Removing a la carte purchasing--especially with absolutely zero confirmation beforehand--is the worst possible move I can imagine. Yes, I'm sure some marketing whiz who has their finger nowhere near the pulse of the average DDB user said "One race or one subclass is the draw! Remove a la carte and we'll watch those profits soar as they spent $40 instead of $2.99 for it!" Except that... we won't. I know I sure as heck won't. I've spent hundreds and hundreds on a la carte purchases, and had every plan to continue doing so. Well, congratulations: I can promise you that I will not be making another purchase until a la carte is returned. If that means I have to accept everything I've already spent as a sunken cost and move to a third-party system for my players' character management, so be it. Until this update, I was a very vocal advocate for DDB. But it's just a bridge too far with this blatant, ill-advised cash grab.
Ditto!!!!
Removing a la carte purchases is absolute garbage.
Not being able to buy 'just this one subclass' is so shit actually. Alienates their users who aren't using this site for all of it's functions. I don't /need/ to own an entire digital book I've already got a hard-copy of, when I would like just the character options that came with that book to made accessible for character building purposes. Rather than spend little amounts of money, now I'll just spend none.
So as someone who has purchased a ton of the books, as well as the a la carte options over the years (4 years of DM tier sub, plus we'll over half, to all of the existing books) I'm not buying a single thing again, until a la carte comes back.
Vote with the wallet, it's the only thing that they listen too.
Giving serious thought to finding a new platform. Not because I don't like DDB (I really, really do) - but because it's very frustrating to have these significant uphevals to the platform, with no guarantee that they won't keep happening.
Doesn't help that dev communication has fallen off a cliff - so as far as we are concerned, gone is any progress towards stuff we will like and use (homebrew alternative features anyone?) and instead seems geared towards well... Less desirable things.
Hey! One of the whales here. Just wanted to add my own feedback to the thread.
1) The owned content filter: I'm just 2 books short from the entire collection, and before this "update" the store was constantly teasing me to get them. Honestly, I kept them in my cart, even! With the update the cart was emptied and guess what? I had to look for several minutes before finding the missing books again. Don't know much about selling practices, but hiding products seems... counterproductive.
2) Removing bundles and single purchases is a bad move. Not directly, mind it, but it also affects me: my friends won't join the site. I do have a master tier subscription and know about the content sharing policy (as long as it's here, because with these winds I suspect that's gonna go next), but most of my players aren't willing to buy entire books like me. The à la carte option was a tool to make these people customers, given they wouldn't have been your clients otherwise. I already have people join my games with pen and paper despite the tools I can already provide them, and I'm afraid this policy will not make them more interested in your tools. Honestly, I can't see myself using your tools in the future if they keep asking me to stay on foundry: it's just easier to keep everyone on the same boat.
3) Content tables: really? What's the point of removing them? I used to look at things I wanted scrolling through the à la carte options to decide if I wanted the book, now everything is hidden from me and I can't really say I'll be missing out things if they are not being teased a bit. This seems, again, counterproductive. You do realise that after monsters of the multiverse (a full purchase for 1 new dolphin!) we are aware most of the content could just be rehashed clutter? How are we supposed to determine what we're missing from a new book, clairvoyance?
I have no idea what's driving these choices, but please, change route. I really like this site, and it is in my interest, having invested so much in it, that it stays up and running healthily.
You had the crown, people were saying D&D as a synonym for TTRPGs... Why throw it to Paizo and Chaosium just to crawl like a beggar in search of pennies? Kings are above that.
Edit: For everyone saying "I'm going to take my money elsewhere, and buy D&D on Foundry" or whatever, then you're not really taking your money elsewhere.
I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, but if that's your choice, buying D&D books on Roll20 isn't any real different from Hasbro's POV than here.
If you would really want to remove your money from the system you'll need to either straight up stop buying things or play a different game.
Edit 2: This kind of thing doesn't even make sense within the framework of wanting to prey solely on "whales", because even within the people who buy a lot, they don't necessarily have a lot of money all up front at one time.
I figure it'd be better to get 3 dollars as a trickle then to be like "No you need $40 all up front" and have them get $35 dollars then go oops and put some of that into another game that lets them trickle buy and perpetually delay getting that book for eternity because they're always a dollar short. There's a reason why even the microtransaction games that rely on whales still have *micro* transactions.
But hey, any excuse to not spend more money is good, I guess.
