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I think everybody who ordered the playtest books in whatever form did get the e-mail last week that our credits cards would be charged two days ago. It's probably already happening for some, as physical copies are not all shipped on the same day (as it is for adventure path books, for example).
However, this leads me to a distinct worry: I am concerned that some people will get the playtest books significantly earlier than August 2nd and then we will have a two class society of people who can discuss the actual playtest book much sooner than people in, say, Europe and who will have the ears of the devs that much earlier as well.
I think if people do get their books before August 2nd, the playtest PDF should release as soon as the first people start posting their first impressions. Otherwise this will lead very early on to a skewed perception of the playtest and many, many angry customers. Which will make for a bad start to the playtest, IMHO.
That would be really sad for me. The only reason I didn't preorder was because I would be traveling the month of August and won't be picking up my mail until late August or early September. I'm just sticking to the PDF as a result. If it would have been delivered in July, that would have been perfect for me so I'd have the book to read while I traveled.
It would definitely be positive for the whole community to be on the same page.
Chief Technical Officer
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We are charging cards this week in preparation for Amazon to ship with a goal of having as many orders as possible arrive close to the release date. And they tell me that the window between the first and last shipments should be much narrower than Paizo's shipping windows.
Regarding early feedback, keep in mind that we're running a structured playtest this time, and a lot of the feedback that's most meaningful to us will be regulated by that structure. So regardless of when you get your products, nobody will be able to participate in the most important part of the process until we open it up for participation.
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I preordered a print playtest book that will surely take some time travelling to France
I do not mind at all having to wait for it after getting the pdf (I am quite used to this after all)
I would not like people being able to talk about the playtest rules because they got their books while I would be unable to get the pdf
Thank you Vic, for addressing my concerns.
Two questions:
Has Amazon received shipments to their local branches in countries like Germany, France, etc., or are all books shipping from their US office?
Is the release date for the playtest PDF really August 2nd, or will it be released earlier when people get their books? I don't really see a good argument for withholding it for later, since it's not a situation where people should get a bonus for suscribing to the AP line or where people won't buy the playtest books as much due to the PDF having been released.
Come to think of it, don't answer that second question until you guys have charged everybody their playtest books. ^^
Thank you Vic, for addressing my concerns.
Two questions:
Has Amazon received shipments to their local branches in countries like Germany, France, etc., or are all books shipping from their US office?
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It was stated previously that Amazon is sending out all Playtest books from the US-Warehouses. (That also explains the huge shipping costs attached to such preorders to other parts of the world.)
It was stated previously that Amazon is sending out all Playtest books from the US-Warehouses. (That also explains the huge shipping costs attached to such preorders to other parts of the world.)Thank you Vic, for addressing my concerns.
Two questions:
Has Amazon received shipments to their local branches in countries like Germany, France, etc., or are all books shipping from their US office?
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Thanks, that is already very helpful information. So I fear books will take a while to get to Germany. Oh, well. More reason to release the PDF earlier than August 2nd.
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I think if people do get their books before August 2nd, the playtest PDF should release as soon as the first people start posting their first impressions. Otherwise this will lead very early on to a skewed perception of the playtest and many, many angry customers. Which will make for a bad start to the playtest, IMHO.
I just got my book.
Paizo now has to release the playtest pdf.
Do it!
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Yeah, nice try. :p I guess you got to realistically wait at least one day after you got your shipping notice to make demands. ;)
Vic Wertz replied to your concern earlier:
We are charging cards this week in preparation for Amazon to ship with a goal of having as many orders as possible arrive close to the release date. And they tell me that the window between the first and last shipments should be much narrower than Paizo's shipping windows.
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Emphasis mine.
I'd be guessing that is the timeframe in which the books are leaving the amazon warehouse.
Yes international shipping is taking its time, but I think Amazon knows a thing or two about shipping times and when things arrive at the recepients doorstep.
With August 2nd being a thursday, I expect that most US recipients of the Playtest books will be getting it between Juli 31st and August 6th.
