Good news at this point, but I won't be surprised if this all happens again two more D&D editions down the road...
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Got notification of shipping from Paizo today too, of everything except the pin. Makes me wonder if someone mixed up 'Australia' and 'Australasia' when writing the contract with Aetherworks, given that international shipping from Paizo was already announced to be complete over a month ago.
If it helps at all, I received mine from Aetherworks, but had no communication at all. Just turned up. It does somewhat, in that I can conclude they're not communicating with their customers beyond actually shipping to them. International shipping can take a while, and it's not been all _that_ long since they have been reported to have finished sending stuff out. If I haven't seen or heard anything in another week though, I'll start assuming things have gone wrong and get onto them.
Supposedly Aetherworks is doing the NZ stuff too. Haven't even heard anything from them so far, much less received anything. Beginning to be concerned to be honest.
Haven't even had an email about it from Aetherworks here in NZ.
Doing so makes it easier for customers to buy products, which is always a good thing for a company, improves goodwill given the number of comments requesting the feature, and to a limited level would actually help customer retention by requiring an extra step to unsubscribe, instead of just stopping buying. However that does need to be balanced against the time and effort required to set up something like PDF only subscriptions, and potential loss of print subscriptions. Given we already have PDF only subscriptions for the Pathfinder and Starfinder Society material, the first seems to be a relatively simple issue to resolve on the technical side, but the second is a point that customers don't have the data to evaluate. Given the changes to the international shipping situation which show no signs of being resolved in less than multiple years, my personal opinion is that Paizo should seriously reconsider the question of whether digital only subscriptions are now a more viable option than in the past, but I genuinely don't know what the results of such an evaluation would be from their business perspective.
Sadly, the test email didn't reach me, though checking the spam folder did net me two non-urgent emails I wanted to keep for the record from other senders. Thanks for the reminder to check there, as I clearly need to do that more often. Wherever the email filtering or disappearance is happening, it seems to be before it reaches my email account.
In my case I've never received a ticket or other email response for any email sent to customer service. My issues to date using email contact have been simple and have been fixed promptly (two Society Subscriber subscriptions stuck in pending and a missing pre-order/subscription PDF), so I know my emails have been received and acted on, but I have never received a response via email, not even a ticket number. The customer service forum had the advantage that customers using it knew that their problem had been received by customer service, but now there's no guaranteed feedback that an email sent to Paizo has been received or lost in limbo.
Given the current spiralling shipping costs for international customers, my opinion is that Paizo should reconsider the idea of PDF only subscriptions. Even if they had no discount and came out on the public release day, the sheer convenience of getting everything I want in PDF without having to go through multiple pages and individually order everything I want would be a godsend. I'm already basically doubling my base costs on just shipping for the two print subscriptions I retain, and have watched the exchange rates drop, coming close to tripling my overall costs for the same print content over what they were before the pandemic, so I'm not resubscribing to anything else print any time in the forseeable future.
Even fixing the metadata at the rate of one or two files a day starting with Paizo releases would help somewhat over time, shouldn't require authorization to fix already known internal issues, and would be necessary en mass anyway to get the page working properly when the big updates can actually get done.
Unfortunately not everyone gets those for some reason. I've mentioned the issue of not receiving auto-responses on the forums here at least once, but I haven't had any issues needing customer service since I did so last time, so I don't know if the issue has been fixed.
If there was a PDF subscription, would it change your print buying habits? In my case, no. I'm a former Paizo Superscriber who dropped most physical subscriptions due in large part to international shipping costs. It would be convenient to me personally to have a subscription system which automatically charged me for the PDFs of the lines I have an interest in on the public release day though. It'd be easier than going through and manually buying PDFs on or near release day. Whether that's a service worth the effort to Paizo in terms of monetary gain versus setup cost, or would be worth the risk that physical subscriptions would drop due to people going digital only if given the option to do so, I have no idea. I do suspect the latter risk has reduced for international customers given current shipping costs though.