Edit: For everyone saying "I'm going to take my money elsewhere, and buy D&D on Foundry" or whatever, then you're not really taking your money elsewhere.
I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, but if that's your choice, buying D&D books on Roll20 isn't any real different from Hasbro's POV than here.
If you would really want to remove your money from the system you'll need to either straight up stop buying things or play a different game.
It would still express dissatisfaction at the changes on D&D Beyond specifically I guess, but do any other platforms offer purchasing items piecemeal (rather than entire books only)?
Another big problem with this change is that it actively encourages piracy; we've seen from things like digital music and movie sales that the easier you make it for people to buy things the way they want them, the less piracy there is, because people are generally happy to pay for convenience/quality.
The advent of proper digital music stores, with the ability to buy individual tracks, purchase the rest of an album later, and at high audio quality (competitive with CDs, and now superior) etc. massively reduced the amount of music piracy that was being experienced. And it really is the same basic model that D&D Beyond used to be; if someone just wants to a build a handful of characters for fun they don't need the entire PHB, DMG, etc., they just need the sub-classes, feats and so-on that they're interested in trying in a character build.
But the moment you turn a quick and easy process that might cost only $5-10, into one costing $90+ you're very much steering people to use certain websites that reproduce all of the content (illegally) for free, because it's a classic example of pricing people out of being your customers. In the wake of the OGL scandal Wizards of the Coast should be doing everything in their power to restore customer trust, instead they're shitting on us.
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.
Edit: For everyone saying "I'm going to take my money elsewhere, and buy D&D on Foundry" or whatever, then you're not really taking your money elsewhere.
I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, but if that's your choice, buying D&D books on Roll20 isn't any real different from Hasbro's POV than here.
If you would really want to remove your money from the system you'll need to either straight up stop buying things or play a different game.
It would still express dissatisfaction at the changes on D&D Beyond specifically I guess, but do any other platforms offer purchasing items piecemeal (rather than entire books only)?
A big problem with this change is that it actively encourages piracy; we've seen from things like digital music and movie sales that the easier you make it for people to buy things the way they want them, the less piracy there is, because people are generally happy to pay for convenience/quality.
The advent of proper digital music stores, with the ability to buy individual tracks, purchase the rest of an album later, and at high audio quality (competitive with CDs, and now superior) etc. massively reduced the amount of music piracy that was being experienced. And it really is the same basic model that D&D Beyond used to be; if someone just wants to a build a handful of characters for fun they don't need the entire PHB, DMG, etc., they just need the sub-classes, feats and so-on that they're interested in trying in a character build.
But the moment you turn a quick and easy process that might cost only $5-10, into one costing $90+ you're very much steering people to use certain websites that reproduce all of the content (illegally) for free, because it's a classic example of pricing people out of being your customers. In the wake of the OGL scandal Wizards of the Coast should be doing everything in their power to restore customer trust, instead they're shitting on us.
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to sound like I was suggesting people take their money out of the D&D ecosystem or not. That's up to the individual. I was just stating that if their intention was to do so, paying the left hand instead of the right isn't going to do it. I figure if one wants to express extreme dissatisfaction, one would have to actually stop spending completely.
I recognize that the à la carte offerings & the credit towards digital purchases for them was in some ways a better deal (for both D&D and the customer) than what's on offer in many other marketplaces & was better than what's on offer by many other brands and I do want to be cognizant of not going "I'm mad at X for going to the status quo of almost every other marketplace, so I'm taking my business to places that never offered as good of a deal than that status quo", but I do still think it was a dumb idea for the reasons we both stated on it pricing people out of their games and turning them to alternatives (be it piracy or other games like Pathfinder).
Like it's anti-consumer but it's also anti-people-buying-D&D and so I don't really get it & it's not even like we don't know what will happen, we saw the results of this kind of thing during the 2000s and 2010s when video games, music and television were participating an anti-consumer arm's race and all it did was make things worse for everyone, the rich suits included.
Hey WOTC, just pointing out that in the long run, this is gonna lose you guys money.
I don't mean that in "I'm gonna go off somewhere else" sabre rattling that often doesn't mean much long term. I'm talking about my own purchase history.
When I first came to DNDBeyond, getting into D&D, I just played around with the available stuff. My first purchases were individual things I wanted for specific characters. Backgrounds bundle, a couple subclasses, and the Artificer subclass.
It wasn't until a couple months later that I ever bought a full book, and those books were books that I'd bought individual pieces from before.
