WotC WotC Removes Digital Content Team Credits From D&D Beyond

According to Faith Elisabeth Lilley, who was on the digital content team at Wizards of the Coast, the contributor credits for the team have been removed from DDB.

The team was responsible for content feedback and the implementation of book content on the online platform. While it had been indicated to them that they would not be included in the credits of the physical books for space reasons, WotC apparently agreed to include them in the online credits.

It appears that those credits have now been removed.

I just discovered that I have been removed from book credits on D&D Beyond for books I worked on while at Wizards of the Coast.

Background:

While at Wizards (so after D&D Beyond was purchased) - with numerous books, my digital content team and I worked directly with the book team on the content, reading through rules drafts, suggesting changes, giving ideas, and catching issues. We had a full database of the content and understood exactly how it interacted.

Given that we were contributing to the content in the books, I felt it reasonable to request that team be added to the credits, but was informed the credits section was already too crowded with the number of people involved and many of the marketing team had already been dropped from credits. I felt strongly that anyone actually contributing to what is in the printed book should be credited though, so we agreed a compromise, that the team would be added to the credits page on D&D Beyond only, as there is no issue with "not enough space" on a web page.

I've added screenshots here that I had for some of the books.

At some point recently, those credits pages have been edited to remove the credits for me and the content team. Nobody reached out to let me know - it just happened at some point, and I only just noticed.

We've even been removed from the digital-only releases, that only released on D&D Beyond, such as the Spelljammer Academy drops.

I'm not angry or upset, just yet again, really disappointed, as somehow I expected better.

EDIT TO ADD MORE CONTEXT

It's not just getting the books online. I worked with Kyle & Dan to improve the overall book process from ideation to delivery across all mediums (you should have seen the huge process charts I built out...)

The lead designers would send over the rules for each new rulebook and we'd go through it, give feedback, highlight potential balance issues, look at new rules/design that was difficult to implement digitally and suggest tweaks to improve it etc etc. We even had ideas for new content that was then included in the book.

We'd go through the whole book in detail, catching inconsistencies and miscalculations, and I'm proud to say that we dramatically reduced the need for clarifications or errata on those books.

I'm not saying anyone on the design or book team was careless - far from it, they're consummate professionals - I am just illustrating the role my team and I had in contributing to the content, quality & success of the physical books, let alone the digital versions.

We should have been in the credits section of the physical printed book. We were part of the creative process. That was something we were actively discussing when I was informed I was being laid off.

Adding the team to the credits pages just on D&D Beyond was, as I mentioned above, a compromise while we figured things out.

My team were fully credited on the Cortex: Prime and Tales of Xadia books when D&D Beyond was still part of Fandom, before the Wizards acquisition.

In fact for those books we made sure to credit the entire digital development team, including developers, community managers and so forth - everyone who helped make the book successful.

I know that Wizards has hundreds of people involved and previously hit issues with the number of people in credits for D&D books, so pulled back from crediting some roles.

Would it be so bad to have to dedicate extra space in a book to the people whose contributions made the book successful?

I really don't think it would.

 

[LordEntrails]

You are posting in a thread about that team - it is right there in the title. Why should you have a problem with what you are doing being tied back to the actual topic of the thread?

Oh, because you personally have never allowed a thread to veer anywhere close to being off topic? Or posted anything in any thread here on ENWorld that is even remotely tangential?

Besides, industry standard practice for giving contributor credit certainly IS related to this thread. It may not be the OP or the title, but by ENWorld standards, as enforced by the mods, my question certainly is appropriate for this thread.

I know you don't like me personally, you have made that clear time and again. But perhaps it would be better if we just did not engage with each other except when we have something positive to add to the other's views.

Which is it - are you trying to educate yourself, or are you trying to show something? If you are uneducated, you should not be trying to show things, should you?

That's one of the most unreasonable assertions I've ever heard. Just because I don't know a subject doesn't mean I can't point out obvious logical fallacies in opinions about a topic. It's one very well documented and esteemed methods for learning a topic critically rather than just taking someone else's opinion as fact or inviolate.

Then just ask that.

Really? I asked over and over again. It wasn't until Desert Gled finally gave an answer that did not have glaring logical flaws in it that I stopped asking. And perhaps you noticed my genuine appreciation to them for doing so? Or do you so color every post I make that you can never even consider I'm as genuine as I say I am?

Trying to pin people to specific answers to select hypotheticals looks extremely aggressive, while not actually revealing underlying principles. The underlying principles will be found in large collections of real-world examples, not in speculative situations these people haven't actually been in.

The hypotheticals are there for a simple reason, to point out the flaws in the poor and inadequate answers people had been providing up to the point of Desert's response. They are there because they help illustrate a point. When you ask someone to educate you and they give you answer that has flaws in it, it is aggressive to point out those flaws?

Actually you know, in some cultures it is. But in many cultures it is not. Yes there are flaws in both approaches, but I think ENWorld states that open and honest discussion is valued. Not shutting down discussion on a topic because someone doesn't understand the reasoning. As you like to say, you don't have to reply to someone if you don't want to.