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Good Lord, this happens all the time for the subscriptions, just in reverse, i.e. the PDF of subscribers arriving before the street dates.
It's not caused the collapse of civilization yet, usually the only result is people squealing with either glee or disappointment at the early spoilage.
If it happens, and I don't have mine yet, I'll just do what everyone always does - pleading with the lucky few to "SPILL! SPILL!" :)
Customer Service & Community Manager
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Here is the thread I have for updates on July's new releases which includes the Playtest materials.
July 2018 Gen Con New Releases (including Playtest Materials) Shipping & Convention Pick Up
Vic Wertz replied to your concern earlier:
We are charging cards this week in preparation for Amazon to ship with a goal of having as many orders as possible arrive close to the release date. And they tell me that the window between the first and last shipments should be much narrower than Paizo's shipping windows.
...Emphasis mine.
I'd be guessing that is the timeframe in which the books are leaving the amazon warehouse.
Yes international shipping is taking its time, but I think Amazon knows a thing or two about shipping times and when things arrive at the recepients doorstep.
With August 2nd being a thursday, I expect that most US recipients of the Playtest books will be getting it between Juli 31st and August 6th.
If it works out in that way, I have no further concerns. The mail we got from Paizo a few days ago was saying, however, that shipping would begin in mid-July. Unless the books shipped in that window will all be international orders and local books ship later, some people in the US will be getting their books significantly earlier than the beginning of August. Or the writer of the mail just formulated it wrong, who knows? ^^
Question for Sara Marie.
Will I receive a tracking number when my books ship?
The Denver area has been hard hit with people stealing packages dropped off at their door steps. One team was even so bold as to follow a UPS truck and pick up stuff as soon as the truck pulled away.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Yes international shipping is taking its time, but I think Amazon knows a thing or two about shipping times and when things arrive at the recepients doorstep.
Yes. Amazon knows that these products have a release date of August 2, and will be shipping accordingly. They have been dealing with preorders for products with release dates for years. Which is to say, if they could handle the street date for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows without breaking the internet, they shouldn't have any problem here.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Has Amazon received shipments to their local branches in countries like Germany, France, etc., or are all books shipping from their US office?
Canadian orders will ship from Canada, and all other orders will ship from the US. (The only other country Amazon offered us the ability to ship from is Mexico, but the extra cost and effort to do that wasn't worthwhile.)
Thanks again for the info! :)
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I did my pre-order through Amazon directly, and I haven't received anything about the order being charged, and no charges have been made to my card. Will my delivery be delayed since I went through Amazon instead of the Paizo website?
Presumably Amazon will treat it like every other preorder with a particular release date. Assuming they have actually secured enough copies to meet demand they'll ship them all out with the intent being that they'll arrive on August 2nd. If for some reason they didn't actually secure enough copies we'll potentially be out of luck (yes, I'm also waiting for Amazon to deliver my copy).
I did my pre-order through Amazon directly, and I haven't received anything about the order being charged, and no charges have been made to my card. Will my delivery be delayed since I went through Amazon instead of the Paizo website?
I would think you would want to ask Amazon support.
Interesting. I ordered mine through my FLGS. I wonder if they get them early if they'll let me have one or sit on them until the 2nd.
I did my pre-order through Amazon directly, and I haven't received anything about the order being charged, and no charges have been made to my card. Will my delivery be delayed since I went through Amazon instead of the Paizo website?Presumably Amazon will treat it like every other preorder with a particular release date. Assuming they have actually secured enough copies to meet demand they'll ship them all out with the intent being that they'll arrive on August 2nd. If for some reason they didn't actually secure enough copies we'll potentially be out of luck (yes, I'm also waiting for Amazon to deliver my copy).
What I'm wondering is since Paizo went through Amazon, if Amazon will treat it all as from one pot and ship them from all the same bunch. If they run out...then both sides will have those that lose out on the pre-order.
