GW have reacted after the issues with Bots and other Scalper Ghak by installing a new Qeue System on their website for SA preorders.

You now have to Enter a Code.

That's a pretty simple CAPTCHA, wont keep the more technically adept bot farmers away, but a good step in the right direction

Tested just now and even the onboard OCR in iOS photos app can solve these..

The bots have 10 mins to add 1000s to the bots ready to grab everything.

Good job GW



Automatically Appended Next Post:
Cool wait time of one hour.

Scalper/bot tech was developed to get concert tickets and other big money items. GW doesn't stand a chance if Ticket Master can't stop them.

One way would be people who spend more than X on their site get early access for a year. Though I suppose a good scalper could make that money back pretty fast...

Or just... limit to 1 per shipping address instead of 1 per account.

I don't like it. GW now makes me lie by claiming I'm not a robot.

What about all the AdMech and Necron players? They just miss out?

This is treating the symptom, not the cause, but it’s a step. Hopefully ends up helping a few people, and isn’t horribly inconvenient.

I logged in at about 11am on the UK website and the Deathwing box was still available, one hour after it launched at 10am. It was out of stock not long after but at least it didn't sell out in seconds / minutes.

I find Captchas annoying, but if it helps deal with the scalper issue (doubtful whether it will in the long run) I guess it's a step in the right direction.

Boxes aren't really worth scalping, that's why they were around for longer Unless it's Kill Team. I expect the new box to be gone in seconds.

I hope no Scalping for the next Legions Imperalis Releases.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Scalper/bot tech was developed to get concert tickets and other big money items. GW doesn't stand a chance if Ticket Master can't stop them.

One way would be people who spend more than X on their site get early access for a year. Though I suppose a good scalper could make that money back pretty fast...

Wasn't there some controversy that some (one?) of the major ticket firms was alleged that they weren't too concerned about it because the resellers were also then just using the official ticket resale website that the firm also ran and took a fee for each resold ticket.

But yeah in general if any of the scalpers are "serious" or have tapped into serious toys then GW are small fry and online scalping is a huge issue that's hard to tackle.
I recall some sporting clubs and venues were talking about how one way to combat it is with premier groups and club organisations. Ergo things that require joining up in person and other such gateways that help prove a person is an actual person and add more layers of complexity; then giving those groups preferential treatment/early access. The theory being that the most serious fans would be willing to jump through a few hoops for the boon and it might help cut down on bots.

Of course it does nothing for new/casual fans and since many of those group systems rely on things like in person events and additional payments it can even lock out some customer groups altogether. From those that are fringe interested through to those who are on tighter budgets.

Of course from a company point of view it at least helps protect some of your most vocal and serious fans.



I know one or two webstores have started doing things like password access and local group reservations and so forth in a bid to combat scalpers and at least help ensure their physical store and most ardent fans get access over scalpers

The captcha system seemed to help today, as my queue consistently went down, rather than surging up and down, even though I logged in right as the presale started.

However, whatever they did also broke something on iOS (which was the only access I had at 1pm EST), as I could not log into my account (without clearing my cart), nor could I add an address checking out as a guest (the 'begin searching address' field refused to register as filled, so I could not save any address), forcing me to ship to a GW 50 miles away from my home to get some Titan transfers.

Full credit to GW, I never expected those transfers to be reprinted, so I was hugely glad for that, and the queue did seem to work properly, at least, so two steps forward, one step back, I suppose.

Imagine a captcha 40K themed system. That would be a thing of beauty separating bots from the true fans

Then we would get a DA captcha requesting to click on the loyalist marines, or a who is Alpharious one, and the shop would remain unaccesible to everybody until the captcha reseted.

M.

So GW had the captcha live? I didn't check the site while it was on, would be interesting to see how it works. I generally hate captchas as I must be too much like a robot and often have to go through a bunch of them to get past them, haha.

I think the idea of the queue system was fine BUT it should be shorter, it's absurd to have to wait close to an hour then finally get on the store to find half the crap you wanted is sold out anyway.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
So GW had the captcha live? I didn't check the site while it was on, would be interesting to see how it works. I generally hate captchas as I must be too much like a robot and often have to go through a bunch of them to get past them, haha.

I think the idea of the queue system was fine BUT it should be shorter, it's absurd to have to wait close to an hour then finally get on the store to find half the crap you wanted is sold out anyway.

I accidentally went to the GW site a minute after pre-orders went up (I was checking something else and wasn't aware of the time). I got a text-based captcha with random letters and numbers. 6-8, I think.

Curiously the queue was almost empty and I had a waiting time of only a minute.

Dark angel players got demoralized by reviews and didn't show up?-)

(dunno. Seeing # of complains seems book had something to make da players not happy)

 Miguelsan wrote:
Imagine a captcha 40K themed system. That would be a thing of beauty separating bots from the true fans

Then we would get a DA captcha requesting to click on the loyalist marines, or a who is Alpharious one, and the shop would remain unaccesible to everybody until the captcha reseted.

M.

Please click on all the first founding chapters.

Select all the marines who share Ultramarine geneseed.

Select all the legions who were at Istavan

Select all the Leviathan Tyranids.

Choose the necrons who belong to the destroyer cult.

Which tau are NOT in the fire caste?

--

This is a great idea. GW needs to implement this right away.

 Nevelon wrote:

 Miguelsan wrote:
Imagine a captcha 40K themed system. That would be a thing of beauty separating bots from the true fans

Then we would get a DA captcha requesting to click on the loyalist marines, or a who is Alpharious one, and the shop would remain unaccesible to everybody until the captcha reseted.

M.

Please click on all the first founding chapters.

Select all the marines who share Ultramarine geneseed.

Select all the legions who were at Istavan

Select all the Leviathan Tyranids.

Choose the necrons who belong to the destroyer cult.

Which tau are NOT in the fire caste?

--

This is a great idea. GW needs to implement this right away.

I'm not sure if either of you are being 100% serious but having a Captcha that requires knowledge of Warhammer lore is not the best idea. What if someone is buying a product for a friend? Or for their child (does anyone talk about Little Timmy any more?)? Or even someone who is new to the hobby but would like to pick up some stuff to get into it. Or even someone who knows nothing about 40K and they want to buy some Age of Sigmar models.

Very clearly a joke.

El Torro wrote:I'm not sure if either of you are being 100% serious but having a Captcha that requires knowledge of Warhammer lore is not the best idea. What if someone is buying a product for a friend? Or for their child (does anyone talk about Little Timmy any more?)? Or even someone who is new to the hobby but would like to pick up some stuff to get into it. Or even someone who knows nothing about 40K and they want to buy some Age of Sigmar models.

Gert wrote:Very clearly a joke.

Just having a bit of a laugh. It might be fun for an April Fools joke, (especially if it just let you in after a failed attempt) but would 100% gatekeep out new players, or even people who didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the lore.

The concept of it gave me a good chuckle over my morning coffee, so wanted to add on to the joke with a few examples that popped into my mind.

