There's been a ton of awesome new D&D content that has been added recently and that, unfortunately, has really brought the pain points of this website to the fore. Here's just a few issues I've had.
Search is broken, more often showing legacy or 3rd party content than anything from the core rules.
Character sheets are a coin toss if a feature will work or not (or worse work partially).
The homebrew creation is too complex, needing to know exact internal terms and small nuances to attempt anything beyond the most mundane changes.
It's also not complex enough with zero tools to automate common calculations such as AC, attack rolls, etc. Many things that should be changeable are impossible like changing the weapon dice of a weapon.
These next two are beta (although calling a product that has seen 6 years of development beta is approaching Star Citizen levels) so some issues are understandable. However the pace of improvement has been painfully slow.
The encounter builder still uses 2014 damage calculations and like the general search does not show the most relevant creatures first.
Maps is cool but so limited currently to be more of a "Oh that's nice" than anything actually helpful to running my games.
Even this forum has become borderline unusable:
It's being chocked by older content (that for some reason has stayed pinned).
That the main way D&D beyond tracks user submitted bugs is gigantic forum posts with little way for the user to see if what they are reporting has been already flagged is madness. I assume someone has to sift through that and create tasks which feels like it would be a massive time sink.
Anyway, I could go on and on with specific examples but my point is this; these issues will keep getting worse the more content is added which will make Beyond less usable. Is there any sign that this will get any better? As it stands I cannot justify getting anything more on this platform.
The two ways I see it getting better is either the dev team is getting substantially larger or there's work being made on a D&D Beyond 2 for the backend with hopefully a more scalable way of doing things. Neither of which seem to be happening.
While the platform remains an essential tool for many players and Dungeon Masters, its overall design and functionality feel outdated and in need of modernization. With a refreshed and modernized UX, it could truly become the ultimate digital tool for the community. I hope the team considers making improvements in future updates.
There's been a ton of awesome new D&D content that has been added recently and that, unfortunately, has really brought the pain points of this website to the fore. Here's just a few issues I've had.
Was not aware a load of new stuff had been added, but I'm not going to make the most of it. A la carte is gone. I've gone from regular purchases of whole sections of books to literally buying 1 book, somewhat reluctantly, out of necessity and ease for a campaign that's already running. They shot themselves in the foot and still haven't realised it.
Search is broken, more often showing legacy or 3rd party content than anything from the core rules.
Character sheets are a coin toss if a feature will work or not (or worse work partially).
The homebrew creation is too complex, needing to know exact internal terms and small nuances to attempt anything beyond the most mundane changes.
It's also not complex enough with zero tools to automate common calculations such as AC, attack rolls, etc. Many things that should be changeable are impossible like changing the weapon dice of a weapon.
Ironically, showing legacy content works in my favour, but yes the mixing of content is unhelpful (especially given OneD&D, or the D&D refresh, 5.5e, whatever you want to call it, ended up being pretty lackluster, so we're left with all the bloat and little of the fun).
I'm curious what you've seen this with? I'll admit myself and my players don't make heavy use of some of the more interactive elements of the character sheets so we might not have encountered this, but it's perhaps the last bastion in my experiences of DnDBeyond working...well?
Homebrew creations have long been a bit of a dark art on this site to make function. It's quite difficult to make it easy while also offering a lot of freedom with them and integrating them into an interactive character sheet. That said the layout and process isn't always the most intuitive and can slow things down more than is probably necessary. Really though what they've needed for a long time is a little tutorial video series "How to Homebrew", walking people through it and some of the syntax. It couldn't cover everything but it'd help make entry into utilising it properly a lot easier.
Yeah. Can't fault you there. I think a little bit of that particular weapon dice question is that you can't really make a non-magic item per se. Which is dumb. "Magic Items" should just be "Items", and then a checkbox for magic. That'd let you make an entirely custom mundane weapon, or whatever other mundane custom items you want, and you can still leverage any interactive functionalities. I'll never work out why they didn't do that.
These next two are beta (although calling a product that has seen 6 years of development beta is approaching Star Citizen levels) so some issues are understandable. However the pace of improvement has been painfully slow.
The encounter builder still uses 2014 damage calculations and like the general search does not show the most relevant creatures first.
Maps is cool but so limited currently to be more of a "Oh that's nice" than anything actually helpful to running my games.