Seen it happen with other items via Amazon...which has me wondering...
Unfortunately, it seems those who order earlier lose out more than those who order later...and those who order later seem to get their orders first...
Don't know why it happens that way via Amazon at times.
It sounds like this is a specific deal between Paizo and Amazon this time though rather than one of those where you have third party sellers (as per some articles, all the items go into the same area, even from different sellers, so even if the item they had sent for Amazon to send was new, Amazon may send a used version through no fault of the seller). That hopefully means that these types of things that have been reported having had occurred at Amazon will not affect the Paizo pre-orders.
Good Luck all...the time is getting closer.
As an Amazon pre-order individual, I just hope Amazon doesn't boff this one up.
Luckily I'll still be able to download the free PDF so no real loss on my part if they do, but still would be nice if they don't mess it up this time around.
I did my pre-order through Amazon directly, and I haven't received anything about the order being charged, and no charges have been made to my card. Will my delivery be delayed since I went through Amazon instead of the Paizo website?Presumably Amazon will treat it like every other preorder with a particular release date. Assuming they have actually secured enough copies to meet demand they'll ship them all out with the intent being that they'll arrive on August 2nd. If for some reason they didn't actually secure enough copies we'll potentially be out of luck (yes, I'm also waiting for Amazon to deliver my copy).What I'm wondering is since Paizo went through Amazon, if Amazon will treat it all as from one pot and ship them from all the same bunch. If they run out...then both sides will have those that lose out on the pre-order.
Seen it happen with other items via Amazon...which has me wondering...
Unfortunately, it seems those who order earlier lose out more than those who order later...and those who order later seem to get their orders first...
Don't know why it happens that way via Amazon at times.
It sounds like this is a specific deal between Paizo and Amazon this time though rather than one of those where you have third party sellers (as per some articles, all the items go into the same area, even from different sellers, so even if the item they had sent for Amazon to send was new, Amazon may send a used version through no fault of the seller). That hopefully means that these types of things that have been reported having had occurred at Amazon will not affect the Paizo pre-orders.
Good Luck all...the time is getting closer.
As an Amazon pre-order individual, I just hope Amazon doesn't boff this one up.
Luckily I'll still be able to download the free PDF so no real loss on my part if they do, but still would be nice if they don't mess it up this time around.
I believe I saw people saying that ordering from Amazon meant it would be fulfilled via the usual mechanism for Amazon getting stuff (i.e. Amazon buys it from a distributor, who bought it from Paizo), so it wasn't like it was just Amazon shipping out of the same pool of stuff they were using to fulfill Paizo's preorders.
As for the "early orders do worse than late ones", well, we'll have to see.
What I'm wondering is since Paizo went through Amazon, if Amazon will treat it all as from one pot and ship them from all the same bunch. If they run out...then both sides will have those that lose out on the pre-order.
Staff have said that Amazon has placed an order for books like every other distributor. If they run out of books, people who ordered through Amazon will be disappointed, because they paid Amazon for something that Amazon underestimated demand for.
But people who ordered through Paizo are paying Paizo, and they will get what they ordered because Paizo knew exactly how many books to order for themselves.
Amazon is pretty good about keeping track of stock, and since this is explicitly something they cannot re-order; I'm sure they're keeping a close eye on how many orders they recieve versus how many they can supply.
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Considering that people are paying a lot of money for the physical product ($93 USD) and are actually invested in it, I think it's OK if they get it a few days earlier. There is supposed to be some benefit. It's better than a week late.
In 3 weeks it won't matter.
Amazon is pretty good about keeping track of stock, and since this is explicitly something they cannot re-order; I'm sure they're keeping a close eye on how many orders they recieve versus how many they can supply.
The concern is that Amazon continued to accept preorders after the window had closed and they had to advise Paizo how many copies they wanted.
With luck, they're very good at estimating future sales from trends and they over-ordered sufficiently. The risk is if they had an unexpected surge in orders after Paizo had placed the order with the printer.