I'm no whale, but I'm someone who has put almost $600 into this site over the last 4 years. I'm not even sure if that includes the books I've ordered off the main D&D site physically that bundled digital.
If I hadn't been able to buy individual items, I can 100% assure you, I wouldn't have gotten invested enough to buy any of those books.
I'm gonna guess this idea came from some brilliant exec who saw smaller sales and thought that "well, if we block smaller sales, they'll buy the whole book"
It's literally the opposite.
The smaller item sales make people interested in buying the book.
Now, saying that I can absolutely see how with the new books coming out, you don't want to possibly just have people buy a single class or two that's really new and thus making the "We sold this many books in the month since the new rulebooks came out" seem way less impressive.
So if I might suggest a hopeful compromise, with the whole idea a compromise makes everyone equally unhappy...
A limited window on new books before the individual options are up for purchase?
New rulebooks for 2024? You can't buy the individual classes from them for, let's say 3 months.
This drives your sales for the folks who can't wait and want to play the new hotness right away, but also allows folks who have a smaller budget to eventually get the specific things they want to play.
If you want D&D to thrive, it needs new players. If many of your newer players are like me, this is absolutely gonna lower that number going forward.
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to sound like I was suggesting people take their money out of the D&D ecosystem or not. That's up to the individual. I was just stating that if their intention was to do so, paying the left hand instead of the right isn't going to do it. I figure if one wants to express extreme dissatisfaction, one would have to actually stop spending completely.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply you were, I just got a bit carried away with my train of thought! Basically my thinking was that WotC forcing people to pay full price or nothing will only result in more people paying nothing, which inevitably includes piracy.
While I'm not sure D&D Beyond has ever released figures on sales value for outright purchases vs. "a la carte" purchases, the impression I've always got is that "a la carte" is popular, in my own group that's how the majority of us have purchased most of our shared content.
Aside from a single book I preordered (Tasha's Cauldron) I've never bought any other books outright, I've always just bought the pieces I've needed and then sometimes if that means I own enough of a book I'll complete it during a sale. But with neither of these being options I just don't see me ever buying anymore content on D&D Beyond because the pricing just isn't enticing without these.
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.
As someone who already owns most of the books physically, I used the the ala carte feature to gain digital access to things that I owned. I just wanted the races, feats, magic items, monsters, etc. from each book since I have the compendium content on my bookshelf. This change is absolutely terrible and needs to be undone.
...and just as I feared, my friends were so upset about this thing that we had to cancel our session. Couldn't manage to look at the logo without ruining the mood.
It took me almost an year to bring my friends back after the OGL disaster. Why, why do you have to make these moves right before good releases? Half of them still refuse to watch the movie!
The new marketplace update is absolutely horrific. It looks pretty, sure, but all of the functionality that made it somewhat good in the past has been wiped out, as has any sliver of goodwill WotC may have still had with the community. A la carte options were the main method through which myself and many others have actually spent money on beyond in the past. If I had to buy entire books to get the things I *do* own, I never would have bought anything. Removing the easily accessible table of contents before purchasing a book also hurts everyone involved, because now people will have no idea which book(s) actually have the content they're looking for, and instead will need to rely on unreliable outside sources. Also removing bundles was a massive mistake, as a bundle encourages people to buy more items. In the same vein, now we have to contact customer service to get the prorates on books we already own a la carte items for? Unintuitive storefront policies and practices hurt consumers and sellers alike. The worst change of all, though, might be gutting the functionality that allows us to see in the marketplace if we already own a book or not. This is such a basic feature of any marketplace, I can't fathom why WotC would remove it aside from hoping people would be confused and accidentally buy the same content more than once (see: scummy greedy business practices). Suffice it to say, these scummy practices and marketplace "improvements" will ensure I never spend another dime on dndbeyond or other WotC content, and will instead actively look for, support, and fund alternatives to this and other WotC-owned services.
As we move into the next iteration of DnD, and DnDBeyond grows both to include more third-party products, physical shipping (in the US at least :P), and probably new dice, tokens, maps and other VTT-microtransactions, the store probably needed a huge overhaul like this - but I'll add my voice to the general consensus that this transition has been poorly handled.
I never use the piecemeal-option - and I've purchased most of the books released up to this point - but beyond it maybe being simpler to get the new store up and running without them, the removal of the a-la-carte-option doesn't give a single benefit to the customers. And maybe it's just me, but in a world where most companies seem to be progressively charging more for less quality (streaming-services comes to mind) it's gonna be a risky move to reduce the QoL for the people who are throwing money into the machine.
