So I've gotten to a point with how this website is run that I no longer feel any want to help other people answer their D&D Beyond related questions, and honestly you shouldn't answer them either.
There are certain people here who are absolutely prolific in terms of the support they've provided to the community and without them, I would wager a lot of games simply wouldn't function. Either via homebrew creator, or just going out of their way to go into the bug and support forums. This isn't to say that some staff members don't provide support, because they do. I have to imagine every single ticket that gets put in is answered. I have no reason to doubt this, and I'm not going to bad mouth that.
Why should I be doing it?
We went weeks without an answer to MMM and if the material would update or not. Dev Updates no longer get posted to the forums. The January Subscriber benefits were just updated to be a rerun of the December benefits. Was the twitch extension deleted? Its missing and any prior links are gone, but there wasn't an announcement. With every book release, there is some piece of content that isn't able to be created with the toolset and then we're never given any updates on the progress of that content. I'm not talking variant or optional rules, I'm talking RAW.
We can talk about community and how a good community helps its player base, but fact is I'm not seeing enough from the staff of this website to care anymore.
I help because I want DDB to be able to get stuff implemented. Some of that can be done with tweaks to the current system, but a lot is going to require that General Features system chassis. Which they need to get done while the current system is still running and providing a service to users. From the particular Bug & Support questions I've answered over time, I can tell that the devs are at work on that chassis, and have been putting parts of it into place, while attempting not to disrupt the current service.
I'd actually be quite happy if DDB hired me to help troubleshoot problems and find bugs in code. I have the education and work experience to do so. But I have chronic health issues and am not always able to work. (If that could possibly be accommodated, PM me, Staff!)
In the meantime, I like helping people on this site, since it's a thing I can do, with my spare time, during these uncertain times. And if it helps DDB focus more on getting the big stuff out of the way, all the better.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Helpful rewriter of Japanese->English translation and delver into software codebases (she/e/they)
Which they need to get done while the current system is still running and providing a service to users. From the particular Bug & Support questions I've answered over time, I can tell that the devs are at work on that chassis, and have been putting parts of it into place, while attempting not to disrupt the current service.
During the last Dev Update, Joe made a comment about how he took the GFS off the roadmap for one Dev Update, and then forgot to put it back, which led to it being forgotten about. Then how other things pushed the GFS back.
The second instance makes sense, the first is just bad management.
I'm just not convinced like you are, but I sure do admire your optimism. I wish I still had it.
We went weeks without an answer to MMM and if the material would update or not. Dev Updates no longer get posted to the forums. The January Subscriber benefits were just updated to be a rerun of the December benefits. Was the twitch extension deleted? Its missing and any prior links are gone, but there wasn't an announcement. With every book release, there is some piece of content that isn't able to be created with the toolset and then we're never given any updates on the progress of that content. I'm not talking variant or optional rules, I'm talking RAW.
I agree with all these as issues, particularly content that hasn't been implemented despite having been released since forever, but in my mind these aren't really customer support issues. They're product issues (a customer support issue is a problem that one or several customers have, possibly one all customers have if something broke down, but not an issue with a product as is) and communication issues, and they're things we can't help out with whether we want to or not.
Should that difference matter? That's up to you. The question I have when looking at this isn't whether I want to help out in the DDB community or not, it's more whether I even want to keep using DDB in the first place.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Should that difference matter? That's up to you. The question I have when looking at this isn't whether I want to help out in the DDB community or not, it's more whether I even want to keep using DDB in the first place.
Part of my table recently, the argument has been that while D&D Beyond has absolutely facilitated the ease of the game, when it leaves something out or it stops working? The player doesn't know they had that in the first place. That and well, I own everything here, including MMM. So I don't feel stuck so much as it's now a ease of use case.
That being said, I think both issues to me relate. I don't want to support a product in ways that don't make sense to me and part of that IS data. Every time I create a homebrew, reference a sheet, go to a rule ETC I am giving D&D Beyond/Fandom and maybe wizards depending on how the license works that data for free. At the beginning I was comfortable with that because of what the return of investment was. Lately, the return is less and less.
