Roll20 is losing people because of the bugs in the last month

Anyone else tried of not being able to play with your group?  For those of us that earn a living being a DM this has been a horrible month.  How hard is it to keep the site up and running?  I've lost two groups now and they are looking for a more stable place to play, it makes me sad...

Same here. I love Roll20, but just mentioning it online, even on the Roll20 reddit, just gets you a horde of people saying "switch to Foundry, it's a thousand times better!" It's pretty sad, because Roll20 was the best at one point, but now every major update basically breaks the game and the staff no longer communicates much with the actual users anymore...

Jeremiah N. said: ... and the staff no longer communicates much with the actual users anymore... Don't say that, Bunny just freaked and threatened to delete critical posts in the UDL thread.

Jeremiah N. said: Same here. I love Roll20, but just mentioning it online, even on the Roll20 reddit, just gets you a horde of people saying "switch to Foundry, it's a thousand times better!" Reddit (for Roll20 anyway) is pretty worthless.  There are people there that don't even believe you when you tell them how to set up tokens.  I think I'm pretty much done bothering with visiting that subreddit due to it being (with some notable exceptions) "the blind leading the blind".  Except that some of them are really just wearing blindfolds and refuse to take them off. I don't know how things will work out as we continue towards the changeover with lighting, the sheet framework updates, etc.  All I know is that I didn't experience any of the issues people have had with sheets (and for some of them, I have no idea why my experience is different).  The only one I could duplicate was not being able to see content of a character when the character sheet was set to "None".  I have made copies of 2 of my games, converted them to UDL, and have had no problems running nightvision (avoiding the black tint) and explorer mode (and I have no idea why I have no problems while others do).  I am currently playing in a game using UDL, and running 2 with that system, and none of the players have had game breaking issues.  There are a couple people that have issues, but they always do (poor computers and internet service) no matter the lighting system.  They haven't had any more issues with UDL than with LDL. A couple of the games I play in are on Friday and Saturday evening.  Recently, I haven't experienced any issues with lag, though a couple I was playing with did, which means that wasn't a Roll20 problem, but something along the line of communication for those couple people. From my own experience, it is pretty hard to say the sky is falling.  That may change if I start experiencing issues others aren't.  But... so far that just simply hasn't happened.

I think its more that the bugs/stability are the straw that broke the camels back ...... If it were just the bugs, I think people would live with it for the moment if and only if the following happened: - there was clear and honest feedback from roll20, with regular updates on whats going on - UDL was left on the devs server until bugs were sorted - token update feedback from the dev server was listened to before going live - character sheet updates were left on the dev server and tested before going live - they did their own quality control on the updates and tested them before going live - concentrated on stability rather then providing updated achievement awards - actually responded to and made some progress to the numerous feature suggestions that have been sitting there unanswered for 6 years - hired TheAaron , Keithcurtis , Gold , Andreas , Brian C & Kraynic , as they are the ones that have provided incredible support to everyone in the last 6 months and without them my guess is that 100's more would have already left. - give those that provided detailed Quality control responses on UDL 6 to a year of free Pro subscription for all their free work.

I'm looking into the Foundry.

Roll20 hasn't figured out the concept of QA yet.  Quality Assurance.  It's a red line on the profit/loss sheet.  Yes you have to pay people to test.  They've relied on the goodwill of the community to go in and test and this is what you get.  Hire QA Roll20.  Bite the bullet.   You have bunch of young programmers.  Called junior programmers in my world.  They are coding questionable interfaces, such as Manage Audio which has so many issues I can't list right now.  They are introducing bugs, and you have no QA to find it or raise the problem or the deficiency and resolve before going live.  Bad practice and it will cost you.  Hire the QA folks.  

