current and previous Dungeons and Dragons Members of the design team spoke together with the official D&D Beyond account to push back on a number of rumors related to the future of D&D Beyond and how One D&D surveys are conducted. Yesterday, the DnD_Shorts Twitter account shared a paraphrased email from an alleged wizards of the shore staff member who claimed that the D&D design team did not read the comment sections in the surveys. The emails even included an alleged quote from a senior designer who said he didn’t care about feedback and proceeded to disparage customer feedback. You can see a screenshot of the email (the DnD_Shorts tweet has since been deleted) below:
Several current and former members of the D&D design team were quick to respond to the rumor, stating that the D&D design team did, in fact, read the polls. Former Wizards of the Coast employee Taymoor Rehman noted who had read over half a million Unearthed Arcana survey comments during his first year on the team, while former D&D design team leader Ray Winninger stated that he personally read the survey feedback, and that One D&D’s design program was built around how and when Wizards could collect feedback. Additionally, current Wizards of the Coast employee Mackenzie De Armas provided a detailed breakdown of how feedback from survey tests is collected and used by designers.
hello royal #WotCStaff and D&D Designer here. Several UA releases are credited to me, and I have edited that content based on qualitative and quantitative survey results.
Let’s go over what goes on behind the scenes of an AU, shall we? ? https://t.co/ZY8DihQGcf
— Makenzie De Armas ✨ (@MakenzieLaneDA) January 18, 2023
DnD Shorts later retracted its comments on the One D&D Survey and published a follow-up email in which its source retracted several of its claims.
I have been in contact with the primary source I used for survey feedback. Here you will see my email and his response (fed in via a syntax paraphraser).
I will continue to share everything I have. Tomorrow you will have everything I have received. So I’m done. pic.twitter.com/GUQyTfDOBe
-DnD_Shorts (@DnD_Shorts) January 19, 2023
At the same time, the D&D Beyond Twitter account pushed back on several additional rumors about alleged changes coming to the digital platform in the future. this rumor, which appears to have been first published by DragonScribe and later confirmed by several other well-known YouTube and Twitter D&D personalities, he claimed that D&D Beyond was preparing to introduce a $30/month subscription tier, limit homebrew content for the lower tier, and introduce AI DM. DnD_Shorts specifically claimed that these initiatives were being led by Wizards of the Coast Vice President Chris Cao. In a series of tweets, the D&D Beyond specifically rejected every aspect of this rumorstating that the rumors of a $30/month subscription level were false, that no one at Wizards of the Coast was working on an AI DM system, and that homebrew content will remain freely accessible in D&D Beyond.
The speech follows a busy two weeks for Dungeons and Dragons as they try to rebuild trust after a disastrous attempt to launch a new open gaming licensewhich would have had disastrous effects on the tabletop RPG industry. While Wizards of the Coast issued a formal apology yesterday for its outreach to the OGLit seems they are still planning to “deauthorize” older versions of the OGL to prevent new content from being released under those versions, which many have said is against the spirit of the OGL and contradictory to what Wizards has said regarding it. to the OGL in the past The failed launch of OGL and the subsequent slow response led to a rapid degradation of trust between the company and fans, which helps explain why further rumors seem to be taking root so quickly in the discourse.
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