My Downloads Page / Humble Bundle Downloads Issues


Website Feedback

551 to 600 of 1,158 << first < prev | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | next > last >>

If you're tired of reading people's legitimate complaints, then encourage Paizo to get SOMETHING working, even if I sadly can't have my name on every page... :( "If we can't stamp your PDFs with your name, we'd rather give you nothing at all" isn't what I'm looking for in a provider of digital goods.

Antagonizing paying Paizo customers with legitimate complaints by posting videos of whining girls and calling us names is not constructive. You aren't doing Paizo any favors by putting your immaturity on display and angering even more customers.

And stop bringing the charity donation up as a reason people shouldn't be upset. It's not like all the money is for charity, they get 15%. Paizo is still taking the lion's share of the revenue from this promotion, more than 4 times what they're giving to charity from each purchase, and if they weren't dropping the ball so hard they'd be making a lot of loyal new customers as well who would probably buy more from them in the future. The charity donation isn't a shield against providing proper customer service.


I have a suggestion for the Paizo Developers. Trying to find their responses in this thread is a pain when seeing everyone else is complaining (or asking that the complainers tone down their impatience.) My thought would be to make a locked thread with all the developer responses for this issue. Yes it means double posting: one in this thread and one in the locked thread.

Would give the new people a heads-up on the on-going developement for handling the downloads versus having to troll through 12 pages of comments to find the little nuggets of actual information.


Devolis wrote:


And stop bringing the charity donation up as a reason people shouldn't be upset. It's not like all the money is for charity, they get 15%. Paizo is still taking the lion's share of the revenue from this promotion, more than 4 times what they're giving to charity from each purchase, and if they weren't dropping the ball so hard they'd be making a lot of loyal new customers as well who would probably buy more from them in the future. The charity donation isn't a shield against providing proper customer service.

You get to choose how much goes to charity when you pay for your Bundle... There's a slider bar that determines how much goes to charity and how much goes to Paizo.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Adventure, Rulebook Subscriber
Devolis wrote:
If you're tired of reading people's legitimate complaints, then encourage Paizo to get SOMETHING working...

I know from experience that forum posts don't help and that the team is already doing everything they can on their end.

Shadow Lodge

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Devolis wrote:

If you're tired of reading people's legitimate complaints, then encourage Paizo to get SOMETHING working, even if I sadly can't have my name on every page... :( "If we can't stamp your PDFs with your name, we'd rather give you nothing at all" isn't what I'm looking for in a provider of digital goods.

The problem with your statement is that it is against their policy to distribute electronic PDFs without a watermark. This is how they protect their own intellectual property from pirating, and is something that they are completely within their right to do.

If you don't like it, and are so impatient that you cannot manage to wait a few days to get your download, request a refund from Humble Bundle and move along. You'll make it easier for the other 30,000+ people trying to get their copies.

The simple fact is, if you aren't happy, you have options. So either join the rest of the folks patiently waiting for their copies to be available, or get your money back and take your complaints somewhere else. Paizo has stated they are doing what they can to get things moving faster, but the incessant whining and complaining is neither helpful or constructive to the process.


Devolis wrote:
And stop bringing the charity donation up as a reason people shouldn't be upset.

Correct. I actually set the sliders to 100% Paizo, so for me it's not about charity at all.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Devolis wrote:

If you're tired of reading people's legitimate complaints, then encourage Paizo to get SOMETHING working, even if I sadly can't have my name on every page... :( "If we can't stamp your PDFs with your name, we'd rather give you nothing at all" isn't what I'm looking for in a provider of digital goods.

Antagonizing paying Paizo customers with legitimate complaints by posting videos of whining girls and calling us names is not constructive. You aren't doing Paizo any favors by putting your immaturity on display and angering even more customers.

And stop bringing the charity donation up as a reason people shouldn't be upset. It's not like all the money is for charity, they get 15%. Paizo is still taking the lion's share of the revenue from this promotion, more than 4 times what they're giving to charity from each purchase, and if they weren't dropping the ball so hard they'd be making a lot of loyal new customers as well who would probably buy more from them in the future. The charity donation isn't a shield against providing proper customer service.

Paizo is doing what they can including installing new hardware. I understand the frustration, I am waiting for my downloads too. One thing to think about is that this humble bundle is generating about 100x peak traffic on the server. It WILL slow it down. Yes it is an issue to make people wait.

