Devolis's page

use generic watermarks like "Humble Bundle Feb 2016" so people can access quickly and later replace those with individual watermarks.

This. Please this. Come to your senses and get it done Paizo! This is a complete disaster! You're losing customers and good will every minute you don't.

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.

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.

Tempest_Knight wrote:

Zelda, I don't think dtreth work in or understands retail or the Tech field... It seems like trying to explain 'Purple' to a blind man. He seems to lack a point of reference.

Any of use who have ACTUALLY dealt with Paizo know that are doing what they can, that the Tech team is going above and beyond to fix things, and yes the game is, and I'll quote...

dtreth wrote:

... JUST SO COOL ...

Instant Gratification this isn't, but anything worth having is worth being patient for.

*HEADDESK* If I had actually had any problem understanding what either of you two were trying to say (rather than just disagree with you) then maybe you'd have a point. But since it is literally the opposite situation, I don't know where you get off on acting that smug.

There's a certain personality type that insists on smugly virtue-signaling in threads like this and making fun of the people with completely legitimate complaints. I'm sure they'd happily wait 5 hours for food in a restaurant too, while constantly chiding all the other hungry customers with other places to be that the food will taste so much better with their name etched into every bit of it, even if it takes much longer than just cooking it, and why won't all these impatient complaining crybabies just be quiet?

What's a timely fashion? Their system can't handle the load and they're taking steps to fix the problem with more hardware. Without trying to minimize the disappointment you are feeling, how would you handle this situation? Would you want Paizo to stop offering the Bundle, refund your money, and pack their things up?

Since you asked... I would handle it by providing the relevant PDFs to the humble bundle people to provide for download exactly the way every other Humble Book Bundle is done. Then I would disable the personalization process temporarily on paizo.com and allow users to download the same unpersonalized copies from Paizo's site until the load drops.

Siedras wrote:

Why are people acting like we will never be able to download the books we got in the bundle?

Because we live in a world of instant gratification where the expectation is that anything digital will be delivered via download link in your email before your order is completed and your credit card charged.

Orders WERE completed and credit cards charged.

Some folks seem to think it's helping to post here telling us how much THEY don't care and that we too need to be chill about not getting what we payed for, often while making fun of us. It's not helping and they're wrong. The bottom line is that not satisfying your customers is bad business, no matter the reason, and not providing goods and services they've payed for in a timely fashion is not OK.

As for why the DRM is important on OUR end... you now OWN all these books, and you can prove it when someone asks. When you go to an official Paizo sponsored Pathfinder Society game and the GM is like "Do you actually own the Advanced Class Guide to be able to play a slayer?" you can say YES.

Except I can't download the book anyway, so this advantage doesn't really make sense in this context. If they would just relax this policy temporarily so everyone could get "humble personalized" copies now that are the same for everyone and therefore don't melt the servers, I could always come back and download a "truly personalized" copy at any point in the future when the server load is lower, to prove to my GM that I really own it. A temporary solution is by definition temporary.

It might take a fair bit of rework to set up a direct site where you can statically download everything, and even then, good luck getting your 20 GB of books x 35000 downloads (assuming people download to more than one device, such as a laptop AND an e-reader) = 700 TB of bandwidth, at worst. Seems expensive, don't you agree?

They have to pay that same bandwidth cost no matter what, but if they store personalized PDFs for everyone they also have to pay that in storage...

...but every possible solution will take *time* to implement, and with a small team that needs to eat, sleep, and idk see the sun once in a while maybe, you're going to look at a longer time than what it will take to get your books.

Setting up static downloads temporarily is without a doubt the simplest and easiest solution to implement, other then just letting the servers burn and churn and ultimately fail to provide anything of course...

It would make sense to just this once "personalize" all the PDFs in the bundle with a single humblebundle specific watermark and just serve them up to us statically for a few days until the load lessens a little. I get that you want to stamp every single PDF individually, but come on, you obviously can't do it when you sell a massive number of copies within a few days like this.

It's nice that a few people are fine waiting and have posted here to say so, but it's completely unreasonable to expect everyone to.

Making a special exception for this exceptional circumstance so that people can get their downloads is just good customer service. Stubbornly sticking to your unworkable policy and giving us nothing? Not so much.