I don’t do it for DDB, I do it for the people who need the help and don’t get it otherwise.
Again, I admire the altruism. You were a name in my head when creating the original post who has absolutely gone out of their way to help people with Homebrew. There are others for sure, but I don't think there is anyone who stands out anywhere close to you in the Homebrew sense.
I honestly feel like D&D Beyond/Fandom take advantage of this. Why dedicate resources or payroll when they know people will do it for free?
Thank you. I appreciate the recognition. And I genuinely agree with you in principle, but it wouldn’t be DDB who would suffer, it’ll be the people asking for help.
Hey we got Battle for Beyond which only lost 3/4 of the views over its run. And tie-in dice you can buy too!
These aren't fair comparisons.
I watch a guy who does Rimworld videos called MrSamuelStreamer. He does roleplay based playthroughs of a concept. First video will trend exponentially higher in views and it tapers off.
If we want to put this into D&D context?
Black Dice Society which is on the official D&D Channel got 123k views for Ep 1, and 48k for Ep 2.
Critical Role has 4.4m views for Ep 1, 3.2m for Ep 2, 2.4 for Ep 3 of Campaign 3.
You're going to see viewship taper off in any medium. Now if you're going to say that they were focused on content creation instead of website development? Sure, I'm with that. Let's focus the argument and make sure it's pointed though.
Hey we got Battle for Beyond which only lost 3/4 of the views over its run. And tie-in dice you can buy too!
These aren't fair comparisons.
I watch a guy who does Rimworld videos called MrSamuelStreamer. He does roleplay based playthroughs of a concept. First video will trend exponentially higher in views and it tapers off.
If we want to put this into D&D context?
Black Dice Society which is on the official D&D Channel got 123k views for Ep 1, and 48k for Ep 2.
Critical Role has 4.4m views for Ep 1, 3.2m for Ep 2, 2.4 for Ep 3.
You're going to see viewship taper off in any medium. Now if you're going to say that they were focused on content creation instead of website development? Sure, I'm with that. Let's focus the argument and make sure it's pointed though.
Fair point, I'll rephrase. Hey we got Battle for Beyond and tie-in dice you can buy too!
Thank you. I appreciate the recognition. And I genuinely agree with you in principle, but it wouldn’t be DDB who would suffer, it’ll be the people asking for help.
Let's be frank.
A lot of the questions that users ask can be answered if they do the research. More of those questions could be answered if they just tried to do it themselves.
While I'm not going to sit here and call out specific instances of this, I will speak to personal experience. A lot of companies outsource public forums to mitigate customer service and questions. My ISP has forums/reddit where while they have official people there, more often than not it's non employees using good will helping others out. Does the company in question ever reward these people? Gift card, discount on service? **** no.
Game companies have this with public mods where people got so angry that it was broken they fixed it themselves. Bethesda has a reputation for this. Don't play the game on release, play it in six months when the community fixes it(See you in May 2023 Starfield).
The end user would suffer, sure, but DDB would get hit. Without the people who have spent days, if not weeks or months of their lives sitting here and answering those questions? Those people asking those questions would go "Well, guess D&D Beyond doesn't want to help me, not giving them my money."
I'm not sure if we're just trying to stir the pot due to judging D&D Beyond on your own criteria, but official support is available. They don't need to be in every thread to be resolving user issues (and they resolve a lot of them). Does anyone remember Sorce? A moderator of old? He's on this team now.
Don't get involved with Unreal Engine if this is the sentiment toward community support. It is supported almost completely by the communities instead of Epic Games.
(I would mention Unity, but unlike Unreal, Unity is also somewhat community-made.)
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I'm not sure if we're just trying to stir the pot due to judging D&D Beyond on your own criteria, but official support is available. They don't need to be in every thread to be resolving user issues (and they resolve a lot of them). Does anyone remember Sorce? A moderator of old? He's on this team now.
