Paul Ryan's page

I've said it here before with no changes to Paizo policy (sadly) - it's poor customer service not to make an announcement when shipping estimates run over, and it makes them a lot of completely unnecessary extra work as people left waiting start emailing CS for updates because their shipment is late and no information has been provided about what's happening.

People are generally understanding when excreta occurs if they're kept in the loop, but they're less understanding when they feel like they're being treated like mushrooms and kept in the dark when problems occur.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

And since you have to come to Paizo anyhow to personalise and download each pdf - what benefit is there really in a sub beyond saving a few mouse clicks a month? Contrast that with the inherent conservatism any company has around tinkering with such a core component of its business model.

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.

Thanks, Paul.

I strongly suspect that your email system is flagging our response emails and sending them to spam or similar. Not only do we have the two tickets you mentioned, but in addition to the automatic confirmation you should have received the emails we sent upon completion of each ticket. I've just sent you a fresh email from our ticketing system with the subject line "A test email from Paizo's ticketing system". Please look through your inbox, spam folder, etc, and let me know if you received it.

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.

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.

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.

I wish to retain the following subscriptions:
Pathfinder Adventure Path
Starfinder Adventure Path

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.

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.
Can someone please check to make sure my subscription gets moving?

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.

Not just that,

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.

The last (non-subscription sidecart) package of mine only went out today, so I guess they're still going with this month's subscriber shipping.

I'm not customer service, but I think I can tell you what's happened.

What you are seeing are authorizations, not charges. See Paizo's FAQ for what those are.

When you try to make a purchase, their system checks with your bank to see that the funds are available. Your bank puts a temporary hold on the funds, pending completion of the transaction. That's probably what you are seeing. When Paizo customer service gets in on Monday they can get your funds released faster, though the actual speed of processing that depends on your bank's procedures.

The problem is almost certainly that Paizo's payment processor is finicky to the point of certifiable paranoia about the address you provide being an exact match for the address on file at your bank for the card you used. It absolutely must match, even to the point of not accepting abbreviations for street types or states if those are spelled out completely without abbreviations in the bank's address for you. Best way to be sure is to type in your address directly copying from a bank statement for that account, right down to the full stops.

(Mind you, when I say it's paranoid, I have to admit I don't actually mind that where my money is concerned. Better safe than sorry, though it's a pain to set up right in the first place.)

The result of the address not matching is that Paizo can't complete the transaction, and those authorization holds on your funds sit around for a while until they expire, or someone at Paizo manually sends a notification to the bank that the hold is no longer necessary because the transaction could not be finalized.

If there's something else going on than what I suspect, then Paizo customer service will be able to help you sort it out after the weekend when they're back in the office.

Edit: Corrected typo in link.

I can't comment on the specifics of your order, not being staff, but usually a split occurs because postage is charged by weight, and two lighter packages can cost less to send than one bigger, heavier one, depending on the total weight of all the items.

I read the Kickstarter page, and once I stopped choking from laughing too hard, I backed on the spot.

Heh. I think I was one of the unlucky ones, but when I realized I'd missed the Starfinder First Contact release and combined it with my subscriptions, I whacked $16 off my shipping.

While I am definitely a supporter, at the Pathfinder special edition level, I do find it a little disappointing that four of the eleven stretch goals revealed so far are for currently 5E exclusive material, when it's a Kickstarter for two game systems.

While not staff, I suspect it's an authorization you're seeing, not an actual charge, and it will expire after a period depending on your bank's policies. See the FAQ for an explanation about what that is.

The Paizo support staff should be able to hasten the process from their end, but it still depends on your bank as to how quickly it happens.

The usual cause is the billing address you entered for your payment on the Paizo site not being an exact match for the one on file at your bank for your credit card. Paizo's site is really finicky about an exact match, so your bank basically reserves the funds temporarily in anticipation of a charge, but the purchase and charge never get made because of the address mismatch.

...Is witches exploding heads, like, a trope that I'm just totally oblivious too? Granted I'm oblivious to a lot, so it certainly could be.

It makes me think of a scene from a Discworld book, where one witch, Mrs Ogg was having trouble getting past her son, who's a guard. Then the second witch, Granny Weatherwax, shows up and the guard snapped to obey her. When Mrs Ogg asked why her friend didn't have trouble, Granny's answer was that her son knew his mother wouldn't make his damned-fool head explode.

When Mrs Ogg said that she knew Granny Weatherwax wouldn't do that, her answer was that Mrs Ogg didn't know that, all she knew was that Granny hadn't done it - yet.

I'd skip that meal - they're unfit for human consumption, and have too great a chance of causing food poisoning.

I will be frank: one of several primary goals for the Pathfinder Tales line is to attract fiction-loving non-gamers to the world of Pathfinder. And we believe that Tor has the ability to advance that goal farther than we ever could on our own.

Without partnering with Tor, the future of the line would likely not rise above "more of the same." And sure, that's great. But if Tor is able to expand the readership, we might be able to do more and bigger and better things in the future. We might be able to mix things up and do something special outside of the bimonthly paperback novel run. We might be able to attract authors that we can't get right now. I can't make any promises, of course, but we wouldn't be doing this if we didn't think it gave the line a better future than it would have otherwise.

Well, I hope you're right, and it all works out for Paizo. I'm not exactly happy with the changes, but you've got to do what you think is best for Paizo's long term prospects and I'm not going to be holding any grudges over this. But I can't help remembering a certain company a few years back that went to try to increase their market without considering their current customers. Someone else did listen, and now that first company has only the second largest share of their market, instead of the largest, which those customer friendly folks who'd been listening took away from them.

I'd hate to see Paizo forget that particular lesson, but this is the second time in the last year or so that the subscribers who've been supporting Paizo all along have been put behind potential new customers. It concerns me a little that this might be a continuing trend.

Lord of Runes is showing on Amazon as a $10.05 preorder, to be released on June 2.

Effectively, not including international shipping, the price for getting a similar amount of product to the old subscription just doubled, with at least a few weeks extra delay before the digital version is available compared to previously.

I'm finding it very hard to see any positives at all from an existing customer's viewpoint.

The name seems to be OK to me, though I have been signed up for a while. ;-)

A stretch goal which has been met too.

What do you flag spam as because none of the options really fit that choice?

Breaks other guidelines.

I'm changing mine to 12345. I got the idea from my luggage.

That should be fine as long as you don't use the same one for your air shield.