Supremely annoying that nobody thought to just use a standard object type for spells and feats, then give every bonus type simple categories. Why can't any class feature or feat easily have a drop down to select any other spell/feat/class feature and give it a damage, attack bonus, etc? Like, what terrible mess of spaghetti code did they build?
What you have to understand is really two things:
1. WotC inherited the spaghetti code originally written by the Fandom team which originally wrote the site
2. WotC/Hasbro are one of the cheapest, least customer-friendly businesses out there
From what I've gathered, the problem is not adding a bonus to spell damage (the cleric's potent spellcasting already does this, even for the arcana domain's wizard spells), but rather the lack of a way to select which specific spell it would apply to.
Also, WotC acquiring dndbeyond happened like four years ago. They've had plenty of time to change things if they wanted to.
From what I've gathered, the problem is not adding a bonus to spell damage (the cleric's potent spellcasting already does this, even for the arcana domain's wizard spells), but rather the lack of a way to select which specific spell it would apply to.
Also, WotC acquiring dndbeyond happened like four years ago. They've had plenty of time to change things if they wanted to.
The latter is an unsupported conspiracy theory.
They are going to start "changing things" starting this year via the backend rework.
There is a time & place for pessimism. This isn't it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
From what I've gathered, the problem is not adding a bonus to spell damage (the cleric's potent spellcasting already does this, even for the arcana domain's wizard spells), but rather the lack of a way to select which specific spell it would apply to.
Also, WotC acquiring dndbeyond happened like four years ago. They've had plenty of time to change things if they wanted to.
The latter is an unsupported conspiracy theory.
They are going to start "changing things" starting this year via the backend rework.
There is a time & place for pessimism. This isn't it.
There's plenty of room for pessimism here considering:
The only mention of the backend rework that I'm aware of is some comments in the AMA that they've "begun" working on it, with no detail of scope or timescale. There's nothing to say that it's the full rework we need. For example, is it going to include 2014 content, or just 2024? Considering their original plan for 2024 was to just overwrite all the 2014 content, I don't trust them to bother fixing any of the many existing issues or add missing content from anything in 2014. At this point I wouldn't even trust them not to use the rework as an excuse to launch a 2024 version of the site and discontinue this one.
They've owned D&D Beyond for a number of years without bothering to work on it, despite the previous owners being well aware of the need for rework. It's clearly not been a priority before, even with the 2024 launch, so I doubt it's much of a priority now. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets abandoned before completion like the encounters tool (still in beta since I joined DDB 5 years ago) or Sigil (released, but very much unfinished).
Pretty much every change to the website recently has had a mixed response at best, with much of it making things objectively worse. They "improved" the marketplace last year, and what we have now is still missing features from the old one (and I don't just mean a la carte). The home page has been reworked into something almost useless for anyone but new players. The addition of the 2024 rulebooks has left things a complete mess due to their inital plan of abandoning the 2014 rules, meaning DM's are constantly having to remind their players of which toggles to use and there's no simple way for users to tell if a given item is 2014 or 2024 without knowing what all the book sources are (something which will only get worse as more 2024 books are released).
DDB hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt, so until there's a proper announcement saying what they're doing and how long they expect it to take, along with evidence that changes are being made, there's plenty of reason to be pessimistic that this rework will even happen, let alone be the full rework thats required.
So, now then, in the future, when someone mentions a problem with rules, please, PLEASE, cite the rule book that you are referencing along with its publication date. I will repeat this admonition: the 2014 PHB has a giant on its front cover, while the 2024 PHB has a dragon on its front cover. These two books are NOT the same; a fact that one of my DMs is rather slow to grasp.
From what I've gathered, the problem is not adding a bonus to spell damage (the cleric's potent spellcasting already does this, even for the arcana domain's wizard spells), but rather the lack of a way to select which specific spell it would apply to.
Also, WotC acquiring dndbeyond happened like four years ago. They've had plenty of time to change things if they wanted to.
The latter is an unsupported conspiracy theory.
They are going to start "changing things" starting this year via the backend rework.
There is a time & place for pessimism. This isn't it.