Other people, such as myself, don't ever get any response via email at all, not even the auto-response with ticket number. The issues I've had have been resolved quickly to date even without receiving an email response from customer service, but there's still clearly something badly wrong with the CS email system. I do get the subscription/purchase emails, product update emails, and subscribed mailing list stuff, but as far as any customer service issue requiring me to contact Paizo from my end goes, the company is an email black hole in my experience. I'm just glad that so far they have received them judging by the fixes I've had.
Like the utter failure that is the completely wrong results from using the filter system on the downloads page, the incredibly oversized Starfinder file sizes are an issue that Paizo needs to look into badly, but neither problem seems to even be on their radar, let alone the priority issues list.
Order shipped for me, but I didn't get my preorder PDF for the Monster Vaults book.
Not me. Whenever there's a delay past the projected subs shipping finish I'm included in the leftover group, pretty much guaranteed. At least it shouldn't be delayed past the public release date.
Got my subscriptions this month. Hopefully the bugs have been thoroughly stomped and everyone else does too.
Second month running that I've found myself emailing about my digital subs not processing. Might be a deeper issue somewhere for the web team to look into.
My concerns about the reason for the change being more of a hide the bad PR move than an attempt to improve customer service aren't helped by hiding the new Announcements forum down in the middle of the assorted Paizo related forums instead of at the top of said group in the logical place for public anouncements.
I can understand the arguments in favor of removing the customer service forums, though I don't actually think it'll result in an improvement to customer service, but removing the web feedback forum as well is a really bad idea. As that forum stands, it's a place where people can see if there's a site issue affecting more than just their own experience, and offer feedback on problems that are causing issues for more people than just that one indivudual customer. By eliminating a public forum for wider technical issues, it seems more likely to increase the workload of customer support and technical staff as multiple reports of the same problem flood the support system. As a personal impression based on Paizo's overall pattern of behaviour over the last months, my own reaction is that this is more of an attempt to hide bad publicity like multiple subscription cancellations and other complaints from the public forums than it is a real attempt to improve customer service. Trust broken is harder to regain.
It all looks good at my end. Thanks for the fix.
Order 36700135 was due to go through last Friday, but is still pending, while the PDFs are on sale. Could someone please nudge this out of the pending stack into actually processing?
I wish to retain the following subscriptions:
I wish to have all my other subscriptions cancelled immediately, if possible including those subscription products contained in my still pending October subscription order, Order 36654329. The cost of shipping is too high for the value received, which is one reason to amicably shut down the majority of my subscriptions and simply buy PDFs. However this month's handling of subscriptions is not acceptable in my view, and receiving a chirpy email about how exciting it is to be preparing the next subscription before mine even ships is adding insult to injury. Paizo expresses a number of laudable goals of inclusion and fairness to all in their works and products, but it seems somewhere along the line the fact the business is based on their customers, and judging by the recent forum drama maybe also their staff, has been forgotten. It's all well and good to build a great tower of principle and ideals and make them real, but if you forget to pay attention to the foundations your tower or business is built on, it will topple to the ground.
I must be one of the few to find the timing of the delay to be a positive. Updating new credit card details is much less of a hassle before the order is generated.
Sara Marie posted in the January Subs thread that she thought all the regular January subscriptions had gone out. However I'm still waiting for mine, Order 36290404.
Also, can someone please start updating the estimated dates in the first posts in the monthly threads again? We used to get updates when shipping was complete, or if there were delays, but now for the last few months we've been left in the dark like mushrooms, wondering if there's just a delay as things seem to run late, like my subscription last month, or if something has actually gone wrong and needs intervention, which seems to be the case for me this month.
It's the second month that there hasn't been an update when the shipping slipped past the estimated finish date, and there hasn't been any update or explanation from customer service staff. It's exceptionally bad customer service, not to mention making extra work for Paizo, because there's at least one thread posted by someone still waiting to see if there's something wrong with their order since the final date has passed and their order hasn't shipped yet. The whole point of the first post in these threads is to help keep customers updated on the order shipping progress, so not updating yet again is beginning to come across to me as being sponsored by the 6th and 21st letters of the alphabet.
