I think the two issues are connected at the core anyhow. If they were not "selling" WOTC material, and instead simply removed the filtering system and charged a reasonable monthly fee for use of the site, all subclasses, spells, feats, etc, in tact, then coding things like the character generator would be far easier to write and manage, reducing overhead for the web site by not having to pay programmers more for writing in and debugging the filters and limitations they've applied for "not having that book". Alternatively, if they charged less for the e-books, they'd likely sell more of them and make more money in the long run IMO, negating your minimum required income point. People are far more likely to impulse purchase a $10 e-book to gain access to something on the site than if it costs $30. Having been acquired by BHI with 315 million unique visitors each month across 250,000 fan powered communities with 30 million pages of content that get 30 billion page views per year, 8 million registered users and is the official digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons, and have their hands in the film, television, music, gaming and hospitality industries, it seems they should be able to resolve a filtering issue such as this in a timely manner, potentially by changing how they operate their system in the first place and switching to a subscription only system and removing the filters entirely.
The more content I have purchased over time, the more having a filter for owned (and not owned) content would be a huge benefit for the monster and spell listings.
I will no longer be purchasing content on DDB because having some, but not all, of the content makes using the content I already own frustrating.
I just checked and there are 31 listed sources to filter results when creating an encounter. Thirty one sources. I think I own ten or more, but can't remember them all. That means I need to not filter by source in case I forgot one, and then I get to play the game of needing to read the name of the creature and the small text below with the source to make sure I don't end up clicking and seeing "You don't own this" which I have to do because why add a creature that I don't have to the encounter?
More content is great, but the more content that comes out the worse the experience is for anyone who isn't buying everything. Even sources aren't the best way to filter because can't you buy individual monsters from a book?
Hiding unowned content is already a feature that exists already during character creation without needing to select a filter option!
Where it needs to exist is any time you have filters for creatures, spells, equipment. Even if it was part of the Advanced search like with the sources it would be useful to narrow down on a search, although my preference would be to have it be one of the basic search options like name or challenge rating.
Again, the frustration of not having this feature only gets worse over time.
Actually I take that back, there is some kind of filter! Although.. to be picky, it would be great if it was clearly more visible what was owned than a small line of text.
I also had this question about filtering out unowned results - I’m mostly interested in this for the encounter builder. At a minimum, showing results for owned content first would be awesome
I'm late to this, but I realize now this isn't an issue on DDB's end, it's intentional. Of course there's filters for selecting out content, but in order to do that you need to open an additional page and navigate to your owned content, and the cross reference that to select only the ones you owned. The "saved filters" option also conveniently doesn't work for me either. But I believe this is by design, because DDB wants you to constantly be bombarded with spells monsters and items you don't own, in hopes to lure you into purchasing something. It's disappointing and I hope I'm wrong, but I don't believe we'll ever get this feature.
I too would love this as a feature. It is incredibly irritating to try to put together an encounter and find half of the monsters unavailable, only after opening the monster.
Adding my voice to the choir. This is definitely a solvable problem, and I can only assume that the reason why it has not been solved is revenue.
I hope that with the recent merger/sale this can be prioritised. If you want people to use the encounter builder, which I am, and continue to purchase items from the store, which I have, then please do not build your system in a way that within half an hour I have begun to regret not only using the encounter builder but my entire set of recent purchases.
lol. So here it is, more or less 2 and 2/3 years later, still no easy way to filter or tell which books items are from in the lists. I'm guessing that not even a Blue post to acknowledge it even.
Maybe it really is too complex for them to figure out how to implement "IsOwned", or it's just more profitable to drive people up to the "buy now" page?
To piggy back off of this, why is the "featured" adventures not alphabetized? It's really frustrating when week to week the position of the module that I'm running is in a completely different place on the list.
If I'm looking for the poisoned condition, I literally never want to see the Rick & Morty answer. That would be a big step forward. If we could simply and easily filter out all the content we don't own, I'd be happy.
I do feel at this point DND Beyond has no desire to add this as it throws in your face all the things you need to purchase any time you decide to actually use the content you've already purchased. I do not feel this is substantially a difficult change as they already query whether or not every item you search is owned. It undoubtedly would make the life of their user base substantially better.
Over a year later and not even a reply from DNDBeyond.... This does not bode well.
It is absolutely dreadful to navigate owned \ not owned content and more often than not I am finding myself redirected to buy a book I don't own.
Sorry but I don't have a spare $25 right now for [insert book here]. Can I rather just see what I do own and work with that? Thanks.
