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D&D Beyond No Longer Supporting Unearthed Arcana
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8365299" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Honestly, DNDBeyond providing yet another reason to cancel my sub (which I did) and stop buying products from them.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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...).</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8365299, member: 18"] 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. [/QUOTE]
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