Which brings me to my personal grievance; Paypal isn't supported. C'mon guys, that's absurd. I get that a 1.0 release is gonna lack some features, but omitting both a decent "This is what you own"-filter and a very popular means of payment is basically shooting yourself in the foot :P
Overall, the new store looks better, but it feels more clunky. Kinda like it was made out of an ecommerce-template, and not designed fully for DnDBeyond from the ground up. I'll be patiently awaiting some polish before I consider picking up any more books from DnDBeyond at this point.
The loss of a la carte options is an incredibly bad move from a customer relations perspective but frankly I'm wondering if this is going to open them up to a class action lawsuit for all of us who purchased things a la carte based on the representations that we would be able to buy the rest of the book at a later date with credit for what we'd already paid for the a la carte options. I just tried buying a book I currently own pieces of and what I've paid for a la carte options in the past is not being deducted from the total cost, even when viewing the item in the cart.
It's bad enough that they won't let us filter by what we own and that they no longer show the actual prices we'll pay taking into consideration legacy bundle discounts until items are in the cart. Actually refusing to honor prior payments for pieces of books is at least incredibly anti-consumer and quite possibly an illegal bait and switch/breach of contract. I haven't done the full analysis to look at prior terms so I'm not accusing them yet of anything illegal but this gets really close and should be examined more closely.
Edit: OK, now I see that the article indicates people have to contact customer service to get their credit. Given that there's no indication of this anywhere on the marketplace or during the purchase process it's still very questionable whether it will be good enough to avoid liability exposure. It is entirely foreseeable that there will be plenty of people who won't have any reason to think they should read the article, particularly as it becomes buried underneath other stories over time and moves off the front page. It's also a material change in the crediting process that adds significant burdens to the purchaser that were not present when the a la carte contracts were entered into originally.
1- The FAQ article was in fact updated to reflect the new marketplace's inability to give you that discount on books you've purchased piecemeal from, primarily to reduce tickets of the "your FAQ says... but I can't..." variety. 2- It is also true that the way to receive that discount right now is by reaching out to customer service. As a note, you do need a Wizards account to submit support tickets. 3- I have followed up about this with customer support, who are going to get point 2 added to that FAQ page as soon as they can.
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I think it is a bad idea considering that while the character builder is great, the individual purchases are a big factor in people choosing to start spending money in growing their digital library. Without it, the builder competes with already purchased physical books and the widely available pdfs and sites for pretty much all the content.
I've gotten several parties to move away from pirating by making a la carte purchases to create the characters they use, and they have started to make purchases on their own for their other tables, several of them even started getting adventure books in here. I definetly will not be able to get more people in without it, and if I cannot get them into the platform I have little reason to get more digital content or to keep my subscription.
I know this has already been said on this thread, but if I can't filter out things that I already own how am I supposed to find ways to flush my money into the bottomless WoTC toilet?!
I wonder what the expected ROI was for this change. While I don't purchase a la carte, I think the company is making another terrible management driven decision. The ability to buy piecemeal is a great option for anyone who wants to start playing the game or who doesn't want to buy a $50 book to get a couple of feats. I am going to speak with my wallet and not purchase another book from D&D Beyond until this change is reverted.
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No it explicitly says you need to contact support if you still want the discount
Ditto!!!!
Removing a la carte purchases is absolute garbage.
Not being able to buy 'just this one subclass' is so shit actually. Alienates their users who aren't using this site for all of it's functions. I don't /need/ to own an entire digital book I've already got a hard-copy of, when I would like just the character options that came with that book to made accessible for character building purposes. Rather than spend little amounts of money, now I'll just spend none.
So as someone who has purchased a ton of the books, as well as the a la carte options over the years (4 years of DM tier sub, plus we'll over half, to all of the existing books) I'm not buying a single thing again, until a la carte comes back.
Vote with the wallet, it's the only thing that they listen too.
Giving serious thought to finding a new platform. Not because I don't like DDB (I really, really do) - but because it's very frustrating to have these significant uphevals to the platform, with no guarantee that they won't keep happening.
Doesn't help that dev communication has fallen off a cliff - so as far as we are concerned, gone is any progress towards stuff we will like and use (homebrew alternative features anyone?) and instead seems geared towards well... Less desirable things.
