Love the site and functionality, would LOVE for you to move to a monthly release cycle with a nice update of features etc along the lines of the way Microsoft does for Visual Studio Code. The piece meal releases where you add a single item here and there just makes users feel a bit strung along. As a developer I like when users can have an idea of when features might drop, not necessarily an exact date, or the exact featueres, but knowing every month there will be a great list of new features and fixes etc. It also has great benefits for the entire dev team, from planning sprints, to feature planning as a whole. It'd be nice to just have a known schedule.
I'd rather have things when they are done. Not wait for the end of the month for a feature that was completed weeks prior. If it is something that will improve my weekly game I'd rather have it "fresh out of the oven" instead of waiting. This platform does not fit well with the develop and wait strategy because so much still needs to be developed.
Secondly since they don't release timelines they have no deadline externally for when things are done. Moving to a forced release time would make for either worse features that are half baked at release and don't get fixed for a month, or constantly missed deadlines.
Third - Microsoft is not some gold standard just because they do it does not make it work for other softwares.
I'd rather have things when they are done. Not wait for the end of the month for a feature that was completed weeks prior. If it is something that will improve my weekly game I'd rather have it "fresh out of the oven" instead of waiting. This platform does not fit well with the develop and wait strategy because so much still needs to be developed.
Secondly since they don't release timelines they have no deadline externally for when things are done. Moving to a forced release time would make for either worse features that are half baked at release and don't get fixed for a month, or constantly missed deadlines.
Third - Microsoft is not some gold standard just because they do it does not make it work for other softwares.
Yes.
The laboriously slow feature release schedule is hard to understand and excruciatingly frustrating. Remember, this product has been out for 4 years. Look at it. The player app specifically, but both apps in general and the website lack basic functionality that any reasonable person would expect. And if you look at the feature request tracker, there are features that have been marked as "planned" for 4 years.
I'd rather have things when they are done. Not wait for the end of the month for a feature that was completed weeks prior. If it is something that will improve my weekly game I'd rather have it "fresh out of the oven" instead of waiting. This platform does not fit well with the develop and wait strategy because so much still needs to be developed.
Secondly since they don't release timelines they have no deadline externally for when things are done. Moving to a forced release time would make for either worse features that are half baked at release and don't get fixed for a month, or constantly missed deadlines.
Third - Microsoft is not some gold standard just because they do it does not make it work for other softwares.
Yes.
The laboriously slow feature release schedule is hard to understand and excruciatingly frustrating. Remember, this product has been out for 4 years. Look at it. The player app specifically, but both apps in general and the website lack basic functionality that any reasonable person would expect. And if you look at the feature request tracker, there are features that have been marked as "planned" for 4 years.
The OP's request is reasonable.
It isn't
You are not even remotely involved in DDB staff so you have no idea of their work load, or inner works to claim slow release.
the app was release THIS YEAR and people are annoyed with it but it is doing frankly EXACTLY what it was made for - accessing the character while offline. The app has been out for 7 months so by their standard we should have only gotten 7 feature updates, but we have gotten 9.
Forcing a company to follow another, frankly gargauntum in size business as an example of how a much, MUCH, smaller development team is quite frankly out of tune for anything. DDB is not transparent and they are not without fault. But I would rather have my character sheet gain access to new functions WHENEVER THEY ARE READY instead of possibly 12 times a year.
I would really suck if I couldn't properly roll a spell on DDB and they made a fix that would allow me but because the followed the OP I would have to WAIT 4 WEEKS (aka ~4 sessions of play) to get access to this update even though it was ready on an earlier day. Why would anyone want to force changes to only occur up to 12 times a year instead of when they are ready for use.
Would really suck if we had to wait for the dice roller to be completely built before we got it no? Does it suck that the dice roller is not fully built, sure. But would I have rather waited until all functionality was in place BEFORE we got to at least just roll a d20 on this site. Hell no.
Not asking for full feature completion, just release schedule consistency. Hotfixes of course don’t wait. The devs probably use VS code and get what I’m saying.
So currently, everytime you visit the site, you think there is a possibility of an update. That's because there is a chance, because releases are made inconsistently, at any time. This leads you to checking the updates page over and over. This results in repeated feelings of disappointment, maybe even frustration, as you see there is nothing new.