 Nevelon wrote:
Just having a bit of a laugh. It might be fun for an April Fools joke, (especially if it just let you in after a failed attempt) but would 100% gatekeep out new players, or even people who didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the lore.

The concept of it gave me a good chuckle over my morning coffee, so wanted to add on to the joke with a few examples that popped into my mind.

Fair enough, I stand corrected

The good old Internet, confusing people with written sarcasm since 1983.

Plus I'm British, so have no excuse for missing the sarcasm...

 Geifer wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
So GW had the captcha live? I didn't check the site while it was on, would be interesting to see how it works. I generally hate captchas as I must be too much like a robot and often have to go through a bunch of them to get past them, haha.

I think the idea of the queue system was fine BUT it should be shorter, it's absurd to have to wait close to an hour then finally get on the store to find half the crap you wanted is sold out anyway.

I accidentally went to the GW site a minute after pre-orders went up (I was checking something else and wasn't aware of the time). I got a text-based captcha with random letters and numbers. 6-8, I think.

Curiously the queue was almost empty and I had a waiting time of only a minute.

From my understanding, the “test” isn’t actually the test. They monitor things like your mouse movement to see if you’re behaving like a human (vs just making a b-line to the correct answer) and also monitor things like whether you’ve done captchas on diffeeent sites, whether your browsing history looks like a real human or a bot, and stuff like that.

I’ve had times where I’ve had to work through half a dozen tests and I’m 90% sure my answers were right but for whatever reason the thing must think I’m a bot.

I wouldn't know anything about that. I'm just the trained monkey trying to get on GW's site.

El Torro wrote:


I'm not sure if either of you are being 100% serious but having a Captcha that requires knowledge of Warhammer lore is not the best idea. What if someone is buying a product for a friend? Or for their child (does anyone talk about Little Timmy any more?)? Or even someone who is new to the hobby but would like to pick up some stuff to get into it. Or even someone who knows nothing about 40K and they want to buy some Age of Sigmar models.

While joke how many of above are in for preorder limited stuff? As the captcha isn't constant.

It applies only part of day for limited # of saturday's.

Friend doesn't likely leave purchase of limited edition for non-gw familiar friend to begin with

New to hobby aren't looking limited edition into entry as hobby anyway.

 tauist wrote:
good step in the right direction

No. Just no. Bots could read captcha a decade ago. Now? In era of GPT? I guarantee you bots will solve captcha too hard for 99% of the humans. But you don't even need fancy AI for that, programming something that will dump all the bot captchas on the screen of scalper PC the instant orders open is trivial and I bet their orders will still be faster than normal fans as the only window they will have to fill is the code, bot will do the rest.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
From my understanding, the “test” isn’t actually the test. They monitor things like your mouse movement to see if you’re behaving like a human (vs just making a b-line to the correct answer) and also monitor things like whether you’ve done captchas on diffeeent sites, whether your browsing history looks like a real human or a bot, and stuff like that.

I’ve had times where I’ve had to work through half a dozen tests and I’m 90% sure my answers were right but for whatever reason the thing must think I’m a bot.

No, that's what google and co do. They gave up on captchas as they were too annoying for customers and you now have to click dumb bikes or whatever. AI can do that too but google measures how you move mouse and randomness of the clicks (and other parameters humans do but bots have difficulty copying, most of them secret because if bot makers knew them bots would pass them with flying colors the next day), not what you click.

If it has old letter/number garbage, I am strangely sure it doesn't do that. GW is as always stuck thirty steps behind (or just went for what their buddies pitched despite having little experience in actually doing the thing, see the new gak website for best proof). Licensing one of the modern captcha system is a fraction of what doing it in house costs and is far more secure, why did they had to reinvent the (ancient) wheel again?

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
One way would be people who spend more than X on their site get early access for a year

You mean, like people who mass buy big, expensive boxes? Wonder what they are called?

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Or just... limit to 1 per shipping address instead of 1 per account.

Yup, because scalpers don't have friends/family/work/post boxes they can use as pickup point. Or hell, most obvious solution, make a simple misspelling in your street name a postman won't even notice but automatic filter will see a different address. Can you spot the difference between Birmingham and Birrningham or London and Londón at a glance?

 Nevelon wrote:
This is a great idea. GW needs to implement this right away.

I am strangely sure ChatGPT can answer all of these

So End and the Death 3 is going back up. Apparently a bunch of orders have been cancelled so there's stock again.

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2024/01/22/the-end-and-the-death-volume-3-special-edition-is-returning-to-sale/

I'm living for the schadenfreude right now. Good move by GW, though I'm sure theres some that will slip through the cracks.

Some will slip through to be sure, but hopefully this hit a good bulk of the scalped copies!

I hope everyone who already bought a resold book on eBay disputes the transaction; you aren’t technically supposed to be selling items you don’t actually have yet on there and being confronted with a bunch of those might make them pay more attention.

Not quite. Here's ebay's general policy for pre-orders or pre-sale items.

"Presale listings must clearly state that they are "presale" in the title and description, and guarantee shipment within 40 business days of purchase."

I suspected that GW would eventually cancel the majority of the scalped orders, but it's very satisfying to see it happen

did see an alternative captcha thing, it rejected "perfect" responses and only let close errors though

The Captcha thing may be a "one use" trick (unless they keep changing the system), because those pre-configured bots that scalpers use were not expecting a Captcha, so we may end up in a battle between the GW IT team (or contractors) tweaking the system and scalpers trying to reconfigure their scripts. But at least it seems this is a battle that GW is ready to fight, so props to them.

The article was quite nice because it acknowledged the situation (which is, IIRC, the first time GW does this and does not try to attribute obvious scalping to "this item was very popular"). I also received a reply to my email about scalping pointing me to the article and saying, in essence, that GW had been working for months to limit scalping.

As others have said I’m under no illusion that GW can “win” this long term, but it’s good to see some effort in addressing it rather than throwing their hands in the air.

RazorEdge wrote:

Hah, are they that dumb? Pretty sure GW records all calls and if so they have whoever that was admitting to having ordered ten copies of an explicitly one per customer item. Assuming that’s real of course.

 Mr_Rose wrote:

RazorEdge wrote:

Spoiler:

Hah, are they that dumb? Pretty sure GW records all calls and if so they have whoever that was admitting to having ordered ten copies of an explicitly one per customer item. Assuming that’s real of course.

I don't see it mattering, as I highly expect there is something under GW's terms and conditions that says they can cancel an order for whatever reason they feel like, and so long as you give they money back consumer protections aren't going to get in the way.

MaxT wrote:
As others have said I’m under no illusion that GW can “win” this long term, but it’s good to see some effort in addressing it rather than throwing their hands in the air.

An easy win for GW. Stop making things limited edition.
#drops-mic

 Gimgamgoo wrote:

MaxT wrote:
As others have said I’m under no illusion that GW can “win” this long term, but it’s good to see some effort in addressing it rather than throwing their hands in the air.