Hey! One of the whales here. Just wanted to add my own feedback to the thread.
1) The owned content filter: I'm just 2 books short from the entire collection, and before this "update" the store was constantly teasing me to get them. Honestly, I kept them in my cart, even! With the update the cart was emptied and guess what? I had to look for several minutes before finding the missing books again. Don't know much about selling practices, but hiding products seems... counterproductive.
2) Removing bundles and single purchases is a bad move. Not directly, mind it, but it also affects me: my friends won't join the site. I do have a master tier subscription and know about the content sharing policy (as long as it's here, because with these winds I suspect that's gonna go next), but most of my players aren't willing to buy entire books like me. The à la carte option was a tool to make these people customers, given they wouldn't have been your clients otherwise. I already have people join my games with pen and paper despite the tools I can already provide them, and I'm afraid this policy will not make them more interested in your tools. Honestly, I can't see myself using your tools in the future if they keep asking me to stay on foundry: it's just easier to keep everyone on the same boat.
3) Content tables: really? What's the point of removing them? I used to look at things I wanted scrolling through the à la carte options to decide if I wanted the book, now everything is hidden from me and I can't really say I'll be missing out things if they are not being teased a bit. This seems, again, counterproductive. You do realise that after monsters of the multiverse (a full purchase for 1 new dolphin!) we are aware most of the content could just be rehashed clutter? How are we supposed to determine what we're missing from a new book, clairvoyance?
I have no idea what's driving these choices, but please, change route. I really like this site, and it is in my interest, having invested so much in it, that it stays up and running healthily.
You had the crown, people were saying D&D as a synonym for TTRPGs... Why throw it to Paizo and Chaosium just to crawl like a beggar in search of pennies? Kings are above that.
The article has been surreptitiously updated to remove that clause, so it looks like it wasn't a bug.
https://dndbeyond-support.wizards.com/hc/en-us/articles/7747224960788-FAQ-D-D-Beyond-Sales
Edit: For everyone saying "I'm going to take my money elsewhere, and buy D&D on Foundry" or whatever, then you're not really taking your money elsewhere.
I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, but if that's your choice, buying D&D books on Roll20 isn't any real different from Hasbro's POV than here.
If you would really want to remove your money from the system you'll need to either straight up stop buying things or play a different game.
Edit 2: This kind of thing doesn't even make sense within the framework of wanting to prey solely on "whales", because even within the people who buy a lot, they don't necessarily have a lot of money all up front at one time.
I figure it'd be better to get 3 dollars as a trickle then to be like "No you need $40 all up front" and have them get $35 dollars then go oops and put some of that into another game that lets them trickle buy and perpetually delay getting that book for eternity because they're always a dollar short. There's a reason why even the microtransaction games that rely on whales still have *micro* transactions.
But hey, any excuse to not spend more money is good, I guess.
Because Robots.
It would still express dissatisfaction at the changes on D&D Beyond specifically I guess, but do any other platforms offer purchasing items piecemeal (rather than entire books only)?
Another big problem with this change is that it actively encourages piracy; we've seen from things like digital music and movie sales that the easier you make it for people to buy things the way they want them, the less piracy there is, because people are generally happy to pay for convenience/quality.
The advent of proper digital music stores, with the ability to buy individual tracks, purchase the rest of an album later, and at high audio quality (competitive with CDs, and now superior) etc. massively reduced the amount of music piracy that was being experienced. And it really is the same basic model that D&D Beyond used to be; if someone just wants to a build a handful of characters for fun they don't need the entire PHB, DMG, etc., they just need the sub-classes, feats and so-on that they're interested in trying in a character build.
But the moment you turn a quick and easy process that might cost only $5-10, into one costing $90+ you're very much steering people to use certain websites that reproduce all of the content (illegally) for free, because it's a classic example of pricing people out of being your customers. In the wake of the OGL scandal Wizards of the Coast should be doing everything in their power to restore customer trust, instead they're shitting on us.
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.
Sorry, I wasn't meaning to sound like I was suggesting people take their money out of the D&D ecosystem or not. That's up to the individual. I was just stating that if their intention was to do so, paying the left hand instead of the right isn't going to do it. I figure if one wants to express extreme dissatisfaction, one would have to actually stop spending completely.
