Goblin Squad Member. RPG Superstar 6 Season Star Voter, 8 Season Star Voter, 9 Season Star Voter. Organized Play Member. 2,014 posts (4,304 including aliases). 7 reviews. No lists. 1 wishlist. 2 Organized Play characters. 11 aliases.
Sorry, that was actually the wrong ticket ID, that was the cancellation where I did get a confirmation, although not in reference to the ID.
The right ticket ID regarding the VAT / IOSS situation was 152488. (We can take this to PM or email, if you want)
Regarding your solution and reaching out to customers:
I get that even for you it might be hard to find out, who is affected and who isn't.
Still, it'd be great to see you informing your customers that they might be affected and to collect those receipts and not throw them away (like I did).
I feel a little screwed over by Paizo right now.
I get that you didn't do this to your customers on purpose. I know that changing the way you do business because of changing circumstances isn't easy, and sometimes you make mistakes, and your promise to reimburse not only the VAT collected, but also the fees your customers had to pay in addition is reassuring that you did not in fact want to screw your customers.
It's just that, I saw this promise more by accident than being informed by you directly. I didn't collect my receipts from the local customs office. Will I now get any reimbursement at all? Just getting the VAT charged by you would be enough for me.
I know that we are living in ... interesting times. I know that you doing business in these times is hard on various fronts, internally and externally, with suppliers and customers, that all have their own problems.
I see that you want to treat us customers right and want to have lasting relationships with us.
That is the Paizo I know and care about.
That and your fantastic Pathfinder second ruleset and wonderful Lost Omens setting is the reason I still buy your books, albeit more digitally than ever before.
I really hope you can sort out those CS Issues you seem to have right now.
Take care,
Franz
(I'm glad I saved my reply before hitting that [Submit Post] button. Damn server goblins)
If Paizo has already assessed and collected VAT for orders from Europe, we will reimburse any fees assessed by your local customs office due to this issue. We will also continue to reimburse such fees until this issue is resolved. This reimbursement will be in the form of store credit added to your Paizo account. To receive this reimbursement, please send an email to customer.service@paizo.com with a copy of your receipt(s) from your local customs office and their associated order number(s).
Thank you Mr. Bauman, and Paizo for this. Too bad I did not keep a copy of those receipts.
I too did reach out to Paizo and never got more than an automated response [157212 ticked ID].
Could you please also send out an email to all likely affected EU subscribers so they too know about this solution? I suspect that most (like me) don't regularly check in on the boards all to often.
The PDF of the Core Rulebook is usually updated, when new printings are made, to incorporate Errata. With PF2 though, Paizo also does errata in between new printings, so it's not always up to date.
Last update to the Core Rulebook was November 2020...
I too miss the downloadable Errata documents of first edition (labled "3rd printing to 5th printing" or somesuch)
Would anyone be interested in PDF only subscriptions if they were merely a convenience (auto billing and dropping of PDFs in Organized Play scenario style on the street date) and not a way to get the PDFs earlier?
I absolutely would be interested in that.
Charge me full price of the book and drop the PDF on street date. I don't need to remember to come and get every PDF of every product line I want. I don't have to pay for shipping to Europe. I don't have to pay VAT when the books arrive. I don't need to find space to store the books.
I don't know if Paizo is making more or less of a profit with a PDF sale. Chances are, they'd be making more.
But, as far as i gather, as soon as they offer a pure digital subscription of books they sell physical as well, they'd probably have to lower the volume of their print-runs. Which makes books more expensive.
By the way, James, I'm honestly feeling very frazzled by writing all this stuff out, I'm not trying to snub you or anything I promise. ...
you are feeling what now? OoO
But, right you are. Thank you for this thread.
And to keep it coming:
James Jacobs:
Thank you very much for your creation of the Golarion setting and for letting Paizo use it for Pathfinder. I know it's not 100% yours but from what I gathered, Golarion as it is published now is mostly based on your homebrew setting and lore and gods and all that jazz. Paizo and Pathfinder certainly would not be what and where it is today without you.
Pathfinder Design team:
I liked Pathfinder (Legacy) from the very start, as it took up the torch when 3.5 fell (and as far as I felt at the time, WotC tried to stomp it out, with pulling the PDF's from online resources and things). You tried (and very much succeeded) in improving on something good, while also making it your own.
In a way you kept the car running, gave it a new paint-job, and raced with it on new tracks.
And after some years, when the underlying framework gave out because of all the bolt-ons and repairs, you transplanted the engine (after an overhaul and with a new tune-up) into a new body.
Yeah, car analogies are bad. But it's the closest I can think of to make my thoughts known.