Is Roll20 actually losing people? No, they really and demonstrably are not. Some folks are vocally leaving, sure. But Roll20 has empirically exploded this year in terms of membership. My experience has pretty much mirrored Kraynic's. Minor issues. Nothing remotely game-breaking. If anything (last week aside with outages and a few character sheet issues), I think it's been remarkably stable and lag-free compared to say, three years ago. I know this goes against the "hot mess" dialog I hear bandied about, but it's my honest experience. Are there issues? Sure. But LDL has issues too, and people don't remember how much AFoW was vilified when it came out. AFoW was a klunky implementation to begin with, and I never used it. Should UDL have stayed on the Dev server? In theory, sure, but if past experience is any guide, the dev server only goes so far. A few people log on and report things and then the reports dry up. There is no pressure, no imperative to improve. Do they need better QA? Absolutely. And they need to respond to criticism when they specifically ask for it. They have taken down a few things recently  that had disastrous rollouts, and those things should have been more throughly tested. When they ask for feedback, they should respond to it. The token interface update is an example of asking for user experience and then letting the field lie fallow. November since feedback was asked for and received, with nothing addressed. That being said, I'm here for the long haul. It's simply not as bad as reported. I haven't had to abandon a session in years. No game has been ruined by an update that could not be simply dealt with. I know other people have reported different experiences; I can only go by my own.

Ravenknight said: Jeremiah N. said: ... and the staff no longer communicates much with the actual users anymore... Don't say that, Bunny just freaked and threatened to delete critical posts in the UDL thread. Not a fair statement. She said that off-topic posts would be removed. Just in the interest of updating flks who may not regularly read the feedback thread: Bunny  said: Hey all, As a reminder this forum thread is specifically for UDL 1.0 Updates, Bugs, and Feedback. I appreciate the honesty (yes, even the negativity), but we need to keep the conversation here specifically to reporting bugs, giving new feedback, and UDL updates.  Posts that are off-topic are going to be deleted  once their sentiment has been recorded internally. Off-topic posts or nonconstructive negativity is more likely to discourage folx that WANT to post a concern, fear, or issue they've encountered from doing so. I want to ensure that every person that wishes to engage in this thread is able to. If you have posted in this forum, if you read this forum, I assume you care about Dynamic Lighting. Same. So let's make sure that we give  everyone  that cares about it the space to air out their thoughts and feedback to make UDL the best it possibly can be. I hardly call that "freaked", but an honest attempt to keep the thread focused and constructive.

@Keith, I'm all in for Roll20 also, but you are making excuses for them.  Better than 3 years ago doesn't mean anything.  They have rested on volunteer testing for years now and they are making enough money, more than enough now especially over the last few years, to have their own testing corp.  Many of these bugs should never leave the door.  Period.

keithcurtis said: Ravenknight said: Jeremiah N. said: ... and the staff no longer communicates much with the actual users anymore... Don't say that, Bunny just freaked and threatened to delete critical posts in the UDL thread. Not a fair statement. She said that off-topic posts would be removed. Just in the interest of updating flks who may not regularly read the feedback thread: Not buying it Keith, sorry. Roll20 has been far too happy to silence critique in the past and this seems like a throwback to the time before Nolan's Reddit debacle.

Ravenknight said: Not buying it Keith, sorry. Roll20 has been far too happy to silence critique in the past and this seems like a throwback to the time before Nolan's Reddit debacle. You're welcome to your interpretation, of course. I simply don't see any silencing going on other than people breaking the CoC. There are plenty of critical voices. I think we'll have to disagree here.

Victor B. said: @Keith, I'm all in for Roll20 also, but you are making excuses for them.  Better than 3 years ago doesn't mean anything.  They have rested on volunteer testing for years now and they are making enough money, more than enough now especially over the last few years, to have their own testing corp.  Many of these bugs should never leave the door.  Period. I can see that view. The better than 3 years ago statement was meant to demonstrate the length of time that has passed since a general site issue (other than a simple outage) has caused me to abandon a session or that a session has been in some way "spoiled" due to performance. I probably could have made that clearer. And I think my second-to-last paragraph was in agreement about the state of QA, or at least of the same general sentiment. It should be and needs to be better than it is.