They are an amazing company and they are doing what they can to fix the issue. I personally am just incredibly pleased at saving over 300 dollars on my pdfs


It's been a smart action of Paizo, using Charity and massive distribution of Pathfinder in order to counter-attack the WotC sales on the physical copies of D&D5.
But it's getting completely trashed by the non-ability of Paizo to give access to people for what they paid.
Yep, come back on earth, it's pdf files, not physical books we are talking about! We should have been able to get them in one day max !
Now Three days and nothing.
This Humble Bundle is becoming more and more frustrating, I don't think it's good for any healthy customer relationship.


3 people marked this as a favorite.
Chris Lambertz wrote:

OK, I've gotten in touch with a few teams and have some words for y'all. Heads up, big post ahead!

The work that went behind the Humble RPG Books Bundle: Pathfinder has generated a wonderful result: as of posting, 26,660 people chipped in to support Extra Life and pick up Pathfinder RPG products. Roughly two-thirds of the redemptions so far are new paizo.com customers. That number is astounding! In fact, that number is projected to eclipse the amount of folks who participated in our Pathfinder RPG beta playtesting. In just over 24 hours. I can assure you that all of us in the office are just amazed to see that number tick continuously upward (the energy here is absolutely palpable).

The easiest way for me to describe what is happening to our downloads system is to compare it to ticketing systems used for large conventions (such as PAX Prime). The system puts you in a queue, which it works through as quickly as it can. If you've ever tried to buy passes for that particular show, you know the feeling of nail biting panic over whether you're going to get to a "Sold Out" page or a page full of badge purchasing options. And that result can take hours to process (and that's not even a service providing on average a ~50 MB PDF download). The systems in place that support the kind of numbers we're seeing are expensive, are maintained by large teams, and are built specifically to handle that kind of load.

Since paizo.com doesn't regularly run and anticipate events on that scale, this is why we're seeing the pileup. We are actively exploring possible solutions, and considering many of the ideas you have suggested in this thread. Paizo.com has had constant and diligent attention to remain stable over the last 24 hours, with our staff (particularly, System Administrator Lissa Guillet and Technical Manager Cort Odekirk) working long, tiring shifts to make it happen. The overall amount of people on our Tech Team available to perform this work is also pretty small (our team is comprised of 7 awesome people, including our Sys Admin and QA). We are examining and exhausting all options immediately available, and hope to have some news for people waiting for their downloads as soon as we can.

As a reminder to anyone under the impression that there's a timeline for redemption: you do not need to redeem your codes immediately for them to be effective, and they do not expire. Additionally, Paizo downloads under your account are updated automatically if a reprint occurs, and have no download limitation or expiration.

I can't say enough how humbled we are by the gaming community choosing to support this bundle benefitting Extra Life. It's also an amazing opportunity to grow our own community and introduce them to the gaming world we've created. Thank you for your continuing support through this fantastic and frenzied promotion!

My team will be posting updates to our site and our social media outlets as frequently as we can get them.

For people who haven't read the whole thread and/or missed it, this is what the team has been up to. Staff has been working and posting here throughout the night.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Bencara wrote:

It's been a smart action of Paizo, using Charity and massive distribution of Pathfinder in order to counter-attack the WotC sales on the physical copies of D&D5.

But it's getting completely trashed by the non-ability of Paizo to give access to people for what they paid.
Yep, come back on earth, it's pdf files, not physical books we are talking about! We should have been able to get them in one day max !
Now Three days and nothing.
This Humble Bundle is becoming more and more frustrating, I don't think it's good for any healthy customer relationship.

It is over A MILLION pdfs and over 100 MILLION pages that need to be watermarked. Twice each. They are having to generate terabytes of pdfs to distribute. Please empathize with them. Nobody expected this to do as well as it has.

It is a shitty situation, but let's try not to make it any harder for them

:)


Same problem here. I finally downloaded one file, but that was it for now.


Chad Newman wrote:


#1 - Your length of time in IT does not make you an expert when it comes to how Paizo does business or how their web solution is set up. Remember, they are doing this FOR CHARITY. Does it make sense for them to spend tons of money ramping up their online services for something that they are making very little actual revenue on? No. I've been in IT for 26 years and I know I'm out of my element when it comes to how someone like Paizo handles their web presence. IT does not make you an expert. You could have spent 30 years changing printer toner for all we know. :)

emphasis mine.

Yes and no.

