Forum Dice Rolling Temporarily Disabled

Quote from Kaemgen >>

     Please do not appreciate my patience.  I have none.  Not for your inability to keep the forums up.  I mean pre-pubescent kids ran much more stable message boards back in the days of dial up internet connections, Wargames style modems where you actually had to place your receiver into the cups to connect phone and computer.  40 years later are we saying message board technology is the only technology that has actively regressed??

     And let's talk about:

In the interest of minimizing impact to users playing D&D over the weekend, we have decided to disabled the Forums temporarily while we continue to investigate the issue.

     So you are telling us to minimize the impact on some you totally eliminated the ability of those players who play via Play By Post on your message boards to play at all?  Let's not let those guys be hassled at all, it's much better to take any and all participation away from this other group of people??  Are there just not enough play by post players for Beyond to care about or what?  Because play by post is all I do.  And if I cannot reliably do that here then I have absolutely no reason to purchase any more anything on Beyond, nor to continue having a Master Tier subscription.  

     Don't get me wrong, I generally like this place and find it very handy...  But not if I cannot play the games I am playing in.  And you all tacking the message boards down anytime you randomly get an itch does eliminate my ability to play.  Eliminates the usefulness of all the money I spent on books and such here.  Eliminates the need for me to have a subscription because I cannot play without message boards.  So please explain why it seems Beyond is totally indifferent to my needs and those like me in favor of others?

 
It is well known by anyone who has been paying attention that D&D Beyond is built on top of a pile of spaghetti code with memory issues.  The evidence for this is plentiful - they had to limit note taking in campaigns to save memory; they recently confirmed they removed piecemeal purchases because the system was struggling to track all those micro-purchases; they have said that they cannot fix the old encounter builder because of the bad code underlying it; they are literally rebuilding the entire site infrastructure (and keeping us very well informed of its goings on) because the site has foundational problems.  It is hardly surprising substantial use of the dice rolling system is breaking the site - that is exactly the kind of issue that takes a lot of processing when in a significant aggregate. 

None of this is Wizards’ fault.  They did not build D&D Beyond - they bought it and its bad infrastructure from someone who got it from someone else. And, the simple reality, is that Wizards now has only three options - they can have the entire site break (which isn’t a good option), they can shut down the forums when there is a problem (which is what they have been doing), or they can shut off the part that is having a problem. There is only one right answer that “minimizes” the harm.

Those who use the site for play by post have my sympathy. Truly, this entire situation sucks.  But your anger is misplaced - unless LaTiaJacquise used to be a programmer for Curse, it is kind of unfair for you to take out your frustration on her and the rest of the Beyond team who are playing the hand they’ve been dealt while they try to overhaul the unstable system. 

Quote from Caerwyn_Glyndwr >>

None of this is Wizards’ fault.  They did not build D&D Beyond - they bought it and its bad infrastructure from someone who got it from someone else. And, the simple reality, is that Wizards now has only three options - they can have the entire site break (which isn’t a good option), they can shut down the forums when there is a problem (which is what they have been doing), or they can shut off the part that is having a problem. There is only one right answer that “minimizes” the harm.

Those who use the site for play by post have my sympathy. Truly, this entire situation sucks.  But your anger is misplaced - unless LaTiaJacquise used to be a programmer for Curse, it is kind of unfair for you to take out your frustration on her and the rest of the Beyond team who are playing the hand they’ve been dealt while they try to overhaul the unstable system. 

 While I agree that there is probably little they can do now, it is entirely Wizards fault that the site is still in this state.  They've known ever since they bought it that it needs rebuilding, but they refused to do anything with it until the start of this year.  They couldn't even be bothered to fix it enough to support the 2024 release properly. The fact that it's still a broken mess is due to WotC\DnDBeyonds neglect of the site, and it's entirely reasonable for people to be angry about that.

Even now, we have no idea how long they expect the rebuild to take, or what the scope of it is.  Will it include fixing the forums?  Considering how staff ignore the forums in favour of Reddit anyway I'd be surprised if they even keep them, let alone fix them.

Quote from Caerwyn_Glyndwr >>

they are literally rebuilding the entire site infrastructure (and keeping us very well informed of its goings on) because the site has foundational problems. 

 Are they keeping us "well informed"?  I've seen the character builder preview, but that was more to do with the design than the underlying code.  Otherwise they don't seem to have said much since it was announced.  They've certainly dodged the question of whether 2014 rules will be supported afterwards, which seems like an important thing to know.