keithcurtis said: Is Roll20 actually losing people? No, they really and demonstrably are not. Some folks are vocally leaving, sure. But Roll20 has empirically exploded this year in terms of membership. I think if you browse the Foundry Reddit, Facebook and discord forums, you will see that every 20th post is "I have just transferred from roll20, I was able to do xyz, how do I do that here..." and they are just the people that post.  So I know they there are people moving.  They may still keep free accounts here, and may still have active plus and pro licenses as they are waiting for their current membership to expire??  of course there are also many that will stay for various reasons. yes Roll20 membership exploded during the lockdown, so maybe they were happy just to pick up the extra market place purchases of books and not worry about keeping people, maybe that is their strategy...an odd one, but thats their prerogative. My group moved, and now my players are enjoying it so much a few of them have started DMing games for others (not on roll20), and those people are enjoying their games and so on...... Roll20 can choose to ignore it if they want, doesnt bother me anymore.  I just like to keep an eye on whats going on over here so I can give honest appraisals of the situation when friends ask me for advise. and even offer roll20 advise if they would listen.... For me it wasnt so much the instability, although I didnt like it, it was more the attitude of the company. Like I said in a previous post above, if it wasnt for people like you and a few others working for free helping so many people, they would have lost many more.  I realise that as a marketplace creator, its in your interest to keep people here, and that is totally understandable, but you should also be paid as a customer service guru as well....

@Keith, your efforts to help people are tireless.  You deserve great credit for that.  

Victor B. said: @Keith, your efforts to help people are tireless.  You deserve great credit for that.   Amen to that.  I wish the company had the same level of communication and attentiveness that Keith demonstrates on a regular basis.

I don't follow your math there keith. I believe your experiences, and your wisdom, and diplomacy, but the math of 1,000,000 -X +Y does not disprove minus X. The first 2 sentences seem to contradict: Roll20 is demonstrably not losing people, some folks are leaving. Fact: Existing Users of Roll20 have demonstrably been leaving (this current thread alone proves that & there are many others like this spread across Forums and Social). Is your post saying this is fine because more new people joined the site in the same time period? Retaining customers should be an important priority.  keithcurtis said: Is Roll20 actually losing people? No, they really and demonstrably are not. Some folks are vocally leaving, sure. But Roll20 has empirically exploded this year in terms of membership.

I am speaking in net terms. Ex: More people are born than die each year. The human population is increasing, not decreasing. Every VTT service is losing people. Every VTT service is gaining people. Roll20 is gaining far more than it is losing. It is growing, not shrinking.

Honestly Keith your a great guy and should be one of the support/community managers for Roll20. I get why your protective of Roll20, but just because its something you don't want to hear doesn't mean its not true. I can say that people are leaving just from my own games, and yah this isn't backed up by data but it sure as hell feels like its affected all of my players. I run 5 games a week.  These average out to about 6-7 players per game. Many of them are Roll20 vets and have been with Roll20 for along time.  I have had each group ask to move to Foundry in the past month. That's over 30 people who have free accounts who were fine with Roll20 until this month.  So yah Roll20 isn't going to die tomorrow, but Roll20 should be very, very concerned about what's going on because it is losing people. Not to mention that a lot of the "growth" is going to disappear fast when live games can happen again, they can't just assume that this growth is going to continue when it's very dependent on COVID conditions and not on how great the service is.

Would love to see better compression so that Video/Voice actually work.  I can't stand Discord, ethically that platform makes me sick.  But the WebRTC is so buggy...I had one player just drop because he couldn't stand the cutouts, and another that isn't able to get the webcam working no matter what fixes we try (and I'm a Site Admin!)  

