It's a new year and a new decade and we've come back from our break with some really quick, NEEDED changes.
First, we changed the descriptor on our transactions to read "D&D Beyond". As many of you know, we are owned by a larger company called Fandom and we had put this larger company as the descriptor because that's technically where the money is going, but many of you were, understandably, confused. So we've changed it to "D&D Beyond" so that way it makes sense and hopefully it'll be a little easier to look down your bank statements and see where you spent your money.
Second, we removed the device limit from free users. We previously only allowed free users to download the mobile app on 2 devices. In the background, we secretly upped it to 6 to see if users were actually hitting the limit. What we learned is that 80% of our users used 2 devices or less; even those with unlimited plans. This makes sense because most people have a phone and sometimes a tablet. 98% of our users had less than 3 devices. So we determined that this device limit was completely artificial and decided to just get rid of it. This will also make it easier when the new player app comes out and there's two apps that users can download.
Keep an eye out for more changes and exciting things in the near future.
As always, questions and comments are welcome!
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 14, 2020And AFAIK that train is already running under full steam, no stopping it now.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 18, 2020Why is the player app going to be a separate app? This makes no practical sense when you could just improve the existing app to do both. The existing app is just a compendium with terrible navigational and basically no e-reader options, long load times and this inane need to refresh the entire content every time you open it, despite it being saved to your device. Sometimes if I go to a place with slow internet it takes FOREVER to update the catalogue and I don't WANT to do that, I just want to open the damn sourcebook so I can play.
Especially a good idea since the existing app has been buggy, inefficient and basically half-forgotten / unfinished for over a year now. !!! DO NOT MAKE TWO SEPARATE APPS. FIX THE EXISTING ONE AND UPGRADE IT !!!
Releasing a truly gorgeous, smooth app with character sheet (and offline functionality) should be your NUMBER ONE priority BAR NONE. Not even the Encounter Builder should come CLOSE to this in terms of what DND Beyond could truly deliver to amaze and change DnD for millions of players.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 18, 2020Yeah no, this is the most lazy excuse. Any developer worth half their salt can fix a broken part of an app without needing to separate it into two. If they want to upgrade a feature or maintain a feature, they can do so in a single app. Google Play and Apple have supported this for over a decade.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 18, 2020As a developer who is worth my salt, worked with and learned several languages, and been working on huge monolithic apps developed by several people over time trying to do several things at the same time, I'd choose.to maintain several smaller apps over that any time. I could write several pages of all the dependency issues and code rot monolithic code can cause very quickly, not to mention size.and unnecessary complexity that.makes it close to impossible to overview, maintain, upgrade and build on, but if you're a developer worth half their salt, you know all about it, if not, then I would just bore you and you still wouldn't get it.
Meanwhile you can still access.your sheet via browsers on your phone. And in cases when you get out of service range, you find the biggest challenge of the app, which affects the character sheet but not the compendium: concurrent editing. That sole concern justifies to keep a separate app for the sheets that need it, and one for the compendium that doesn't. And it's way simpler to make the two app communicate with each other through transparent APIs than to.maintain a huge app that both does and doesn't use concurrent editing.
So, instead of one clunky app.that is prone to have issues because of its complexity, and would be a resource hog to do everything at the same time, two smaller apps that are maintainable (which means if there is an issue, it's easier and faster to fix) that needs less resources are more desirable.I
Any developers worth their salt could see that.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 18, 2020None of that makes sense. You can compartmentalize any application to simplify its workings. You don’t need to physically separate them.
The only need for an app is because people want to access dnd beyond encounter trackers outside of cell range.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 18, 2020The current app opens faster in airplane mode, syncing licenses slows things down. I’d rather have two separate apps if we can get to the information faster. Switching between two apps can be just as easy as jumping around within one app. However, presumably all the compendium info would need to be in both, which does seem inefficient. The only way you wouldn’t need compendium info in the character app is if you can’t edit your PC offline, which would suck.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 19, 2020While I understand why you're a bit curt towards me, I do happen to live in a family of developers, my father and brother both avid developers who work from home. Whilst I also agree that it would be easier from a developer's standpoint to do two separate apps, my family's ethic has always been about delivering the best possible experience to the customer. We COULD separate our systems into twice as many clients, but that would NOT make a better UX for our customers. I guess this is one of the things that sets us apart from large developers who couldn't care less if their business customers have a less-cohesive UX because they've got the sheer image to get away with cutting corners.
If the provision of a single app (a single unified UX) is possible without great difficulty, we strive to make it happen. Our company's software was designed to compartmentalize various modules within a single client (so module updates can be pushed on a per-module basis), and we develop bespoke on-demand front and back end software for the betting industry. Large customers include multinational betting shop chains who run our system both front-and-back-end. You turned this into a size-comparison contest, after all, by sharing your resume in some misguided attempt to discredit my opinion, so yeah, I'm not totally clueless on the subject as you'd think...