I recognize that the à la carte offerings & the credit towards digital purchases for them was in some ways a better deal (for both D&D and the customer) than what's on offer in many other marketplaces & was better than what's on offer by many other brands and I do want to be cognizant of not going "I'm mad at X for going to the status quo of almost every other marketplace, so I'm taking my business to places that never offered as good of a deal than that status quo", but I do still think it was a dumb idea for the reasons we both stated on it pricing people out of their games and turning them to alternatives (be it piracy or other games like Pathfinder).
Like it's anti-consumer but it's also anti-people-buying-D&D and so I don't really get it & it's not even like we don't know what will happen, we saw the results of this kind of thing during the 2000s and 2010s when video games, music and television were participating an anti-consumer arm's race and all it did was make things worse for everyone, the rich suits included.
Because Robots.
Hey WOTC, just pointing out that in the long run, this is gonna lose you guys money.
I don't mean that in "I'm gonna go off somewhere else" sabre rattling that often doesn't mean much long term. I'm talking about my own purchase history.
When I first came to DNDBeyond, getting into D&D, I just played around with the available stuff.
My first purchases were individual things I wanted for specific characters.
Backgrounds bundle, a couple subclasses, and the Artificer subclass.
It wasn't until a couple months later that I ever bought a full book, and those books were books that I'd bought individual pieces from before.
I'm no whale, but I'm someone who has put almost $600 into this site over the last 4 years.
I'm not even sure if that includes the books I've ordered off the main D&D site physically that bundled digital.
If I hadn't been able to buy individual items, I can 100% assure you, I wouldn't have gotten invested enough to buy any of those books.
I'm gonna guess this idea came from some brilliant exec who saw smaller sales and thought that "well, if we block smaller sales, they'll buy the whole book"
It's literally the opposite.
The smaller item sales make people interested in buying the book.
Now, saying that
I can absolutely see how with the new books coming out, you don't want to possibly just have people buy a single class or two that's really new and thus making the "We sold this many books in the month since the new rulebooks came out" seem way less impressive.
So if I might suggest a hopeful compromise, with the whole idea a compromise makes everyone equally unhappy...
A limited window on new books before the individual options are up for purchase?
New rulebooks for 2024?
You can't buy the individual classes from them for, let's say 3 months.
This drives your sales for the folks who can't wait and want to play the new hotness right away, but also allows folks who have a smaller budget to eventually get the specific things they want to play.
If you want D&D to thrive, it needs new players.
If many of your newer players are like me, this is absolutely gonna lower that number going forward.
Think long term, not short term.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply you were, I just got a bit carried away with my train of thought! Basically my thinking was that WotC forcing people to pay full price or nothing will only result in more people paying nothing, which inevitably includes piracy.
While I'm not sure D&D Beyond has ever released figures on sales value for outright purchases vs. "a la carte" purchases, the impression I've always got is that "a la carte" is popular, in my own group that's how the majority of us have purchased most of our shared content.
Aside from a single book I preordered (Tasha's Cauldron) I've never bought any other books outright, I've always just bought the pieces I've needed and then sometimes if that means I own enough of a book I'll complete it during a sale. But with neither of these being options I just don't see me ever buying anymore content on D&D Beyond because the pricing just isn't enticing without these.
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.
As someone who already owns most of the books physically, I used the the ala carte feature to gain digital access to things that I owned. I just wanted the races, feats, magic items, monsters, etc. from each book since I have the compendium content on my bookshelf. This change is absolutely terrible and needs to be undone.
...and just as I feared, my friends were so upset about this thing that we had to cancel our session. Couldn't manage to look at the logo without ruining the mood.
It took me almost an year to bring my friends back after the OGL disaster. Why, why do you have to make these moves right before good releases? Half of them still refuse to watch the movie!
The new marketplace update is absolutely horrific. It looks pretty, sure, but all of the functionality that made it somewhat good in the past has been wiped out, as has any sliver of goodwill WotC may have still had with the community. A la carte options were the main method through which myself and many others have actually spent money on beyond in the past. If I had to buy entire books to get the things I *do* own, I never would have bought anything. Removing the easily accessible table of contents before purchasing a book also hurts everyone involved, because now people will have no idea which book(s) actually have the content they're looking for, and instead will need to rely on unreliable outside sources. Also removing bundles was a massive mistake, as a bundle encourages people to buy more items. In the same vein, now we have to contact customer service to get the prorates on books we already own a la carte items for? Unintuitive storefront policies and practices hurt consumers and sellers alike. The worst change of all, though, might be gutting the functionality that allows us to see in the marketplace if we already own a book or not. This is such a basic feature of any marketplace, I can't fathom why WotC would remove it aside from hoping people would be confused and accidentally buy the same content more than once (see: scummy greedy business practices). Suffice it to say, these scummy practices and marketplace "improvements" will ensure I never spend another dime on dndbeyond or other WotC content, and will instead actively look for, support, and fund alternatives to this and other WotC-owned services.