In my case, default settings in Chrome on multiple Samsung devices, and two different internet providers all give the error in question. If stock settings on a device default major browser are throwing up errors, then something needs looking into. Interestingly, the Paizo site using the latest version of Firefox on the exact same devices works fine, but I get the same error in Firefox with Win7 OS on my PC as I do in Chrome on my mobile devices. I'm not sure if any of that is useful for Paizo's hopeful investigation of the issue, but maybe the data points will help.
Mine came through today as well, which is nice, but I really think someone at Paizo needs to give an update here. Running subscriptions a week or more over the estimated shipping period and past the public release date isn't necessarily a serious customer service issue on its own IMO, because between Covid and Xmas things are crazy right now, but doing so without any explanation or warning at all to the customers affected IS a really big deal as far as I'm concerned and potentially a significant PR problem for them.
Still pending here too. It'd be nice to get some sort of update on subscription shipping from Paizo, seeing as the public release is tomorrow, and the final shipping estimate in this thread still says December 4th. It's only been three working days since then... Right now we're stuck in limbo wondering if the shipping is just taking much longer than anticipated, or if there's something actually wrong with our subscriptions.
I guess that they didn't manage to finish all the subscriptions today. :-(
I guess I'm in the Tuesday (Wednesday locally) shipping club. Be nice if once in a while I didn't somehow end up near the back of the shipping queue.
Sadly the tools I have won't let me try to compress the files due to the access permissions. Hopefully sooner or later someone at Paizo will realise that they have some rather noticeable quality control issues that have been slipping through since, judging by the sudden file size jumps from a consistent 15-30 megs to first 75-100 then to ~330, sometime since February or so.
Seriously? Another huge file? There appears to be something going horrendously wrong when creating the Starfinder AP retail PDFs, judging by the file sizes. To compare: Starfinder Core Rulebook: 532 pages, 142 MB file size. Waking the Worldseed: 68 Pages, 339 MB file size.
At this point the new file sizes are sufficiently large as to be rather slow to read on my admittedly older tablet just due to the memory required. That's not even considering that each of those files takes up a rather large chunk of storage. Goodbye easy electronic reference. Is someone accidently skipping an image/filesize optimization step somewhere in the process between a version meant to be sent to the printer with maximum image quality and one intended for retail usage?
The Paizo site downloads files as a single ZIP file which in the case of a multiple file download contains the separate chapters of the book. Once you download the zip, the individual chapter PDFs are inside and can be extracted to another directory or viewed separately as desired.
Not just that, but also...: Fabergé was a Russian jeweller, so the likewise Russian Baba Yaga is if anything more likely than not to have ended up with some of his work by one means or another.
As it says in the product description, some content isn't included due to licensing issues, specifically including the TV Structure article.
The order updated itself, and was reported as shipped today including the SE Bestiary 2 that was missing from the initial email. One less headache for the Paizo staff at this busy time I hope.
Both my email notification and order status pages for this order are missing the Special Edition Bestiary 2 subscription item which is listed in the May release thread as coming out this month. Can someone please add it to my shipment?
Because the ship date is when they legally can bill us. There are several ways that releasing the PDFs before shipping/billing could be exploited unfortunately. And charging for them separately to the shipping books runs into the issue that they're advertised as a free bonus. Among other problems I can think of coming up.
My subscriptions went from Pending to Suspended Pending overnight.
I noticed yesterday that I hadn't had any new scenarios from the complementary subscriptions since the initial June releases. Can someone please check up on what's happening when it's convenient?
No Pathfinder version here (yes, I know it already exists and I do already have it), so I'd normally just back the Kickstarter for the PDF version to show some support. Except there isn't a PDF option anywhere in this one. Sorry, but while I like and want to support Kobold Press, I'm not paying international shipping costs for a physical book in a system I don't actually play.
Don't worry. A lot of other people are in the same position of still waiting, since the estimated shipping completion date is the 7th and it's still only the 1st in the US. I'm one of the ones stuck in the queue too.
There can sometimes a certain amount of entertainment value in the more creative complaints from my onlooker's viewpoint, but I'd expect the people they're aimed at won't be disappointed by their absence.
I admit I'm at the point of looking for information about the next guide, if only to make sure I hadn't missed it being released, and now I know I haven't missed anything, to ensure I don't miss it when it does come out.
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