I was already Master Tier. I was also happy enough to wait for the content to arrive on the "normal" release schedule.
But when I read that Master tier gets it 2 weeks early, I was like "Ooh. A benefit I didn't expect! How nice!"
But with all these buggy and unsupported parts of the 2024 rules in Character Builder, it doesn't feel like a Master Tier Benefit -- it feels like a Paid Beta Test.
I understand that the last-minute pivot to supporting both 2014 and 2024 may have impacted your development schedule, but honestly, it feels like there are some fundamentals that just weren't going to be ready on time, regardless of needing to support 2014 content.
I just wish I hadn't got my hopes up, that this was going to be useful from Sep 3rd. I'll check back in a couple of weeks, I guess.
Would have to agree. At the very least, it should have been marketed as Early Access Sneak Peek with incomplete features so players can at least play around with the builder and see the new flow ahead of time. That's how I'm treating it right now.
Everywhere I play wasn't jumping in and using it day 1 anyway.
To be clear -- I'm still super happy with the early access to the digital rule books. That was nice.
But the reason I'm a Master Tier subscriber here is for the Character Builder, and the ability for my players to use the content I buy to build their characters in my campaigns. So when Character Builder isn't working correctly, well.. let's just say I hope the large numbers of bugs get fixed in a reasonable time-frame. I'm not threatening to unsubscribe or anything dramatic, but it just leaves the impression that this roll out was all Marketing's idea, and the poor devs are scrambling to hit unreasonable timelines.
Been there, mate. .. been there. All my sympathy to the devs.
Launching a new product shouldn't mean neglecting your existing consumers / those who doesn't buy your new product (yet), but that is the feeling I get regarding the situation right now. I can't believe that they genuinely thought that people would accept the switch without saying nothing. You don't plan those kind of things from day to day. This is planned by months and I'm sure there are people right now at WoTC saying "I told you so" (or saying nothing by fear of getting fired). The situation is sad because, it shows again that this company is lead only by greed and people who understand NOTHING of this hobby...
I use D&D Beyond for CONVENIENCE. I'm about to launch a new campaign with 5E14. I won't use 5E24 yet because I am french and I'll wait the french version to be out to convert my players. For CONVENIENCE.
I am close to cancel my subscription and use pen and paper only despite the hundreds of dollars paid on sourcebooks / adventures here (books, that I physically own also) because it will be easier to play that way.
And because I have the feeling that I am giving my money to people that don't care about my user experience.
I think it was a smart move. They get the most dedicated part of their fan base, the people who pay money to use their product, to do large scale testing before rolling it out to the general public. This gives them 2 weeks to resolve bugs before full release. A pile of people testing will always find more bugs then the internal QA ever will.
I think it was a smart move. They get the most dedicated part of their fan base, the people who pay money to use their product, to do large scale testing before rolling it out to the general public. This gives them 2 weeks to resolve bugs before full release. A pile of people testing will always find more bugs then the internal QA ever will.
This is an interesting take, but not entirely wrong. Just amusing.
You're right that the general user base is far more capable of finding cracks than the testers, due to sheer volume if nothing else. (Having been a video game tester myself for a AAA game.)
I think it was a smart move. They get the most dedicated part of their fan base, the people who pay money to use their product, to do large scale testing before rolling it out to the general public. This gives them 2 weeks to resolve bugs before full release. A pile of people testing will always find more bugs then the internal QA ever will.
Heh. If that were their actual intent, they could have reached out to a list of subscribers and offered them the chance to perform controlled beta testing in advance and had a much higher quality of feedback from selected invested customers, provided to them in a controlled manner. The sheer number of obviously broken things in the current offering suggests that this isn't even to the level of "let's ask the public to find corner case issues". And the deluge of reports coming in for the same bugs.. coupled with the "leave a comment on this post" response, suggests to me that they're not thinking about this as a QA process at all.