2014 the encounter build does work great for, although it is a bit slow. It is quite funny that it appears WotC/Hasbro have just left the 2024 refresh in this half-dead state, where it's still seemingly promoted as the default/preferential, but also barely supported. It's wild that it turned out this way too, as the early playtest material seemed really genuinely good, and it was meant to be more integrated to the 2014 stuff too. It is absolutely insane though that the encounter builder is still labelled as "BETA". Has it seen any changes in the last year at all? I think they've just given up on the platform honestly.
Maps I've not touched. It needs a master tier subscription and...in the past there'd have been a bit of more of a reason (many moons ago didn't it give you a discount on bundles I think?), but at this point:
"Two week early access to the core rulebooks" - That's a rarity it'd become relevant. It's not like they're dropping a rulebook a month, and that bonus only applies to CORE rulebooks.
Unlimited characters/encounters... The extra characters is useful, but you can definitely manage with just 6. I didn't even realise there was a limit to encounters so that tells you how little benefit that has unless you are really heavily and messily using that tool I guess.
Add publicly share homebrew content? I mean, it's quite a useful bonus, and it's wild that they make doing that locked behind a paywall...but I can just view the content regardless and then manually copy it in if need be. That said, public homebrew content is of a wildly varying (often quite poor) quality. I can write up a better version myself. So all they're doing is making the copying across the draft of it slower.
"Exclusive subscriber perks each month" - remarkably vague. Let me guess, a digital dice?
Maps - I'm using roll20, it's not charging me to run maps, it's very functional. Would a fully integrated maps system be nice? Sure. Is it worth paying $4.50 a month? Nah. It'd need to be the holy grail of VTT maps to get a subscription out of me because there is very good free options around.
Share unlocked content with other players - I'll be honest, we've got what we needed before they axed a la carte, and I am neither buying them a whole book, or giving temporary access via a subscription. There are ways to see the contents of a book, I'll reference those and write a private homebrew. That's automatically accessible by my campaign players.
It's being chocked by older content (that for some reason has stayed pinned).
That the main way D&D beyond tracks user submitted bugs is gigantic forum posts with little way for the user to see if what they are reporting has been already flagged is madness. I assume someone has to sift through that and create tasks which feels like it would be a massive time sink.
It's very antiquated, yes. I mean, I think "borderline unusable" is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's got no particular benefits to it. Suboptimal.
Anyway, I could go on and on with specific examples but my point is this; these issues will keep getting worse the more content is added which will make Beyond less usable. Is there any sign that this will get any better? As it stands I cannot justify getting anything more on this platform.
The two ways I see it getting better is either the dev team is getting substantially larger or there's work being made on a D&D Beyond 2 for the backend with hopefully a more scalable way of doing things. Neither of which seem to be happening.
I'll be honest, I think Hasbro has abandoned D&DBeyond. It was a very useful and effective tool, Hasbro mismanaged it and gutted some of it's great features. They then bungled a refresh of 5e. That led to less $$$'s coming to them from this platform. They've interpreted that as a view that this platform is intrinsically bad and unprofitable. It's being left to coast on whatever success and popularity it previously had.
What they need:
They need to bring back some degree of a la carte. I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point and it'll never happen, but it is what's needed. The interactive character sheets of D&D beyond are nice, and from my experience function, but that's not revolutionary. Most platforms have an interactive character sheet, and worst comes to worst you can just use a pen and paper sheet, after all D&D was designed around that. The biggest benefit of D&D beyond was that you could inexpensively get the content you needed, as you needed, and it'd save you the set up of integrating it. They could get away with perhaps a trimmed back a la carte, I remember you could buy a whole section of most books for $9.99 I think it was, although tbf even the individual item $1.99 purchases has to have been pretty profitable if you stop and think about it. Whole books now are sometimes running like $40+ and the sales haven't been remotely worthwhile in forever and a day. I'm not dropping half a hundred because of one nice spell.
Tidy up searches. One chronic issue of D&DBeyond is that the searches/listings will show you everything from all sources by default. I can manually go through and select all the books I have already, but I've got a fair number. It's impractical to just see content I own. I can also only see which is the results I own / don't own by opening them up. It's slow and obtuse, and as we get more content becomes so much worse.