I said in my original post that tickets I am sure were answered. I have no experience on this and I will not speak to something I have no experience on.
Good for Sorce, not the point.
Is this post meant to stir the pot a bit? Yeah, it is. I'll freely admit that, but I also will freely admit I'm not going to be negative just for the sake of being negative. It honestly seems like the only time feedback is given to users is when these types of threads are made.
The bugs and support forum isn't to "discuss and share experiences". It's to report bugs, or what people think are bugs and get answers. We have multiple stickied threads with multiple released books that talk about bugs/non-implemented features. These are tedious to work through. A solution would be at this point would be to take every single book released prior to 2022, with all of the known bugs in those stickied threads and create one megathread with all known issues and whatever updates there are. When a new book comes out, it gets its own thread. When the next book comes out? All remaining bugs are posted in the megathread AND an update on prior bugs is given.
Would that take time? Yeah. Would it put everything in one nice neat place? Yes. That makes it easier for both sides to go "Where are the reported bugs that our users know about?" and go ok, what do we have bandwidth to tackle. It gives users an update on what things are being done.
My issue is that this website thrives on community support, and with less and less community interaction from "management", we get into the weeds on if/when/maybe something is being done or nothing is being done. That being said, standard users shouldn't be answering D&D Beyond related questions.
Don't get involved with Unreal Engine if this is the sentiment toward community support. It is supported almost completely by the communities instead of Epic Games.
(I would mention Unity, but unlike Unreal, Unity is also somewhat community-made.)
Again, these are two entirely separate things. Unreal Engine is a product that is put out to enable something, and can be licensed for a fee paid back based on how successful your project is. With paying that license, you get the entireity of the source code under the premise that you will pay that monthly and potentially royalties should you bring a product to sale. Once you have the source code, that's it. The same with Unity.
I'd like to think that this many years in, DDB would have some sort of UX analysis pointing out that that this support system is not at all intuitively accessed, especially by new DDB users. If DDB really wanted to leverage this support system it should probably be on the banner at the top of the page rather than at the bottom of the main page, literally in finer print. The fact that the Forum and Bugs and Support are literally more boldly displayed and quickly found than any path to the "entire" (why that qualifier?) Zendesk style ticketing system (speaking in my experience as a community member helping new community members find it). Le'ts not gloss over in praising an entire ticketing system what happens when an inexperienced user types help or support into the largest fonted area of non branded text, the "search everything" field. I wouldn't be surprised if a UX analysis indicates that this "entire" ticketing system is probably underutilized in comparison to the Forum. I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I'm guessing the data is probably proprietary behind the black box of DDB operational workings. Tl;dr you can say there's an entire ticketing system, but in the design of the site the entire ticket system is placed in a marginal position in comparison to the forums.
I'm not sure if we're just trying to stir the pot due to judging D&D Beyond on your own criteria, but official support is available. They don't need to be in every thread to be resolving user issues (and they resolve a lot of them). Does anyone remember Sorce? A moderator of old? He's on this team now.
I mean, I guess someone in moderator font is free to minimize a (in my estimate) valued community members' feelings as pot stirring. I agree staff doesn't have to be on everything. However, that assertion is coming on the tale end of a pretty ample thread on this board that points out the lack of actual staff's involvement on the forum in any way, involvement that would likely help DDB's image.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
So I've gotten to a point with how this website is run that I no longer feel any want to help other people answer their D&D Beyond related questions, and honestly you shouldn't answer them either.
There are certain people here who are absolutely prolific in terms of the support they've provided to the community and without them, I would wager a lot of games simply wouldn't function. Either via homebrew creator, or just going out of their way to go into the bug and support forums. This isn't to say that some staff members don't provide support, because they do. I have to imagine every single ticket that gets put in is answered. I have no reason to doubt this, and I'm not going to bad mouth that.