Thank you very much, all that worked on the Design team, especially (but not limited to): Jason Buhlman and Mark Seifter
Developers, writers and editors:
I know, I'm bunching a lot of people in one pot Thank you for your work. I love reading those AP's and modules I don't have time to run.
I love it even more when I get a chance to run something and see the reaction of the group.
I have very fond memories of running "The mosquito witch", so special thanks to Eleanor Ferron.
There are so many of you talented people, especially the freelancers, that make it easy for me to run Pathfinder Adventures in Golarion.
Lastly, but most dear to me, because I actually interacted with these people personally (well, via forum posts, email or at one time even telephone):
Paizo Customer Service team:
<3
You rock!
Whenever I had an issue, you would go above and beyond (if possible), to get things worked out. Whether it was missing packages, bent or otherwise damaged books, the problems with the first Starfinder Core rulebook printing, or my bank overreacting to creditcard fraud and blocking all international charges, even those monthly ones I had for years (I think Virginia J. helped me with that one on an international skype call while I was on vacation in Wales).
There is a middle ground to all this, the one I'm about to go now:
I did cancel my subscription, because I wanted to send a message the company can verify. At the same time, I will buy Paizo's products, to support the writers and editors and the company, because I love the (inclusiveness of the) setting and the rulesystem of PF2.
Additionally, I signed up to some of my favorite authors patreons.
I know it's not the perfect solution. It might make books more expensive. It might put Paizo in a tight spot. I hope it will make them think about how they do their business, and how they treat their employees. It will be hard for me to verify any changes. But I'll keep on the lookout for official statements, and the transparency Aaron has spoken of.
So, in order to regain customer trust, Paizo will have to be proactive and show that it is accountable over the long haul. I don’t think there is an instant fix. Lost trust has to be re-earned. I think this will require that we be transparent in new, perhaps uncomfortable, ways. Fortunately, there are steps in place to move us in that direction already, exciting things, that we simply haven’t had time to announce yet because it is Gen Con Week. And there are even more ideas we are discussing internally to be considered and budgeted for–formal, systematic, administrative, intentional changes. The staff has given management an earful, not for the first time, and it’s going to take time to process it.
...
I understand the tactic of withholding with your dollars and your subscriptions, and you should do what you feel you need to do, but it’s the people who help us keep the lights on that every organization listens to the most. If you like playing Pathfinder and Starfinder, games with diversity and inclusion baked in, I invite you to consider being one of those people.
Aaron, thank you for your response.
It reads less hollow than the words of Jeff Alvarez, and I hope we will see Paizo being proactive and transparent.
Yet at the same time you admit that staff has made you aware of issues. We know that things don't change from one day to the other, that it's a process. But I'm left feeling like that process is headed in the wrong direction, if in a short amount of time 3 CS people are no longer with Paizo, one even saying they quit because another was fired.
I understand that you as a company still need our money, but don't devalue those canceling subscriptions.
I was a charter subscriber. (I was thinking about canceling because shipping to Europe was getting more expensive and I was focusing more on online play, but I did not intend to cancel my various subs until the end of the year, at the earliest, and maybe not even next year. I enjoy the setting very much, the AP's for the most part, and the ruleset for how smooth it is to play.)
Canceling my subscriptions right now is the (only) way I can make management feel my displeasure. Sure I can voice my opinion on these boards or others, but that's not as measurable in your sales charts.
I will use the money I used to set aside for Paizo to support the authors I came to appreciate.
I will buy Paizo material in the future, to vote with my wallet for stuff I want to see produced.
But until I see Paizo being proactive in making the offices and warehouses an accommodating environment, until I see Paizo being transparent, until I feel you earned my trust again, I won't be subscribing.
I'm a bit concerned that many beta testers have posted they flagged a lot of these bugs pre official launch but Owlcat never addressed them.
...
That is concerning to hear.
I had a minor bug yesterday that in a 'cutscene' there was no speech displayed on screen, I remember that in Beta that text was displayed.
Not gamebreaking, you can interpret the gestures the NPC's make to indicate the missing text, but a bug nonetheless. And hard to report, if you don't know that the text is missing.
Being a Europe-based subscriber, I don't get Old_Man_Robot. I never felt like I was a "second class customer" at Paizo.
The subscription costs the same for me as it does for any US-citizen.
The shipping&handling costs for that subscription are different, but Paizo being a US based company, that's to be expected.
Sometimes my shipments are among the first being handled, sometimes they are at the end of the line. Most of the times, if there aren't any unusual circumstances (like Gen-Con release or such), I have access to the PDF before 'street date'.