An easy win for GW. Stop making things limited edition.
#drops-mic

And then all the people who want limited editon complains gw doesn't say what they want to buy.

For them the value is in owning what only few have.

Thus gw couldn't sell higher price book for them as unlimited wouldn't be interest.

 Dawnbringer wrote:

 Mr_Rose wrote:

RazorEdge wrote:

Spoiler:

Hah, are they that dumb? Pretty sure GW records all calls and if so they have whoever that was admitting to having ordered ten copies of an explicitly one per customer item. Assuming that’s real of course.

I don't see it mattering, as I highly expect there is something under GW's terms and conditions that says they can cancel an order for whatever reason they feel like, and so long as you give they money back consumer protections aren't going to get in the way.

I would like to see GW put a note in their terms of service that anyone caught in violation will have their order cancelled and the funds donated to a charity of GWs choice. So a scalper will loose the resale and their money, but they can claim the loss on their taxes.

Warhammer.com/GB is under maintenance just now. I wonder what they broke.

I’m still getting “queue is paused”.

Going on the Warhammer Webshop site, why is there a preorder queue on a Wednesday?

They relisted End and Death.

More companies need websites that block people from going on them on a random Wednesday. Another genius move by Games Workshop. No weekend access, no Wednesday access, I say make it so you can only buy from your company one day a week, and close it at noon on that day too.

Yeah, cool queue system. I don't care about Horus Heresy at all, just let me look at the catalogue.

Then get mad at the scalpers DDOSing the website.

You could stop at just "Get mad at the scalpers".

 frankelee wrote:
More companies need websites that block people from going on them on a random Wednesday. Another genius move by Games Workshop. No weekend access, no Wednesday access, I say make it so you can only buy from your company one day a week, and close it at noon on that day too.

When did Aziraphale take over GW?

 Platuan4th wrote:
You could stop at just "Get mad at the scalpers".

I prefer to save anger for those who buy from them. No market would equal no scalpers.

Apparently GW are doing checks on sales to help identify multiple orders.

Scalpers really need to get in the bin.

Quick look on feebay shows about 50 listings for these End books, so all this que and captcha rubbish over 50 resellers or scalpers or whatever.

If GW wanted to do right by the fans they'd put out preorder systems for those that want to get these items instead of the constant churn of limited number releases.

Anger at scalpers is vastly overplayed and about as interesting as jumping through these artificial hoops that GW have put in place to pretend they are combating it.

Thanks for telling me my opinion.

Guess it’s time to go nuke my Loot Group.

I mean, 6k+ members clearly don’t really care about avoiding scalpers. You said so.

They should have a different site that is only for the preorders so it doesn't interrupt customers who want to shop normally.

With the constant releases they have now they could just put up a banner that says "Don't bother buying stuff on a saturday since it is preorder/queue day and you have 6 other days in the week to order everything else".

I find it pathetic that the site is still off-limits and locked behind a queue, even though sale of the item in question has been stopped hours ago now.

Smaug wrote:

 Dawnbringer wrote:

 Mr_Rose wrote:

RazorEdge wrote:

Spoiler:

Hah, are they that dumb? Pretty sure GW records all calls and if so they have whoever that was admitting to having ordered ten copies of an explicitly one per customer item. Assuming that’s real of course.

I don't see it mattering, as I highly expect there is something under GW's terms and conditions that says they can cancel an order for whatever reason they feel like, and so long as you give they money back consumer protections aren't going to get in the way.

I would like to see GW put a note in their terms of service that anyone caught in violation will have their order cancelled and the funds donated to a charity of GWs choice. So a scalper will loose the resale and their money, but they can claim the loss on their taxes.

I'd rather they put a note in their terms that scalpers will be taken out behind the woodshed. I put scalpers about on par with thieves as far as scumbags go.

 BrookM wrote:
I find it pathetic that the site is still off-limits and locked behind a queue, even though sale of the item in question has been stopped hours ago now.

It's 9pm in the UK right now. Chances are the website is managed by staff in the UK. So since it broke after-hours it might be the fix to get it back and running has to wait until staff are back on the clock.
GW likely hoped that their site wouldn't break in some critical area, however the trick scalpers used (plus probably the huge number of people using the site at once) must have broken a few things. So its likely better that its off rather than on.

It's nice that the queue page tells you the pre-order book is sold out, so at least you don't have to wait for nothing.,, but the fact that there still is a queue of over an hour for the full webstore in a timezone where the pre-order sold out hours ago does not seem entirely efficient. How much did this new website cost again?

 Kanluwen wrote:
Then get mad at the scalpers DDOSing the website.

Well originally they said they had 2500 copies and 500 were scalper copies that were going back for resale.
I guess the DDOSing are a majority of genuine customers.


EDIT.
And according to the GW website, it sold out of the SE book at 17:48
It's now nearly 4 hours later and I still have to queue for 3 quarters of an hour to look at a webstore?

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:


I'd rather they put a note in their terms that scalpers will be taken out behind the woodshed. I put scalpers about on par with thieves as far as scumbags go.

Whilst I dislike scalpers, I think advocating for their summary, extrajudicial execution is is worse.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Thanks for telling me my opinion.

Guess it’s time to go nuke my Loot Group.

I mean, 6k+ members clearly don’t really care about avoiding scalpers. You said so.

I think your responding to me.

You and your group of 6000 plus should be able to order these special edition books without any hassle, scalpers or no scalpers. Unfortunately GW printed what? 2500 copies. And then wants you to digitally que for however long at 10am only to find out all the books already sold out at 09:59.

I always love it when an institution implements a process to stop the "bad guys" and instead makes the process bad for everyone else except for those they intended to stop in the first place.

Seems to happen far, far too often.

Well apparently this didn't work.

At this point it's going to have to be 10 copies per GW store and then brutal combat to see who gets them. Only way to stop the machines is remove the machines.

tneva82 wrote:

And then all the people who want limited editon complains gw doesn't say what they want to buy.

For them the value is in owning what only few have.

Thus gw couldn't sell higher price book for them as unlimited wouldn't be interest.

'Premium' edition books sold at the limited edition pricetag with the sexy limited edition covers but as a MTO instead of limited edition would satisfy the vast majority of customers who collect limited editions for their limited nature (because they would still have a book that by its nature and pricetag is less common than the standard edition and looks different), while potentially opening the door for more sales overall and simultaneously removing any potential for scalping and the need to make customers looking for completely unrelated products queue for a webstore.

The other option is GW could form a book-collectors club which gains exclusive purchasing access to a single copy of each limited edition book like this.

Then they can have a rafter of things like fees/activity monitoring and such to try and whittle out the scalpers whilst also running address checks and so forth; plus they'd have X number of members and be able to then have exact order quantities which could satisfy that market.


Of course that does mean they'd lock out regular people jumping on in on a whim and it kind of closes off these books. Then again at 2.5K copies globally and a sale window measured in seconds, most people are already locked out of that.