Going by the current numbers as of 9:30 am EDT.

Total Raised: $545,571.54 Wow!, just WoW!

If we assume nobody changes the distribution of their donations then

Paizo has earned $354,621,50 (65%)
Charity has earned %81,835.73 (15%)
Humble Tip $136,392.89 (20%)

Again, this is based on the assumption that no one changed their distribution of funds. There is no way for the general public to know how the money is really distributed.

These numbers are taken right from the Humble page.

Also, based on previous posts, 20,000+ new Paizo accounts is just amazing.

Grand Lodge

Its understandable the problem.
I am fairly sure that paizo is working hard on the issue.

I know any solution would take time to implement. It would be nice to either do a queueing system. IE you click on the link and you are then shown where you are in the queue and when your spot in the queue comes the download starts. So at least have our computers sitting in queue.

Or after you click the link you get a message notifying you that after personalization has been completed an email with the attached pdf will be sent.

I guess I don't care how the problem is solved just a couple of ideas.

It would go a long way I think to see something official from paizo posted even if it is "we are working hard to solve the problem and are pursing several options" because right now it feels like you have to get lucky and hope you hit the server at the right time to get a download in so you can download the pdfs.


Quick question and by no means a complaint but when do you know that a download has been personalized? Does the click again in 10 seconds message change to Ready for Download or the like? Again, not a complaint but simply a logistical question. Thanks.


Zelda Marie Lupescu wrote:
msmelo wrote:

What happens is the user session is timing out BEFORE your site is able to produce the watermarked PDF. Apparently this means that, whatever work had already been done in producing the PDF is lost, as when you re-login and re-click you seem to go back to the PDF-produce queue.

My three books downloaded so far proves you wrong.

Are you actively maintaining your session live by pressing F5, clicking the link every other minute or using a browser plugin? If you are, then I am not.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

A situation like this can be so fascinating on a sociological level. I gotta admit that. I wonder if this can be considered people (or group) reacting to a crisis?


10 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Just to try and cover a point I made previously:

Paizo and HB did their homework. They looked at previous HB demand for product, and the capabilities of Paizo's systems to handle that demand, and concluded that they were more than capable of dealing with that expectation. Therefore, no need to invest in any solutions, because the existing solution was strong enough to cope.

You do not throw money away investing in additional IT capacity when your worst-case projections show that your existing infrastructure can trivially handle the expected load.

And then the bundle went live and the expectations weren't just beaten, they were overwhelmingly thrashed.

Paizo are doing their best to hang on by the skin of their teeth for a situation that caught them completely by surprise, based on the best figures HB could give them. This is not poor planning on anyone's part, this a completely unexpected favourable response that far exceeds HB's own estimates of demand.

Yes, it sucks to not be able to download things. I have books I want to get access to. That I can't is rather annoying. But please don't blame Paizo for not expecting demand that far exceeds the demand they were told to expect.

This situation is basically the Spanish Inquisition.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

EDIT: Please also read the post directly above mine, it's fitting too.

I haven't been able to download yet, and I'm fine with that. Really, when I spent the amount of the Beginner's Box, plus shipping, and I'm getting the Beginner's Box plus a veritable horde of .pdfs, I'm not going to complain about it taking time to download.

I understand the reasoning for the watermarking - this way it allows the .pdfs to be used for Pathfinder Society play - showing you supported the creator helps you "earn" the additional features. It's frustrating but it's part of the ways to help support you as Paizo.

I feel that this is truly one of the proverbial "first world problems" - ohnoes! My super cheap .pdfs aren't downloading right nao - I haet you guis and I'll nevar support you again!

It's not like Paizo's going to go out of business immediately and leave you with your funds removed and no materials - it'll just take a bit longer than normal. Yes, it's frustrating, but considering how much they generally charge for a single .pdf, I'd say it's worth the wait.


J4RH34D wrote:

One thing to think about is that this humble bundle is generating about 100x peak traffic on the server. It WILL slow it down. Yes it is an issue to make people wait.

It's not the traffic itself. The load on their servers is so high because they decided to make every request for a PDF download require a huge amount of centralized processing, none of which can be shared across multiple requests even by the same user, let alone all users. This doesn't scale and won't scale with the addition of a few extra servers either. This is an architectural problem, not a small deficit of resources, and it's clear that Paizo doesn't have the expertise or time to rearchitect their system. There is a reason Humble Book Bundles normally use a commercial CDN to distribute the large amount of data involved.