Why should I be doing it?
We went weeks without an answer to MMM and if the material would update or not. Dev Updates no longer get posted to the forums. The January Subscriber benefits were just updated to be a rerun of the December benefits. Was the twitch extension deleted? Its missing and any prior links are gone, but there wasn't an announcement. With every book release, there is some piece of content that isn't able to be created with the toolset and then we're never given any updates on the progress of that content. I'm not talking variant or optional rules, I'm talking RAW.
We can talk about community and how a good community helps its player base, but fact is I'm not seeing enough from the staff of this website to care anymore.
If you personally do not feel you are getting anything out of helping your fellow community members to justify doing it, don't. Practice self care and look after your own well being as you are not, and shouldn't feel, obligated to answer questions on the forum. Participate just in the conversation you do get value from.
I will sat however that advocating others don't answer questions and queries as some kind of 'punishment' for the developers not meeting a quota or schedule you deem acceptable seems a tad harsh. The issues you are highlighting, valid criticisms and complaints, have no relation to the community fielding questions from each other. The messaging on Monsters of the Multiverse has no bearing on a user asking how they enable Underdark mode. There is no connection between epic boons or supernatural gifts not yet being implemented and someone asking how they add more wizard spells to their character sheet.
Do what feels best for you and certainly don't burn yourself out trying to answer every community question. But I don't think it's fair to say no one should answer any questions because D&D Beyond isn't meeting your criteria. That just seems unfair.
What ya don’t get is, when I started here I asked my share of questions too while I was dissecting that homebrewer like the fetal pig in 10th grade. People helped me, so I’ve just been doing what I can to pay it forward, and have hopefully inspired someone else to do the same. I do it to help people like people helped me. It’s… it’s a mitzvah. Only I’m not Jewish so it’s more a Work of Mercy. Call it “giving nourishment to those who hunger or thirst for knowledge.”
What ya don’t get is, when I started here I asked my share of questions too while I was dissecting that homebrewer like the fetal pig in 10th grade. People helped me, so I’ve just been doing what I can to pay it forward, and have hopefully inspired someone else to do the same. I do it to help people like people helped me. It’s… it’s a mitzvah. Only I’m not Jewish so it’s more a Work of Mercy. Call it “giving nourishment to those who hunger or thirst for knowledge.”
Your presence helping out in the forums is a noticeable, positive, and appreciated one and it's that kind of behaviour that forms the backbone of any community
I'm not sure if we're just trying to stir the pot due to judging D&D Beyond on your own criteria, but official support is available. They don't need to be in every thread to be resolving user issues (and they resolve a lot of them). Does anyone remember Sorce? A moderator of old? He's on this team now.
I mean, I guess someone in moderator font is free to minimize a (in my estimate) valued community members' feelings as pot stirring. I agree staff doesn't have to be on everything. However, that assertion is coming on the tale end of a pretty ample thread on this board that points out the lack of actual staff's involvement on the forum in any way, involvement that would likely help DDB's image.
Yeah the fact this is the first response from a mod is a little disheartening tbh...
I feel like that valid concerns are being ignored by staff in general. I have mentioned it in pretty threads but staff rarely if ever engage in discussions anymore unless it reaches a fever pitch and they pretty much need to respond.
Also not to mention the ticket system works for minor things but major issues remain unsolved for long periods of time with no resolution window available.
I know exactly what people will say to this too:
"DDB never gives estimates on when things will be implemented"
Which is fair but what is not fair is not having things implemented for months/years and no communication on why it's not fixed... Then slowly disengaging from the community.
Then people have to build it through the terribly clunky homebrew system instead of DDB providing a temporary fix through that system themselves. The support for building the features this way is not really what the ticket system is built for so Sedge's comments really don't track...
Overall my confidence in the product has gone down considerably in the last year and I'm at the point I can hardly suggest to new DMs to invest in the service at this point.
I can only hope my experience gets better as I'm already pretty invested in the product so I have a desire to see it recover.