Work out what they hell they're doing with 2024 rules, and make it a more seamless and tidy experience. Why list the two versions fully separately? It makes the above issue even worse. If there is multiple versions of a spell (ie, basic rules 2014/PHB 2014/basic rules 2024/PHB 2024), combine them to one listing. If there's a functional difference, then give a little 'flip to the other version of the spell' button on its page. Given this'll usually be a case of 2014/2024, you could also let people choose their default option. It'd allow you to still optionally choose to engage with any content of the other version, but make it more seamless to experience your chosen version.
Finish the encounter builder. It's a great tool, and absolutely dirt simple. It's a glorified calculator basically so the actual work that needs to go into it should be quite simple. It shouldn't take a lot to run. It is a tool with a good amount of benefit. Maybe even, wild suggestion here, allow people to either publish encounters like they do homebrew, or allow each of the books to have some attached encounters which you can search for and bring up in the "My Encounters" bit. It's not really competing with any other tools either, and it's a good thing for DM's. Gives a reason to pull them into D&DBeyond, and by extension encourage their players to make characters on here.
Maps - maybe a controversial take, but either decide to invest in it, or ditch it and work more with other VTT's. Having virtual responsive maps is amazing, but is a lot more work than an encounter building, is gonna be more costly on a servers front to them to operate, and is gonna have to compete a lot harder as there are many very good options on the market already. It's not an easy money maker for D&DBeyond.
Bring back some of the de-listed content. I absolutely get them revising some language and content that was outdated and offensive (though, I'd contend the "species" change in particular was a bit over the top and performative, every other fantasy RPG is using "races" and not causing a stir from it, and it's a big weird to have "elf subraces" for the "elf species", and it still lists "racial traits" on the short description - by contrast the Hadozee lore they wrote for 5e was grossly offensive and insensitive, and very simple to correct, also, weirdly was not present in UA Hadozee rather the offensive stuff was only added later on for release, that was a mess, I'm getting sidetracked-) -but the particular example, though I don't think it's wholly unique, which comes to mind- Tieflings. We had 9 very good tiefling subraces that that built upon their lore, was pretty uncontroversial, loved by a lot of players, and opens a lot of interesting options when playing a tiefling or doing a campaign that has anything to do with the 9 hells. They released a new book that revised some of that content, and delisted the old one, preventing people getting access to that old content, and some major bits were not included in the new book (those subraces in particular). While I do kind of like the idea of expanding tieflings to cover all three 'evil' planes, it's a really silly move to cut out that content. Sourcebooks really should build out from what we already have, not cut it down.
Believe the majority of issues that DnDbeyond faces are caused by indecision along with trying to appease players that in my opinion only wish to exploit rather then support DnD as a whole.
Keeping in mind that Wotc acquired DnDbeyond May 18, 2022 - they would still be going through DnDbeyonds spaghetti code, fixing pre-existing bugs and the growing pains of that acquisition, especially considering the interference from individuals getting emotional over changes that are needed to get the site running smoothly.
Personally I still can't understand:
the whole 2014 vs 2024 considering they are both 5e, and why people wish to separate 5e from 5e...
Why anyone would want less lore or in some cases artwork within a book, a book of statblocks doesn't seem that appealing at least to me...
Why a company would ever want to restrict their own content to in my opinion appease people that don't want conflicts with their homebrewed worlds at the expense of new people to DnD.
So no, I personally don't think DnDbeyond is on life support, things do seem to be getting better, however like all things there is room for improvement
In that time the site has become more unstable not less.
there are things that were published in tasha or eberon that are still not supported.
we have no idea what they are actualy working on.
a large part of why people are so upset about 2014 vs 2024 is that they botched both the communication around it (as in they didn't comunicate at all despite a lot of people asking wath the impact would be) And the rollout of it and was full of bugs/not supported functionality.
i haven't seen any asks for the book without artwork. we want to be able to buy a single (magic) item, Subclass, background, ... when that's what we need for a character or campaign, not the entire book
That's 3 years. Where there used to be frequent updates to what as fixed then it was radio silence. Nothing has been fixed since apart from critical issues.
Biggest issue I see is the massive layoffs that Hasbro went through not long ago. We probably have a much smaller team on DNDBeyond than it used to have who are pressured to prioritize work that actively brings in more money, ie. integrating new books and partnered content.
They really need two dev teams. One to work on the platform and one to work on content. From what we have seen so far, it seems pretty clear they don't have that and the devs they do have working on it are just focused on content and specifically new content.
