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I noticed the other day that the “show more” now loads 36 items per time, rather than 12. Still not as good as “show all”, but an improvement, at least.

For what it's worth the Inquisition Agents are on the site again, out of stock, but on the site.

And they sent me a real reply about the made to order terrain (it's coming).

So the site is closer to being as useful as the old one.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
For what it's worth the Inquisition Agents are on the site again, out of stock, but on the site.

And they sent me a real reply about the made to order terrain (it's coming).

So the site is closer to being as useful as the old one.

So... it basically wasn't ready the day it went up? Why not wait the few extra days/weeks to get these little bits installed, and then give some actual notice before the changeover? Oh, GW?

 Shakalooloo wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
For what it's worth the Inquisition Agents are on the site again, out of stock, but on the site.

And they sent me a real reply about the made to order terrain (it's coming).

So the site is closer to being as useful as the old one.

So... it basically wasn't ready the day it went up? Why not wait the few extra days/weeks to get these little bits installed, and then give some actual notice before the changeover? Oh, GW?

Could be a hard deadline + codependencies.

At one well known UK high street chain I worked for, the planning system had to launch at the beginning of a new planning cycle because it was too difficult to switch, and each cycle started every 6 months, which was too long to accept a delay for. The accompanying reporting system had to launch at the same time regardless of the state it was in, and we spent the next few months frantically filling in the missing pieces.

There’s always going to be some bugs, so it’s often better to just set the damn thing live than try to get it perfect, because you won’t anyway.

Not an IT expert, but I imagine some stuff, like the 360’s, is more bandwidth intensive, so has to be uploaded over time after the site is live and can’t be part of the launch.

Of course, none of that excuses the poor design choices that have been made for the site (menu system, filters, appearance, etc.).

And we still have to queue on new release day like excited iPhone fans outside an Apple store on release day.
Jeez. Welcome to the future.

Considering how fast the 3rd party stores are selling out of boxed sets and how a few are a bit hiccupy on response (wayland is having glitches now and then and they don't seem to have even listed the items for sale yet) I'm not surprised GW have the system.

I think the queue was a given. The issue has never been infrastructure but FOMO. GW doesn't make enough boxes most of the time and have conditioned their customers to be there five minutes before pre-orders go up if they even want a chance of getting the latest release. Even if there happened to be enough Christmas boxes to go around, people would still all pile onto the website at the same time.

Of course GW isn't going to spend money to handle rare peak traffic either, but that's still just a side effect of their production planning.

I mean these are limited discount boxes of main products. So even if you miss out on getting one you are only missing out on a discount, you can still get those products from GW and 3rd parties as normal.

And yeah you don't spend vast sums boosting your sites performance for what will likely be a 1 day sales boost (spread out globally)

Heck even if GW produced enough boxes to satisfy every single customer you'd still have people buying as many as they could to split/sell on later so that would still generate more sales "above" the market demand today

Given GW's eye-watering prices, I wouldn't understate the appeal of getting a 35% discount before independent store discounts. Just saying.

The new website is just AWFUL isn't it? What you want from the GW website is to get as quickly as possible to the wonderful range of products to be able to start browsing. With this new website you have to navigate through screen after screen of info about and options before you see the miniatures and then you don't get a good overview of what's available faction by faction.

There is now no possibility of seeing 3D views of the miniatures and no list of which paints are recommended for each of the figures.

The section on paints is even worse. It is really hard to find the section with an overview of different paints by type. There's even a tab called "browse the range" and it doesn't let you do that. It just takes you to a page with a series of separate videos about the different types of paints.

Surely they should have tested the website out on users. If they had wouldn't they have said that the new set up is just awful. I see no improvements whatsoever, only things that make the experience poorer. Surely it's not just me?

 Jadenim wrote:
There’s always going to be some bugs, so it’s often better to just set the damn thing live than try to get it perfect, because you won’t anyway.

Not an IT expert, but I imagine some stuff, like the 360’s, is more bandwidth intensive, so has to be uploaded over time after the site is live and can’t be part of the launch.

Of course, none of that excuses the poor design choices that have been made for the site (menu system, filters, appearance, etc.).