As we move into the next iteration of DnD, and DnDBeyond grows both to include more third-party products, physical shipping (in the US at least :P), and probably new dice, tokens, maps and other VTT-microtransactions, the store probably needed a huge overhaul like this - but I'll add my voice to the general consensus that this transition has been poorly handled.
I never use the piecemeal-option - and I've purchased most of the books released up to this point - but beyond it maybe being simpler to get the new store up and running without them, the removal of the a-la-carte-option doesn't give a single benefit to the customers. And maybe it's just me, but in a world where most companies seem to be progressively charging more for less quality (streaming-services comes to mind) it's gonna be a risky move to reduce the QoL for the people who are throwing money into the machine.
Which brings me to my personal grievance; Paypal isn't supported. C'mon guys, that's absurd. I get that a 1.0 release is gonna lack some features, but omitting both a decent "This is what you own"-filter and a very popular means of payment is basically shooting yourself in the foot :P
Overall, the new store looks better, but it feels more clunky. Kinda like it was made out of an ecommerce-template, and not designed fully for DnDBeyond from the ground up. I'll be patiently awaiting some polish before I consider picking up any more books from DnDBeyond at this point.
The loss of a la carte options is an incredibly bad move from a customer relations perspective but frankly I'm wondering if this is going to open them up to a class action lawsuit for all of us who purchased things a la carte based on the representations that we would be able to buy the rest of the book at a later date with credit for what we'd already paid for the a la carte options. I just tried buying a book I currently own pieces of and what I've paid for a la carte options in the past is not being deducted from the total cost, even when viewing the item in the cart.
It's bad enough that they won't let us filter by what we own and that they no longer show the actual prices we'll pay taking into consideration legacy bundle discounts until items are in the cart. Actually refusing to honor prior payments for pieces of books is at least incredibly anti-consumer and quite possibly an illegal bait and switch/breach of contract. I haven't done the full analysis to look at prior terms so I'm not accusing them yet of anything illegal but this gets really close and should be examined more closely.
Edit: OK, now I see that the article indicates people have to contact customer service to get their credit. Given that there's no indication of this anywhere on the marketplace or during the purchase process it's still very questionable whether it will be good enough to avoid liability exposure. It is entirely foreseeable that there will be plenty of people who won't have any reason to think they should read the article, particularly as it becomes buried underneath other stories over time and moves off the front page. It's also a material change in the crediting process that adds significant burdens to the purchaser that were not present when the a la carte contracts were entered into originally.
yes, something they changed later in the day. congrats on your big internet "win" though
Hello, hello~ Couple of things about this:
1- The FAQ article was in fact updated to reflect the new marketplace's inability to give you that discount on books you've purchased piecemeal from, primarily to reduce tickets of the "your FAQ says... but I can't..." variety.
2- It is also true that the way to receive that discount right now is by reaching out to customer service. As a note, you do need a Wizards account to submit support tickets.
3- I have followed up about this with customer support, who are going to get point 2 added to that FAQ page as soon as they can.
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I think it is a bad idea considering that while the character builder is great, the individual purchases are a big factor in people choosing to start spending money in growing their digital library. Without it, the builder competes with already purchased physical books and the widely available pdfs and sites for pretty much all the content.
I've gotten several parties to move away from pirating by making a la carte purchases to create the characters they use, and they have started to make purchases on their own for their other tables, several of them even started getting adventure books in here. I definetly will not be able to get more people in without it, and if I cannot get them into the platform I have little reason to get more digital content or to keep my subscription.
I know this has already been said on this thread, but if I can't filter out things that I already own how am I supposed to find ways to flush my money into the bottomless WoTC toilet?!
Am I just supposed to send it on *****?
I wonder what the expected ROI was for this change. While I don't purchase a la carte, I think the company is making another terrible management driven decision. The ability to buy piecemeal is a great option for anyone who wants to start playing the game or who doesn't want to buy a $50 book to get a couple of feats. I am going to speak with my wallet and not purchase another book from D&D Beyond until this change is reverted.