QuillKnight's page

I agree that the site isn't very friendly to new users. I hated it when I first started.

That's precisely where my worries lie. This entire event is about new users, and a site that isn't new-user-friendly is a major detriment to that. I'm not 'demanding a fix' or anything. I've dipped my toes in the deep-end of the web-mastering pool, and I know how ridiculously tough it can be to make major changes on demand, especially with this kind of site traffic. I'm merely expressing my concerns, as Paizo seems to legitimately care about it's fan-base and I'd hate to see them get a bad rap from this one event going rather poorly to start.

On the sorting of books, it makes no sense if you don't know the product lines

Rule books fall under "Paizo Inc.: Pathfinder® (Pathfinder Roleplaying Game)" and should probably be the first thing you look at

On that front, as a fairly seasoned role-player, I can make a lot of reasonable assumptions regarding product lines, what books I should be looking at first, etc (although I thank you for the tip). But, again, this is about new users, and likely a lot of people who are entirely new to role-playing, and knowing how frustrated *I've* been, I can only imagine their perspective in all this.

I want to make it clear that I sympathize with the techs (and other support staff) busting their butts to get through this. It's a tough situation, and whether or not it could have been avoided is irrelevant - we're in it, they're dealing with it, end of story. I sincerely hope that the quality and user-friendliness of the site gets improved in response to all this, which I would call a definite silver lining. :)

As someone who is mostly ignorant of Pathfinder (and therefore Paizo), I cannot speak to how they do business. I've seen a few videos and read some posts, and from what I can tell, it seems like they're legitimately doing everything they can. Is the layout and download system on their site weird and annoying? Yes. Should they have expected these numbers from the deal they're offering through Humble Bundle? Probably. Am I satisfied that the Paizo techies are doing everything in their power to fix this. Mostly.

But what I'm seriously concerned about is the fact that, while I'm pretty patient, a lot of people aren't. And with a very large portion (likely the vast majority) of the traffic on the site being people new to Pathfinder, Paizo, and the idiosyncrasies of this specific website, a lot of people are just going to get confused, give up in exasperation, or both. It's easy to dismiss this as 'their loss,' but those people can still talk to other people, and with nothing but frustration coming across, this could seriously damage Paizo's reputation.

And there's more to confuse the newbies than just the fact that their downloads aren't working and being asked to click on the link they've just clicked... again (if they even notice the rather unassuming text asking them to do so). The downloads page will boot you out if you're idle for about five minutes, despite the message saying you should wait a few minutes. The books are grouped into all sorts of confusing categories, there are no obvious distinctions between standard Pathfinder and Pathfinder Society (I'm guessing that's an official group of players, but I don't know), and there are so many 'helpful' links that you're just drowning in information right off the bat.

It's after midnight, I finally got ONE file to download after two days of endless clicking, and my brain is fried, so I don't have any direct solutions to this at the moment, but I definitely think that something more than apologies (however sincere) and requests to be patient (however understandable) is called for in the face of this massive influx of new, bewildered users.