Disclaimer: I understand that the internet is unpredictable
in a very short period of time, I have had two of my on-line D&D games severely hampered by D&D Beyond being down (last night's server issues continuing into today). Inconvenient, yes, very much so. But not the end of the world.
But this got me thinking about a catastrophic failure of the site in the future. What if there is a prolonged server shut down in the future or if Beyond should go under (a prospect I think is less likely, now being a property of WOTC)?
Will all the money we have spent on media simply be gone? Or do you think, in such an event, a PDF download of purchased material be made available?
I understand that the internet has become a major aspect of the modern world, with music in the cloud and Microsoft leasing, rather than selling, software. It's a new world for some of us who learned this game long before the internet was even a dream.
You can download texts to your mobile device if you have the app. You can print and save to PDF. That's probably all we're going to get. Everything else is licensed on the condition of 'so long as the licensor supports it.'
You can download texts to your mobile device if you have the app. You can print and save to PDF. That's probably all we're going to get. Everything else is licensed on the condition of 'so long as the licensor supports it.'
Thank you. I was unaware that we could create PDF files. That is helpful indeed.
Edit: I just looked at my Player'sd hanbook and find nothing to convert it to a pdf or otherwise download or print. or did you mean this can only be done via the app?
You can download the PDF from the web site when viewing your character.
Clarifying. You can create PDFs of your character sheets. There is no download mechanism for the books themselves unless you are using the app and even then I can't speak to availability if there are site issues.
This isn't some sort of "outages happen" situation. The site's functionality, feature growth, and customer support have been in decline since the Hasbro purchase a year ago. I recommend you download everything you can, any way you can, while you still can.
You can download texts to your mobile device if you have the app. You can print and save to PDF. That's probably all we're going to get. Everything else is licensed on the condition of 'so long as the licensor supports it.'
Thank you. I was unaware that we could create PDF files. That is helpful indeed.
Edit: I just looked at my Player'sd hanbook and find nothing to convert it to a pdf or otherwise download or print. or did you mean this can only be done via the app?
Downloading happens to the app. Printing happens to character sheets (export to PDF from the 'Manage' button) or by going chapter by chapter through the compendium and hitting Print on your browser and saving as PDF. Or saving as html instead of printing, which might result in a prettier layout, I haven't tried it.
Because I'm a language pedant, I feel the need to be annoying and note that functionality hasn't been in decline, as that would mean it's actively going backwards, which it is not. Feature growth has definitely slowed, but not entirely stopped. Fixes for ongoing problems, however, seems to have entirely vanished. Overall, this whole situation amounts to product stagnation, but clearly that's not what should be happening with an actively maintained web service run by a multibillion dollar corporation.
Customer support/communications, otoh, has absolutely gone in reverse, and dramatically so. Even ignoring the whole recent kerfuffle, the terrible fulfillment of the recent Dragonlance orders was sheer incompetence, and while that's more of a WotC/Hasbro thing directly than DDB specifically, they're using DDB as their D&D communications platform, for what little that's worth. Adding in the silence of any sort of dev updates for months now, something that used to be weekly, and it sends the message that corporate management has zero interest in communicating with their customers for any reason, unless absolutely unavoidable.
Seriously, there hasn't been a dev update in eight months, and they used to be every week. That's almost exactly when the sale was finalized. You can also see when it happened because the thumbnail frames and format changed, they used to be a solid white border, now they're a thing white frame. And video output has ground down to nearly nothing that isn't a clear advertisement, where before, most stuff over a couple minutes was just people hanging out talking about D&D stuff.
So I'm agreeing with you, while providing a silly wall of text about some of the things that are pissing me off with DDB specifically.
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Disclaimer: I understand that the internet is unpredictable
in a very short period of time, I have had two of my on-line D&D games severely hampered by D&D Beyond being down (last night's server issues continuing into today). Inconvenient, yes, very much so. But not the end of the world.
But this got me thinking about a catastrophic failure of the site in the future. What if there is a prolonged server shut down in the future or if Beyond should go under (a prospect I think is less likely, now being a property of WOTC)?
Will all the money we have spent on media simply be gone? Or do you think, in such an event, a PDF download of purchased material be made available?
I understand that the internet has become a major aspect of the modern world, with music in the cloud and Microsoft leasing, rather than selling, software. It's a new world for some of us who learned this game long before the internet was even a dream.
You can download texts to your mobile device if you have the app. You can print and save to PDF. That's probably all we're going to get. Everything else is licensed on the condition of 'so long as the licensor supports it.'
Birgit | Shifter | Sorcerer | Dragonlords
Shayone | Hobgoblin | Sorcerer | Netherdeep
Thank you. I was unaware that we could create PDF files. That is helpful indeed.
Edit: I just looked at my Player'sd hanbook and find nothing to convert it to a pdf or otherwise download or print. or did you mean this can only be done via the app?
You can download the PDF from the web site when viewing your character.
Clarifying. You can create PDFs of your character sheets. There is no download mechanism for the books themselves unless you are using the app and even then I can't speak to availability if there are site issues.
This isn't some sort of "outages happen" situation. The site's functionality, feature growth, and customer support have been in decline since the Hasbro purchase a year ago. I recommend you download everything you can, any way you can, while you still can.
Downloading happens to the app. Printing happens to character sheets (export to PDF from the 'Manage' button) or by going chapter by chapter through the compendium and hitting Print on your browser and saving as PDF. Or saving as html instead of printing, which might result in a prettier layout, I haven't tried it.
Birgit | Shifter | Sorcerer | Dragonlords
Shayone | Hobgoblin | Sorcerer | Netherdeep
Because I'm a language pedant, I feel the need to be annoying and note that functionality hasn't been in decline, as that would mean it's actively going backwards, which it is not. Feature growth has definitely slowed, but not entirely stopped. Fixes for ongoing problems, however, seems to have entirely vanished. Overall, this whole situation amounts to product stagnation, but clearly that's not what should be happening with an actively maintained web service run by a multibillion dollar corporation.
Customer support/communications, otoh, has absolutely gone in reverse, and dramatically so. Even ignoring the whole recent kerfuffle, the terrible fulfillment of the recent Dragonlance orders was sheer incompetence, and while that's more of a WotC/Hasbro thing directly than DDB specifically, they're using DDB as their D&D communications platform, for what little that's worth. Adding in the silence of any sort of dev updates for months now, something that used to be weekly, and it sends the message that corporate management has zero interest in communicating with their customers for any reason, unless absolutely unavoidable.
Seriously, there hasn't been a dev update in eight months, and they used to be every week. That's almost exactly when the sale was finalized. You can also see when it happened because the thumbnail frames and format changed, they used to be a solid white border, now they're a thing white frame. And video output has ground down to nearly nothing that isn't a clear advertisement, where before, most stuff over a couple minutes was just people hanging out talking about D&D stuff.
So I'm agreeing with you, while providing a silly wall of text about some of the things that are pissing me off with DDB specifically.