The thing is, I don't give a damn about acquiring limited editions. But I do really like having fancy editions. By all means, have a limited run of the signed and numbered fancy editions. But then have a much wider printing of the not-signed and not-numbered fancy editions so that those who want them can get them.

Now forgive me if I've missed some nuance regarding the checkout system in relation to this whole debacle, but why don't they just put these books up as a Made To Order purchase?
-Anyone who wants a book, can order one.
-GW knows exactly how many are needed.
-Scalpers don't really benefit from buying multiples.

Are there any issues being MtO wouldn't solve/alleviate?

 Snrub wrote:
Now forgive me if I've missed some nuance regarding the checkout system in relation to this whole debacle, but why don't they just put these books up as a Made To Order purchase?
-Anyone who wants a book, can order one.
-GW knows exactly how many are needed.
-Scalpers don't really benefit from buying multiples.

Are there any issues being MtO wouldn't solve/alleviate?

You would have to wait (up to 180 days?) before you get it, instead of "next weekend".
Won't 100% stop scalpers, but those who want one won't be left out.

 Stormonu wrote:

 Snrub wrote:
Now forgive me if I've missed some nuance regarding the checkout system in relation to this whole debacle, but why don't they just put these books up as a Made To Order purchase?
-Anyone who wants a book, can order one.
-GW knows exactly how many are needed.
-Scalpers don't really benefit from buying multiples.

Are there any issues being MtO wouldn't solve/alleviate?

You would have to wait (up to 180 days?) before you get it, instead of "next weekend".
Won't 100% stop scalpers, but those who want one won't be left out.

Aren't the limited editions signed by the author? Big difference between a limited run of 2500 copies and, say, 30,000.

And some authors have pretty rad signatures to boot ha!

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

Aren't the limited editions signed by the author? Big difference between a limited run of 2500 copies and, say, 30,000.

Just have them sign the first 2500, and not the rest? Technically it would still make those 2500 'more collectible' so which ever person wants to specifically buy those can do that on ebay, but the rest of us can just have their pretty book. And who cares about the 180 days, if I could have ordered that book (or any 'preorder' for that matter) 180 days ago and actually have gotten it now I would do it instantly. Instead of being 1 book shy of a full collection now and having to be forced to go to ebay and pay a ridiculous amount.

 Stormonu wrote:
I always love it when an institution implements a process to stop the "bad guys" and instead makes the process bad for everyone else except for those they intended to stop in the first place.

Seems to happen far, far too often.

It happens chronically when you use anti customer sales tactics. FOMO in this case.
The obvious solution would've been a single run MTO of them, but that isn't selling as fast and therefore has less pressure on the customer which may impact their decision making process adversly for the company (e.g. not instant impulse buy.) Can't have that.

MoD_Legion wrote:

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

Aren't the limited editions signed by the author? Big difference between a limited run of 2500 copies and, say, 30,000.

Just have them sign the first 2500, and not the rest? Technically it would still make those 2500 'more collectible' so which ever person wants to specifically buy those can do that on ebay, but the rest of us can just have their pretty book. And who cares about the 180 days, if I could have ordered that book (or any 'preorder' for that matter) 180 days ago and actually have gotten it now I would do it instantly. Instead of being 1 book shy of a full collection now and having to be forced to go to ebay and pay a ridiculous amount.

Have a fixed number signed. Issue those to random orders.

Issue solved.

 Snrub wrote:
Now forgive me if I've missed some nuance regarding the checkout system in relation to this whole debacle, but why don't they just put these books up as a Made To Order purchase?
-Anyone who wants a book, can order one.
-GW knows exactly how many are needed.
-Scalpers don't really benefit from buying multiples.

Are there any issues being MtO wouldn't solve/alleviate?

Wouldn't solve?
Well, it wouldn't help GW's fomo sales strategy. If everyone knew they could get the item, there wouldn't be the mad rush to buy it.

Santtu wrote:
Yeah, cool queue system. I don't care about Horus Heresy at all, just let me look at the catalogue.

Ok. I'm sure you are happy to pay the bill for separate server for GW to do it


Automatically Appended Next Post:

SonofHades wrote:
Quick look on feebay shows about 50 listings for these End books, so all this que and captcha rubbish over 50 resellers or scalpers or whatever.

If GW wanted to do right by the fans they'd put out preorder systems for those that want to get these items instead of the constant churn of limited number releases.

Anger at scalpers is vastly overplayed and about as interesting as jumping through these artificial hoops that GW have put in place to pretend they are combating it.

Eh. Preorder. What stops scalpers from preordering it?

Oh? You mean GW should put UNLIMITED AMOUNT of LIMITED EDITION items?

You realize right you are basically saying "GW shouldn't sell limited edition at all" at which point the people who WANT limited edition are angry because GW doesn't sell what they want?

Why limited editions are bought in the first place is because they are LIMITED compared to UNLIMITED.

You are in essence saying GW should do print run of 0 for limited editions. Which is fine. But then that leaves unhappy customers. NOBODY then gets what they want.

If GW sells 1500 limited edition that gives you 1500 people who got the book they want.

If GW makes unlimited amount of books...Then it's 0 who got what they want because nobody got LIMITED edition book because it's actually UNLIMITED edition book.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Klickor wrote:
They should have a different site that is only for the preorders so it doesn't interrupt customers who want to shop normally.

Good idea. Are you willing to pay the bill? I'm sure GW is happy to open up another server for people if you pay the bill

Don't demand GW to double their fees for some days in the year if you aren't willing to pay the bill.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

SonofHades wrote:


You and your group of 6000 plus should be able to order these special edition books without any hassle, scalpers or no scalpers. Unfortunately GW printed what? 2500 copies. And then wants you to digitally que for however long at 10am only to find out all the books already sold out at 09:59.

So you want them to print unlimited print run? Ie make print run of limited edition to 0...So NOBODY gets what they want. Rather than 2500 getting limited edition NOBODY gets limited edition.

Good job. You denied everybody what they wanted.

If you want unlimited book there ACTUALLY IS ONE AVAILABLE. You DO know there's more than 2500 of that book available? Just not LIMITED EDITION. Which is limited becase there's only limited amount of books. If you remove the limited amount from the print run then it obviously isn't limited anymore and thus value of limited edition vanishes and nobody gets what they wanted.

tneva82 wrote:

Santtu wrote:
Yeah, cool queue system. I don't care about Horus Heresy at all, just let me look at the catalogue.

Ok. I'm sure you are happy to pay the bill for separate server for GW to do it


Automatically Appended Next Post:

SonofHades wrote:
Quick look on feebay shows about 50 listings for these End books, so all this que and captcha rubbish over 50 resellers or scalpers or whatever.

If GW wanted to do right by the fans they'd put out preorder systems for those that want to get these items instead of the constant churn of limited number releases.

Anger at scalpers is vastly overplayed and about as interesting as jumping through these artificial hoops that GW have put in place to pretend they are combating it.

