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...because it's much easier at other times?
It's your right, of course, to do things the most difficult way. But don't be surprised if people wonder why someone would want to give themselves a lot of additional grief.
Look, I share your concerns about the unreliability of download services. I have issues with paying real money to services like Steam (computer games) or Comixology (comics) because their servers could be gone tomorrow and I would have nothing left.
But I am telling you, and everyone else -- Paizo has been here for a decade. They are not some fly-by-night operation. And they are not going to go bankrupt and disappear two weeks after getting a half a million dollar cash infusion. The files WILL BE HERE two weeks from now. Guaranteed. I know it's difficult to put trust on companies. But if you try in this specific case, you will be rewarded.
Another post in my series of questionable advice offered on circumstantial evidence and my own experiences so... purely biased guesswork.
Just recently, I was able to download 2 more PDFs after having no luck for hours (just clicking the same download link periodically). Both files downloaded at a good clip too! (guessing something like 100 MB/5 mins?). But now I'm back in "page refresh" land.
This along with many folks talking about being able to download a few files (2-3) and then running into issues makes me think we all would have a more productive experience by just taking a break for a few hours if you're having no luck downloading, especially if you just downloaded a couple files. One reasonable theory here is that each account is allotted a limited amount of storage for downloads and you need to wait for your previous downloads to timeout (as mentioned above, timeout varies with load but tends to be a few hours).
However, there are the posts that seem to indicate some folks have never been able to download anything. I'm not sure what to say, that hasn't been my experience.
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The new server which I heard went online yesterday or this morning, seems to have done the trick.
Thank you Paizo!
Sure, it would have been nice to have fixed before the problem occurred, but who'd have known the Humble Bundle would be so popular?
Thanks for not trying to ride it out and coming up with a solution. My downloads, while not as quick as they were a couple weeks ago, are at least happening now in a timely fashion, and my Play By Post games are quick and stable.
Thank you.
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You have issues giving money to Steam because you worry that their servers could be gone tomorrow, but not to Paizo because they've been around a decade?
I didn't say I don't have issues buying Paizo PDFs. All I'm saying is that if you chose to do it, you have nothing to worry about. Like Steam, they've been in the business forever, and they just got a major cash infusion, so they *are going to be here* two weeks from now.
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Just did a test.
Earlier today I was able to download the Strategy Guide and the Hell's Rebels Player's Guide, so I took what I learned and tried to be at least a bit scientific about it.
At about 22.55 GMT, selected a book (Hell's Rebels Book 1) to download.
I set a timer for 30 minutes.
About 20 minutes in, I re-logged into My Downloads, but did nothing.
At the end of the 30 minutes I clicked link to start download.
Download message "Your Download should start in 5 seconds" message appeared.
Download timed out (Chrome).
Copy/pasted download address from Chrome into Microsoft Edge.
Got "Hmm, we can't reach this page" for remote3.paizo.com.
Refreshed that page in Edge.
Download started. Currently 49% complete (at current download speed, it'll complete roughly 1 hour after I started).
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Things should be better now, needed to tweak some things in the new infrastructure. Just as an interesting FYI, over 1 terabyte of data generated in bit less than 12 hours. If printed (both sides) on standard paper, the stack would be 10 miles high.
And then fall over and destroy the servers, so we're not going to do that *here*.....
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As of the time of writing this, given the number of orders and the average amount, this bundle has raised $666k.
...Jack Chick was right!
Well, I've reached the first hurdle. I've received the URL for my download link.
I can't actually reach that server yet though... so I'm hoping that download link sticks around long enough for me to actually download it. But this is progress at least. (And heck yea I was excited when I saw the download link!)
If it's saying can't connect to the server host, cut/paste it into a different browser. We're having a weird DNS caching problem with Chrome right now (there was a bad entry, long since fixed, but Chrome is having issues letting it go).
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It's giving me time out errors, not DNS errors. (Though Chrome IS particularly bad about DNS stuff, admittedly.) Edge took a while to connect, but it claims to have. Now I just need to wait 40 minutes to make sure it worked. Thanks!
You guys there ARE doing a good job trying to handle this insane load. Kudos to everyone there, and again, congratulations on the success of this charity event even thus far. It's amazing to see that the average is higher than the high book tier. It's amazing not only how many people have been in, but how much they're going in for.
What if it's saying "Web Page Unavailable"?
Thanks
System Administrator
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Yeah I think Chrome has a max connect below other browsers. There are basically two things that switching to a different browser can do for you and one of them is getting a higher timeout for connecting to the web servers that are handing those files out. Edge seems to be doing pretty well and firefox has been fairly great as well.
Core Rulebook successfully downloaded. :D
I'll be waiting a bit before I try to d/l any others. But rest assured everyone trying, the system IS working. Eventually.
I finally got my 3rd and final pdf last night. I hope it starts easing up on everyone soon.
Hello Paizo,
First off, thanks for this Humble Bundle deal. Lots of goodies in the package to start my Pathfinder adventures.
I have been trying to download the PDFs all day today. I have only managed to get 3 PDFs downloaded. My biggest issue is that after being personalized, a prompt saying my download will begin in 5 seconds.
