Wizards of the Coast's damage control continues. In response to the greater tabletop community protesting and shifting focus in response to the leaked OGL 1.1, the major tabletop publisher has walked back several of the document's contentious elements. Shortly after the company published a formal apology to their community, WOTC employees made several social media posts, putting to rest several pieces of D&D misinformation.
WOTC and D&D misinformation
Shortly after the release of WOTC's formal apology to the community, the D&D Beyond Twitter account posted a thread. In the thread, the developers stated that several rumors about the future of the D&D Beyond platform were false. Specifically, they confirmed that a $30 a month master tier was not happening, the use of homebrew content would not be paywalled, and that the company was not working on AI-controlled DMs. The account even linked to the official D&D Discord server, stating they love their community of DMs.
The biggest source of clarification was how WOTC handles fan feedback for D&D. As part of their apology, the company stated that elements of the new OGL would be made public and that they would be accepting feedback. They framed this process as similar to how they receive feedback for D&D with their Unearthed Arcana and OneD&D playtest materials. However, several TTRPG YouTubers, all of which claimed to have WOTC inside sources, alleged that the company disregards fan feedback. According to these allegations, the company conducts these surveys, uses them to determine broad product satisfaction, then disregards personal feedback when it comes to design. This meant that this could happen to something as vital to the tabletop industry's future regarding the new OGL.
Not only does the D&D Beyond twitter thread claim they have a team that reads such feedback, several developers support this claim. Mackenzie De Armas, one of the writers of Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep as well as the DM for the Galesong Actual Play event, spoke openly about how feedback from UA have helped shaped the design of certain D&D books. She even mentions the reason why Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos didn't have subclasses was because the majority of the community didn't want them. D&D's Lead Designer, Jeremy Crawford, corroborated this, stating that fan feedback had been the beating heart of the community ever since the development of D&D 5e. An external source, former D&D VP Ryan Wininger, also stated that the leaked claims were false. According to him, both quantitative and written feedback was taken into account regarding UA. He even states that the entire OneD&D design schedule was built around how and when the company could collect feedback.