 

[Hussar]

Remember - the case at hand is not one person who contributed 15 minutes to one project. It is an entire Digital Design team, with credits removed from multiple products. If they had an entire team that wasn't doing work... why was that team still there?

But, again, let's be careful about what we're talking about.

That the Digital Design team obviously worked on the D&D Beyond platform is without question. Obviously. But, that's not what these credits are for.

These credits are for the physical, print book. The claim is that the Digital Design team contributed to the physical, print book. No one is ever saying that the Digital Design team wasn't doing work. The question is, did that team do work on the physical, printed book, before that book was printed? Or, did they take the finished product and then bring it to the D&D Beyond platform?
/edit to add:

Or, what @Staffan said, which is much, MUCH better put than how I was very poorly trying to communicate.

 

[Vaalingrade]

What is the purpose of the line of attack trying to figure out when one gets to cut off a contributor out of credits? Unless you're actively planning on screwing over a creative working under you and then pretending it was justified, there's limited value to this information.

 

[FrogReaver]

What is the purpose of the line of attack trying to figure out when one gets to cut off a contributor out of credits? Unless you're actively planning on screwing over a creative working under you and then pretending it was justified, there's limited value to this information.

To understand how the industry works and what common expectations those involved have around credits.

That said, one common theme I see repeatedly reported is that there is no industry standard. Some companies do X and some Y in regards to credits.

 

[Hussar]

To understand how the industry works and what common expectations those involved have around credits.

That said, one common theme I see repeatedly reported is that there is no industry standard. Some companies do X and some Y in regards to credits.

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. There is no standard here. And repeatedly asking for one seems rather strange.

 

[Iosue]

But, again, let's be careful about what we're talking about.

That the Digital Design team obviously worked on the D&D Beyond platform is without question. Obviously. But, that's not what these credits are for.

These credits are for the physical, print book. The claim is that the Digital Design team contributed to the physical, print book. No one is ever saying that the Digital Design team wasn't doing work. The question is, did that team do work on the physical, printed book, before that book was printed? Or, did they take the finished product and then bring it to the D&D Beyond platform?
/edit to add:

Or, what @Staffan said, which is much, MUCH better put than how I was very poorly trying to communicate.

This is in the very first post on the subject:

The lead designers would send over the rules for each new rulebook and we'd go through it, give feedback, highlight potential balance issues, look at new rules/design that was difficult to implement digitally and suggest tweaks to improve it etc etc. We even had ideas for new content that was then included in the book.

We'd go through the whole book in detail, catching inconsistencies and miscalculations, and I'm proud to say that we dramatically reduced the need for clarifications or errata on those books.

Note that she's not talking about the DDB implementation when she says "book," she's referring to the content of books not yet finalized.

 

[Nikosandros]

What is a bit weird to me is that, as I mentioned above, in several products they credit the Organized Play team and, also, they do credit the whole D&D Studio, but surely not everyone in it has contributed more to every specific book than the DDB team?

 

[Staffan]

These credits are for the physical, print book. The claim is that the Digital Design team contributed to the physical, print book. No one is ever saying that the Digital Design team wasn't doing work. The question is, did that team do work on the physical, printed book, before that book was printed? Or, did they take the finished product and then bring it to the D&D Beyond platform?

According to Lilley, they did. I do not know how much they did, but I have no reason to disbelieve her. And from what she says, they certainly seem to have done more than what I did for a playtest credit in Munchkin d20 (IIRC, a suggestion for how to translate the ability dwarfs have in Munchkin to carry more than one Big item into d20).

 

[LordEntrails]

That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. There is no standard here. And repeatedly asking for one seems rather strange.

Strange? You do know this is the first page where anyone has actually said "There is no standard." Since all of you in the know have taken over 450 posts to get to the point where we outsiders could figure out what was so obvious to the insiders, maybe it wasn't so obvious?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That said, one common theme I see repeatedly reported is that there is no industry standard. Some companies do X and some Y in regards to credits.

This is true. Generally the smaller the industry, the less standardization on things like credits. However, I think it's pretty fair to say broader credits are generally better than narrower ones. And it can be especially bad if some people who didn't work on a thing are credited just because they're part of X studio, but people who actually did work on it are not credited.

Credits are important for people's careers, and anyone who think it's "weird" for people to want to get credited is, at best, not understanding the situation on a basic level, and at worst, intentionally speaking in bad faith.

It's worth noting videogames used to have no standardization but have increasingly been moving towards standardization over the decades, especially recently. There are still companies, particularly Japanese ones, which can be extremely bad about it. Nintendo are absolute wankers, for example, because they're completely inconsistent. Like, if a game is translated, they'll credit some of the translation teams, and just ignore that others even exist. A couple of publishers have also been extremely bad in terms of removing people who worked significantly on games, but weren't still there when the game released - this is such bad form that it's lead to significant backlash and generally companies avoid that now.