There's plenty of room for pessimism here considering:
The only mention of the backend rework that I'm aware of is some comments in the AMA that they've "begun" working on it, with no detail of scope or timescale. There's nothing to say that it's the full rework we need. For example, is it going to include 2014 content, or just 2024? Considering their original plan for 2024 was to just overwrite all the 2014 content, I don't trust them to bother fixing any of the many existing issues or add missing content from anything in 2014. At this point I wouldn't even trust them not to use the rework as an excuse to launch a 2024 version of the site and discontinue this one.
They've owned D&D Beyond for a number of years without bothering to work on it, despite the previous owners being well aware of the need for rework. It's clearly not been a priority before, even with the 2024 launch, so I doubt it's much of a priority now. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets abandoned before completion like the encounters tool (still in beta since I joined DDB 5 years ago) or Sigil (released, but very much unfinished).
Pretty much every change to the website recently has had a mixed response at best, with much of it making things objectively worse. They "improved" the marketplace last year, and what we have now is still missing features from the old one (and I don't just mean a la carte). The home page has been reworked into something almost useless for anyone but new players. The addition of the 2024 rulebooks has left things a complete mess due to their inital plan of abandoning the 2014 rules, meaning DM's are constantly having to remind their players of which toggles to use and there's no simple way for users to tell if a given item is 2014 or 2024 without knowing what all the book sources are (something which will only get worse as more 2024 books are released).
DDB hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt, so until there's a proper announcement saying what they're doing and how long they expect it to take, along with evidence that changes are being made, there's plenty of reason to be pessimistic that this rework will even happen, let alone be the full rework thats required.
Even if they did that, people would demand it all be done now. Right now.
Because people demand all of the things be fixed "now now now now now now".
& again, unless you're calling Ghostfire Gaming liars, Beyond staff do indeed test to see if things work as is.
So they're not being as sloven & slothful as you're implying.
But that doesn't serve the narrative, does it?
Given I'm not allowed to call out those who pushed said narrative, I'll just say:There is a LOT of disinfo out there.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Hells yes we want it done now, RIGHT NOW. Implementation should have been ready upon release. It’s over a year later and still nothing. This is not a free service we pay for this. We expect it to be right and on time.
Hells yes we want it done now, RIGHT NOW. Implementation should have been ready upon release. It’s over a year later and still nothing. This is not a free service we pay for this. We expect it to be right and on time.
So you admit you don't believe they test anything beforehand.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Hells yes we want it done now, RIGHT NOW. Implementation should have been ready upon release. It’s over a year later and still nothing. This is not a free service we pay for this. We expect it to be right and on time.
So you admit you don't believe they test anything beforehand.
Did they "test" it? I'm sure they did Did they get 100% code and functional coverage? I highly doubt it.
Hells yes we want it done now, RIGHT NOW. Implementation should have been ready upon release. It’s over a year later and still nothing. This is not a free service we pay for this. We expect it to be right and on time.
So you admit you don't believe they test anything beforehand.
Did they "test" it? I'm sure they did Did they get 100% code and functional coverage? I highly doubt it.
Are you assuming that that's possible?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Hells yes we want it done now, RIGHT NOW. Implementation should have been ready upon release. It’s over a year later and still nothing. This is not a free service we pay for this. We expect it to be right and on time.
So you admit you don't believe they test anything beforehand.
Did they "test" it? I'm sure they did Did they get 100% code and functional coverage? I highly doubt it.
Are you assuming that that's possible?
well, code coverage is an automatic tool thing.
for it to work, you have to run all your tests on the code base. and the tool tells you which chunks of code were executed, which branches were always skipped, and so on.
So, its possible, at least from a "does the tool do this thing?" perspective.
But that would require that they have a bunch of tests that they automatically run on the tool somehow, and that's going to take work to create and maintain.
letting users run into bugs and report them is a lot easier than the test-regression-code-coverage approach.
my guess is they have some crash-detection tests (or interns/volunteers) that click on random stuff and make sure some valid/working webpage is served after that. but that won't tellyou if things are functionally correct. You'd need tests for each functional item, and that's goign to be a LOT of work. and the only thing I know that gets 100% coverage liek that is code that could kill someone if theres a bug. So, they probably have some testing. hopefully automated. but I'm goign to guess they rely a lot on customer bug reports to find functional bugs.