I just wish they were up-front with the expectations on homebrew and third party content options for 2024 characters. You'd think with their big push, and long time coming update, they'd have already done the legwork for the latest additions to be 2024 ready. I mean how many MCDM and Kobold Press got released on DDB recently and not one of them was ready at launch? That's a massive oversight.
Don't tell us all options will be ready and fully backwards compatible to then roll out a half baked mess. The devs at this point are putting out fires that executives had all the time to plan for.
I agree, character making is more complicated than ever. The reason I got DnDB was that character making was easy and fun. It has become complicated and frustrating. It's especially difficult migrating a character you had to the new ruleset. I had to manually delete every spell and re-select them. also legacy spells were coming up on a new character in the manage spells tab even though I had legacy content deselected. That visual clutter makes things needlessly confusing. I will most likely cancel my subscription if these quality of life issues are not addressed.
I think it was a smart move. They get the most dedicated part of their fan base, the people who pay money to use their product, to do large scale testing before rolling it out to the general public. This gives them 2 weeks to resolve bugs before full release. A pile of people testing will always find more bugs then the internal QA ever will.
I don't think it was made on purpose, nor that everything will be fixed in two weeks. It's more a two month schedule from what I see. And no, you don't serve that crap to your more invested customers, labelled as a privilege, hoping that they will help your fix everything with a smile.
But I agree that it would have been a smart move to make an official "private beta" to solve this huge pile of sh**.
The whole point is that you should be able to use the content you bought the intended way, like it's written in the books, which means not forcing people to use it with a revise version of the rules they didn't buy (yet) and that is not working on top of that.
Or if it's your intention from the begining to make the old digital ruleset obsolete :
- you offer a discount to everyone that own the previous digital ruleset
- you stop selling the digital version of 5E14 rules MONTHS before the new one comes out, or at least you offer the old one till it's out. Like "Buy 5E24 on DDB, we offer you 5E14 so you can play while waiting"
- you communicate MONTHS in advance to explain this choice and the consequences, like so:
"We'll launch a revised version of the ruleset in a year. This will be the only one supported officially on D&D Beyond after that. All previous content will be marked as legacy and won't necessary work with the new ruleset. Here is a 75% discount for you for upgrading digitally.
The new ruleset will be free on D&D Beyond for all of those who'll participate to the beta test session starting in two month (because we planned this for months already and everything is under control)".
I was already Master Tier.
I was also happy enough to wait for the content to arrive on the "normal" release schedule.
But when I read that Master tier gets it 2 weeks early, I was like "Ooh. A benefit I didn't expect! How nice!"
But with all these buggy and unsupported parts of the 2024 rules in Character Builder, it doesn't feel like a Master Tier Benefit -- it feels like a Paid Beta Test.
I understand that the last-minute pivot to supporting both 2014 and 2024 may have impacted your development schedule, but honestly, it feels like there are some fundamentals that just weren't going to be ready on time, regardless of needing to support 2014 content.
I just wish I hadn't got my hopes up, that this was going to be useful from Sep 3rd. I'll check back in a couple of weeks, I guess.
Would have to agree. At the very least, it should have been marketed as Early Access Sneak Peek with incomplete features so players can at least play around with the builder and see the new flow ahead of time. That's how I'm treating it right now.
Everywhere I play wasn't jumping in and using it day 1 anyway.
To be clear -- I'm still super happy with the early access to the digital rule books. That was nice.
But the reason I'm a Master Tier subscriber here is for the Character Builder, and the ability for my players to use the content I buy to build their characters in my campaigns. So when Character Builder isn't working correctly, well.. let's just say I hope the large numbers of bugs get fixed in a reasonable time-frame. I'm not threatening to unsubscribe or anything dramatic, but it just leaves the impression that this roll out was all Marketing's idea, and the poor devs are scrambling to hit unreasonable timelines.
Been there, mate. .. been there. All my sympathy to the devs.