So yes, I repeat myself: Any developers worth their salt certainly CAN develop an app that merely contains a character sheet and a compendium, both accessible off the same unified main menu. It's not a huge ask whatsoever, and it's not an unrealistic thing to hope for. Generally speaking most of the app would need only act as a front end, GUI and cache, because the bulk of the data need be pulled from the website when a WiFi or mobile signal is available.
I really don't understand why developers (as people) are generally so... defensive? They seem to take so much as a personal affront. I kinda get the difficulty in reworking an established app to do both, but the current app could do with a total overhaul anyway because it's quite lacking, unstable and primitive. I don't choose these words to be rude, I choose them to be blunt because I don't believe in beating around the bush.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 19, 2020Also AFAIK, the plan is to have a separate character sheet app and compendium app. Your point regarding both concurrent-and-non character sheets in the same app could actually be what we get after all, and if that does turn out to be the case then it would make little sense NOT for them to include the compendium in the same app, since that has no such issues. It's just stuff you download to your device and occasionally it checks for updates.
Also, at least in the part of the UK where I live (not even the middle of nowhere), losing signal and having no access to WiFi either is actually very common, so a character sheet app that can function entirely without reception would be very, very useful. Simply giving the user access to sync settings alone would allow them some greater degree of flexibility, maybe even a manual sync button so they can manually sync the website to the app or vice-versa. Just deciding "no, you can't have that because it's a more work for us" is a viable response, but NOT the correct response if DnD Beyond's mission statement and goal, is to truly be the ultimate source of DnD tools and information...
On a previous thread I recall you likening having a separate char sheet and compendium app to Google having a separate app for mail, docs, sheets, etc. It's not the same thing at all. Some people might not care about docs or sheets and only want mail, etc. Having them combined in one app is unnecessary because the majority of users 1. Won't care about most of the features or interplay, and 2. The purpose and function of the above apps are so utterly different.
But with DnD, there's almost always interplay between the rulebooks and the character sheet. Physical games? You're sat at the table with your sheet in front of you, but you'll often reference specific rules in your PHB, right? Same thing here: Making people switch app to reference rules then switch back to their sheet app, THAT's clunky. Having them both in the same app, a little search button at the top right of your character sheet so you can quickly pull up rulings in a pop-up or sidebar, without closing the sheet? That's integrated, efficient and continuous, and potentially smooth if executed properly. The rules and sheet have a direct tie-in and function together in the D&D game. This alone is a fantastic case for why separate apps, whilst easier for the developer, is NOT easier for the end-user. And DnD Beyond are hardly backwater amateurs...
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 20, 2020Whoo!
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 24, 2020"80% of our users used 2 devices or less ... 98% of our users had less than 3 devices."
Am I to understand that many users use the app on other peoples devices?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 24, 2020Not necessarily. I have a phone and a kindle fire. Some people may have two tablets (a smaller and a larger), or a second phone.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 26, 2020Yes. Multiple people in my group stopped using DnD Beyond because they want to use the class variants UA. It’s definitely a top priority for us!
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 27, 2020If you have a phone and a kindle that means you fall into "80% of users used 2 devices or less", you are also in the "98% of users who had less than 3 devices", but the question is, what are the 18% of users who "did not use 2 devices or less" but also "had less than 3 devices"?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 27, 2020I would assume it was meant to be "3 or less devices"... which then would mean 18% used 3 mobile devices. Would that be a satisfactory answer?
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Jan 28, 2020Could be a typo, if that's what Andrew meant.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Feb 6, 2020Sure, but how does it solve the problem of locating content by page references? In my experience it doesn't. At all.
This is just one reason why I don't understand DDB's development. The BIG update for the new decade is removing a limit and changing the name of the vendor on billing?
It's sad that the release cadence is so slow and the additions so uninspired. We are expected to pay premium prices for digital versions of content most of us already own, and they have done next to NOTHING to add value or improve our experience of that content.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Feb 6, 2020Are you a DDB developer? It sounds like precisely the kind of engineering- rather than user-centered design thinking that seems to drive DDB development.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Feb 6, 2020As a user, I would prefer two apps. That way instead of installing one big software that tries to do everything, I would be able to choose what to install. On my mobile I'd like to have the compendium app, but not the character sheets - and I don't want a big app that syncs all my characters all the time on my phone where I don't want to use them, but I still want to access the compendium.
The same way as I have a separate email, doc, calendar and maps app on my phone even though they are all using my google account, and they have interactions between them - I can get a calendar event in a mail, add it to my calendar with one click, then click on the address in it to open it in the map app.
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Feb 8, 2020Hey your mobile app should have access to our characters as well as to the sources that we have purchased it would be a bit more convenient to use the mobile app instead of having to jump on the website
-
View User Profile
-
Send Message
Posted Feb 8, 2020They are working on the app for the character sheets...