The ONLY real solution is to disable the unworkable unscaleable watermarking process. This is a no-brainer. ANYTHING else is just sticking their collective heads in the sand while their customers' goodwill evaporates.

Eventually, in a few days or weeks, the demand will drop somewhat and the customers they haven't been driven to refund, chargeback, or just plain run for the hills will be able to get their PDFs, but not because of anything Paizo is doing.

The Exchange

I tried the "Log Out and Clear Cache" method.

Clicked every 5 minutes for 20 minutes with no result. On the 25th minute I got booted to the Blog page.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Swiftbrook wrote:


If we assume nobody changes the distribution of their donations then

Paizo has earned $354,621,50 (65%)
Charity has earned %81,835.73 (15%)
Humble Tip $136,392.89 (20%)

Again, this is based on the assumption that no one changed their distribution of funds. There is no way for the general public to know how the money is really distributed.

Personally, I always slide 100% charity for any Humble Bundle I participate in, and I'm sure others do as well. However, using these numbers seems legit, as many probably don't bother to mess with the sliders.

However, $350k doesn't go a long way in large scale IT, and some of the suggestions for massive infrastructure overhauls to facilitate faster delivery of the PDFs would constitute a huge investment in both equipment and the programming needed to change how the systems work.

I just spun up a rather small scale virtual environment to act as a backup site for a tiny company in comparison to Paizo and we spent well over $300k on the project.

The point is, people shouldn't be so quick to judge how much Paizo should be spending to give them their downloads ASAP. Sadly, this is the age we are living in, the Gimme Now Age.


I finally got 2 of my 3 .pdfs last night right before I went to bed. The Hell's Vengeance Player's Guide and the 1st AP issue. Blood of Shadows still won't play ball. I'll try again later today.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
silverfoxdmt73 wrote:
Pete17331 wrote:
IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.

I imagine companies like EA Sports have more than 50 staff across their IT department, never mind the whole company and a few $billion to throw at outsourcing IT.

And many of them STILL have significant issues at launch relating to unexpected popularity. I mean, every one know, you don't try to play a blizzard game until three days after release.


8 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Maps, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Paizo team,

I think you all are doing a wonderful thing. I'm a big fan of the Extra Life charity, and I'm (obviously) a huge fan of Pathfinder. I'm doing all I can to spread the word about the Humble Bundle with the caveat that it may be a while before new folks experience the great material and customer service I've always had from you guys. I've been where you're at and I know it can be disheartening, but I always wish you all the best.

Kindest regards,
Chuck Childers
E-Commerce Manager
DriveThruRPG.com

Ps. I really miss Cort's homegrown Voyager game (just before the show, so the title wasn't taken yet), where we would repeatedly go into hyperspace in a planet's atmosphere despite the crazy odds that disaster would happen. Good times and - geez - decades ago!


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Did... Did he just call Cort old?

Get off my lawn, Dangnabbit!


I gave $6 to Paizo, $10 to charity, and $1 to Humble Bundle to account for where the money went from my $17 "donation". (Since some folks were talking about the money split, thought I'd share).

Anway, as someone who is not new to Pathfinder, but I've always played with the physical books (which reside on my bookshelf right next to me, now!) and never bought a PDF from Paizo before, someone who doesn't need these PDFs right now, maybe I'm not the ideal customer to ask about this, but my personal suggestion would be that Paizo should institute new queue rules so that anybody trying to download a product not acquired from the Humble Bundle should immediately be put on the queue in front of anyone who got their product from Humble Bundle.

This is probably a horrible idea and nobody should listen to me :) (I understand the bad idea side of it is that all the thousands of new customers get hit with big wait times, failed downloads, and an overall bad first impression. But from my own personal perspective, I think it's important to be loyal in return to your loyal customers, so those folks who bought something outside of the bundle and need to download it, and let's face it THIS IS PROBABLY A VERY SMALL PERCENTAGE OF ATTEMPTED DOWNLOADS RIGHT NOW ANYWAY, should be able to get that product downloaded immediately).