Now let's say it's a monthly release cycle. You visit the site and see the last time an update was made was on, let's say the 23rd. Then you know that it's not until 'roughly' the next 23rd to expect anything new. You cut out the repeated hope-disappointment-frustration experience.
That's just on the customer side. There are benefits to the dev team in having a known consistent release schedule as well.
Not asking for full feature completion, just release schedule consistency. Hotfixes of course don’t wait. The devs probably use VS code and get what I’m saying.
At this point all they are doing is jumping from hot fix to hot fix as quickly as possible. They cannot even guarantee that anything will be done on a monthly basis. There may be months on end with no updates whatsoever and then two updates in two consecutive weeks.
There are benefits to the dev team in having a known consistent release schedule as well.
Apart from the fact you cannot guarantee everything they want to do can be done in a month. What if something takes around 3 months of work and the whole dev team has to work on it to get it out as fast as possible. Are they meant to not release anything for months? Are they meant to release half finished products?
What happens when the release is in 3 days and they haven't tested something yet, but everything else is done, and it takes 2 weeks to test? Are they going to not release it that month? Release a potentially buggy product? Not stick to the schedule?
Setting fixed dates for updates may be nice for a customer, but it's not so good from a dev stand point
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"The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren't in charge. You're the DM, and you are in charge of the game" - Dungeon Masters Guide
I understand there are some things that require an outside time to be set. For example book releases. But content releases can be handled differently from feature releases.
I gave the model of Visual Studio Code as an example. Another model is the two person team who handles Foundry VTT. They are exceptional in both the communication and their consistency. When you lack consistency you can provide communication, and vice versa.
Let's not discard the idea simply because of the worry that not enough items will be included in a release.
I would hazard a guess that the features are setup as Epics in Jira, tickets are created to try and define tasks that can be managed in a sprint, with proper descriptions, story points, and acceptance criteria defined. The team has a general feel of velocity and know in a rough sense the amount of story points achievable per sprint. And so on. It's a very imprecise science (see a recent Soft skills podcast on the topic). I know there is a whole layer of feature flag management that I''m not aware of but that's an aside. Maybe monthly releases are just not possible given team structure, outside requirements, and/or management thinking. It is only a suggestion.
My job is in development (specifically the release side of things) and I can assure you that the only thing monthly release schedules do is create trouble for a few reasons:
It creates a bottleneck where everything that was completed in the last month gets pushed out the door at once. Releases to production environments can cause strain and thus if you don't have the bandwidth to do all of them, some will get pushed.
It's a nightmare for issue debugging. It's always a possibility a live release will go wrong in some fashion and if you're lucky the issue will be exclusively limited to the area the feature exists in and thus can be quickly identified. However, if you release three things that all affect the same service and one of them breaks, you have to dig through all three to see which one is to blame and revert that, if you're lucky. If you're not, you have to revert all of them, either because you can't see which one is at fault, or reverting one can cause the others to break.
It causes unnecessary delays for the end user. What benefit is a feature that was completed on the 3rd of the month being released on the 14th when it's good to go? Those 11 days of holding doesn't mean extra testing or tweaks because if that testing or tweaks was needed in the first place, the feature wouldn't be penned for the 3rd in the first place.
I get that it's nice to have a regular day of the month when you can look forward to new hotness if it's ready, but ultimately this would just be delaying completed features for the sake of novelty in their release. What you could do is check the change log on a regular basis to find out what released since the last time you checked.
Definitely NO on a Monthly Timeline. It is counterproductive in every situation I have encountered it. I understand why an Operating System company does it... it makes it so a lot of enterprise users can do testing before releasing it to their general pool. I don't think there is any sort of "Enterprise D&D Player"... it's not like we're doing Character Sheet testing two days before we go into the big game because it is going to affect some systems and may cause outages. That is just bizarre thinking. And if D&D ever gets to a point where there ARE Enterprise users... I'm still against it... because "Ready Player One".
Worth noting: Microsoft is a hundred-gorillian dollar company that employs thirty percent of the human beings alive on Earth right now. DDB is a relatively small business with maybe thirty codemonkeys. Microsoft can afford to do a Monthly Release Cadence where they force features through every month, on the month, because they can devote ten or twenty thousand people per line of code to ensuring that gets done. DDB has no such luxury.