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So I've gotten to a point with how this website is run that I no longer feel any want to help other people answer their D&D Beyond related questions, and honestly you shouldn't answer them either.
There are certain people here who are absolutely prolific in terms of the support they've provided to the community and without them, I would wager a lot of games simply wouldn't function. Either via homebrew creator, or just going out of their way to go into the bug and support forums. This isn't to say that some staff members don't provide support, because they do. I have to imagine every single ticket that gets put in is answered. I have no reason to doubt this, and I'm not going to bad mouth that.
Why should I be doing it?
We went weeks without an answer to MMM and if the material would update or not. Dev Updates no longer get posted to the forums. The January Subscriber benefits were just updated to be a rerun of the December benefits. Was the twitch extension deleted? Its missing and any prior links are gone, but there wasn't an announcement. With every book release, there is some piece of content that isn't able to be created with the toolset and then we're never given any updates on the progress of that content. I'm not talking variant or optional rules, I'm talking RAW.
We can talk about community and how a good community helps its player base, but fact is I'm not seeing enough from the staff of this website to care anymore.
I help because I want DDB to be able to get stuff implemented. Some of that can be done with tweaks to the current system, but a lot is going to require that General Features system chassis. Which they need to get done while the current system is still running and providing a service to users. From the particular Bug & Support questions I've answered over time, I can tell that the devs are at work on that chassis, and have been putting parts of it into place, while attempting not to disrupt the current service.
I'd actually be quite happy if DDB hired me to help troubleshoot problems and find bugs in code. I have the education and work experience to do so. But I have chronic health issues and am not always able to work. (If that could possibly be accommodated, PM me, Staff!)
In the meantime, I like helping people on this site, since it's a thing I can do, with my spare time, during these uncertain times. And if it helps DDB focus more on getting the big stuff out of the way, all the better.
Helpful rewriter of Japanese->English translation and delver into software codebases (she/e/they)
During the last Dev Update, Joe made a comment about how he took the GFS off the roadmap for one Dev Update, and then forgot to put it back, which led to it being forgotten about. Then how other things pushed the GFS back.
The second instance makes sense, the first is just bad management.
I'm just not convinced like you are, but I sure do admire your optimism. I wish I still had it.
Not that I necessarily do a whole lot of it, but for me the free customer support is more of a community building effort.
I agree with all these as issues, particularly content that hasn't been implemented despite having been released since forever, but in my mind these aren't really customer support issues. They're product issues (a customer support issue is a problem that one or several customers have, possibly one all customers have if something broke down, but not an issue with a product as is) and communication issues, and they're things we can't help out with whether we want to or not.
Should that difference matter? That's up to you. The question I have when looking at this isn't whether I want to help out in the DDB community or not, it's more whether I even want to keep using DDB in the first place.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I don’t do it for DDB, I do it for the people who need the help and don’t get it otherwise.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Part of my table recently, the argument has been that while D&D Beyond has absolutely facilitated the ease of the game, when it leaves something out or it stops working? The player doesn't know they had that in the first place. That and well, I own everything here, including MMM. So I don't feel stuck so much as it's now a ease of use case.
That being said, I think both issues to me relate. I don't want to support a product in ways that don't make sense to me and part of that IS data. Every time I create a homebrew, reference a sheet, go to a rule ETC I am giving D&D Beyond/Fandom and maybe wizards depending on how the license works that data for free. At the beginning I was comfortable with that because of what the return of investment was. Lately, the return is less and less.
Again, I admire the altruism. You were a name in my head when creating the original post who has absolutely gone out of their way to help people with Homebrew. There are others for sure, but I don't think there is anyone who stands out anywhere close to you in the Homebrew sense.
I honestly feel like D&D Beyond/Fandom take advantage of this. Why dedicate resources or payroll when they know people will do it for free?
Hey we got Battle for Beyond which only lost 3/4 of the views over its run.