Eh. Preorder. What stops scalpers from preordering it?

Oh? You mean GW should put UNLIMITED AMOUNT of LIMITED EDITION items?

You realize right you are basically saying "GW shouldn't sell limited edition at all" at which point the people who WANT limited edition are angry because GW doesn't sell what they want?

Why limited editions are bought in the first place is because they are LIMITED compared to UNLIMITED.

You are in essence saying GW should do print run of 0 for limited editions. Which is fine. But then that leaves unhappy customers. NOBODY then gets what they want.

If GW sells 1500 limited edition that gives you 1500 people who got the book they want.

If GW makes unlimited amount of books...Then it's 0 who got what they want because nobody got LIMITED edition book because it's actually UNLIMITED edition book.

Technically a limited pre-order window would still make the product limited, but the exact number of copies in circulation would vary depending on how popular the product was during the preorder period.

I also wouldn't say nobody gets what they want. Some purchasers of limited editions do so for the exclusivity. Others do so because they like the product in its own right and would buy it if it wasn't limited (they want the premium product, not the limited product). These groups are not mutually exclusive, but on the whole group 1 will be unhappy and group 2 will be happy by a move away from limited products. However, I do think that the FOMO of limited editions does probably increase sales in the short term for the latter group who are not looking for limited products specifically, and that is probably the main driver of GW's limited edition strategy.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Klickor wrote:
They should have a different site that is only for the preorders so it doesn't interrupt customers who want to shop normally.

Good idea. Are you willing to pay the bill? I'm sure GW is happy to open up another server for people if you pay the bill

Don't demand GW to double their fees for some days in the year if you aren't willing to pay the bill.

GW is likely to loose customers whilst their website is effectively bricked by the limited edition sales. It is up to them if they think the lost sales and goodwill from this is worth more or less than separate hosting space for popular orders.

A strict MTO slot still creates a Limited Quantity.

Even if you make it just a couple of days, or even 24 hours.

You still get “FOMO”, and few end up going without, as the only limit is whether you’ve got the money at the time to order.

Make a certain amount signed, dispatching those at random among the orders, and there’s some extra incentive.

 Gimgamgoo wrote:

 Snrub wrote:
Now forgive me if I've missed some nuance regarding the checkout system in relation to this whole debacle, but why don't they just put these books up as a Made To Order purchase?
-Anyone who wants a book, can order one.
-GW knows exactly how many are needed.
-Scalpers don't really benefit from buying multiples.

Are there any issues being MtO wouldn't solve/alleviate?

Wouldn't solve?
Well, it wouldn't help GW's fomo sales strategy. If everyone knew they could get the item, there wouldn't be the mad rush to buy it.

If you have a limited preorder window, the product is still limited and FOMO is still present.

This is actually the exact approach GW takes with the Warhammer + exclusives- they essentially have a one-year limited period to get them, but if you pay for an annual subscription during that time you can definitely get the mini. The mini is still limited, but how limited varies on how many annual subscriptions were purchased over a year. Subscribe too late, you miss the mini. GW can still use this to generate FOMO when the minis change over too.

Personally, I think this is a much better approach than the current one for customers. I suspect it is not favoured by GW due to a reduced ability to hype releases with the long lag between order and shipping.

MTO hinders scalpers in the way that they cannot earn quick money

of course they can buy 500 books on MTO and sell them on ebay, but with up to 180 days waiting time you it is more of a problem to sell it before you receive it you need to have the spare money to buy 500 books

OOP Books sell for a lot of money among collectors, no matter how limited the initial run was
but no one bought 500 copies of the Liber books to have a stock to sell for triple the price once production stops
because if you cannot make profit fast, it is not worth doing it

 kodos wrote:
MTO hinders scalpers in the way that they cannot earn quick money

of course they can buy 500 books on MTO and sell them on ebay, but with up to 180 days waiting time you it is more of a problem to sell it before you receive it you need to have the spare money to buy 500 books

OOP Books sell for a lot of money among collectors, no matter how limited the initial run was
but no one bought 500 copies of the Liber books to have a stock to sell for triple the price once production stops
because if you cannot make profit fast, it is not worth doing it

Supply and demand definitely influences the price of OOP books though. A very common OOP book is likely to be cheaper than a very rare one, unless the demand is much higher for the common book.

I can buy a 3rd edition 40k codex for £10. That is barely different to the price when they were new, and they've been OOP for 20 years! Low demand, relatively high supply.

technically the 3rd Edi Codex is not oop but still in print as it was replaced with an updated version

same as you can get a 20 year old encyclopedia for cheap not because there are so many around but because the updated version is still in print

Warhammer Fantasy army books were sold for much higher prices, although a lot of them were around but because the game stopped to be people knew that there won't be a new version
when 40k stops tomorrow, the price of 3rd Editon books

tneva82 wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Santtu wrote:
Yeah, cool queue system. I don't care about Horus Heresy at all, just let me look at the catalogue.

Ok. I'm sure you are happy to pay the bill for separate server for GW to do it

tneva82 wrote:

Klickor wrote:
They should have a different site that is only for the preorders so it doesn't interrupt customers who want to shop normally.

Good idea. Are you willing to pay the bill? I'm sure GW is happy to open up another server for people if you pay the bill

Don't demand GW to double their fees for some days in the year if you aren't willing to pay the bill.

That's not how web hosting works...like, at all. You don't need a separate server for this. There are out-of-the-box solutions that will allow you to set up queues on specific URLs within your site, or subsections, or sets of URLs. There is literally no reason why GW has to block off their entire site behind a queue because they've released a fancy book that day.

It's just another example of how terrible their new website is. These kinds of issues are well-known problems with a variety of solutions. The current implementation suggests GW didn't think about them at all, and their chosen developers also didn't think about it at the planning and requirements stage.

tneva82 wrote:

Klickor wrote:
They should have a different site that is only for the preorders so it doesn't interrupt customers who want to shop normally.

Good idea. Are you willing to pay the bill? I'm sure GW is happy to open up another server for people if you pay the bill

Don't demand GW to double their fees for some days in the year if you aren't willing to pay the bill.

It would cost them barely anything at all to have a separate site that handles preorders and then let their normal store just run as normal. They shouldn't make a complete copy for the entire site, just the preorder part. It might even be a cheaper solution since they only need to dedicate extra server bandwith during new releases for it and can have their normal store run on slightly less than it does now most of the time. Their over all use of server load would be way lower since right now you have people who aren't after preorders spending half their saturdays queuing and putting load on the servers when they normally would have been done in a couple of minutes. They would also not have downtime on their regular webstore that right now loses them money when people who aren't interested in preorders can't even spend their money.

But since GW is even more inept when it comes to IT than when it comes to writing good rules I can't see them managing this. But this would be a cost saving measure that could increase overall sales and not cost us customers a single cent extra if done properly.