If they refocused on fixing issues and improving user experience they would likely get more money long term from subs, but short term, they would get less money because they get a big bump with every new book release.
Welcome to corporate America I guess. Short term gains get an outsized influence on development time. Without a dedicated platform dev team nothing gets better because they are constantly pressured to maintain short term profitability.
In that time the site has become more unstable not less.
there are things that were published in tasha or eberon that are still not supported.
we have no idea what they are actualy working on.
a large part of why people are so upset about 2014 vs 2024 is that they botched both the communication around it (as in they didn't comunicate at all despite a lot of people asking wath the impact would be) And the rollout of it and was full of bugs/not supported functionality.
i haven't seen any asks for the book without artwork. we want to be able to buy a single (magic) item, Subclass, background, ... when that's what we need for a character or campaign, not the entire book
Can you clarify in what ways and which parts of the site has become unstable??
Weren't both of those released before wotc acquired DnDbeyond - might be worth reporting any issues with those again incase new owners are unaware - Which parts of eberron are currently not supported?? Believe there's an eberron book due around july, suspect Devs would be working on reported eberron stuff around then
Working on?? As in books (led to believe there's a schedule floating around somewhere), updates (perhaps in the changelogs) or bugs (think they just notify the person who reports the bug).
The impacts of new products on old ones are usually discovered after release as people stumble across them - nothing is ever released perfectly without issues
But you don't NEED whatever item, subclass, background, etc.. to play DnD, it is just a desire and (just personal opinion) suspect a desire would have little weight in DnDbeyonds decision making in bringing back that capability
Anywho back to my corner I go, didn't originally comment to debate each other's opinions but instead just voicing my opinion based of the title questions - either way thanks for the insights
I'm hoping that the team has been consumed by the 2024 rules update, and now that that's largely done, they can settle in to fixing the issues and providing QoL features for 2024 play.
In that time the site has become more unstable not less.
there are things that were published in tasha or eberon that are still not supported.
we have no idea what they are actualy working on.
a large part of why people are so upset about 2014 vs 2024 is that they botched both the communication around it (as in they didn't comunicate at all despite a lot of people asking wath the impact would be) And the rollout of it and was full of bugs/not supported functionality.
i haven't seen any asks for the book without artwork. we want to be able to buy a single (magic) item, Subclass, background, ... when that's what we need for a character or campaign, not the entire book
Can you clarify in what ways and which parts of the site has become unstable??
Weren't both of those released before wotc acquired DnDbeyond - might be worth reporting any issues with those again incase new owners are unaware - Which parts of eberron are currently not supported?? Believe there's an eberron book due around july, suspect Devs would be working on reported eberron stuff around then
Working on?? As in books (led to believe there's a schedule floating around somewhere), updates (perhaps in the changelogs) or bugs (think they just notify the person who reports the bug).
The impacts of new products on old ones are usually discovered after release as people stumble across them - nothing is ever released perfectly without issues
But you don't NEED whatever item, subclass, background, etc.. to play DnD, it is just a desire and (just personal opinion) suspect a desire would have little weight in DnDbeyonds decision making in bringing back that capability
Anywho back to my corner I go, didn't originally comment to debate each other's opinions but instead just voicing my opinion based of the title questions - either way thanks for the insights
Do you really think DDB is a better website since wotc bought it?
If so please elaborate, for me personally it is so much worse than when I bought in. The tos and censorship are going south faster than anything I have experienced in recent times. The 24 roll out has chased several of my game night groups to card games like canasta, rummy and cribbage. Good job wotc!
Do you really think DDB is a better website since wotc bought it?
If so please elaborate, for me personally it is so much worse than when I bought in. The tos and censorship are going south faster than anything I have experienced in recent times. The 24 roll out has chased several of my game night groups to card games like canasta, rummy and cribbage. Good job wotc!
Do you really think DDB is a better website since wotc bought it?