And tie-in dice you can buy too!
Thank you. I appreciate the recognition. And I genuinely agree with you in principle, but it wouldn’t be DDB who would suffer, it’ll be the people asking for help.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
These aren't fair comparisons.
I watch a guy who does Rimworld videos called MrSamuelStreamer. He does roleplay based playthroughs of a concept. First video will trend exponentially higher in views and it tapers off.
If we want to put this into D&D context?
Black Dice Society which is on the official D&D Channel got 123k views for Ep 1, and 48k for Ep 2.
Critical Role has 4.4m views for Ep 1, 3.2m for Ep 2, 2.4 for Ep 3 of Campaign 3.
You're going to see viewship taper off in any medium. Now if you're going to say that they were focused on content creation instead of website development? Sure, I'm with that. Let's focus the argument and make sure it's pointed though.
Fair point, I'll rephrase.
Hey we got Battle for Beyond and tie-in dice you can buy too!
Let's be frank.
A lot of the questions that users ask can be answered if they do the research. More of those questions could be answered if they just tried to do it themselves.
While I'm not going to sit here and call out specific instances of this, I will speak to personal experience. A lot of companies outsource public forums to mitigate customer service and questions. My ISP has forums/reddit where while they have official people there, more often than not it's non employees using good will helping others out. Does the company in question ever reward these people? Gift card, discount on service? **** no.
Game companies have this with public mods where people got so angry that it was broken they fixed it themselves. Bethesda has a reputation for this. Don't play the game on release, play it in six months when the community fixes it(See you in May 2023 Starfield).
The end user would suffer, sure, but DDB would get hit. Without the people who have spent days, if not weeks or months of their lives sitting here and answering those questions? Those people asking those questions would go "Well, guess D&D Beyond doesn't want to help me, not giving them my money."
The Bugs & Support forum is a community forum, much like all the others. It allows the community to discuss and share experiences.
If you're pointing to structured Staff support - there is an entire ticketing system with D&D Beyond Support Staff behind it: https://support.dndbeyond.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055233654-Contact-Information
I'm not sure if we're just trying to stir the pot due to judging D&D Beyond on your own criteria, but official support is available. They don't need to be in every thread to be resolving user issues (and they resolve a lot of them). Does anyone remember Sorce? A moderator of old? He's on this team now.
Don't get involved with Unreal Engine if this is the sentiment toward community support. It is supported almost completely by the communities instead of Epic Games.
(I would mention Unity, but unlike Unreal, Unity is also somewhat community-made.)
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I said in my original post that tickets I am sure were answered. I have no experience on this and I will not speak to something I have no experience on.
Good for Sorce, not the point.
Is this post meant to stir the pot a bit? Yeah, it is. I'll freely admit that, but I also will freely admit I'm not going to be negative just for the sake of being negative. It honestly seems like the only time feedback is given to users is when these types of threads are made.
The bugs and support forum isn't to "discuss and share experiences". It's to report bugs, or what people think are bugs and get answers. We have multiple stickied threads with multiple released books that talk about bugs/non-implemented features. These are tedious to work through. A solution would be at this point would be to take every single book released prior to 2022, with all of the known bugs in those stickied threads and create one megathread with all known issues and whatever updates there are. When a new book comes out, it gets its own thread. When the next book comes out? All remaining bugs are posted in the megathread AND an update on prior bugs is given.
Would that take time? Yeah. Would it put everything in one nice neat place? Yes. That makes it easier for both sides to go "Where are the reported bugs that our users know about?" and go ok, what do we have bandwidth to tackle. It gives users an update on what things are being done.
My issue is that this website thrives on community support, and with less and less community interaction from "management", we get into the weeds on if/when/maybe something is being done or nothing is being done. That being said, standard users shouldn't be answering D&D Beyond related questions.
