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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 8365592" data-attributes="member: 58197">I'm not surprised they quit supporting UA. A week's notice to turn those things around is a rough deadline to hit, and it's not like they were getting paid for it.That said... you can get a (small, dim) window into the underlying structure of D&amp;D Beyond by using their homebrew content creator, which lets you get a sense of how they are representing all this stuff behind the scenes. Monsters aren't too bad, but races, feats, and subclasses are a hideous mess. It's very clear that they just kept bolting on new options as the need arose, without ever stepping back to consider the larger design. Sometimes I think I can actually hear it screaming &quot;Refactor me! For the love of God, refactor me!&quot;This does not mean the DDB developers were or are bad at their jobs. They could not possibly have accounted for all the interactions when they were building the data layer, and the market won't wait around for you to design the perfect product. Comes a point when you've just got to slap duct tape on the broken bits and ship the damn thing. Technical debt is like financial debt; you often need to take on a bunch of it to get a project off the ground.But if you don't pay down your tech debt eventually, the interest will slowly crush you. And I think that's happening to DDB. So many of their features remain in a half-assed state, years after release, while new half-assed features get cranked out.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 8365592, member: 58197"] I'm not surprised they quit supporting UA. A week's notice to turn those things around is a rough deadline to hit, and it's not like they were getting paid for it. That said... you can get a (small, dim) window into the underlying structure of D&D Beyond by using their homebrew content creator, which lets you get a sense of how they are representing all this stuff behind the scenes. Monsters aren't too bad, but races, feats, and subclasses are a hideous mess. It's very clear that they just kept bolting on new options as the need arose, without ever stepping back to consider the larger design. Sometimes I think I can actually hear it screaming "Refactor me! For the love of God, refactor me!" This does not mean the DDB developers were or are bad at their jobs. They could not possibly have accounted for all the interactions when they were building the data layer, and the market won't wait around for you to design the perfect product. Comes a point when you've just got to slap duct tape on the broken bits and ship the damn thing. Technical debt is like financial debt; you often need to take on a bunch of it to get a project off the ground. But if you don't pay down your tech debt eventually, the interest will slowly crush you. And I think that's happening to DDB. So many of their features remain in a half-assed state, years after release, while new half-assed features get cranked out. [/QUOTE]

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