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Okay, so first off to all you Fanboys out there, I dont care what you think..so flame away it matters not to me....Second, I love the game of Malifaux, think the game system and miniatures are AMAZING!! This is solely about their Gencon ordering and Wyd customer service (or lack there of)....

So backtrack to last month, I couldnt go to Gencon, so I asked my friend "hey you mind picking up so Gencon Malifaux goodness for me"...now interject local henchman "hey you know Wyrd lets you order all that stuff online during Gencon weekend right?" What?!! Really?!! and I STILL get the limited miniature....Awesome....now mind you I have not been playing the game long, never trolled their forums and had ZERO knowledge of how things went in the past. All I know is that I go online I place my order and I should receive product in a timely manner...right? I mean thats how business works....unless your Wyrd apparently. So midnight hits and I am frantically hitting the refresh button...now originally I only wanted a couple things, but I fell into the "Oooooo Shiney!" trap and my $100 order became 3 orders totaling nearly $400. Mind you that one of my orders was only stock neverborn stuff that I wanted and not Gencon stuff.

So almost 3 weeks passes and none of my orders move passed the "processed" stage, which is their way of saying "Yep...we got your money". So I email a request for update as to why any of my orders were not shipping even though people who ordered after me were getting their orders. Response...cricket cricket cricket.....so I wait 48 hours and send another email request an update within 24 hours or I would be initiating charge back action on my card and filing with the BBB.

Low and behold that gets a response...which basically states that if I dont like the way things are being done or the order that the orders are being filled (im sorry did you say order? how back lack of any system of order) that they would be happy to cancel my order and refund my money. That this is how it goes every year and I knew what I was getting into. Really?!! I am sorry, I must have missed the big banner on the ordering page that stated "Once we have your money we have no idea when you will have your product". Now, again remember this was my first EVER order with them directly (and last I will add) and I had zero info that this was status quo for Gencon. Interject here that if this really is how things go every year at Gencon, and you have REALLY done this every year for the past 4 years, you should literally be ashamed that you have not adjusted your business model to learn from it, but that would be to say you have a business model...

So I take the option of cancelling 2 of my 3 orders and only keep the order open for the original stuff I REALLY wanted....Misaki and the Ten thunders stuff. Now this is the one part that Wyrd did right. They kept people updated about the Misaki ordeal and they refunded my money in 24 hours of my request. Which freed up that money for another major release that had just dropped. Say what you want about the evil company that is GW, but when I order mini's with a street date of X....I have my minis in hand on X. I mean I cant confirm this but I thought I heard somewhere that some of these minis had a street date of the last week of Sept. Which means some people wont even have their orders before the general public can order them. Again I cannot confirm that date though.

The sad thing is that I was able to get all my Neverborn stuff from my FLGS in 4 days and get a discount....So lets move on to the orders....Wyrd says hey guys we are going to throw some goodies into your order for having to wait and we are going to "upgrade" you to Fedex....sounds good...oh wait no, its Fedex Smartpost. A horrible discount shipping service that is some hybrid cooperation between Fedex and that USPS. Well this was obviously a mistake, someone didnt negotiate the service correctly. So why not just ship peoples stuff based on the service they PAID for at checkout?? Could it be that you were already SO overloaded by the orders that making a one shipping choice "upgrade" made it easier for you to fill orders instead of having to figure out "did this guy order overnight? priority? standard?" I hope the latter is not the case, but I have my doubts. So what were the goodies that people received? A Wyrd keychain tape measure....are you fething serious? The sad thing is how giddy every fanboy is about this thing...you realize that at worst case, those things are $0.41 each to order (and no, in the quantity that they are ordering they are not paying that). Oh and you might get a coloring book...what am I 10? WTF am I going to do with a coloring book, how about a mini? any mini...if I cant use it, then at least I can trade it.

So to this very writing, there are still people whose orders have not even shipped yet and one of the most recent post was "blah blah blah have patience they are overloaded with Gencon orders"...you know what GENCON WAS LITERALLY A MONTH AGO....that card is played out...stop it...just stop. If you are going to say that "people knew what they were getting into when they ordered" then you have to say "Wyrd knew what they were getting into with Gencon ordering", where was the temp help? You telling me you dont know a Swath of gamers down there in GA that had nothing to do that weekend that would have accepted peanuts for pay and one of each release to compensate for their time??? Im not talking after Gencon, I am talking about a warehouse crew operating and shipping during Gencon.