2 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens, PF Special Edition, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Pete17331 wrote:
RedCastoff wrote:
I am new to the site (due to the Humble sale, thanks so much for putting this together Paizo) and was wondering what normally happens during non-stress situations with the downloads. Does the text "Personalizing... Click link again in 10 seconds to download" change when the download is ready? Also, when I clicked on the download after giving it ~15 min to personalize I was taken back to the homepage for Paizo. Any idea why this happens? Finally, what is supposed to happen when a download goes through? Does it immediately show as a file download in progress or is there another page that opens after the personalization is done? Thanks in advance for any answers, and sorry to dump questions like this.
IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.

Cloud is indeed the solution for temporary spikes of traffic orders of magnitude larger than what you normally handle. Cloud is also not a magic wand you can wave around and say a word and it magically happens. Migrating from an entirely on-premises infrastructure to full cloud or even hybrid cloud takes a significant investment of both time and money, and is not something that can be accomplished properly in 3 days. While such a migration may be something paizo is examining, it isn't going to happen before the Humble Bundle promo is over and everything returns back to normal.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
J4RH34D wrote:
Bencara wrote:

It's been a smart action of Paizo, using Charity and massive distribution of Pathfinder in order to counter-attack the WotC sales on the physical copies of D&D5.

But it's getting completely trashed by the non-ability of Paizo to give access to people for what they paid.
Yep, come back on earth, it's pdf files, not physical books we are talking about! We should have been able to get them in one day max !
Now Three days and nothing.
This Humble Bundle is becoming more and more frustrating, I don't think it's good for any healthy customer relationship.

It is over A MILLION pdfs and over 100 MILLION pages that need to be watermarked. Twice each. They are having to generate terabytes of pdfs to distribute. Please empathize with them. Nobody expected this to do as well as it has.

It is a s%%+ty situation, but let's try not to make it any harder for them

:)

Evidence suggests it's far far worse than that. Paizo does not appear to cache the watermarked pdfs. So every fail and later retry adds more processing that must be done.

I understand the trade-offs involved in caching the watermarked versions. I understand that it could be a major overhaul of Paizo's systems and processes to start caching, even for a "short term".
It's probably easier to ram together a queueing approach that would prioritize personalization requests based on purchase date. Even that won't happen quickly nor salve the pain of those who want it *now*.
As with many others here, I'm an IT professional. The problem is knowing why and how this happened does nothing to address the frustrations of new customers.
This is a promotion that should have led to great things for Paizo. It seems likely now that instead it will become a major embarrassment and a significant down-turn in actual adoption of Pathfinder.
That is entirely regrettable.


This is unsatisfactory.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

Well I'm pretty much a tourist in these parts.

It must be really annoying for the bread and butter users that the normal service they support all year round has failed them.

From my perspective (still yet to have a successful download from Bundle) I'm very pleased to have gotten this deal and am looking forward to when I can get my digital paws on the goods. It's annoying that It's going to take some time but I'm pleased that they are secured.

I appreciate that Paizo have been so generous with this offering to support the charity initiative. Clearly they didn't expect the uptake to be what it is. These things happen and when the outcome gets resolved the good intention will remain.


I wouldn't say it's failed me, it's inconvenient, but it'll clear up.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
silverfoxdmt73 wrote:
Pete17331 wrote:
IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.

I imagine companies like EA Sports have more than 50 staff across their IT department, never mind the whole company and a few $billion to throw at outsourcing IT.

Fellow IT guy here. You can scale, sure, but if you don't have the hardware or the ability to invest, that scalability doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

EA has (I would argue) a far bigger resource pool to work with. But hey, obviously everyone has infinite servers to deploy at any time.

Plus, it's not like the access to the books will expire, so I can wait a few days.


Zaero wrote:
silverfoxdmt73 wrote:
Pete17331 wrote:
IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.

I imagine companies like EA Sports have more than 50 staff across their IT department, never mind the whole company and a few $billion to throw at outsourcing IT.

Fellow IT guy here. You can scale, sure, but if you don't have the hardware or the ability to invest, that scalability doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

EA has (I would argue) a far bigger resource pool to work with. But hey, obviously everyone has infinite servers to deploy at any time.

Thats why for a company like this they should be using Amazon WS. Sure owning hardware is cheaper in the long run but now instead of letting the service spawn a few more servers for you or you do it yourself they now have angry customers who may or may not have been future clients at full price or monthly subscribers to other services offered.


Zaero wrote:
silverfoxdmt73 wrote:
Pete17331 wrote:
IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.

I imagine companies like EA Sports have more than 50 staff across their IT department, never mind the whole company and a few $billion to throw at outsourcing IT.