Paizo has 76 employees (as of July 2021, if my google-fu can be trusted). That's not a multinational corporation. I'm sure they are looking at ways to distribute their products as best they can within financial constrains.
I too am at a point where I look if getting my books by subscription is still the best option for me.
Buying the PDF's here and the books at my FLGS is the other option, but at the same time, it is more demanding on my time: I have to put the PDF's in my shopping cart here, once they are released. I have to go to my FLGS and pick up the books, once they have them in store.
For me that is tedious and error-prone. (I did and do own some books multiple times, because I thought I didn't buy them before, only to find out I already have them on the shelf.)
So, simply for convenience, I kept my subscriptions up for so long. Because of said convenience, Paizo isn't getting more money from me: If I had canceled my subscriptions before covid, I would have payed them for the PDF's directly, and Paizo would have got money for the books sold through distribution.
Now, with the move to digital play, I'm not sure I'm going to have much use for physical books going forward.
Even going from 1 square = 5ft down to 1 square = 1 yard makes things really nice. That 10ft by 10ft room goes from 2x2 squares to 3x3 squares and 3yards is practically the same size as 10ft.
Additionally, converting to metric from yards can be done 1:1, as the difference is, (for a game,) negligible.
I understand that a US company likely won't start using metric for a game that most of their customers are going to play in the US, using imperial. But it'd be nice to use such imperial units that are close to metric ones, like yard and meter (1:0.91), or quart and liter (1:0,95)
Well, what other word would you have used to get the same impression to other readers?
Cathedral, though it's used different than the definition is, brings out a certain expectation/picture in a readers mind.
Yes, words have meaning. And sometimes they are used in a way that portraits an object/place/... differently than the words original meaning would suggest, so that others quickly gather an impression.
Even Merriam-Webster has a second definition of the noun cathedral:
Merriam-Webster wrote:
something that resembles or suggests a cathedral (as in size or importance)
- a cathedral of business
- the sports cathedral
English isn't my native language, so I might not bring the point across as clear as others could
Umm I'm still unsure of what I do here since I can't afford "ap books shipping at same time"
In an attempt to migitate costs, you could buy a Paizo.com Gift Certificate with the amount you'd pay for this months subscription.
You can then redeem that immediately to receive store credit, which you can use next month to reduce the cost then.
(This works for me, I hope it does for you too.)
I think Yqatuba didn't ask how many attempt to take the test, but how many just take a stroll over one of the remaining bridges just to have a look around inside the cathedral.
The first step for the test is crossing the pit without taking the bridge.
I now too wonder, how many just take the bridge and have a nice day on the steps leading into the cathedral.
And there is no way that 8 to 1 odds on the price of 4 buns translates to enough for a hotel room and arena seats.
...
You seem to have missed this line:
Blog wrote:
Well, no mercy then. The baker dumped her earnings for the day out onto the railing. “Three consecutive.”
So more than the price of 4 buns * 8.
_________________________
But yeah, 8 to 1 odds seem sorta low, for such a specific bet.
Unless the Abadaran priest (and some others betting) knew that the 'underdog' is actually a worthy contender. Lei probably isn't the only one to recognize the uniform of the 'Academy of Golden Arms'.
That field is already available on all profiles, and is optional. Show that fields entry next to a Profile's name on top of the post on the message board, it would be great for visibility. Keep it optional, so everyone can decide on their own, if they want to reveal their gender/pronouns.
Personally, I use Forge for hosting Foundry on a server, because my ISP can't get port-forwarding to work it seems.
I can't compare the reliability of Forge to Roll20, as I haven't used Roll20 much. Forge's servers worked every time I needed them.
What you lose is a bit of speed: For example the PDF import module takes much more time to work through an AP-PDF, than it takes if Foundry is running on my machine.
Also, you have to think about how much data you use on the server, at home your disk space is the only limit.
This is very off topic, and the numbers are miniscule, even compared to a microSD-card, but yes. If your data is mostly 0's, your drive with charge-dependent memory (USB-sticks, RAM, SSDs...) is going to weigh less. For magnetic-dependent memory (typically HDDs, but also floppy disks and tape IIRC) its irrelevant, once the change of state has finished and the drive has cooled off again.
Lastly, there's optical memory (CDs, DVDs, laserdisc...): I couldn't find info on that one, but I would guess the same prinicple as for charge-dependent memory applies, but at a different scale (not that you would notice or be able to accurately measure, I guess).
... It's stored on a computer hard drive (the weapon or armour in this probably-tortured analogy) or on a USB flash drive (the runestone). Both the computer's hard drive and the flash drive both have weight of their own, but the file itself is just a collection of information with no weight of its own.