If so please elaborate, for me personally it is so much worse than when I bought in. The tos and censorship are going south faster than anything I have experienced in recent times. The 24 roll out has chased several of my game night groups to card games like canasta, rummy and cribbage. Good job wotc!
since dndbeyond being "better" or "worse" is subjective to the individuals needs and how they use the website, each persons opinion is just as valid as the next. for example:
I personally see the removal of ala carte as an all round good decision, where others may see it as a bad decision
I personally consider both 2014 and 2024 as 5e, where others consider them separate editions for what ever reasons
honestly have never looked at a ToS, but would assume they are no different to any website that has a forum and sold digital content... can you clarify in what ways ToS and censorship has changed and/or how its going south within your experience compared to in the past??
these may be stupid questions but:
how does the roll-out prevent you and your groups from playing dnd like you used to??
when did you "buy in" to dndbeyond?? I ask since it seems like a very short timespan for things in your experience to get "worse" atleast based of your dndbeyond join date
either way back to my corner i go - its peaceful there :)
I wouldn't say it's on life support, but dndbeyond is definitely worse now compared to when I first joined about four years ago (after the original owners had left but before WotC took over).
The site had two main appeals back then. One was the character sheets that looked nice compared to the clunky Roll20 sheets, and the automatic implementation of various features functioned well. This has remained more or less the same since - the sheets look similar apart from some minor reorganization. Some bugs have been fixed, but each new release has introduced an increasing number of new ones. Other bugs have not been fixed, the aberrant mind and clockwork soul subclasses from Tasha's were never fully implemented. Currently, stuff like the agonizing blast eldritch invocation is not working as it should. Sadly, I would not be at all surprised if it never gets fixed.
The other main appeal was the ability to buy only certain parts of books. This was fantastic from a player's perspective. For instance, whenever my character got some magic item from an official book, I'd then go to the dndbeyond marketplace to buy that particular item and add it to my sheet. And of course just buying the races/subclasses/backgrounds from a particular sourcebook was also super convenient. As we know, this feature was removed along with the bundles when they "updated" the marketplace by making it worse in practically every regard. This change alone was such a drawback, that in my books, it alone makes dndbeyond worse than it was. The only thing I've bought since is the 2024 PHB, as I actually wanted the entire book. There's been times when I've thought to myself I'll buy this thing to add to my collection, only to remember that it's no longer possible. I guess you could see the money I've thus saved as a positive, but I don't.
Another thing that's gotten clearly worse is communication from the staff. On the forums, they open a new thread for issues with each new book, but then never bother to reply or update the post. When they occasionally do fix problems with character sheets, they don't report it anywhere. Thus, players will not know when something they want to use becomes available. The site does still include some nice articles. Unfortunately, it seems like half the links on front page are nowadays just clickbaity titles taking you directly to a page in the shop rather than an actual article. As a result, I rarely bother checking them anymore.
There's very few actual improvements that I can think of. It is nice that they offer some third party books nowadays. However, because you have to buy the entire book, and because of the half-assed implementation to character sheets, I haven't actually bought any of them. This whole Sigil thing is undeniably something new (and unlike Maps, not just an inferior version of what other places offer), but it's not really something that I would personally be interested in.
since dndbeyond being "better" or "worse" is subjective to the individuals needs and how they use the website, each persons opinion is just as valid as the next. for example:
I personally see the removal of ala carte as an all round good decision, where others may see it as a bad decision
I personally consider both 2014 and 2024 as 5e, where others consider them separate editions for what ever reasons
honestly have never looked at a ToS, but would assume they are no different to any website that has a forum and sold digital content... can you clarify in what ways ToS and censorship has changed and/or how its going south within your experience compared to in the past??
these may be stupid questions but:
how does the roll-out prevent you and your groups from playing dnd like you used to??
when did you "buy in" to dndbeyond?? I ask since it seems like a very short timespan for things in your experience to get "worse" atleast based of your dndbeyond join date
either way back to my corner i go - its peaceful there :)
Ofcourse what is worse/better with DDB is subjective.
might i ask why you think the removal of a la carte is a good decision? to me it seems like just taking away choice and that is almost always a worse experience.
I meant working on as in what features/bug/infra/front-end thing are they working on. we used to have a weekly dev up-date where they didn't always anounce new things but at least they gave us some info about what they were working on and on aocasion deep dives with the dev leads themself on what chalenges they were facing. This went away when WotC took over and was moved to the changelog. Now the changelog isn't even up to date or contain everything they did since the last update.
not only the impact of new functionality on the old functionality but there are parts of the new PHB that are also not yet supported which is mainly what i was talking about.
If they are the same edition why does not erverything that worked for the 2014 version work for the 2024 version? that means that at least there are some difrences. though it may not be a 6th edition it does seem to be closer to 5.5 then to 5.
as for the instability issue's at least the character sheet has gone down way more since the WotC takeover then it used to do before.