So a couple points here: First, yes the Reddit subreddit seems to have a lot of negativity.  That's how Reddit and all social media works...Someone says "X pisses me off"...100 more people say yeah, me too. Second, Keith is probably right that the Roll20 community has gotten larger, that is because the number of people playing online exploded, and Roll20 capitalized on it at the beginning of the pandemic.  (Yes, they did, and that was a good thing for a lot of people).   But they came because people like us recommended it. But Roll20 should have invested some of that new money into infrastructure.   There are definitely nights where die rolls take 10-20 seconds to show up.  There have been nights when it takes 10 minutes to get past the Loading screen... (no, I'm on wireless, all other sites come up fine.)   I haven't personally been impacted by the neglect to QA, I keep my games pretty simple, but I see a lot of that going around.

Just my $0.02 to the people commenting here.  I am sure that Roll20 knows that they are losing people to other alternatives.  If they had any business sense, they would have predicted the rise of competition and be well aware of how they stand up to the competition.  It is naive to think they don't understand this. Keith pointed out that there are more and more people coming to on-line gaming.  The sudden realization that you can play with people from around your country, surrounding countries and even half-way around the world has spurred an increasing interest in VTTs for role playing games -- and this will not change as the pandemic winds down and life gets back to resembling normal. One of my groups is diverse in geography and will certainly stay on-line for gaming. The other is a local group and we have talked about where we would be in the future. We all agreed to a mix of occasionally getting together in-person but most of the games would still be on Roll20 as it is much easier on time commitments and scheduling.  I get the frustration and disappointment when Roll20 missteps on changes.  Their system of upgrades and improvements has certainly proven to be lacking in QA.  When it interferes with games, then that elevates the frustration levels.  At the same time, I have yet to have a hiccup in a game which did not take more than a minute or two to fix.  Maybe I have just been lucky with UDL, but ever since getting one player to give up trying to use Safari and switch to Firefox, there have been no issues directly related to Roll20. The last changes in the character sheet made a few of my macros go haywire, but there are still other ways to rolls saves, checks, and attacks from the character sheets or using the die roller that it did not slow the game down after the issue was discovered. Are there still issues?  Yes!  Do those issues make it impossible to play on Roll20?  No.  Does losing 30 free accounts hurt Roll20?  Maybe, but each of those accounts does not directly add to their bottom line.  In fact they are supported by in-game purchases (maybe) or DMs like me who pay for a premium service.  Bottom line is that I am positive that Roll20 understands its business model and points of differentiation from competition.  I am sure they are trying to add more quality-of-life improvements on a system which appears to respond with instability.  Likewise, I am sure they will get there in the end, regardless of the growing pains in getting there.

Keith is almost certainly correct that Roll20 is experiencing net growth. From the outside, we don't know what their attrition/retention rate is, or what is normal for the industry. Anecdotal evidence isn't really useful from a data perspective, but it is relevant from a brand perception perspective. I do see more negativity online about the service, and it's clear that a fair amount of anecdotal evidence exists that the issues over the last couple of months are causing some pain, and some people (who may or may not have stayed either way) are leaving in a huff - and for what seem like valid reasons. So even if Roll20's bottom line isn't currently suffering for this, it's very much in their interests to get on top of the situation.

KhanKrom said: Honestly Keith your a great guy and should be one of the support/community managers for Roll20. I get why your protective of Roll20, but just because its something you don't want to hear doesn't mean its not true. First: Thanks! Second: I'm super fine with hearing opposing viewpoints. I just don't agree with some conclusions, and certainly would not try to guess motivations. I assume Roll20 is very aware of any demographic shifts. I don't assume their thoughts: ex. "They don't care about X" or "As long as the Marketplace brings in money, they don't want to make any changes" or anything like that. I'm not a mind reader, and I assume people have reasons for the things they do that I don't know. ex: It looks to me like there are a lot of things which would be easy to fix, but I'm not a coder and don't know what else might break because of those fixes. I am not superfine with insults and abusive speech. This thread has been really good in that regard, which is why I feel good about responding openly here.