Also: if there are large numbers of 'monsters', those need to feed on something too. A large population of predators need a large population of prey, and those need a food source too, so the soil needs to be able to support that too.
While sharp stakes make it easier to impale things, dull stakes cause more damage/pain. Splintering stakes are the way to go, I would say.
---------------
I remember the outcry among the community when one of the last AP's in Pathfinder (1) concluded with what could be summed up to "you achieved that not much has changed and your characters died doing so". yeah, I know, that's not what happened.
On the one hand, I get why Paizo doesn't want to change the setting in major ways every six months. On the other hand, gods don't directly interfere with Golarion, change does (usually) take time, and so on.
Coming back to 2e AP's:
- Age of Ashes: seemed pretty high stakes to me (I didn't read it, I could still play it one day)
- Extinction Curse: Medium-high stakes I think. The Isles of Kortos is inhabited by a large number of people, it's a major trade point and all that.
- Agents of Edgewatch: I don't know, to be honest. I wasn't that interested in this particular AP.
- Abomination Vaults: Only going to level 10/11 makes it hard to judge, also it's a dungeon crawl and not completely out yet.
All told, I'm okay with the height of stakes so far.
Having had a bit of time and finding out that the debit card is charging a very large exchange fee for $ charges on my € account, I switched back to a creditcard for Paizo:
- in your account settings go to Payment Methods and add the new card as a new payment method.
- this new payment method is for new purchases, that aren't running subscriptions, as those still use the old payment method selected for them.
- in your account settings go to your subscriptions, there you can select your new payment method.
- now that your subscription is set to the new card, go back to your payment methods and click 'update' on your old card: this now lets you remove the old payment method.
I did these steps and confirmed that it is working with a purchase of a gift certificate where I was asked the 3 numbers on the back to verify the new card.
I was able to redeem the gift certificate for store credit.
Thanks for the heads up, Franz. The blog page wasn't archiving posts properly, so it was sending far more content than it should have been. The page should now have a more reasonably sized payload which should load much more quickly.
...
It absolutely improved the blog loading. Pressing [ctrl]+[F5] on the blog now finishes loading in less than 20 seconds for me.
I actually managed to get rid of my old cc (that ran out 01/21) and switch over to a new debit card. It was no easy task though, and I don't remember which hoops I had to jump through.
Also, changing the shipping adress because your phone number has changed (somehow required for international shipping), that took some clicking, cursing, changing and confirming.
@Skeld: try setting up the new payment method, then changing the subscription payment method, then updating the 'current' one. When updating, I think you can remove the old cc. It wasn't really intuitive but as said, I managed to get it done.
[Edit] yeah, I just checked again, I only have the new debit card as payment method in the system. So it is possible to do this without CS assistance. It 'just' not really straight-forward. Which is something to bring to the website tech team's attention, CS probably can't change that.
Paizo had some hardware issues and had to replace somethings.
Cookies in your browser say you are logged in, while Paizo's server says you aren't. That leads to your browser not being able to log you in correctly.
Solution is to clear your Paizo-cookies, see: this thread
@Aaron Shanks: Thanks for the offer. Luckily, Loreguard was right, I found chapter 2 in a 'recently deleted' folder of my email account.
Chapter 1 was already gone (the folder is appearently set to auto-delete anything older than 10 days), but that's on the blog so I read it here.
I have checked that newsletter setting some time ago (I want to say years, but I'm not certain).
Up until now, if such short fiction was in my emails, I was sure that I could read it on the blog. That this has changed was not clear to me, at a glance in the email. (I just looked above, it's the third paragraph, just in line text, nothing big or noticable.)
Adding to that, is that most of the time I check my emails on my smartphone, but I don't really read long texts on that small screen.
So, for me, sending out the chapters by email is not optimal, but now that I know...
Please cancel my Accessories Subscription before November.
I have no use for item and spell cards. I might get the Hero Point Deck digital only.
The B2 Battle Cards will be bought at my FLGS, as the weight of them is making shipping too expensive for me.
I tried Pathfinder Online, and some other MMO's, I'm not really into that.
But a Group-Co-Op (online or local/LAN) would be nice. Basically the existing game but you don't controll the whole group, but just your character, while the other 5 can be other players or companions (NPC's).
I'd even try it in Real-time game mode then, to get the hectic of combat simulated for once.
"No, buddy, I don't know if you'd rather cast Magic Missile or Icicle now. I need to get my Barb into cleave-position. And now your character auto-casted acid arrow. That was great. ..."
Yeah, I mean: even Heal is very much on the fence here: If there are undead in the area of effect, casting heal is harmful, but what if you didn't know the attackers that took out two of your allies and are barely hurt are undead?
