D&D 5E Dungeonscape no more?

[TDarien]

As a person with little to no experience coding, I'll have to defer to your expertise. What I'm questioning, is how they didn't even have (by all accounts of those who had beta access) an even functional product at this point. It looks as though the developers tried to do too much at one time and both companies got burned by not having a working product several months after the players handbook released.

They did have a functional product. They've had a functional product, by all accounts ready for release, for over a month, but they've been unable to release it because WotC wouldn't agree to a pricing model.

 

[Mistwell]

It was called Master Tools...That has been bugging me all day!

http://ww2.wizards.com/Company/Misc/Index.aspx?doc=pr_20020521a

I really liked that original CD that was included with the 3e PHB. I liked the music, I liked the graphics, etc.. It was buggy and just a beta, and they eventually scrapped all that interface music and graphics for something more simple, but I always liked it.

 

[SilverfireSage]

They did have a functional product. They've had a functional product, by all accounts ready for release, for over a month, but they've been unable to release it because WotC wouldn't agree to a pricing model.

Reading the comments on this thread, the general consensus seems to be they've had far less than a functional product.

 

[Jackal2100]

Reading the comments on this thread, the general consensus seems to be they've had far less than a functional product.

He's talking about the IOS version, which was months ahead of the android and web versions.

 

[lkj]

I believe the confusion here is that the iOS app-- which had a very small private beta-- was apparently in pretty good shape. And the company said it was ready for release.

The web and android apps were much further behind, and therefore arguably not entirely functional.

AD

 

[TDarien]

Reading the comments on this thread, the general consensus seems to be they've had far less than a functional product.

The people in this thread are speaking of the public web beta, which I'm guessing amounted to about 15-20% of Trapdoor's total efforts.

The iOS version was reportedly much further along. And ready for submission to Apple over a month ago.

 

[Wolfskin]

Reading the comments on this thread, the general consensus seems to be they've had far less than a functional product.

Yeah, I don't want to be mean to the folks at Trapdoor because they're cool people who seem to genuinely love the hobby, but after a few hours of beta testing the web version it was clear to me the app was way too green to be released for a while. For DS to become a product that's good enough to ask money in return was going to require months of development. I don't know if WotC made the right call here, but let's try not to be too simplistic and take a "EV0L CORP HATES US GAMERS" stance.

 

[Dausuul]

As a person with little to no experience coding, I'll have to defer to your expertise. What I'm questioning, is how they didn't even have (by all accounts of those who had beta access) an even functional product at this point.

Well, just because you can build an enterprise-scale product doesn't mean you will. The rate of failure in IT projects is very, very high, and the bigger the project the higher the chance of failure. There are a whole lot of things that can go wrong. I stressed the need for good management because this is very often what's lacking, but there's plenty of room for the devs to screw up, too.

It looks as though the developers tried to do too much at one time and both companies got burned by not having a working product several months after the players handbook released.

That is indeed exactly what it looks like. We call that "scope creep," and it's the devil whispering in the ears of developers and managers alike. Management wants more features to show to the higher-ups and advertise to the end user. Developers want to add bells and whistles and do cool fun stuff instead of workaday, "Today I will build a login page" tasks. And every new feature adds complexity and slows down the project.

It's one of the reasons a prototype is so valuable: It gives you a working design, a set of features that you can legitimately call complete. When someone proposes a new feature, it's easier to say, "No, we're not going to build that yet. It's nice but it's not essential. Put it off until we have our scaled-up prototype working."

 

[Dannager]

So what's interesting to me about this whole situation is that the Trapdoor team (namely, Hobo) is pushing a pretty consistent message that we'll hear more about their plans when they're able to share it. This is what I would expect to hear from a group that was aware of a coming license and believes that their product can exist in that licensing environment.

It's not the only explanation, obviously, but for those who hold to the theory that WotC is planning on releasing a (relatively open) third-party license, this fits that theory's framework.

 

[Bugleyman]

No offense intended, but I doubt your claim. You've been very vocal on this issue for many months now, and already said back in August you were not buying it unless they offered PDFs. You already vented this rage, prior to this news, so I am doubting your claim that you've made any new decision based on this. You already said you would stick with Pathfinder two months ago...and now you sound like you're just trying to get double mileage from that threat.

Believe what you like...I canceled my Amazon pre-order of the DMG today.

And if you read my posts you'll see that, despite my annoyance about the PDF situation, I've always maintain that I was buying the core three in hard back. In fact, said that as recently as yesterday. In fact, this will be the first DMG that has ever been published that I will not be buying. But there are always other customers, right? I mean look at how well 4E turned out...