Well I think I will put the suggestion to rest. While I do think items stated against the idea could be further considered, I don't think it's a productive course. I look forward, as always, to the wonderful things you do to make our lives as players and dm's that much better. Thank you taking time to think about the idea.
So currently, everytime you visit the site, you think there is a possibility of an update. That's because there is a chance, because releases are made inconsistently, at any time. This leads you to checking the updates page over and over.
I don't ever check the updates page.
If something starts working, or works better, then I think "oh, an improvement".
As a dev as well, I gotta agree with Davyd. It has implications for their entire workflow. We are reluctant to even tell our own product team exactly when we can have something ready, because we could find ourselves stuck in QA for much longer than anticipated and pushing out half-baked code is simply not an option. In my own job, sticking to regular releases would have a significant negative impact on my stress levels and overall quality of life. Probably to the point that I'd look for somewhere else to work.
Again, it's not about what is in the release. There is no requirement to put anything in a release that isn't ready or stipulate or communicate that some feature has to be done in time for a release. It's just having a consistent, knowable time when a release will occur.
No pressure is implied by having this. There is already sprint pressure, is it done yet pressure, etc. Is it more pressure to go to a store every time you need something vs making a weekly trip?
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Love the site and functionality, would LOVE for you to move to a monthly release cycle with a nice update of features etc along the lines of the way Microsoft does for Visual Studio Code. The piece meal releases where you add a single item here and there just makes users feel a bit strung along. As a developer I like when users can have an idea of when features might drop, not necessarily an exact date, or the exact featueres, but knowing every month there will be a great list of new features and fixes etc. It also has great benefits for the entire dev team, from planning sprints, to feature planning as a whole. It'd be nice to just have a known schedule.
No.
I'd rather have things when they are done. Not wait for the end of the month for a feature that was completed weeks prior. If it is something that will improve my weekly game I'd rather have it "fresh out of the oven" instead of waiting. This platform does not fit well with the develop and wait strategy because so much still needs to be developed.
Secondly since they don't release timelines they have no deadline externally for when things are done. Moving to a forced release time would make for either worse features that are half baked at release and don't get fixed for a month, or constantly missed deadlines.
Third - Microsoft is not some gold standard just because they do it does not make it work for other softwares.
Yes.
The laboriously slow feature release schedule is hard to understand and excruciatingly frustrating. Remember, this product has been out for 4 years. Look at it. The player app specifically, but both apps in general and the website lack basic functionality that any reasonable person would expect. And if you look at the feature request tracker, there are features that have been marked as "planned" for 4 years.
The OP's request is reasonable.
It isn't
You are not even remotely involved in DDB staff so you have no idea of their work load, or inner works to claim slow release.
the app was release THIS YEAR and people are annoyed with it but it is doing frankly EXACTLY what it was made for - accessing the character while offline. The app has been out for 7 months so by their standard we should have only gotten 7 feature updates, but we have gotten 9.
Forcing a company to follow another, frankly gargauntum in size business as an example of how a much, MUCH, smaller development team is quite frankly out of tune for anything. DDB is not transparent and they are not without fault. But I would rather have my character sheet gain access to new functions WHENEVER THEY ARE READY instead of possibly 12 times a year.
I would really suck if I couldn't properly roll a spell on DDB and they made a fix that would allow me but because the followed the OP I would have to WAIT 4 WEEKS (aka ~4 sessions of play) to get access to this update even though it was ready on an earlier day. Why would anyone want to force changes to only occur up to 12 times a year instead of when they are ready for use.
Would really suck if we had to wait for the dice roller to be completely built before we got it no? Does it suck that the dice roller is not fully built, sure. But would I have rather waited until all functionality was in place BEFORE we got to at least just roll a d20 on this site. Hell no.
Not asking for full feature completion, just release schedule consistency. Hotfixes of course don’t wait. The devs probably use VS code and get what I’m saying.
I don't feel strung along at all.
It is nice to start your weekly game and find some small improvement on the web site :)
So currently, everytime you visit the site, you think there is a possibility of an update. That's because there is a chance, because releases are made inconsistently, at any time. This leads you to checking the updates page over and over. This results in repeated feelings of disappointment, maybe even frustration, as you see there is nothing new.