As I mentioned before I have had a handful of successes but at this moment the connection times out and the webpage says that the webpage is not available.
Is this an individual issue or a server one?
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As a rocket scientist with 20 years of experience, I would like to offer Paizo some friendly advice by telling them that they really should use a system with a vibration-isolated IMU. Otherwise, you're going to get some undesirable secondary harmonics.
-Skeld
This isn't rocket science...
On the other hand, as a tax lawyer with 2 years experience I strongly recommend that Paizo utilise complex trust structures to route the humble bundle money through the cayman islands, followed by luxembourg, lithuanian, mongolia and finally the moon. [/tongue-in-cheek]
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As I mentioned before I have had a handful of successes but at this moment the connection times out and the webpage says that the webpage is not available.
Is this an individual issue or a server one?
Sounds like the Chrome issue. Try copy/pasting the link of the timed-out page into a back-up browser. (Firefox and IE, of all things, have shown particular success.)
As I understand it, your PDF has personalized, but the browser is giving up on the process before a secure link is established. I had the same thing happen in Chrome but successfully got the download with two tries in IE.
As I mentioned before I have had a handful of successes but at this moment the connection times out and the webpage says that the webpage is not available.
Is this an individual issue or a server one?
Sounds like the Chrome issue. Try copy/pasting the link of the timed-out page into a back-up browser. (Firefox and IE, of all things, have shown particular success.)
As I understand it, your PDF has personalized, but the browser is giving up on the process before a secure link is established. I had the same thing happen in Chrome but successfully got the download with two tries in IE.
Thanks!
This is fun. It was kinda like gambling on Chrome for a bit, sometimes working out, sometimes crashing, but then it all went to crap entirely. Now it's just a straight up stubbornness contest with Firefox since anything shoved through it goes at about 5 percent of normal speed.
Silly machine, it doesn't realize that I used to sit through dial-up.
I can do this standing on my head.
Hmm. Cleared out my Chrome cache again, now it's working properly, and with proper speed.
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As a rocket scientist with 20 years of experience, I would like to offer Paizo some friendly advice by telling them that they really should use a system with a vibration-isolated IMU. Otherwise, you're going to get some undesirable secondary harmonics.
-Skeld
This isn't rocket science...
On the other hand, as a tax lawyer with 2 years experience I strongly recommend that Paizo utilise complex trust structures to route the humble bundle money through the cayman islands, followed by luxembourg, lithuanian, mongolia and finally the moon. [/tongue-in-cheek]
As it turns out, most things aren't rocket science. Sometimes, rocket science isn't even rocket science. Although, it can get confusing, what with all the maths and power point.
-Skeld
Heya! The other day we did find an issue that was blocking downloads, which is now fixed.
Currently, we are experiencing higher-than-usual traffic, which is causing the My Downloads page to work *really* hard and it's taking the service longer to churn through requests. I would recommend giving your download a few minutes to finish personalizing, or come back later on to attempt to download.
Tried that multiple times three days in a row now. I guess I'll try really early in the morning see if that helps.
The 117 might be a reference to the individual chapter files for some of the books. I have not downloaded the books in that manner, so it is just speculation.
@Dave Talbert: While you might not be planning on hosting or pirating, that doesn't mean that everyone else is on the up and up. Paizo has been putting up a fight against digital pirates for years -- and from what I understand giving some of them fits -- so it is in their best interest not to release the books without watermarks. Sure, there are probably cleaned copies out there, but turning off the watermarks on however many thousand copies of the books is just asking for trouble.
How so, if there are already cleaned copies out there?
But that's not really my issue. I think it was Gabe Newell that said that piracy is mostly a service problem. Judging by the nine hundred messages here, it looks like a lot of people aren't being served. I'd be interested to know what Paizo mgmt thinks about that.
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HINTS FOR THE PERSONALIZER - based on my experience over the last decade.
- Don't Go Away - the process times out if you don't click the link every minute or so
- Personalized Files Are Temporary - the system will remove your personalized file after a few hours regardless of if you download it, requiring a new personalize
- Multiple Personalizes Won't Help - don't use multiple browsers or tabs to try to personalize more at once; this will only harm performance
- Bigger Files Take Longer - the more pages a PDF has, the longer it takes to personalize so expect rules books to take longer
- Think Of Steam - You can always come back and download your files later, even years later
- Some Of Humble Bundle Is Available FREE in HTML - You can visit the Pathfinder Reference Document where the key rules for all the major books are in hypertext
No the new hardware is not picking up the slack like you said it would - nor is any "improvements" in the programming that you may have done.
This is my least-helpful response: the improvements have had effect. They're just not enough. When this started, the entire site was verging on dead. The forum and store frequently wouldn't load at all, or would only load partial pages. Today, the download system is the only part of the system that shows significant stress. Yes, absolutely, that's the most important part for most of you, but the fact that we can post to have this discussion does have value.
And no the files don't stay in the queue after the response of "Personalizing" comes up because when I try again later - maybe 10 minutes, maybe 4 hours - it still wants to "personalize" the files again.
Here's a non-intuitive fact. The personalizer isn't permanent.