Adam said: First, yes the Reddit subreddit seems to have a lot of negativity.  That's how Reddit and all social media works...Someone says "X pisses me off"...100 more people say yeah, me too. That isn't my issue.  My issue is when you post advice on something, you get people telling you that you don't know how Roll20 works, even when you can point to documentation.  True advice/tutorials on how to operate Roll20 sometimes get downvoted just because the truth conflicts with the mob mentality.  Which means that it is a total cesspit for passing on actual information.  Not all threads are that way, but there are enough that it is too bad a bunch of newer people post there instead of the forums. But Roll20 should have invested some of that new money into infrastructure.   There are definitely nights where die rolls take 10-20 seconds to show up.  There have been nights when it takes 10 minutes to get past the Loading screen... (no, I'm on wireless, all other sites come up fine.)  They have been investing in infrastructure.  That has come up several times over the last year or so.  And that loading time really means nothing.  Are all of the players experiencing exactly the same thing at the same time?  If not, then Roll20 is not at fault, but something along the route of communication between you and Roll20 is at fault instead.  It is easy to blame Roll20 for slowdowns at some hub that your data has to pass through that is being overloaded with Netflix, Hulu, and whatever else.  And sometimes it is Roll20.  Or it can be Roll20 related, but not something they actually have real control over.  It isn't like Amazon (who stores all our data) is totally flawless either.

Just another voice to say how much @keithcurtis adds to the discussion in here. And since people are noting their differences with his perspective and interpretation, I suppose I should note my agreement with him. It's important to have a vanguard of the angry and doubtful. They help combat groupthink and acquiescence. I don't think anyone could accuse the folks in this forum of acquiescence! We need both angry/doubtful people and optimists to balance things out. It's been a rough couple of months for Roll20. On the other hand, their service has been transformational for me and my friends over this last year. I have no doubt that if I spent a few weeks behind the curtain, I would see things that would frustrate me, but I'm sure I'd also see some things that would put a lot of existing issues in understandable context. Long story short, there's room for everyone here. I'm an optimist, but I appreciate the angry/doubtful ones.

Adam said:    But they came because people like us recommended it. This is a very important point.

Drespar said: Hello everyone, Just to start, a reminder to keep conversations within the bounds of our Code of Conduct and the purpose of this sub forum. This has veered heavily into topics speculating on how Roll20 does business which is not the purpose of our forums-- you can pose those questions to us via the  Help Center , we are happy to answer what we can. Folks have posted a wide variety of perspectives and insights; these are valuable and I appreciate you sharing them. This topic already toes the line of the CoC. As it can very easily stray past the CoC, I will be shutting this thread down. However... In an effort to provide the space for anyone else that would like to chime in, I would like to leave this thread open for at least another 24 hours so more folks can share their thoughts and experiences. Keep responses within the Code of Conduct and away from off-topic discussion. Be sure to word responses with care, don’t speak for others, and recognize that there are real people on the other side. Myself and mods will be keeping an eye on this thread. If necessary, I will be closing the thread sooner rather than later, but I’m hopeful that you all can keep the conversation on topic and productive. Talks about how bugs and poorly handled issues are driving people away from your platform is not off-topic when the topic is "Bugs are driving people away from your platform". You locking this thread or deleting posts only fans this fire. People are airing their grievances. As a business you would do well to listen to them, even if they have bad language or have rage behind their words, or get a little off-topic by speculating how bad your business practices are. You are a business(representing one, anyways), and business don't have feelings, so do yourself a favor and listen to the people who pay your bills.