Of course, we all remember well that when GW canned their Forgeworld site (must have been sooo expensive!), they were able to pass on those savings to us customers...

 kodos wrote:
technically the 3rd Edi Codex is not oop but still in print as it was replaced with an updated version

same as you can get a 20 year old encyclopedia for cheap not because there are so many around but because the updated version is still in print

Warhammer Fantasy army books were sold for much higher prices, although a lot of them were around but because the game stopped to be people knew that there won't be a new version
when 40k stops tomorrow, the price of 3rd Editon books

Sort of true, although later editions of 40k publications are normally wildly different and not iterative in the way most book editions are.

Eitherway, that merely factors into demand. Demand is low because a later edition usable for the current version of the game exists.

Compare to, say, a 1st edition copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. A later edition of the book is still in print, but the original first editions have a lot of demand and low supply and therefore a lot of value. This is also true of limited edition books when the standard edition remains in print. More limited books floating around will reduce the price per book.

So OOP isn't the only factor, but that provides a hard cap on the supply.

tneva82 wrote:

Why limited editions are bought in the first place is because they are LIMITED compared to UNLIMITED.

Uh no. I'm fairly sure actual warhammer fans that buy limited edition warhammer books buy them because they look cool. It's scalpers and 'investors' that buy them specifically because they are limited. People that actually read their books don't give a gak about whether it's limited or not, they just like it because it's a premium product compared to the normal hardback.

MoD_Legion wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Why limited editions are bought in the first place is because they are LIMITED compared to UNLIMITED.

Uh no. I'm fairly sure actual warhammer fans that buy limited edition warhammer books buy them because they look cool. It's scalpers and 'investors' that buy them specifically because they are limited. People that actually read their books don't give a gak about whether it's limited or not, they just like it because it's a premium product compared to the normal hardback.

Yes exactly.

No que
No captcha
No FOMO, though I guess this is not an entirely one sided problem.
No bad will, you can get all your special edition bound books with cool map and importantly don't miss out on say book III of a series because you got hit by a que when the likelihood is the books already sold out 09.59.
So yes a print run of say 10,000 world wide is still a limited edition for those that do care. But importantly the fans get what they want.

Unfortunately I do think GW is obsessed with product churn, don't really care who buys their stuff, queit/captcha system are performative and the que system doesn't appear to have stopped the dozens of feebay scalpers. There is a point where this stuff becomes too obnoxious like cookie menus on some of the more unfriendly hobby sites and more users are switched of by it.

Gw gets far too much leeway with anti consumer practices like FOMO.

tneva82 wrote:

Klickor wrote:
They should have a different site that is only for the preorders so it doesn't interrupt customers who want to shop normally.

Good idea. Are you willing to pay the bill? I'm sure GW is happy to open up another server for people if you pay the bill

Don't demand GW to double their fees for some days in the year if you aren't willing to pay the bill.

Didn't GW just spend almost $14 MILLION dollars on their new pile of crap website? This isn't about money, it's about competence, as has been pointed out, there's several options for GW to have set up their site differently, part off a separate section for a queued portion of the site that has new releases is one of those options.

BL has tried different release methods. The HH novella Tallarn: Executioner was released as a limited signed and numbered MTO. There was the gold edition (numbered, extra art, and signed) and silver edition (numbered but no art or signature) of Aurelian. Even the mass market paperbacks had different color foil on the covers to show what print run they where from, gold, silver, or bronze, the exception being Horus Rising which got a platinum anniversary edition.

Slipspace wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Santtu wrote:
Yeah, cool queue system. I don't care about Horus Heresy at all, just let me look at the catalogue.

Ok. I'm sure you are happy to pay the bill for separate server for GW to do it

tneva82 wrote:

Klickor wrote:
They should have a different site that is only for the preorders so it doesn't interrupt customers who want to shop normally.

Good idea. Are you willing to pay the bill? I'm sure GW is happy to open up another server for people if you pay the bill

Don't demand GW to double their fees for some days in the year if you aren't willing to pay the bill.

That's not how web hosting works...like, at all. You don't need a separate server for this. There are out-of-the-box solutions that will allow you to set up queues on specific URLs within your site, or subsections, or sets of URLs. There is literally no reason why GW has to block off their entire site behind a queue because they've released a fancy book that day.

It's just another example of how terrible their new website is. These kinds of issues are well-known problems with a variety of solutions. The current implementation suggests GW didn't think about them at all, and their chosen developers also didn't think about it at the planning and requirements stage.

I can't imagine the GW visitor load is so high the store couldn't continue to function. We're talking about, what, 3000 users at peak? Probably less than 10% of them doing something that requires server work (loading a page mostly). I reckon the queue thing is mostly to make it look busier or to mask some other issue.

At worst, you might need to cap the number of people trying to checkout their cart at once, but again e-commerce platforms can handle orders of magnitudes more visitors and be fine.

Google tells me you can handle about 250 users per processor core, so 3000 users would only be 12 cores - which a lot of desktops have these days and are nothing for a server. Most of the web server software seems capable of supporting 10,000+ connections at a time.

So you'd expect a £1m website to be able to handle far more traffic than it does. Then worst case you could spawn up an AWS instance to handle the extra traffic for a few hours a month and it would cost virtually nothing.


In short, there's absolutely no valid reason a toy store should need an artificial queue.


I'd argue Something like ticketmaster can benefit from a queue because instead of handling stock for 2500 instances of a thing (where you just need to track how many things are in the baskets), it can have well over 100,000 unique things to track (40,000 seats in a stadium over multiple dates/venues). But for GW? Nah. But then I'm convinced that the £1m website is generating a lot of profit for a friend of a board members or something, because it's definitely not a £1m website even with the stock room back end.

It's wild that people still don't understand that the main tactic used was to swarm the site with bots.

I'm pretty sure GW's entire customer base online amounts to more than 3K users at any one time for a major product sale. Even if many don't want the book they will likely jump on in to have a look.

Throw a bot or two that swarms the site like crazy and boom you've got a broken site.

Heck most of the 3rd parties crashed on the launch of Leviathan. Firestorm, Wayland, almost all the 3rd party sites were iffy to outright crashed on that launch day. That's WAY more than 3K users at once.



Now granted GW's website does seem to be less than amazing considering how much they spent on it; but even if it were more amazing it would still suffer under a scalper bot attack.

Kanluwen wrote:It's wild that people still don't understand that the main tactic used was to swarm the site with bots.

Right, can't parse/exclude them fast enuff. So if for every genuine user there are 3-500 bots, the math doesn't favour "dum 'umies"

I haven't bought from GW's site in a long time. I still remember when the last site (that comments here were praising in comparisons to the new one) was the new and buggy site that had lost features and had only gotten worse. So I can't really say much about its performance in isolation but I'd ask this. Have scalpers multiplied by a factor of 100 right as GW went live with their new site? Why does the new site need a queue system when the old didn't? Or did the old one have a queue system and need to take breaks every few days too? From what I have read here it's a new problem for GW's site.

