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The problem is that you need to stay on the site and can not just leave it and come back later when it is finished.
Staying on the site does not help either, got kicked out of queue despite reloading every minute.
Only thing saving my sanity is that I normally get my RPG fix from a different source.
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I will just point out that staying logged in to the site is not an issue: once your personalisation request hits the queue, it stays there. Once your item is personalised, it is available to download for a period of time, however newly personalised items can kick older ones off on a First In, First Out basis. The current estimate for a personalised item to remain on the server is 2 hours (under normal traffic it's a lot longer).
However, the downloads page does not have a short-term memory. It doesn't know that you clicked a product 20 minutes ago, so it looks like you've had to start again (and, depending on whether your personalised product is available for download, you really might have to start again.
What's happening most commonly is that people are queuing up several personalisations of the same product, putting an even heavier load on the server, and (unfortunately) not catching the product when it's actually available for download.
Because the system was never expected to handle requests with this frequency, it was never designed to accurately report when a personalised product is available for download, so there are no built-in methods of reporting to the user, which is why we're all having to play "click, click, click", which is actually just making things worse.
I suspect that the Paizo tech team will be taking a good look at this as soon as they have a chance to breathe, but right now the focus is on keeping the site stable enough to handle demand.
I suspect that the Paizo tech team will be taking a good look at this as soon as they have a chance to breathe, but right now the focus is on keeping the site stable enough to handle demand.
It's not stable enough to handle demand. It's stable enough that the rest of the site doesn't fall over in the face of demand on this particular area, but it's not handling demand. In other words, it's stable enough to be stable, and that's it (and achieving that goal seems to be the limit of the ambition at this point).
I think what the team need to take a good look at is whether an owned-hardware approach is best for a system that seems to have highly elastic load requirements, or whether they should be putting this in a cloud service. Should say, I have no personal interest in them doing so (in terms of being, e.g., an employee or shareholder in Amazon etc.) other than having a number of documents that I paid for (not via this current promotion) that I can't download.
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I like it how rpgdrivethru does it. You click on the link and it will personalize it and save it to drop box. This way I do not need to wait for the personalization to complete. I can just check dropbox later when the queue catches up.
Just a thought.
It seems like it would be possible to include a separate download link for files which have already completed personalization so that personalization doesn't need to be repeated.