Search Posts
To have salt rubbed into raw skin, I purchased the PDF of the Monster Core book to read while I wait for my late subscription. I have lovely 171 and 185 byte zip files for my money.
At this point, I'm rather irritated. We all know things go wrong and outside factors can make the best plans go awry, but there is absolutely no excuse for the current lack of communication to their supporting subscribers. When things go wrong, part of the Customer Service responsibility is to keep the customers informed. Yes, the digestive biproducts may have hit a rotary air moving device in the warehouse to have delayed things this much, but that shouldn't stop someone in CS providing some sort of timing update to the still waiting subscribers with shipments looking to be processed after the public release date, whose purchases ultimately help pay their wages.
Looks like I get the usual overun special. In all the years that Pathfinder has been a thing, I have only once ever not been in the group left waiting when they run over the shipping estimate. I really wish they weren't so incredibly consistent about it, especially since this time I'm waiting for my subscription to ship before updating my credit card.
When it comes to the digital XSociety subscriptions, I email about lack of delivery issues when I notice the latest releases are publicly available, which may be anywhere from on the release day to a couple of weeks later. With a currently two week plus delay in customer service responses, better to get into the queue as soon as I spot the problem and minimise the wait. If a digital product is there for the public before the subscriptions process for the subscribers, there's something gone wrong. (I first noticed multiple missing months of subscriptions back in July 2023 and have had problems every month since, so this has been going on for way too long...) Actually getting a pending notification for February is a step in the right direction though. I can't say I'm really happy with how CS interaction is going these days. The lack of a monthly release thread for February, when coupled with the ongoing customer service response delays strikes me as a bad sign of how the company is going. Hopefully things improve soon, but given that some of the subscription problems have been ongoing for close to a year by now without a fix, I'm not precisely confident.
My experience with customer service is that they're running about two weeks behind at the moment, based on the time it took from email to resolution with the buggy digital subscription issues.
My missing subscriptions were fixed yesterday, so they still seem to have a roughly two week backlog of customer service emails.
Sadly not. As of my last resolved ticket, which was for my missing December Society subscriptions, the delay from email to response resolution seemed to be about two weeks. It's only been about 8 days since I emailed for my January Society subscriptions which I'm still waiting on.
Is there a way we can ask in advance for our subscriptions to be automatically manually checked by customer service directly? It's getting a little annoying to have to email every month because the automatic subscription failed again. Maybe there should be a watch list of the people with regular and ongoing subscription issues for customer services to manually check when the automatic subscription fulfillment process is completed?
Thanks for the reminder to email about them. Since the latest releases are on sale now, I figure it's a safe bet my Society subscriptions vanished again.
I'll wait until the end of tomorrow unless there's an update, because some of my subscriptions have been wonky of late. I'm confidently expecting to email over my Xfinder Society subscriptions once the release date hits again too. I'm pretty sure I've said it before, but by not giving any updates when things run over, the customer service people are making an expletive-of-choice-load of extra work for themselves as people still waiting after the estimated end of shipping date passes then email them to find out if something's gone wrong with their subscriptions.
I don't mind that estimations aren't always accurate, but it'd be nice if someone would actually give a warning when things aren't going to plan. (It'd also be nice if it wasn't so consistent that of literally every single time there's been an overrun of estimated subscription shipping time, I've not been in the left over waiting group only once ever... and that one time was still the last day of the estimated date range.)
Good news at this point, but I won't be surprised if this all happens again two more D&D editions down the road...
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.
|
