D&D 5E D&D Beyond No Longer Supporting Unearthed Arcana

Announced on their livestream Dev Update, D&D Beyond will be refocusing development on new features and content, citing an inability to keep up with Unearned Arcana in a timely fashion.

We at D&D Beyond regret to inform you that we will no longer be supporting Unearthed Arcana content on our platform.

While we have loved giving users the opportunity to use new Unearthed Arcana playtest material offered by Wizards of the Coast on D&D Beyond, there are a multitude of factors that have made it difficult for us to do so in a way that presents the content the way it was intended, and in a timely way that does not divert our development resources.

[News] The Future of Unearthed Arcana & DDB - News & Announcements - D&D Beyond General - D&D Beyond Forums - D&D Beyond

We at D&D Beyond regret to inform you that we will no longer be supporting Unearthed Arcana content on our platform. While we have loved giving use...

www.dndbeyond.com

 

[Yaarel]

For certain things, including a race, the custom character tools at DnDBeyond are amazing.

For many UAs, one can probably still use DnDBeyond. And it is worth learning what the tools can do.

 

[cbwjm]

This betrays some ignorance of what they're doing, not to mention the fact that wizards has put out a bunch of content that works completely differently from past content in the last year. Your expectations are entirely unreasonable.

Yeah, the experimental mechanics must take up a fair amount of time to implement. The strixhaven subclasses would have taken an age to implement, I'd have thought.

 

[pukunui]

Yeah, the experimental mechanics must take up a fair amount of time to implement. The strixhaven subclasses would have taken an age to implement, I'd have thought.

Yeah, and when they say WotC abandon them almost right away, that was probably the last straw. No point investing time and money into implementing something that could end up dead on arrival.

 

[Plaguescarred]

This will heavily impact future campaigns, but very little on my current one. I certainly can understand why though.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yeah, the experimental mechanics must take up a fair amount of time to implement. The strixhaven subclasses would have taken an age to implement, I'd have thought.

You would have to treat each one as a separate subclass for each of the classes it could be applied to.

 

[thundershot]

That’s fine, I guess…. Let’s just get Sidekicks done and we’ll call it even.

 

[Bolares]

UA is very experimental adn ephemerate. Excluding some users that really love an UA option their relevance fades very quickly. So it was probably a heavy amount of work, for something users would use for very little time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Honestly, DNDBeyond providing yet another reason to cancel my sub (which I did) and stop buying products from them.

It should not be this hard for them to implement content. They screwed up with their original design spec in a really ludicrous way (too focused on the MTXes I think). Then they've been sold repeatedly (unclear if this is because they're a good asset but a bad part of a brand package or what), and that seems to have resulted in them drastically under-resourcing the people developing the actual features Beyond needs, in favour of putting money towards developing features it doesn't yet have and which are also unlikely to attract people.

I think you guys are being too forgiving by a mile with the "Oh but UA stuff is hard and doesn't last!". No. Most of it is just data-entry stuff that could be done extremely cheaply, and the problem isn't that the UA stuff doesn't last, it's that Beyond's back-end is so incredibly badly-designed and was designed in the complete opposite of a future-proof way, that it means they simply can't implement a lot of this stuff, stuff which, from a software dev perspective (I work with stuff like this), should be relatively trivial.

The big issue remains the Beyond continues to under-resource the actual development of the back end in favour of fantasy features like the VTT or the pointless glowing MTX dice.

They make the incredibly crappy and frankly shameful suggestion that players should manually implement the content, and only share it with friends. This is trash. Yeah I got an opinion on this. This whole attitude and suggestion they have here is utter trash. Instead of some data-entry person they hire doing this (or very low-end dev) once, for everyone, taking say, a few hours to a few workdays, they want every single group who want one PC to use one subclass or w/e to take maybe 2x that time (because they're less experienced with the system, and don't even have access to some of the stuff the inside people do). A few dozen man hours becomes thousands. Whilst we pay them for the privilege. And like, whilst once you get good at the system it isn't too bad, I've done this myself (with various bits of content), and it's not something that's going to come naturally to most people.