Has anything else changed with GW's sales tactics (or any other relevant factors) when they changed sites? Because if it hasn't (that's how it looks to me but I also haven't really kept up with GW's web dev efforts) then that would clearly indicate that it's the new site's fault for not being able to keep up if the old one was at least capable of doing that.

Mario wrote:
I haven't bought from GW's site in a long time. I still remember when the last site (that comments here were praising in comparisons to the new one) was the new and buggy site that had lost features and had only gotten worse. So I can't really say much about its performance in isolation but I'd ask this. Have scalpers multiplied by a factor of 100 right as GW went live with their new site? Why does the new site need a queue system when the old didn't? Or did the old one have a queue system and need to take breaks every few days too? From what I have read here it's a new problem for GW's site.

Has anything else changed with GW's sales tactics (or any other relevant factors) when they changed sites? Because if it hasn't (that's how it looks to me but I also haven't really kept up with GW's web dev efforts) then that would clearly indicate that it's the new site's fault for not being able to keep up if the old one was at least capable of doing that.

The previous site also used a similar system to try and deter bots. And yes during Covid the amount of scalping increased a LOT everywhere. Lots of people out of work twiddling their fingers doing nothing took to scalping supplies of things because everything was in short supply.

GW got hit with scalpers worse then than normal and its remained an issue. Chance are it just means a few pro scalpers have found GW to be small, but profitable and worth targeting for specific limited edition releases to then resell online.

Thing is you don't need many individual scalpers to cause an issue; you just need them to have enough half decent to decent tools to break websites and cause issues.

My understanding was that scalpers have become "professionalised" in recent years and now employ some fairly sophisticated techniques targeting a variety of sectors (such as music tickets). Then they have discovered this fairly niche hobby with high profit margins and descended like vultures. Gone are the days where scalpers are also members of the hobby who buy a handful of boxes to upsell.

That this happened with the new website seems to be coincidental bad timing.

Herzlos wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Santtu wrote:
Yeah, cool queue system. I don't care about Horus Heresy at all, just let me look at the catalogue.

Ok. I'm sure you are happy to pay the bill for separate server for GW to do it

tneva82 wrote:

Klickor wrote:
They should have a different site that is only for the preorders so it doesn't interrupt customers who want to shop normally.

Good idea. Are you willing to pay the bill? I'm sure GW is happy to open up another server for people if you pay the bill

Don't demand GW to double their fees for some days in the year if you aren't willing to pay the bill.

That's not how web hosting works...like, at all. You don't need a separate server for this. There are out-of-the-box solutions that will allow you to set up queues on specific URLs within your site, or subsections, or sets of URLs. There is literally no reason why GW has to block off their entire site behind a queue because they've released a fancy book that day.

It's just another example of how terrible their new website is. These kinds of issues are well-known problems with a variety of solutions. The current implementation suggests GW didn't think about them at all, and their chosen developers also didn't think about it at the planning and requirements stage.

I can't imagine the GW visitor load is so high the store couldn't continue to function. We're talking about, what, 3000 users at peak? Probably less than 10% of them doing something that requires server work (loading a page mostly). I reckon the queue thing is mostly to make it look busier or to mask some other issue.

At worst, you might need to cap the number of people trying to checkout their cart at once, but again e-commerce platforms can handle orders of magnitudes more visitors and be fine.

Google tells me you can handle about 250 users per processor core, so 3000 users would only be 12 cores - which a lot of desktops have these days and are nothing for a server. Most of the web server software seems capable of supporting 10,000+ connections at a time.

So you'd expect a £1m website to be able to handle far more traffic than it does. Then worst case you could spawn up an AWS instance to handle the extra traffic for a few hours a month and it would cost virtually nothing.


In short, there's absolutely no valid reason a toy store should need an artificial queue.


I'd argue Something like ticketmaster can benefit from a queue because instead of handling stock for 2500 instances of a thing (where you just need to track how many things are in the baskets), it can have well over 100,000 unique things to track (40,000 seats in a stadium over multiple dates/venues). But for GW? Nah. But then I'm convinced that the £1m website is generating a lot of profit for a friend of a board members or something, because it's definitely not a £1m website even with the stock room back end.

You're missing a zero, not a £1m website, it's over £10m.

But I'm sure the traffic is a lot more than 2500 instances, probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude bigger than that for big releases. When Leviathan launched, I saw one independent stockist go from 600 units down to zero in a couple of minutes, and that was just 1 independent stockist in Australia (granted, one of the bigger ones in Australia). The official GW store in the US has got to be orders of magnitude more traffic than that.

But that said, I still think it's absurd that a company that put $14M into their online system couldn't come up with something better than effectively shutting down their store on a saturday to deal with preorders (and the fact you can't even view the Australian site during the UK launch or the UK side during the US launch etc).

 Kanluwen wrote:
It's wild that people still don't understand that the main tactic used was to swarm the site with bots.

Because it wasn't. The main tactic was to inject the product code into the payment gateway, so they never had to access the main site in the first place.

A couple of things:

1. There's a copy of Death Ending of Death on eBay with 31 people bidding on it at nearly £1500. I am wearied beyond belief about this constant grinding exploitation.

2. That horror of a user interface hellsite they've just launched cost FOURTEEN Million?! Flippin eck. I bet those devs are laughing a skipping down the street over that.

 Dimrill wrote:
2. That horror of a user interface hellsite they've just launched cost FOURTEEN Million?! Flippin eck. I bet those devs are laughing a skipping down the street over that.

£10.8M which is about $14M USD, proudly stated in their half yearly financial report.

Man, I wish I had a few copies to sell if you can get that much for them.

 Dimrill wrote:
A couple of things:

1. There's a copy of Death Ending of Death on eBay with 31 people bidding on it at nearly £1500. I am wearied beyond belief about this constant grinding exploitation.

That is pretty obviously troll non-paying bids to annoy the seller, not that there is a real sale for that amount.

 The Phazer wrote:

 Dimrill wrote:
A couple of things:

1. There's a copy of Death Ending of Death on eBay with 31 people bidding on it at nearly £1500. I am wearied beyond belief about this constant grinding exploitation.

That is pretty obviously troll non-paying bids to annoy the seller, not that there is a real sale for that amount.

Er... doesn't whoever is last get on the hook for the bill though?

 Haighus wrote:

 The Phazer wrote:

 Dimrill wrote:
A couple of things:

1. There's a copy of Death Ending of Death on eBay with 31 people bidding on it at nearly £1500. I am wearied beyond belief about this constant grinding exploitation.

That is pretty obviously troll non-paying bids to annoy the seller, not that there is a real sale for that amount.

Er... doesn't whoever is last get on the hook for the bill though?

They can just not pay, they get a black mark against their account and I believe banned after a few of those, but if the account has just been set up for the purpose of trolling sellers then that doesn't matter.