I mean, for this, they just need a checklist, a test server, and a couple of employees testing functionality before full release. That should 100% be something they're doing, and if they aren't, that's a failure on their part.
The last few big rollouts have made it very clear that they either do not have a dedicated QA team at all, or don't give them nearly enough resources, and rely on the subscribers getting early access to essentially do it for them.
So, the "solution" is to: Shut down the website indefinitely, displaying the Giant Space Eels screen in the process, impacting a good chunk of the playerbase's ability to play the game w/o buying all over again on other sites, to forever do maintenance, until 100% of 100% is working forever in perpetuity? Is that what I'm hearing?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
So, the "solution" is to: Shut down the website indefinitely, displaying the Giant Space Eels screen in the process, impacting a good chunk of the playerbase's ability to play the game w/o buying all over again on other sites, to forever do maintenance, until 100% of 100% is working forever in perpetuity? Is that what I'm hearing?
I don't know what you're hearing, only you can report that. But I can absolutely guarantee that that is NOT what anyone is saying.
So, the "solution" is to: Shut down the website indefinitely, displaying the Giant Space Eels screen in the process, impacting a good chunk of the playerbase's ability to play the game w/o buying all over again on other sites, to forever do maintenance, until 100% of 100% is working forever in perpetuity? Is that what I'm hearing?
I don't know what you're hearing, only you can report that. But I can absolutely guarantee that that is NOT what anyone is saying.
You do know that they have to shut down the website to fix ALL of the things? W/the Giant Space Eel Infestation screen and all?
& if fixing one thing means that they have to fix another, that, in order to have 100% of 100% done right now, this would mean that the website would be down indefinitely until the impossible goal of perfect functionality is achieved.
I'm not unconvinced that that's the goal w/demanding a indefinite maintenance shutdown. Ending Beyond in order to get people over to Other Stuff that Exists.
If they don't end up doing ANY maintenance on the backend during the whole year to free up invocations like Agonizing Blast, I'll eat my words(I particularly want to eat "taco" & "Faygo". Some good words to enjoy).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
So, the "solution" is to: Shut down the website indefinitely, displaying the Giant Space Eels screen in the process, impacting a good chunk of the playerbase's ability to play the game w/o buying all over again on other sites, to forever do maintenance, until 100% of 100% is working forever in perpetuity? Is that what I'm hearing?
I don't know what you're hearing, only you can report that. But I can absolutely guarantee that that is NOT what anyone is saying.
You do know that they have to shut down the website to fix ALL of the things? W/the Giant Space Eel Infestation screen and all?
& if fixing one thing means that they have to fix another, that, in order to have 100% of 100% done right now, this would mean that the website would be down indefinitely until the impossible goal of perfect functionality is achieved.
I'm not unconvinced that that's the goal w/demanding a indefinite maintenance shutdown. Ending Beyond in order to get people over to Other Stuff that Exists.
If they don't end up doing ANY maintenance on the backend during the whole year to free up invocations like Agonizing Blast, I'll eat my words(I particularly want to eat "taco" & "Faygo". Some good words to enjoy).
It seems, from this, that you may be under the impression that they can’t do any development work on the site without turning it off for the entire time they’re working on it. That is not how web development works.
Right? Why do you think I mentioned a test server? It's a way to deploy and test the update without affecting the primary site so they can run tests.
If they're running completely without a QA team, that's an even bigger failure than any of the bugs on the site, company-wise.
Do you have a direct quote from a named current employee, yes or no?
No, but I don't need one to speculate and comment with a simple IF statement. I didn't make any claims that this is what they're doing, only pointed out that IF it is, it's a major business failure.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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What you have to understand is really two things:
1. WotC inherited the spaghetti code originally written by the Fandom team which originally wrote the site
2. WotC/Hasbro are one of the cheapest, least customer-friendly businesses out there
From what I've gathered, the problem is not adding a bonus to spell damage (the cleric's potent spellcasting already does this, even for the arcana domain's wizard spells), but rather the lack of a way to select which specific spell it would apply to.
Also, WotC acquiring dndbeyond happened like four years ago. They've had plenty of time to change things if they wanted to.
The latter is an unsupported conspiracy theory.
They are going to start "changing things" starting this year via the backend rework.