They're also completely inconsistent on their policy of "you should not publish content you are not the original author of", and intentionally inconsistent I should say. If something is from a 3PP, and you put it on Beyond, it'll typically be completely fine. If it's from WotC, even if it's UA or deprecated, even if you re-write it to remove copyrighted material, it's likely to get taken down. So it's a fake policy.

And let's be real - they seem to have hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of subscribers, and their rates are not minuscule. And that's before books, MTXes, and so on. They have the money to do this all right, but something is causing them not to do that.

The most likely explanation is that the current owners are simply taking all the profit and doing something else with it, rather than re-investing any of it at all to make the product better. It's not uncommon - Vivendi did it with Blizzard for example (literally using the profits from WoW to profit up failing and ill-advised investments in aging French power plants...).

Literally the only sympathy I have for DDB here is that WotC seem to be planning their own DDB (presumably with blackjack and hookers, to quote the immortal Bender), which must be demoralizing. But this underinvestment started a long, long time ago (more or less as soon as Twitch sold them), so I don't think that's the actual cause.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If it was just new feats and spells, I might agree with you, but as lkj points out above, Unearthed Arcana sometimes includes experimental mechanics that are very different from the 5e ruleset, like the new Strixhaven subclasses. It can take a lot of programming effort and time behind the scenes to support complex differences in game processes. And after all that, the new rules might end up being rejected or dramatically changed for publication. At that point, D&D Beyond has spent a lot of time and money creating functions that are not mainstream.

This is a pretty big misunderstanding of how products like DDB should work.

If you're sane, you essentially (and yes, I am dumbing this down a bit) build the building blocks you need, then you arrange them in the ways you need. And you have a team who can quickly add features, and those are unlikely to be wasted, because they tend to be possible to reuse later.

I work with three products somewhat similar to DDB and they all have a very different attitude and approach. All of them are aimed a professionals who are obviously less tolerant of bad implementations than gamers, but that's not really an excuse at all, if anything it's the opposite.

You say "Just spells and Feats would be fine", but no, actually you're demonstrably wrong. DDB have shown that they can't handle that. They still haven't implemented incredibly basic/trivial stuff (from a technical perspective) like the Supernatural Gifts from Theros, which are, to all intents and purposes, Feats (indeed, you can drop yours and get a Feat). Why haven't they done this? Because as they've actually admitted before (some of it in since-deleted threads IIRC), they mishandled their design of the backend, didn't allow for anything new, conceptually, to be added to D&D, and then have not had the resources to actually implement this stuff.

What's particularly striking is that they've also avoided cheap "brute force" approaches (i.e. putting stuff in, in a format that isn't final but will work for now). That can indicate one of three things - firstly, completely incompetent management - you can't rule it out! Secondly, it can mean that the actual proper solution is just around the corner - i.e. 3-6 months away or less. That's demonstrably not the case. So we can rule that out (though again, we can't rule out delusional managers believing it was). Thirdly, extreme under-resourcing, which means even the minimal budget to basically data-entry this stuff (which they can do, hence them telling us to do it) isn't available.

And why haven't they had the resources? Not because it's hard - it isn't. It's because they've taken their developers (and no, this is not like gaming where devs are ultra-specialized) and put them on projects like making glowing dice to sell to people, or working on a VTT that's seen apparently zero progress but they've constantly claimed to have a bunch of devs on, and so on.

 

[TwoSix]

They make the incredibly crappy and frankly shameful suggestion that players should manually implement the content, and only share it with friends. This is trash. Yeah I got an opinion on this. This whole attitude and suggestion they have here is utter trash. Instead of some data-entry person they hire doing this (or very low-end dev) once, for everyone, taking say, a few hours to a few workdays, they want every single group who want one PC to use one subclass or w/e to take maybe 2x that time (because they're less experienced with the system, and don't even have access to some of the stuff the inside people do). A few dozen man hours becomes thousands. Whilst we pay them for the privilege. And like, whilst once you get good at the system it isn't too bad, I've done this myself (with various bits of content), and it's not something that's going to come naturally to most people.

Agreed. Making a customer-friendly front-end facing character builder isn't trivial, but neither is it extraordinarily complex. I mean, look at something like Pathbuilder 2e, which is a very robust character builder for a system that has a much increased amount of complexity compared to 5e. And that's just one main guy running a Patreon!