Fellow IT guy here. You can scale, sure, but if you don't have the hardware or the ability to invest, that scalability doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

EA has (I would argue) a far bigger resource pool to work with. But hey, obviously everyone has infinite servers to deploy at any time.

It only takes one.

I will however take over the world, and enslave humanity, so...


I am having the same problem. I can't download anything. It just stops at the personalization, and I click the link again (ranging from 5-20 minutes wait) and still get nothing. The credit card processing for the physical ship item also took forever, so I am assuming the servers really can't handle the load. Well maybe I will get my physical box before the downloads, one way or the other I will be able to play.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Lost Omens, PF Special Edition, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

I'm in no rush to get my pdfs, so I wouldn't say it failed me either. I'm dissapointed, of course, but I also understand that the tech team is doing everything in their power to make this better and pulling sleepless nights to do so, and I appreciate and thank them for that.

While I'm not a fan of the watermarks, I understand both why paizo does them as well as that they will not compromise on their stance to apply them, so I view them as a necessary evil. Therefore, even though I don't agree with the premise behind the DRM and even with the knowledge that this mechanism I don't agree with is causing all of the issues, I am supportive of paizo and wish them the best of luck in resolving this and making the experience smooth for everyone. I hope all of you new people can extend the same consideration as well :)


I want to know what protocol do we use for downloading? So I click once or how many times? Also how long do I have before I'm timed out and have to sign back into my account? I've bought many scenarios and guides before but have never had these types of difficulties like this. Just post something paizo besides the we're sorry doing what we can posts. We know your doing stuff but give us a freaking clue on how to get through tjis. Your click to download and walk off approach was a huge fail. Tried that last night at 9 pm central time woke up at 6 this morning and had nothing. This is why I'm pis*ed.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

The thing I'm finding most frustrating is that my pdf "personalization" seems to get cancelled when my web login session expires.

I've probably added the 3 things I want to the queue a dozen times in the past two days, and I wouldn't be surprised if your server has actually processed it a dozen times but just isn't allowing me to download because of the session change, instead insisting on personalizing it *again*.


Gareth Martin 777 wrote:

The thing I'm finding most frustrating is that my pdf "personalization" seems to get cancelled when my web login session expires.

I've probably added the 3 things I want to the queue a dozen times in the past two days, and I wouldn't be surprised if your server has actually processed it a dozen times but just isn't allowing me to download because of the session change, instead insisting on personalizing it *again*.

It does, and that there is the massive flaw within their distribution. You have to refresh the page for an hour or so every 15 seconds and hope the server doesnt just drop you itself. If you are logged out or your session ends for any reason you can no longer access that file. But heres the catcher, that file doesnt stop processing or anything it keeps on going so theres a workload the server is performing on files no one can access.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
gryfon1 wrote:
J4RH34D wrote:
Bencara wrote:

It's been a smart action of Paizo, using Charity and massive distribution of Pathfinder in order to counter-attack the WotC sales on the physical copies of D&D5.

But it's getting completely trashed by the non-ability of Paizo to give access to people for what they paid.
Yep, come back on earth, it's pdf files, not physical books we are talking about! We should have been able to get them in one day max !
Now Three days and nothing.
This Humble Bundle is becoming more and more frustrating, I don't think it's good for any healthy customer relationship.

It is over A MILLION pdfs and over 100 MILLION pages that need to be watermarked. Twice each. They are having to generate terabytes of pdfs to distribute. Please empathize with them. Nobody expected this to do as well as it has.

It is a s%%+ty situation, but let's try not to make it any harder for them

:)

Evidence suggests it's far far worse than that. Paizo does not appear to cache the watermarked pdfs. So every fail and later retry adds more processing that must be done.

I understand the trade-offs involved in caching the watermarked versions. I understand that it could be a major overhaul of Paizo's systems and processes to start caching, even for a "short term".
It's probably easier to ram together a queueing approach that would prioritize personalization requests based on purchase date. Even that won't happen quickly nor salve the pain of those who want it *now*.
As with many others here, I'm an IT professional. The problem is knowing why and how this happened does nothing to address the frustrations of new customers.
This is a promotion that should have led to great things for Paizo. It seems likely now that instead it will become a major embarrassment and a significant down-turn in actual adoption of Pathfinder.
That is entirely regrettable.

I agree the system could run better, but I can guarentee that the admin and tech groups are doing their utmost to work out the best solution. That including installing new hardware overnight.