Well until DDB there was no ala carte in the history of dnd. It was buy the books or homebrew. Was removal of ala carte good for publicity no, is it good for the game, IMHO yes it limits dragging things into a particular table game that don't fit. If you have a great dm then they can overcome and adapt to just about anything, IRL most DM'S (myself included) really need some limits on character options. This is where the content sharing severly hampers games for beginner DM'S ( excluded books should be global, not just compendium acess but characterbuilding tools for all books includingthe 24e "stuff"), and will ultimately chase players from the platform. This is not a video game, I repeat this is not a video game, no matter how much people (wotc) try to make it one.
Notes: You don't need to quote, you're replying directly below it.
so it seems like your issue is more with how DM's can manage what content is used in their campaigns than with a la carte? people have been asking for that for years already aswell. I don't realy see how not having a la carte limits people draging in things that don't fit. after all as the DM you can always just say no whan someone does that.
Notes: You don't need to quote, you're replying directly below it.
There's been a ton of awesome new D&D content that has been added recently and that, unfortunately, has really brought the pain points of this website to the fore. Here's just a few issues I've had.
These next two are beta (although calling a product that has seen 6 years of development beta is approaching Star Citizen levels) so some issues are understandable. However the pace of improvement has been painfully slow.
Even this forum has become borderline unusable:
Anyway, I could go on and on with specific examples but my point is this; these issues will keep getting worse the more content is added which will make Beyond less usable. Is there any sign that this will get any better? As it stands I cannot justify getting anything more on this platform.
The two ways I see it getting better is either the dev team is getting substantially larger or there's work being made on a D&D Beyond 2 for the backend with hopefully a more scalable way of doing things. Neither of which seem to be happening.
Hello,
While the platform remains an essential tool for many players and Dungeon Masters, its overall design and functionality feel outdated and in need of modernization. With a refreshed and modernized UX, it could truly become the ultimate digital tool for the community. I hope the team considers making improvements in future updates.
Absolutely Shibal, if it wasn't a useful tool I wouldn't be so frustrated that it's let to rot.
Was not aware a load of new stuff had been added, but I'm not going to make the most of it. A la carte is gone. I've gone from regular purchases of whole sections of books to literally buying 1 book, somewhat reluctantly, out of necessity and ease for a campaign that's already running. They shot themselves in the foot and still haven't realised it.
It's very antiquated, yes. I mean, I think "borderline unusable" is a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's got no particular benefits to it. Suboptimal.
I'll be honest, I think Hasbro has abandoned D&DBeyond. It was a very useful and effective tool, Hasbro mismanaged it and gutted some of it's great features. They then bungled a refresh of 5e. That led to less $$$'s coming to them from this platform. They've interpreted that as a view that this platform is intrinsically bad and unprofitable. It's being left to coast on whatever success and popularity it previously had.
What they need:
I would say less life support and more growing pains.
It's having some issues adapting to the new set, and needs time.
What's actually grown, I've seen no new features being implemented for years and old content that doesn't work has stayed that way.
Believe the majority of issues that DnDbeyond faces are caused by indecision along with trying to appease players that in my opinion only wish to exploit rather then support DnD as a whole.
Keeping in mind that Wotc acquired DnDbeyond May 18, 2022 - they would still be going through DnDbeyonds spaghetti code, fixing pre-existing bugs and the growing pains of that acquisition, especially considering the interference from individuals getting emotional over changes that are needed to get the site running smoothly.
Personally I still can't understand:
So no, I personally don't think DnDbeyond is on life support, things do seem to be getting better, however like all things there is room for improvement
Just my 2cents worth
you do realise that is almost 3 years ago right?
That's 3 years. Where there used to be frequent updates to what as fixed then it was radio silence. Nothing has been fixed since apart from critical issues.
Biggest issue I see is the massive layoffs that Hasbro went through not long ago. We probably have a much smaller team on DNDBeyond than it used to have who are pressured to prioritize work that actively brings in more money, ie. integrating new books and partnered content.
They really need two dev teams. One to work on the platform and one to work on content. From what we have seen so far, it seems pretty clear they don't have that and the devs they do have working on it are just focused on content and specifically new content.
If they refocused on fixing issues and improving user experience they would likely get more money long term from subs, but short term, they would get less money because they get a big bump with every new book release.
