Saturday, 10 January 2015

The End Times: Thanquol pre-order chaos

It takes a lot for Games Workshop to piss me off. This is because I acknowledge firstly that there's very little a medium size miniatures business can do to seriously offend me and, secondly, because a lot of things that seem to piss of hobbyists on the internet look to me just like a business being a business. But today...

I'm writing this at half past eight on Friday night after over an hour of standing in Games Workshop waiting for their website to work so I can order the latest End Times book.

There were three of us in the queue, most local gamers having worked out last time that sitting in the pub with their laptop was a better bet than queueing at GW is they wanted the damn book. However, the problem with this was that so many more computers were trying to connect that it crashed the website completely for nearly an hour.

The first guy in the queue got his straight away, which I was glad of because he is a very longstanding Skaven player. I was second in the queue and got mine ordered an hour later after crashes, server errors, 520 errors, 523 errors and the rest. This pisses me off because GW had decided not to allocate any hardback copies of The End Times: Thanquol to stores, they were all going to be put in the stock for pre-order via the website.

The ONLY WAY to order this product didn't work due to bandwidth issues and I find it hard to believe any company with a lick of common sense and in light of the last three near-instant sellouts couldn't anticipate this and hire time on extra servers for one damn day.

I just stood there wondering “Do you guys even want my money?” whilst the staff fielded phone calls from every other store in the country asking if they had a working order point. It is going to be a few fun days coming up to be GW customer services (which I do not feel much sympathy for) and a horrible few days for the in-store staff (for whom I feel immense sympathy because it is so far from their fault but they're the point of contact for most gamers).


Please, GW, sort this shit out. 

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