Launching a new product shouldn't mean neglecting your existing consumers / those who doesn't buy your new product (yet), but that is the feeling I get regarding the situation right now. I can't believe that they genuinely thought that people would accept the switch without saying nothing. You don't plan those kind of things from day to day. This is planned by months and I'm sure there are people right now at WoTC saying "I told you so" (or saying nothing by fear of getting fired). The situation is sad because, it shows again that this company is lead only by greed and people who understand NOTHING of this hobby...
I use D&D Beyond for CONVENIENCE. I'm about to launch a new campaign with 5E14. I won't use 5E24 yet because I am french and I'll wait the french version to be out to convert my players. For CONVENIENCE.
I am close to cancel my subscription and use pen and paper only despite the hundreds of dollars paid on sourcebooks / adventures here (books, that I physically own also) because it will be easier to play that way.
And because I have the feeling that I am giving my money to people that don't care about my user experience.
I think it was a smart move. They get the most dedicated part of their fan base, the people who pay money to use their product, to do large scale testing before rolling it out to the general public. This gives them 2 weeks to resolve bugs before full release. A pile of people testing will always find more bugs then the internal QA ever will.
This is an interesting take, but not entirely wrong. Just amusing.
You're right that the general user base is far more capable of finding cracks than the testers, due to sheer volume if nothing else. (Having been a video game tester myself for a AAA game.)
Heh. If that were their actual intent, they could have reached out to a list of subscribers and offered them the chance to perform controlled beta testing in advance and had a much higher quality of feedback from selected invested customers, provided to them in a controlled manner. The sheer number of obviously broken things in the current offering suggests that this isn't even to the level of "let's ask the public to find corner case issues". And the deluge of reports coming in for the same bugs.. coupled with the "leave a comment on this post" response, suggests to me that they're not thinking about this as a QA process at all.
I just wish they were up-front with the expectations on homebrew and third party content options for 2024 characters. You'd think with their big push, and long time coming update, they'd have already done the legwork for the latest additions to be 2024 ready. I mean how many MCDM and Kobold Press got released on DDB recently and not one of them was ready at launch? That's a massive oversight.
Don't tell us all options will be ready and fully backwards compatible to then roll out a half baked mess. The devs at this point are putting out fires that executives had all the time to plan for.
I agree, character making is more complicated than ever. The reason I got DnDB was that character making was easy and fun. It has become complicated and frustrating. It's especially difficult migrating a character you had to the new ruleset. I had to manually delete every spell and re-select them. also legacy spells were coming up on a new character in the manage spells tab even though I had legacy content deselected. That visual clutter makes things needlessly confusing. I will most likely cancel my subscription if these quality of life issues are not addressed.
I don't think it was made on purpose, nor that everything will be fixed in two weeks. It's more a two month schedule from what I see. And no, you don't serve that crap to your more invested customers, labelled as a privilege, hoping that they will help your fix everything with a smile.
But I agree that it would have been a smart move to make an official "private beta" to solve this huge pile of sh**.
The whole point is that you should be able to use the content you bought the intended way, like it's written in the books, which means not forcing people to use it with a revise version of the rules they didn't buy (yet) and that is not working on top of that.
Or if it's your intention from the begining to make the old digital ruleset obsolete :
- you offer a discount to everyone that own the previous digital ruleset
- you stop selling the digital version of 5E14 rules MONTHS before the new one comes out, or at least you offer the old one till it's out. Like "Buy 5E24 on DDB, we offer you 5E14 so you can play while waiting"
- you communicate MONTHS in advance to explain this choice and the consequences, like so:
"We'll launch a revised version of the ruleset in a year. This will be the only one supported officially on D&D Beyond after that. All previous content will be marked as legacy and won't necessary work with the new ruleset. Here is a 75% discount for you for upgrading digitally.
The new ruleset will be free on D&D Beyond for all of those who'll participate to the beta test session starting in two month (because we planned this for months already and everything is under control)".
I agree. And I did cancel my Master tier subscription. Won't be in effect until May 2025, but it is still cancelled.