sevion's page

The other factor is that if Paizo even once lets out unwatermarked PDFs, it changes the attitude of the community a lot. Right now, if you have a PDF that lacks a watermark, everyone KNOWS that it's pirated. If they distribute, even for a day, an unwatermarked PDF, there's suddenly a legitimate way to explain having such a PDF, and suddenly the watermarks are worth a lot less as a way to discourage piracy. And discouraging piracy is all any company can do. If someone is determined enough, they will find a way to pirate anything. As many of us have noticed, the harder companies work to make piracy impossible, the more normal users suffer. Before this huge bottleneck, the watermarks were a way to discourage piracy with basically no inconvenience to legitimate users.

Anyway, all this was a longwinded way to say that the watermarks are for a reason, and I at least appreciate that Paizo found such a good way to try to protect their IP rights.

I understand what they are trying to do. But in less time it takes a legit person to download their product they purchased I could take a watermarked version remove the watermark and share it around the world millions of times.

It should never be easier for a pirate to alter and distribute a product then it is for a legit buyer to obtain the product. This is when DRM over steps its bounds and why so many dislike it.

Bardic Beacon wrote:

THIS IS RIDICULOUS!

I am not seeing updates from the system operators.

I ordered through the humble bundle when there were less than 2000 people on the cue and now there are 32000+ and still the blooming 'wait 10 seconds' and try again notice.

Then when it is especially overloaded it wipes them and I have to restart the personalization. I would be fine if it would complete and email me when done.

I feel like your process is not prepared for the cueing you are experiencing and the 12 more days of this promotion will be a disaster for myself and thousands more unsuspecting customers.

Pay the price and work with Humble Bundle to manage your workflow. Then clean up the audit on the back end.

You are getting a black eye minute by minute with literally thousands of new users to embark on your website's shores. This is bad business and I actually am a long time supporter. What do you think that new customers will think of this experiences?

Updates are definitely coming in from the operators. A post from one of the staff is a few above yours. ;-)

The queue time last night fell to around 40-45 minutes, but is back up to a few hours for "personalisation" (watermarking). Even if your login times out, you can still log back in and download the files -- the page, for whatever reason, wipes the "personalising..." text, but they are still processing on the back end.

That said, I'm with you 100%. Even if persistence does work, it's immensely frustrating.

If you could log out and still have your files when you come back I would have had them this morning. Hell files I managed to download yesterday would still be downloadable right? But nope if I click any of those it starts personalization over again.

Terminus1066 wrote:

sevion wrote:

Zaero wrote:

silverfoxdmt73 wrote:

Pete17331 wrote:

IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.

I imagine companies like EA Sports have more than 50 staff across their IT department, never mind the whole company and a few $billion to throw at outsourcing IT.

Fellow IT guy here. You can scale, sure, but if you don't have the hardware or the ability to invest, that scalability doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

EA has (I would argue) a far bigger resource pool to work with. But hey, obviously everyone has infinite servers to deploy at any time.

Thats why for a company like this they should be using Amazon WS. Sure owning hardware is cheaper in the long run but now instead of letting the service spawn a few more servers for you or you do it yourself they now have angry customers who may or may not have been future clients at full price or monthly subscribers to other services offered.

Agreed - building an infrastructure that doesn't scale may be easier in the short term, but eventually it's going to bite you in the ass, which is what has happened here.

It's all dependent on need. Sure it's easy to say "just use X" or "get more servers", but you ain't running the company. It may make more sense for them to host in house. You don't know that.

Playing Backseat Architect doesn't quite work. I mean, even Steam tips over when a new sale starts, and they're MASSIVE. No online service is perfectly scalable to meet demand. Yea, people are mad they can';t get their books NOW, but it's not like Paizo's going to run out of copies. This ain't TVs on Black Friday.

I'm being patient. Would I like my books now? Sure. But I'd also like a giant novelty...

Sure its dependent on needs and a company of this size really isnt saving any money in the long run housing its own servers. A company this size will actually find it cheaper and more effective to use Amazon WS so it may scale with its usage. A single hardware failure will set them back double what they are currently saving using in house dedicated servers vs using Amazon WS and not having any of these issues or having to worry about a unknown costs of hardware failure that are just a matter of when not if.

I do this for a living and I have to admit when I was first designing games and setting up servers I made these same mistakes. Hell I continued to make them for a good year and a half after cloud computing began to get big. But just as I needed to adjust scripts and functions to provide a better service on an archaic system so should they adjust to current issues. And much faster than they are, this fiasco instead of finding more users for life could find themselves with a angry group of paying customers who will now share their issues and may lead to others not moving to your product at all at a later date via word of mouth.

I really hope they drop this whole personalization watermark thing. Or personalize it with a generic mark. Its really useless (I dont know if they know how easy it is to remove those things but it is very) and its killing the experience for fresh new players.

The thing I'm finding most frustrating is that my pdf "personalization" seems to get cancelled when my web login session expires.

I've probably added the 3 things I want to the queue a dozen times in the past two days, and I wouldn't be surprised if your server has actually processed it a dozen times but just isn't allowing me to download because of the session change, instead insisting on personalizing it *again*.

It does, and that there is the massive flaw within their distribution. You have to refresh the page for an hour or so every 15 seconds and hope the server doesnt just drop you itself. If you are logged out or your session ends for any reason you can no longer access that file. But heres the catcher, that file doesnt stop processing or anything it keeps on going so theres a workload the server is performing on files no one can access.

silverfoxdmt73 wrote:

Pete17331 wrote:

IT guy here. Yes, it is perfectly possible to prepare for this kind of workload. For example, companies like EA Sports does it every time they get ready to release a new game. They outsource and get enough temporary processing power (in the cloud) to handle the predicted workload.

I imagine companies like EA Sports have more than 50 staff across their IT department, never mind the whole company and a few $billion to throw at outsourcing IT.

Fellow IT guy here. You can scale, sure, but if you don't have the hardware or the ability to invest, that scalability doesn't amount to a hill of beans.

EA has (I would argue) a far bigger resource pool to work with. But hey, obviously everyone has infinite servers to deploy at any time.

Thats why for a company like this they should be using Amazon WS. Sure owning hardware is cheaper in the long run but now instead of letting the service spawn a few more servers for you or you do it yourself they now have angry customers who may or may not have been future clients at full price or monthly subscribers to other services offered.