Drespar said: Hello everyone, Just to start, a reminder to keep conversations within the bounds of our Code of Conduct and the purpose of this sub forum. This has veered heavily into topics speculating on how Roll20 does business which is not the purpose of our forums-- you can pose those questions to us via the  Help Center , we are happy to answer what we can. Folks have posted a wide variety of perspectives and insights; these are valuable and I appreciate you sharing them. This topic already toes the line of the CoC. As it can very easily stray past the CoC, I will be shutting this thread down. However... In an effort to provide the space for anyone else that would like to chime in, I would like to leave this thread open for at least another 24 hours so more folks can share their thoughts and experiences. Keep responses within the Code of Conduct and away from off-topic discussion. Be sure to word responses with care, don’t speak for others, and recognize that there are real people on the other side. Myself and mods will be keeping an eye on this thread. If necessary, I will be closing the thread sooner rather than later, but I’m hopeful that you all can keep the conversation on topic and productive. We do understand that there are real people on the other side, and we are paying good money to have those real people on the other side provide us with a service that does not suck.  Right now, the real people on your side are failing at that but the people on OUR side are still paying. The fact that you threaten to lock or delete posts because they shine a negative light on your business just goes to show how you truly feel about your paying customers.  

March was a disaster to me. The character sheet enhancement is a really really bad update (sorry, I'm not mad, just can't see it otherwise since I had bugs almost everytime I started a game). And I can't get why you just don't rollback everything till you get some good copy to provide to your customers, instead of leading them through this entire mess for such a long time... I would totally get it, but now, at some point there's money involved to get a service, that simply doesn't work and ruins the fun. And I can't get why things mostly work on the dev server, but just  don't on the production server... The disappointment is sadly growing on me, but I still really really hope things will get fixed soon for good.

Dear Roll20, please keep a DL system in place that actually works for everyone after May 18th. If I see it doesn't work for me or my groups, I will go back to a free account, and look for alternatives. I have already refrained from buying stuff from the marketplace because I am not sure how long I will stay here. If you need more money to invest into R&D, so you do not have to rely on your paying customers to identify all the bugs, please take it from the marketing and their youtube commercials. Also: If you lock down this thread, please make sure that all the links in other announcementsdo direct to the new DL thread (the 4th or 5th one?) and not to the first (or second) as they do now. And while you are at it, you could just keep other announcements up to date (like the 5e Charactermancer saying what is included as a simple example).

keithcurtis said: I am speaking in net terms. Ex: More people are born than die each year. The human population is increasing, not decreasing. Every VTT service is losing people. Every VTT service is gaining people. Roll20 is gaining far more than it is losing. It is growing, not shrinking. I think it would be interesting to see the correlation between number of new users, plus/pro users, and actual long term games being played over time. Roll20 is definitely increasing in account numbers and games, but I think that kind of covers an issue of experienced users that are leaving the platform. The experienced ones seem to be GMs which are harder to replace. There is already a shortage of GMs to run games (which is why we see so many LFGs with dozens and dozens of applicants). The GMs don't necessarily delete their accounts (or campaigns) either, so their account numbers (and their test dummy accounts for lighting) seem to remain as part of that sampling too. Do more accounts necessarily mean more playable games and at better quality?  I haven't looked at the ORR report in awhile because it seemed like the data definitions weren't clearly defined, but I never looked into it too deeply. Throwing my two cents into the general thread: I can see why the Roll20 would close this thread, it does seem to veering towards the all criticism but no indication on what could be improved.  I too am frustrated by the seeming unreliability in the last few months, but I still believe Roll20 is acting in good faith. I suppose some suggestions I would have would be: could we get some sort of post-mortem on large user group issues?  Maybe you already have one and it just gets lost in all the threads, I for one would like to know: What occurred? Who/how many it affected? Why? When? What is being done to prevent it in the future? I know there is a twitter account that Roll20 typically states when there is a known severe issue, but it doesn't seem too reliable on what qualifies as severe and then all the useful details get buried by memes and response posts. I'd like to see it in a more formal document, perhaps posted in a non-forum page where we can get just the facts. You do something like this in the Roundtables, which really helps me understand the issue (honestly, I don't think I would still be on Roll20 if it wasn't for the IT Q&A on the Roundtables). However I don't really like spending the time listening through marketplace product placement. I would rather just read a short one or two pages. Plus it can be up to a month from when the issue occurred, maybe if we had a weekly breakdown until UDL is stabilized (like one month after LDL sunset or something of that nature?)