Again, these are two entirely separate things. Unreal Engine is a product that is put out to enable something, and can be licensed for a fee paid back based on how successful your project is. With paying that license, you get the entireity of the source code under the premise that you will pay that monthly and potentially royalties should you bring a product to sale. Once you have the source code, that's it. The same with Unity.
We're not even in the same ballpark.
I'd like to think that this many years in, DDB would have some sort of UX analysis pointing out that that this support system is not at all intuitively accessed, especially by new DDB users. If DDB really wanted to leverage this support system it should probably be on the banner at the top of the page rather than at the bottom of the main page, literally in finer print. The fact that the Forum and Bugs and Support are literally more boldly displayed and quickly found than any path to the "entire" (why that qualifier?) Zendesk style ticketing system (speaking in my experience as a community member helping new community members find it). Le'ts not gloss over in praising an entire ticketing system what happens when an inexperienced user types help or support into the largest fonted area of non branded text, the "search everything" field. I wouldn't be surprised if a UX analysis indicates that this "entire" ticketing system is probably underutilized in comparison to the Forum. I'd be happy to be proven wrong but I'm guessing the data is probably proprietary behind the black box of DDB operational workings. Tl;dr you can say there's an entire ticketing system, but in the design of the site the entire ticket system is placed in a marginal position in comparison to the forums.
I mean, I guess someone in moderator font is free to minimize a (in my estimate) valued community members' feelings as pot stirring. I agree staff doesn't have to be on everything. However, that assertion is coming on the tale end of a pretty ample thread on this board that points out the lack of actual staff's involvement on the forum in any way, involvement that would likely help DDB's image.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If you personally do not feel you are getting anything out of helping your fellow community members to justify doing it, don't. Practice self care and look after your own well being as you are not, and shouldn't feel, obligated to answer questions on the forum. Participate just in the conversation you do get value from.
I will sat however that advocating others don't answer questions and queries as some kind of 'punishment' for the developers not meeting a quota or schedule you deem acceptable seems a tad harsh. The issues you are highlighting, valid criticisms and complaints, have no relation to the community fielding questions from each other. The messaging on Monsters of the Multiverse has no bearing on a user asking how they enable Underdark mode. There is no connection between epic boons or supernatural gifts not yet being implemented and someone asking how they add more wizard spells to their character sheet.
Do what feels best for you and certainly don't burn yourself out trying to answer every community question. But I don't think it's fair to say no one should answer any questions because D&D Beyond isn't meeting your criteria. That just seems unfair.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
What ya don’t get is, when I started here I asked my share of questions too while I was dissecting that homebrewer like the fetal pig in 10th grade. People helped me, so I’ve just been doing what I can to pay it forward, and have hopefully inspired someone else to do the same. I do it to help people like people helped me. It’s… it’s a mitzvah. Only I’m not Jewish so it’s more a Work of Mercy. Call it “giving nourishment to those who hunger or thirst for knowledge.”
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Your presence helping out in the forums is a noticeable, positive, and appreciated one and it's that kind of behaviour that forms the backbone of any community
So thank you
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
Yeah the fact this is the first response from a mod is a little disheartening tbh...
I feel like that valid concerns are being ignored by staff in general. I have mentioned it in pretty threads but staff rarely if ever engage in discussions anymore unless it reaches a fever pitch and they pretty much need to respond.
Also not to mention the ticket system works for minor things but major issues remain unsolved for long periods of time with no resolution window available.
I know exactly what people will say to this too:
"DDB never gives estimates on when things will be implemented"
Which is fair but what is not fair is not having things implemented for months/years and no communication on why it's not fixed... Then slowly disengaging from the community.
Then people have to build it through the terribly clunky homebrew system instead of DDB providing a temporary fix through that system themselves. The support for building the features this way is not really what the ticket system is built for so Sedge's comments really don't track...
Overall my confidence in the product has gone down considerably in the last year and I'm at the point I can hardly suggest to new DMs to invest in the service at this point.
I can only hope my experience gets better as I'm already pretty invested in the product so I have a desire to see it recover.