Basically, when you personalize a PDF, the system takes a master copy of the file and edits the PDF to apply your customer information etc to each page. Obviously larger files take longer for this to happen, but once this is complete, the file is placed in a temporary holding area. I don't know how long this temp file lasts, but I'm pretty sure it's only a few hours.
This is a necessity as storing unique copies of everyone's files forever is impractical. If you need to download a file two days in a row, you need to personalize it each day. This normally doesn't matter because it normally only takes 3-5 seconds, except on days when massively popular books are released, when it might take the full 10 seconds.
What this means is you pretty much must sit around prodding the system. If you go away, your temp file will likely expire even if the personalize succeeds.
So I attribute the 3 files that I did get downloaded as flukes of the system.
Yes, they're most likely flukes based on a set of factors including personalizer demand at the moment, the persistence of your clicking the "click here after 10 seconds" link, and the size of the files in question.
Its a shame that Paizo can't see past their own nose and allow other sites involved in etrade (like rpgnow and drivethru rpg) sell their files.
Not cool. Paizo is absolutely aware of the issue. That doesn't mean that there is a perfect solution to it that can be implemented before the problem resolves itself.
This is a problem of numbers. We're talking about a potential customer-demand well in excess of a million PDF personalize operations. Even when high-demand new books are released, odds are very good that the system needs to process maybe 10,000 personalize requests that day. We're looking at in the general realm of 100x the peak demand ever required.
That still sucks. I absolutely, positively don't disagree. But RPGNow and DriveThruRPG would very, very likely have similar issues if they experienced 100x their peak demand.
Now, people keep pointing the finger, and - again - I understand the frustration. But what happened here is that the 48-hour demand for the Humble Bundle was nearly four times the demand for the historic most popular book bundle ever. HB said "one time we sold 10,000 bundles". That's a number the system should have been able to handle over the two weeks of the offer. But instead there were something shy of 40,000 bundles sold in fourty eight hours. Instead of about 700 bundles a day, it was nearly 20,000 bundles. 30x the predicted performance of the best selling ever.
I'm just posting this to try to help manage expectations. Something happened here that nobody would have predicted. And everyone's suffering because of it.
But you WILL get your PDFs. Paizo's download area is forever. Even if it takes a week to cope with the absurd back-log, you WILL get your product.
Please imagine this as a sale where the seller ran out of stock on a product because of 30x more customers than anyone predicted might want the thing. More WILL be made, and you WILL get yours. Unfortunately, it's on back-order, and it will take a while for the factory to make some more.
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I have now successfully downloaded the entire Humble Bundle, including all formats for each product.
I accomplished this in IE by first queuing about a dozen files for personalization, then going back and downloading. I've found that five files in the download queue usually resulted in timeouts on the sixth download, so I started waiting for a download to complete before starting the next download, all the while keeping 5 downloads in the queue. By simply being patient and taking the time, I was able to queue personalization and downloading dynamically, which took about 6 hours for every file in the Humble Bundle.
YMMV.
OK, that's legitimate. I didn't realize that this was the book equivalent of the Origin bundle.
I still think having Humble distribute would have been better, but it makes a lot more sense now.
I am having trouble downloading PDFs that I need for a convention that I am helping organize. Any advice rather than trying another five times for a single file? I keep on getting timed out.
If it's timing out after going to the "Your download should begin in 5 seconds" page, try this.
I've had luck in getting files in IE and Firefox when Chrome keeps timing out on me.
As noted here, Firefox will allow you to reset the amount of time it waits for a connection before giving up, which worked for me.
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Just finished downloading the last of my files.
HUGE thank you to the Paizo team for your sleepless hours and hard work. I am consistently amazed by your professionalism in the face of a minority of customers who, in any situation, take justifiable frustration and turn it into maddening entitlement. Thank you, as always, for being who you are, and giving us a thriving, diverse, and thoroughly enjoyable hobby.
As a side note, while I was "personalizing," I was shopping Noble Knight Games. Just (finally) landed the whole Council of Thieves series at a price that matches what I usually see for just the first volume. When the dust from the Humble Bundle clears, I'll be back to pick up the pdf's for that Adventure Path, too...and the last three parts of Hell's Rebels.
I suppose that makes me a lifer...
Thanks again!!!
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And I have now downloaded everything else I've purchased from Paizo using my instructions from my above post.
Yay for reports of success starting to outnumber reports of failure! :D
Tech team, you might want to make a note about the timing-out problem and how to solve it in Chris's consolidated Updates thread.
I'll throw my two cents in that I had problems in Chrome but due to advice in this thread I copy/pasted the address in to IE and my file was successfully downloaded. Thanks to the IT team and the suggestions here!
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Feh. I must be a filthy 'Murican because I much prefer bourbon over Scotch.Pah, bourbon. Single malt Scotch from Islay is where the life is at.Pray-zos go to our IT staff.
I hear accepted offerings like small batch bourbon go over well.
Pfft!
Release the Kraken!
Things are looking up. I was able to get two downloads going. They will take ~40 mins to complete. (Using Firefox 44.0.2 on Xubuntu 15.10, did not need to play with timeout values as that was not the hangup for me.)