HI!

Holy cow, it’s been busy. The changes that we’ve rolled out for season 8 have been released to the wild, and some people love them, some people hate them, and some are just too busy rolling dice and sharing stories to get too far into the final docs (lookin’ at you, Dragon*Con and PAX attendees).

I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about the feedback that we’ve received over the last four weeks, how it’s been processed, and what we’re doing with it going forward. Many, MANY of you have taken time out of your days to share your input by sending emails, private messages, tweets, or flagging us down when you see us out in public. The response has been pretty awesome, and I want to stress that we very much appreciate every word that is sent across.

So, let’s get started:

In our main Facebook group, we had: 909 approved membership requests

542 approved new posts

20,904 comments

18,628 active users (of 26,923)

1 post with over 1,000 comments

5 additional posts with over 500 comments each In our DM Discussions Facebook group, we had: 461 approved membership requests

640 approved new posts

24,542 comments

9,948 active users (of 14,286)

3 posts with over 1,000 comments each

4 additional posts with over 500 comments each

The above bullets do not reflect the number of pending posts that were not approved. Many people submitted variations or even direct copies of identical questions. In the latter half of the month, we ended up not approving roughly 300 pending posts across both groups as we funneled those insights into a private internal document for our review. Some folks have expressed frustration with this, specifically in that we won’t be sharing those questions or posts – and to be frank, we won’t. We didn’t ask for permission to post those insights and comments in a different format than the users originally intended, and it’s not a responsible way to handle what is ostensibly someone else’s data. That said, the messages were duplicates and there was already a LOT of chatter in our groups that covered the same topics.

And that’s just the ‘public’ side of things. I can’t speak directly to the number of private messages (Facebook PMs, twitter DMs, and so on) that the other admins got, but I rounded out August averaging 103 Adventurers League-centric private messages a day, personally.

Another interesting bit of engagement data is email activity. Thanks to the email form, consistent outreach, and so on, we received nearly 3,000 non-spam emails during the month.

So what do we do with all of this? Well, we devoured it. It wasn’t pretty; it was a bit like watching Slimer in Ghostbusters – and it left us with 6 very tired admins at the end of the month. Lysa and I were on the forefront of the feedback and the rest of the team chipped in as their time allowed. I think at one point I might have fallen asleep on my keyboard, and I’m pretty sure I completely lost at least one day in August somewhere (I’m gonna blame that on my “day job”, though, where some ancient servers on the office network kept trying to self-immolate). Please believe us when we say that we wanted to respond to every tag, inclusion, email, comment, and post there simply wasn’t enough time. For example, if we spent just a few seconds responding to each message that came up, we’d be using a massive number of hours per admin of personal time in August simply doing that instead of working on implementing changes that needed to be implemented, maintaining our standard workloads, doing our day jobs, or spending time with our families and taking care of ourselves (and let’s face it: if we suggest to players and DMs that they should be taking care of themselves, we probably should, too).

Whew.

And from here?

From here the future looks pretty awesome. Dragon Heist is gonna be hitting WPN shelves on Friday the 7th, and will be available everywhere shortly after that. The first wave of Dragon Heist DDAL adventures will be available pretty quickly, a whole slew of Guild Adept content is on the way, we have 2 (count ’em, TWO!) upcoming streams to talk about, Eberron in three weeks, and Dungeon of the Mad Mage to prep for in November.

Oh man.

So if you stayed through this wall of text, thank you, I really appreciate you all taking the time to glance behind the screen with me. Since Lysa’s not here to threaten me with her confetti cannon, I’m giving everyone one point of Inspiration for their next game, and I’m unlocking the Folding Boat (a rare magic item on table C) for all D&D Adventurers League players for the remainder of September 2018.

Thanks for reading!