for a fraction of sales on D&D Beyond so has not been prioritised at this time" blah blah blah. It's not hard to keep your customers informed.
I am a software developer, and the bulk of the work I do is in websites these days (mostly back-end stuff in PHP, SQL-ish databases, and increasingly clients wanting to integrate ChatGPT into everything because it's the latest fad).
Any decent off-the-shelf e-commerce software should support everything you'd need to do this as we're not talking anything overly fancy; it's just listing feats etc. as products under their own category/categories you can link from the books, and issuing product discounts to the customer who buys them (which again should be possible in any decent system, or can be issued separately if it doesn't support bundled items). Then it's a bit of automation to make it easier/port it across (any good e-commerce system should have an API, as these are intended to be integrated with existing systems).
It would still be worse than the old system (no pretty integrated single page where you can do everything) but it would mean the capability to buy what we want, how we want, and have it apply as a discount for completing books. Again, ditching the feature is a conscious choice, if it wasn't they would have told us why.
It's true until proven otherwise, because that's still exactly what they've done.
Paying customers are now forced to either pay full price, or not at all, as those are literally the only two choices left. I'm very much in the "not at all" bracket, and given the way they've handled this whole situation I frankly don't think them rolling back the change would even be good enough anymore – I no longer trust the service or company one bit.
I'll only be staying on the site until my groups have finished moving to another system; as much as I loved D&D, I don't give a shit about the actual rules system itself, and they can't stop me using the artwork I own and setting I started my campaigns in even if I move to another system. And as I've said before, there's no shortage of 5e compatible alternatives these days thanks to the OGL scandal, so their previous steps have only made it easier to switch.
Might not be any sites as accessible to use as D&D Beyond, but then that's now true of D&D.
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.