Again I will say, I love the game of Malifaux, love the miniatures....but Wyrd needs to bring someone in to professionalize their operation, especially customer service (btw, the no news is good news concept is BS, if people send in requests for updates, miscasts, etc, you need to respond in a timely manner) I still dont think the MisakI shipping question has been answered (are people going to get an email with a new tracking number? or is it just going to...show up...one day? how long before we should be concerned?)...they have been at this for what 7 years? The "we are a small start-up company trying our best" doesn't cut it anymore.

I'm not going to flame you for your post, but you should bring this up in the Wyrd boards. I know you're a member there... if you feel this strongly about it, tell them there, don't put it on a thread on dakka that will get a quarter of the views. There are plenty of people just as angry as you about this. You'll get your stuff, no worries man.

While I agree with Alfndrate that the OP's post should be posted on the Wyrd forums, I disagree with the notion that it doesn't belong here. We have a dedicated Malifaux forum here on Dakka, and any news about Malifaux or Wyrd have a place here. The OP may have saved some of us the nightmare of ordering directly from Wyrd in the future by posting this here and for that reason alone, the post belongs here.

 helium42 wrote:
While I agree with Alfndrate that the OP's post should be posted on the Wyrd forums, I disagree with the notion that it doesn't belong here. We have a dedicated Malifaux forum here on Dakka, and any news about Malifaux or Wyrd have a place here. The OP may have saved some of us the nightmare of ordering directly from Wyrd in the future by posting this here and for that reason alone, the post belongs here.

The thread can be here, but if OP's purpose was to warn people, then dakka discussions would have been a better place to put this thread.

I would say read up past messages on Gencon ordering from Wyrd.

Most smaller companies specifically state they will have slow shipping/order filling over the Gencon period. As they take most of their staff to Gencon and leave only a very small crew behind.

Thus no to little personnel at home base to pack/fill orders. THen the crew has to get home after being gone for a week prolly relax a day and then start filling the orders in the order they were recieved.

Wyrd isnt a huge company and I think they have explained this in the past several times. An honestly any company that is small and does alot of business at gencon has the same issues from what I have seen. As they cant afford to hire a bunch of extra staff just for a week or two as the temps would cause more trouble than they would be worth.

Is pretty standard gaming business really....even large companies have had trouble meeting releases...look at Battlefront that does Flames of war...they have over 130+ employees and usually dont meet demand on their new products.

An I doubt Wyrd has anywhere near 130 employees.

I appreciate all the viewpoints expressed so far, and I am considering posting in the Wyrd forums with a link to here (I appreciate that all the responses have been constructive and just not flames as seems to be status quo for most of the fanboys over on Wyrd). I understand the Gencon thing, I dont agree with how its disclosed. I dont troll the forums of any game....in fact my first post on the Wyrd forum was to request information about the problem. The "status quo" should have been "banner advertised" on the ordering page when placing my order, then you could have said "yeah you knew what you were getting into". In addition, the lack of temp help was only ONE issue in the post. Its the totality of issues that I am raising in regards to Wyrd Customer Service. Also just to clarify to Chaos45, orders were NOT filled in the order they were received, they were just randomly spit out. I love this game, and had I not got last minute deployed, i had originally volunteered for the Avatar Beta test team in Ohio. This in no way affects my love of the game, it just means I will never order direct from Wyrd again, and will get friends to pick up my Gencon love for me if I am not there.

 quickfuze wrote:
I appreciate all the viewpoints expressed so far, and I am considering posting in the Wyrd forums with a link to here (I appreciate that all the responses have been constructive and just not flames as seems to be status quo for most of the fanboys over on Wyrd). I understand the Gencon thing, I dont agree with how its disclosed. I dont troll the forums of any game....in fact my first post on the Wyrd forum was to request information about the problem. The "status quo" should have been "banner advertised" on the ordering page when placing my order, then you could have said "yeah you knew what you were getting into". In addition, the lack of temp help was only ONE issue in the post. Its the totality of issues that I am raising in regards to Wyrd Customer Service. Also just to clarify to Chaos45, orders were NOT filled in the order they were received, they were just randomly spit out. I love this game, and had I not got last minute deployed, i had originally volunteered for the Avatar Beta test team in Ohio. This in no way affects my love of the game, it just means I will never order direct from Wyrd again, and will get friends to pick up my Gencon love for me if I am not there.

This sounds like a weird post to inquire lol, but where abouts in Ohio are you from/returning to after deployment?

I was from Cincinnati, with my unit in Columbus...but I am not coming back, I have been on Active Duty since summer 2009, so I just decided to go full active duty. I will be staying at Ft. Bragg for the near future

Okay, best of luck.