Now let's say it's a monthly release cycle. You visit the site and see the last time an update was made was on, let's say the 23rd. Then you know that it's not until 'roughly' the next 23rd to expect anything new. You cut out the repeated hope-disappointment-frustration experience.
That's just on the customer side. There are benefits to the dev team in having a known consistent release schedule as well.
At this point all they are doing is jumping from hot fix to hot fix as quickly as possible. They cannot even guarantee that anything will be done on a monthly basis. There may be months on end with no updates whatsoever and then two updates in two consecutive weeks.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
Apart from the fact you cannot guarantee everything they want to do can be done in a month. What if something takes around 3 months of work and the whole dev team has to work on it to get it out as fast as possible. Are they meant to not release anything for months? Are they meant to release half finished products?
What happens when the release is in 3 days and they haven't tested something yet, but everything else is done, and it takes 2 weeks to test? Are they going to not release it that month? Release a potentially buggy product? Not stick to the schedule?
Setting fixed dates for updates may be nice for a customer, but it's not so good from a dev stand point
"The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren't in charge. You're the DM, and you are in charge of the game" - Dungeon Masters Guide
I understand there are some things that require an outside time to be set. For example book releases. But content releases can be handled differently from feature releases.
I gave the model of Visual Studio Code as an example. Another model is the two person team who handles Foundry VTT. They are exceptional in both the communication and their consistency. When you lack consistency you can provide communication, and vice versa.
Let's not discard the idea simply because of the worry that not enough items will be included in a release.
I would hazard a guess that the features are setup as Epics in Jira, tickets are created to try and define tasks that can be managed in a sprint, with proper descriptions, story points, and acceptance criteria defined. The team has a general feel of velocity and know in a rough sense the amount of story points achievable per sprint. And so on. It's a very imprecise science (see a recent Soft skills podcast on the topic). I know there is a whole layer of feature flag management that I''m not aware of but that's an aside. Maybe monthly releases are just not possible given team structure, outside requirements, and/or management thinking. It is only a suggestion.
My job is in development (specifically the release side of things) and I can assure you that the only thing monthly release schedules do is create trouble for a few reasons:
I get that it's nice to have a regular day of the month when you can look forward to new hotness if it's ready, but ultimately this would just be delaying completed features for the sake of novelty in their release. What you could do is check the change log on a regular basis to find out what released since the last time you checked.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
Definitely NO on a Monthly Timeline. It is counterproductive in every situation I have encountered it. I understand why an Operating System company does it... it makes it so a lot of enterprise users can do testing before releasing it to their general pool. I don't think there is any sort of "Enterprise D&D Player"... it's not like we're doing Character Sheet testing two days before we go into the big game because it is going to affect some systems and may cause outages. That is just bizarre thinking. And if D&D ever gets to a point where there ARE Enterprise users... I'm still against it... because "Ready Player One".
Worth noting: Microsoft is a hundred-gorillian dollar company that employs thirty percent of the human beings alive on Earth right now. DDB is a relatively small business with maybe thirty codemonkeys. Microsoft can afford to do a Monthly Release Cadence where they force features through every month, on the month, because they can devote ten or twenty thousand people per line of code to ensuring that gets done. DDB has no such luxury.
Please do not contact or message me.
Well I think I will put the suggestion to rest. While I do think items stated against the idea could be further considered, I don't think it's a productive course. I look forward, as always, to the wonderful things you do to make our lives as players and dm's that much better. Thank you taking time to think about the idea.
I don't ever check the updates page.
If something starts working, or works better, then I think "oh, an improvement".
As a dev as well, I gotta agree with Davyd. It has implications for their entire workflow. We are reluctant to even tell our own product team exactly when we can have something ready, because we could find ourselves stuck in QA for much longer than anticipated and pushing out half-baked code is simply not an option. In my own job, sticking to regular releases would have a significant negative impact on my stress levels and overall quality of life. Probably to the point that I'd look for somewhere else to work.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Again, it's not about what is in the release. There is no requirement to put anything in a release that isn't ready or stipulate or communicate that some feature has to be done in time for a release. It's just having a consistent, knowable time when a release will occur.
What would the point be, then? If Release Day can come around without there being any sort of release, why have the time pressure in the first place?
Please do not contact or message me.
No pressure is implied by having this. There is already sprint pressure, is it done yet pressure, etc. Is it more pressure to go to a store every time you need something vs making a weekly trip?