I think the two issues are connected at the core anyhow. If they were not "selling" WOTC material, and instead simply removed the filtering system and charged a reasonable monthly fee for use of the site, all subclasses, spells, feats, etc, in tact, then coding things like the character generator would be far easier to write and manage, reducing overhead for the web site by not having to pay programmers more for writing in and debugging the filters and limitations they've applied for "not having that book". Alternatively, if they charged less for the e-books, they'd likely sell more of them and make more money in the long run IMO, negating your minimum required income point. People are far more likely to impulse purchase a $10 e-book to gain access to something on the site than if it costs $30. Having been acquired by BHI with 315 million unique visitors each month across 250,000 fan powered communities with 30 million pages of content that get 30 billion page views per year, 8 million registered users and is the official digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons, and have their hands in the film, television, music, gaming and hospitality industries, it seems they should be able to resolve a filtering issue such as this in a timely manner, potentially by changing how they operate their system in the first place and switching to a subscription only system and removing the filters entirely.
Too legit to crit!
I will no longer be purchasing content on DDB because having some, but not all, of the content makes using the content I already own frustrating.
I just checked and there are 31 listed sources to filter results when creating an encounter. Thirty one sources. I think I own ten or more, but can't remember them all. That means I need to not filter by source in case I forgot one, and then I get to play the game of needing to read the name of the creature and the small text below with the source to make sure I don't end up clicking and seeing "You don't own this" which I have to do because why add a creature that I don't have to the encounter?
More content is great, but the more content that comes out the worse the experience is for anyone who isn't buying everything. Even sources aren't the best way to filter because can't you buy individual monsters from a book?
Hiding unowned content is already a feature that exists already during character creation without needing to select a filter option!
Where it needs to exist is any time you have filters for creatures, spells, equipment. Even if it was part of the Advanced search like with the sources it would be useful to narrow down on a search, although my preference would be to have it be one of the basic search options like name or challenge rating.
Again, the frustration of not having this feature only gets worse over time.
So.... there is a sale on content. Here I go to find what I own, so I can pick and choose what I don't. And I can't.
Does DND Beyond not realize how this hurts their sales?
Actually I take that back, there is some kind of filter! Although.. to be picky, it would be great if it was clearly more visible what was owned than a small line of text.
I also had this question about filtering out unowned results - I’m mostly interested in this for the encounter builder. At a minimum, showing results for owned content first would be awesome
Totally agree. I had this thought popping up countless times when I was scouring the site.
I'm late to this, but I realize now this isn't an issue on DDB's end, it's intentional. Of course there's filters for selecting out content, but in order to do that you need to open an additional page and navigate to your owned content, and the cross reference that to select only the ones you owned. The "saved filters" option also conveniently doesn't work for me either. But I believe this is by design, because DDB wants you to constantly be bombarded with spells monsters and items you don't own, in hopes to lure you into purchasing something. It's disappointing and I hope I'm wrong, but I don't believe we'll ever get this feature.
I don't think that was ever in question.
I too would love this as a feature. It is incredibly irritating to try to put together an encounter and find half of the monsters unavailable, only after opening the monster.
Adding my voice to the choir. This is definitely a solvable problem, and I can only assume that the reason why it has not been solved is revenue.
I hope that with the recent merger/sale this can be prioritised. If you want people to use the encounter builder, which I am, and continue to purchase items from the store, which I have, then please do not build your system in a way that within half an hour I have begun to regret not only using the encounter builder but my entire set of recent purchases.
lol. So here it is, more or less 2 and 2/3 years later, still no easy way to filter or tell which books items are from in the lists. I'm guessing that not even a Blue post to acknowledge it even.
Maybe it really is too complex for them to figure out how to implement "IsOwned", or it's just more profitable to drive people up to the "buy now" page?
2.5 years later, and we are still waiting on this simple feature or even ANY improvement to the search/filter functions
They clearly have a way to track ownership since it knows whether to show you the content or not when you click on it.
Fairly new to dnd beyond and purchased a bunch of content, not having this feature makes using this painful when it shouldn't be.
I can't upvote this enough, it's getting more and more frustrating.
To piggy back off of this, why is the "featured" adventures not alphabetized? It's really frustrating when week to week the position of the module that I'm running is in a completely different place on the list.
If I'm looking for the poisoned condition, I literally never want to see the Rick & Morty answer. That would be a big step forward. If we could simply and easily filter out all the content we don't own, I'd be happy.
it's insane this hasn't been implemented.
I do feel at this point DND Beyond has no desire to add this as it throws in your face all the things you need to purchase any time you decide to actually use the content you've already purchased. I do not feel this is substantially a difficult change as they already query whether or not every item you search is owned. It undoubtedly would make the life of their user base substantially better.