Scalpers have always been part of the GW economy, more than in any other genre

simply because it is a niche were "value" is not related to anything but the possible saving and/or not getting the item at all
(and buying a box and selling of everything but the 1 model you want and making profit in the end is something that was there since we got box exclusive items)

once you could win a chainsaw 1:1 replica for display at an event
the winner put it on ebay the moment he got it and sold it for a price that would cover all his travelling fees + profit

what changed is that there is a bigger drive for collectors items with FOMO from GW itself that increases the willingness from the costumers to pay more, also to GW.
like when GW switched from selling bundles at discount to making those collectors boxes that sell for more than it will cost later
and as soon as people are willing to pay more to get it early, others will be there to make profit from it as well

 Kanluwen wrote:
It's wild that people still don't understand that the main tactic used was to swarm the site with bots.

But then you'd be better passing traffic through something like Cloudflare, who make a big deal of stopping bots? I don't deal with that side of tech so not up to date on bot fighting.

Adding a queue doesn't do anything to deter the bots, who can sit happily for hours waiting on access whilst the users have got bored and left.

You can presumably identify bots from how they interact with the site too; misleading code labels, unnatural browsing style and so on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kodos wrote:
Scalpers have always been part of the GW economy, more than in any other genre

simply because it is a niche were "value" is not related to anything but the possible saving and/or not getting the item at all
(and buying a box and selling of everything but the 1 model you want and making profit in the end is something that was there since we got box exclusive items)

once you could win a chainsaw 1:1 replica for display at an event
the winner put it on ebay the moment he got it and sold it for a price that would cover all his travelling fees + profit

I don't really view stuff like that as scalping - box splitters serve a valid purpose, because someone else can just buy the bits they want.
Selling prizes isn't new either; it's pretty limited in scale since you have to win it in the first place.

if you defeat "bots" you will find someone who thinks there is enough money will hire one of the "mechanical turk" type sweat shops

you won't get around this short of limiting probably by delivery address

but as others have noted, for GW this scalping means both 100% sell out and incentive to try to buy now to avoid missing out

its only the not very good PR look to it thats a downside really

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
You're missing a zero, not a £1m website, it's over £10m.

My bad. I should have known that but even £1m seemed high.

But I'm sure the traffic is a lot more than 2500 instances, probably 1 or 2 orders of magnitude bigger than that for big releases. When Leviathan launched, I saw one independent stockist go from 600 units down to zero in a couple of minutes, and that was just 1 independent stockist in Australia (granted, one of the bigger ones in Australia). The official GW store in the US has got to be orders of magnitude more traffic than that.

I'm not sure there's going to be as much as 250,000 genuine buyers for something on launch, but that's still small fish as far as online retail is concerned. Here's a case study from 2020 about how someone was using AWS to handle 400,000 concurrent quiz users: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/case-study-handling-one-million-concurrent-players-aws/

It's not as if the GW webstore is a single machine sitting in a data centre somewhere in Nottingham. I hope.

But that said, I still think it's absurd that a company that put $14M into their online system couldn't come up with something better than effectively shutting down their store on a saturday to deal with preorders (and the fact you can't even view the Australian site during the UK launch or the UK side during the US launch etc).

Indeed. Even a lazy solution of having a separate pre-order site with a queue whilst leaving the real one up would be an improvement.

Herzlos wrote:
I don't really view stuff like that as scalping - box splitters serve a valid purpose, because someone else can just buy the bits they want.
Selling prizes isn't new either; it's pretty limited in scale since you have to win it in the first place.

where does it start?
boxes are limited and sold out on pre-order, the 1 hero model is exclusive to the box, and people selling everything from the box with profit and a good chance that the hero model is sold above MSRP (if it will be available stand alone)

just because they sell the parts from the box at a higher price and not everything at once does not make a big difference, it is just less obvious

I buy a 100€ starter box with a free 50€ book and 2 factions at 60% discount, the box is sold out on pre-order and some models are exclusive to the box
now I sell the book for 40€, and the models each for 60€, making 60€ profit, this is good and helps the community
buying the box 10 times and splitting it making 600€ profit and it is still good because no one notice

selling all 10 boxes at once on ebay for 160€ each makes me a scalper?
to I need to sell it with 100€ profit to be one? (stil easy, selling the book for 45€, the not exclusive models for 75% MSRP and the exclusive ones for estimated MSRP)

 kodos wrote:
I buy a 100€ starter box with a free 50€ book and 2 factions at 60% discount, the box is sold out on pre-order and some models are exclusive to the box
now I sell the book for 40€, and the models each for 60€, making 60€ profit, this is good and helps the community
buying the box 10 times and splitting it making 600€ profit and it is still good because no one notice

selling all 10 boxes at once on ebay for 160€ each makes me a scalper?
to I need to sell it with 100€ profit to be one? (stil easy, selling the book for 45€, the not exclusive models for 75% MSRP and the exclusive ones for estimated MSRP)

Well - I think as you say, its subjective depending on the level of perceived abuse. Which is largely a function of profit.

Generally buying up say the Lion and then sticking it on ebay for 3 times the price is abusing supply/demand.

By contrast, lets say someone breaks up the Leviathan box. The box's RRP is £150. If say I want to buy the Tyranid half, what are my choices?
A) Buy the Tyranid half from someone for £X.
B) Buy a box for £150 with Space Marines I don't want - but just keep them arguing they are worth something to me.
C) Buy a box for £150 and sell off the Space Marines for whatever, hopefully recouping the money.

Clearly if £X exceeding £150 it would be irrational to buy the half versus the whole box. If however I'm paying £80-90 for the Tyranid half, I'm almost certainly making them money. (On the assumption they get around the same for the Marines, and maybe something from the book although this can be debated). But really, that small increase is probably worth saving the hassle - as I don't want the Space Marines (or at least would rather have the £70-80 for something else), and I don't really want to deal with selling them. So its a price I'm willing to pay. Its unclear the seller is really abusing anything - they are just making some profit, which they should make otherwise why are they bothering?

Herzlos wrote:

It's not as if the GW webstore is a single machine sitting in a data centre somewhere in Nottingham. I hope.

Part of me suspects it's a beige tower sat under the marketing manager's desk, and he keeps kicking it and putting his feet up on it...

If anyone would like a screen shot of my Kindle copy I'm happy to sell it.

I'll even sign it for you.

Thanks for all the clarifications about GW (recent) scalper issues! I simply haven't been in a "I must by this" mood about GW products for quite a while so I never encountered these problems.

MoD_Legion wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

Why limited editions are bought in the first place is because they are LIMITED compared to UNLIMITED.

Uh no. I'm fairly sure actual warhammer fans that buy limited edition warhammer books buy them because they look cool. It's scalpers and 'investors' that buy them specifically because they are limited. People that actually read their books don't give a gak about whether it's limited or not, they just like it because it's a premium product compared to the normal hardback.

That's me. I just like the way the book feels in my hands. If I can't get the Limited Edition, I just get the Kindle version. I couldn't care less about the exclusivity or signature.

I would think it would depend on the book.

Some of their 'limited editions' are the exact same book with a text layer left off the cover image. If that excites people, fair play, I guess.