Knowing how and why it happened doesn't fix the issue now, but it can help prevent future issue. We may well see Paizo offload watermarking to external servers in future only for events like these, or use generic watermarks like "Humble Bundle Feb 2016" so people can access quickly and later replace those with individual watermarks.

This is a learning experience for them as a company and for everybody here as a community.

I have been lurking the forums for 2 years and never seen so much criticism of Paizo, but I want to defend them without scaring away new customers. I hope I have been managing to do that.

We all know that this is a crappy situation, but it should improve as Paizo keeps working on it


3 people marked this as a favorite.

I'm honestly surprised at the reaction to this. What do people expect from smaller companies (manpower-wise) when it comes to these major bundles? Does anyone remember the GameMaker bundle from a few months ago? Every single person had to wait a full week to redeem their codes for GameMaker and the Android Dev pack, and then several more weeks to get the Steam keys after that. HumbleBundle deals like this regularly kill the sites that they link to, so much so that the phenomenon is referred to as the "Humble Hug of Death" on reddit.

I, for one, am perfectly fine waiting to download my PDFs. I've been wanting Pathfinder for a couple of years now, but I haven't been to afford it until this bundle. Now I have several books for $1, and I'm planning on upgrading to a higher tier when I get paid next week.

Sorry that you guys feel scammed, but it's a known occurence with these bundles.


8 people marked this as a favorite.
Pete17331 wrote:
RedCastoff wrote:
I am new to the site (due to the Humble sale, thanks so much for putting this together Paizo) and was wondering what normally happens during non-stress situations with the downloads. Does the text "Personalizing... Click link again in 10 seconds to download" change when the download is ready? Also, when I clicked on the download after giving it ~15 min to personalize I was taken back to the homepage for Paizo. Any idea why this happens? Finally, what is supposed to happen when a download goes through? Does it immediately show as a file download in progress or is there another page that opens after the personalization is done? Thanks in advance for any answers, and sorry to dump questions like this.
IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.

As much as I'm frustrated by the delays getting these books is it actually reasonable for Paizo to have foreseen this level of demand ?

The closest thing I've seen to this kind of Bundle are the Bundle of Holding deals and to give you some comparison in 2015 the average bundle there sold 701 copies and even their most popular deal (for Monte Cook Game's the Strange) only hit 2203 copies sold over the space of 2 weeks or so.
http://beyondthebundle.com/2016-01-01/2015-review/

Similarly the other book bundle on Humble Bundle (a great set of classic Sci-Fi ebooks if you're interested) has sold a total of 10,453 copies in the space of ~9 days - so a little over a thousand a day.

This bundle on the other hand has sold 32239 copies in less than 48 hours - and is the first bundle I can ever remember seeing where the Beat the Average price is HIGHER that the highest digital product fixed price tier - this is supposed to be the tier that you buy if you want to get *everything* (barring any physical items) but here that's not the case.

So what I'm saying is that, yes, Paizo have a rather serious problem here (mainly because it's not just Humble Bundle buyers who can't access their downloads it's everyone, including people who have paid a great deal more for their products) but it's also a pretty unprecedented event by the standards of previous RPG and Book bundles and I'm not sure anyone expected anything quite like this.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

I was able to download the Hell's Vengeance player's guide just now, so have faith, things are turning around. :-)

Shadow Lodge

captain yesterday wrote:
I was able to download the Hell's Vengeance player's guide just now, so have faith, things are turning around. :-)

How long did it take you? And were you auto refreshing the page or anything?

I've been trying to get it for 2 hours now.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

A reminder to those of you that need the contents of your core rule books and such NOW, for whatever reason (A game waiting in your living room, setting up your first character, ANYTHING AT ALL) hit up the PRD.
It has all the info you need to learn to play the game, run a game, create a character or anything else. All it lacks is the pretty pictures.

If you need any additional help with the system feel free to PM me and I am sure any of the other regulars and we will do our best to help


MeditatedPie wrote:
captain yesterday wrote:
I was able to download the Hell's Vengeance player's guide just now, so have faith, things are turning around. :-)

How long did it take you? And were you auto refreshing the page or anything?

I've been trying to get it for 2 hours now.

Same here.

551 to 600 of 1,158 << first < prev | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | next > last >>
Community / Forums / Paizo / Website Feedback / My Downloads Page / Humble Bundle Downloads Issues All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.