Amazon buys their copies from a book distributor, and that distributor will be placing their preorder during that window. Whatever number we get from them, that's what we'll print and ship to them.
If Amazon is going to continue to take preorders after they've given their distributor a number—and I expect they will—then they better be ordering more copies than they have customer orders for, or hope that their distributor is ordering more copies than they have retailer preorders for.
Otherwise, they're going to have a hard time filling those orders.
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Considering that people are paying a lot of money for the physical product ($93 USD) and are actually invested in it, I think it's OK if they get it a few days earlier. There is supposed to be some benefit. It's better than a week late.
In 3 weeks it won't matter.
I am one of those people and paying likely extra for delivery in Europe
Yet I would not mind everybody getting access to the pdf before I get my physical product. After all it happens all the time with my subscriptions and I actually enjoy the product twice : when the pdf is released and when I later get the physical product
But what I will dislike is if some people get their physical product and start babbling about it before I even have a chance to get the pdf
For where is my benefit then ?
Much better IMO if no one gets a physical copy before the pdf is released
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Interesting. I ordered mine through my FLGS. I wonder if they get them early if they'll let me have one or sit on them until the 2nd.
They will be required to wait until the 2nd - Paizo’s agreement with the distributor, and the distributor’s agreement with the store is that the books won’t be released until the street date. The normal way this is made easy is that distributors only deliver to store on a Wednesday, and companies like Paizo make their street dates a Wednesday. The only common exception is this time of year, where the street date is the first day of Gencon, which is aThursday. I’m not certain which way distributors tend to go for this - deliver a day early and trust the stores, or deliver Best part of a week late and annoy the stores due to the annoyed customers...
Interesting. I ordered mine through my FLGS. I wonder if they get them early if they'll let me have one or sit on them until the 2nd.They will be required to wait until the 2nd - Paizo’s agreement with the distributor, and the distributor’s agreement with the store is that the books won’t be released until the street date. The normal way this is made easy is that distributors only deliver to store on a Wednesday, and companies like Paizo make their street dates a Wednesday. The only common exception is this time of year, where the street date is the first day of Gencon, which is aThursday. I’m not certain which way distributors tend to go for this - deliver a day early and trust the stores, or deliver Best part of a week late and annoy the stores due to the annoyed customers...
Rule of thumb, never trust the stores to NOT release early.
Most will follow the rule or thought...however...there's always that ONE that has to just release it early.
Just got my shipping notice for Playtest.
Are you sure you got the shipping notice and not just the billing notice? I recently got the latter. The billing notice looks a lot like the shipping notice that we usually get from Paizo, including the statement that the order can no longer be altered.
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Just got my shipping notice for Playtest.Are you sure you got the shipping notice and not just the billing notice? I recently got the latter. The billing notice looks a lot like the shipping notice that we usually get from Paizo, including the statement that the order can no longer be altered.
Just checked my order history. The order containing the playtest material, for me at least, was dispatched Friday. 9 to 36 day travel estimate. Assuming 21 days on average, it should arrive right around the correct date, but could be before or after if it’s not an average journey.
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Because of these being dispatched by Amazon, what we have is only a billing request (rather than the normal billing and shipping request)
Once they've procesed everything, they'll send a file to Amazon with exactly what has been paid for, and they will ship what is on that list.
On Thursday, Vic Wertz said:
NO preorders have shipped. The confirmation email some of you have received says "A package... is about to ship from Amazon Main Warehouse via Amazon Standard Delivery."
We are still in the process of charging cards so that we can deliver Amazon the data on the orders that were successfully charged. Amazon will then be shipping them with the target of delivering to most customers near the August 2 release date (which is when the PDF will be available).
And if you haven't received such an email yet, don't worry; they'll be going out for a while yet; at least into tomorrow, I should think. You can check for updates on that here.
Because the Playtest products aren't actually being shipped by Paizo, the process is slightly different than we're used to.