There is a time & place for pessimism. This isn't it.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
There's plenty of room for pessimism here considering:
DDB hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt, so until there's a proper announcement saying what they're doing and how long they expect it to take, along with evidence that changes are being made, there's plenty of reason to be pessimistic that this rework will even happen, let alone be the full rework thats required.
So, now then, in the future, when someone mentions a problem with rules, please, PLEASE, cite the rule book that you are referencing along with its publication date. I will repeat this admonition: the 2014 PHB has a giant on its front cover, while the 2024 PHB has a dragon on its front cover. These two books are NOT the same; a fact that one of my DMs is rather slow to grasp.
Even if they did that, people would demand it all be done now. Right now.
Because people demand all of the things be fixed "now now now now now now".
& again, unless you're calling Ghostfire Gaming liars, Beyond staff do indeed test to see if things work as is.
So they're not being as sloven & slothful as you're implying.
But that doesn't serve the narrative, does it?
Given I'm not allowed to call out those who pushed said narrative, I'll just say:There is a LOT of disinfo out there.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Hells yes we want it done now, RIGHT NOW. Implementation should have been ready upon release. It’s over a year later and still nothing. This is not a free service we pay for this. We expect it to be right and on time.
So you admit you don't believe they test anything beforehand.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Did they "test" it?
I'm sure they did
Did they get 100% code and functional coverage?
I highly doubt it.
Are you assuming that that's possible?
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
well, code coverage is an automatic tool thing.
for it to work, you have to run all your tests on the code base. and the tool tells you which chunks of code were executed, which branches were always skipped, and so on.
So, its possible, at least from a "does the tool do this thing?" perspective.
But that would require that they have a bunch of tests that they automatically run on the tool somehow, and that's going to take work to create and maintain.
letting users run into bugs and report them is a lot easier than the test-regression-code-coverage approach.
my guess is they have some crash-detection tests (or interns/volunteers) that click on random stuff and make sure some valid/working webpage is served after that. but that won't tellyou if things are functionally correct. You'd need tests for each functional item, and that's goign to be a LOT of work. and the only thing I know that gets 100% coverage liek that is code that could kill someone if theres a bug. So, they probably have some testing. hopefully automated. but I'm goign to guess they rely a lot on customer bug reports to find functional bugs.
I mean, for this, they just need a checklist, a test server, and a couple of employees testing functionality before full release. That should 100% be something they're doing, and if they aren't, that's a failure on their part.
The last few big rollouts have made it very clear that they either do not have a dedicated QA team at all, or don't give them nearly enough resources, and rely on the subscribers getting early access to essentially do it for them.
pronouns: he/she/they
So, the "solution" is to:
Shut down the website indefinitely, displaying the Giant Space Eels screen in the process, impacting a good chunk of the playerbase's ability to play the game w/o buying all over again on other sites, to forever do maintenance, until 100% of 100% is working forever in perpetuity?
Is that what I'm hearing?
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
I don't know what you're hearing, only you can report that.
But I can absolutely guarantee that that is NOT what anyone is saying.
You do know that they have to shut down the website to fix ALL of the things? W/the Giant Space Eel Infestation screen and all?
& if fixing one thing means that they have to fix another, that, in order to have 100% of 100% done right now, this would mean that the website would be down indefinitely until the impossible goal of perfect functionality is achieved.
I'm not unconvinced that that's the goal w/demanding a indefinite maintenance shutdown. Ending Beyond in order to get people over to Other Stuff that Exists.
If they don't end up doing ANY maintenance on the backend during the whole year to free up invocations like Agonizing Blast, I'll eat my words(I particularly want to eat "taco" & "Faygo". Some good words to enjoy).
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
It seems, from this, that you may be under the impression that they can’t do any development work on the site without turning it off for the entire time they’re working on it. That is not how web development works.
pronouns: he/she/they
Right? Why do you think I mentioned a test server? It's a way to deploy and test the update without affecting the primary site so they can run tests.
If they're running completely without a QA team, that's an even bigger failure than any of the bugs on the site, company-wise.
Do you have a direct quote from a named current employee, yes or no?
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
No, but I don't need one to speculate and comment with a simple IF statement. I didn't make any claims that this is what they're doing, only pointed out that IF it is, it's a major business failure.