Welcome to corporate America I guess. Short term gains get an outsized influence on development time. Without a dedicated platform dev team nothing gets better because they are constantly pressured to maintain short term profitability.
The site has to be adjusted for the new rulesets, Maps, and Sigil.
Anywho back to my corner I go, didn't originally comment to debate each other's opinions but instead just voicing my opinion based of the title questions - either way thanks for the insights
I'm hoping that the team has been consumed by the 2024 rules update, and now that that's largely done, they can settle in to fixing the issues and providing QoL features for 2024 play.
And fixing the Combat Difficulty bug in Maps.
Do you really think DDB is a better website since wotc bought it?
If so please elaborate, for me personally it is so much worse than when I bought in. The tos and censorship are going south faster than anything I have experienced in recent times. The 24 roll out has chased several of my game night groups to card games like canasta, rummy and cribbage. Good job wotc!
So since you bought in today?
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
since dndbeyond being "better" or "worse" is subjective to the individuals needs and how they use the website, each persons opinion is just as valid as the next.
for example:
honestly have never looked at a ToS, but would assume they are no different to any website that has a forum and sold digital content...
can you clarify in what ways ToS and censorship has changed and/or how its going south within your experience compared to in the past??
these may be stupid questions but:
either way back to my corner i go - its peaceful there :)
I wouldn't say it's on life support, but dndbeyond is definitely worse now compared to when I first joined about four years ago (after the original owners had left but before WotC took over).
The site had two main appeals back then. One was the character sheets that looked nice compared to the clunky Roll20 sheets, and the automatic implementation of various features functioned well. This has remained more or less the same since - the sheets look similar apart from some minor reorganization. Some bugs have been fixed, but each new release has introduced an increasing number of new ones. Other bugs have not been fixed, the aberrant mind and clockwork soul subclasses from Tasha's were never fully implemented. Currently, stuff like the agonizing blast eldritch invocation is not working as it should. Sadly, I would not be at all surprised if it never gets fixed.
The other main appeal was the ability to buy only certain parts of books. This was fantastic from a player's perspective. For instance, whenever my character got some magic item from an official book, I'd then go to the dndbeyond marketplace to buy that particular item and add it to my sheet. And of course just buying the races/subclasses/backgrounds from a particular sourcebook was also super convenient. As we know, this feature was removed along with the bundles when they "updated" the marketplace by making it worse in practically every regard. This change alone was such a drawback, that in my books, it alone makes dndbeyond worse than it was. The only thing I've bought since is the 2024 PHB, as I actually wanted the entire book. There's been times when I've thought to myself I'll buy this thing to add to my collection, only to remember that it's no longer possible. I guess you could see the money I've thus saved as a positive, but I don't.
Another thing that's gotten clearly worse is communication from the staff. On the forums, they open a new thread for issues with each new book, but then never bother to reply or update the post. When they occasionally do fix problems with character sheets, they don't report it anywhere. Thus, players will not know when something they want to use becomes available. The site does still include some nice articles. Unfortunately, it seems like half the links on front page are nowadays just clickbaity titles taking you directly to a page in the shop rather than an actual article. As a result, I rarely bother checking them anymore.
There's very few actual improvements that I can think of. It is nice that they offer some third party books nowadays. However, because you have to buy the entire book, and because of the half-assed implementation to character sheets, I haven't actually bought any of them. This whole Sigil thing is undeniably something new (and unlike Maps, not just an inferior version of what other places offer), but it's not really something that I would personally be interested in.
Ofcourse what is worse/better with DDB is subjective.
Well until DDB there was no ala carte in the history of dnd. It was buy the books or homebrew. Was removal of ala carte good for publicity no, is it good for the game, IMHO yes it limits dragging things into a particular table game that don't fit. If you have a great dm then they can overcome and adapt to just about anything, IRL most DM'S (myself included) really need some limits on character options. This is where the content sharing severly hampers games for beginner DM'S ( excluded books should be global, not just compendium acess but characterbuilding tools for all books includingthe 24e "stuff"), and will ultimately chase players from the platform. This is not a video game, I repeat this is not a video game, no matter how much people (wotc) try to make it one.
so it seems like your issue is more with how DM's can manage what content is used in their campaigns than with a la carte? people have been asking for that for years already aswell. I don't realy see how not having a la carte limits people draging in things that don't fit. after all as the DM you can always just say no whan someone does that.