The 360's are just a series of not-terribly-high-resolution images, they wouldn't be more than a couple of megabytes each (given the static images are only 100-200kb, would imagine the set of images that make up the 360 view would only be a few meg). So I can't imagine it's a bandwidth issue, even on residential internet that would only take a few minutes to download a thousand products worth of 360 views.

They do seem to have replaced the 360 with much lower resolution versions

I went looking again for something and they expected me to queue.


@##% that

Jandgalf wrote:
Surely they should have tested the website out on users.

Market research is otiose in a niche.

is that the infamous tom kirby quote when he explained why they dont bother with it?

God what a prick, even the way he said makes my skin crawl. Who even talks like that? "otiose"? I dont think i've ever actually seen someone use the word in a sentence in real life before. the definition of the word might as well be the word itself - "serving no practical purpose", i.e. just say "pointless" because the word "otiose" is pointless itself and outside of whatever niche group of academics or businessfolk he was trying to impress, most people won't know what it means.

It's a slightly slimmed down paraphrase. The good parts are still there, but I can't be bothered to memorize the exact quote.

 Geifer wrote:
It's a slightly slimmed down paraphrase. The good parts are still there, but I can't be bothered to memorize the exact quote.

Yeah it was something like "market research is otiose in a niche", which he literally put in a letter to shareholders. Because I want to hear that my management doesn't believe in market research. Anyway I agree it's a rather pompous phrase like a high schooler trying to show off that SAT vocabulary book wasn't a waste. Which is why it's my current title.

chaos0xomega wrote:
is that the infamous tom kirby quote when he explained why they dont bother with it?

God what a prick, even the way he said makes my skin crawl. Who even talks like that? "otiose"? I dont think i've ever actually seen someone use the word in a sentence in real life before. the definition of the word might as well be the word itself - "serving no practical purpose", i.e. just say "pointless" because the word "otiose" is pointless itself and outside of whatever niche group of academics or businessfolk he was trying to impress, most people won't know what it means.

The financial and wannabee "educated" elite not that the actual educated elite is any better either since elites tend to have severe exclusionary impulses partially justified to sort through information and partially exclusionary for the sake of it and its status.

And it is far more prevalent in certain circles working more in the abstract or high up the food chain of a company or government or any hierarchy that is steep, partially due to the focus on the abstract partially because they want to feel even more special than they are. It's selfagrandisement.

Normaly what you did is good enough, alternativly you could bring in a chicken that you stripped of its feathers and proclaim it a human.

Another reason might simply be confusion. Use an advanced word most people won't know in a situation where they won't expect it and it might confuse them enough to not question your position. Partly because you sound like you know more than you do; partly because they don't understand the word and thus feel that maybe there's more to the meaning than is in the dictionary search they do. Like there's some subtle "business specific" meaning that has a bit more than "its pointless" like "its pointless - because we have the info at our fingertips through our stores" kinda thing.


But yeah it was the height of GW's very much management led, shareholder value focused approach to business. Some elements of were good; lets not forget when Kirby took over GW's finances were not in a healthy position and when he left he left a very powerful firm with very solid finances and distribution. Not perfect, but certainly very functional and with vast amounts of potential.

 Gimgamgoo wrote:
And we still have to queue on new release day like excited iPhone fans outside an Apple store on release day.
Jeez. Welcome to the future.

New store won't do much to stop scalpers trying to scalp the hell out of boxes.

Queue does though which is why 3h from launch several still available.

Hate queue? Say thanks for scalpers.

I'm sure those are the only two possible options ever, yes.

Yeah but what about the new website? It’s rubbish in every conceivable way isn’t it?

Jandgalf wrote:
Yeah but what about the new website? It’s rubbish in every conceivable way isn’t it?

it is what it is, like a rock is a rock. It is a piece of gak.

It’s just unfathimable that they would put so much money and energy into something that is worse in every possible way and lacks nearly all the features that made the old website good. The reason people like GW are the miniatures surely? So what we want to see are lots of miniatures that are easily findable. They had that. The only change that makes any plausible sense is the merger with Forgeworld but that could have been done without changing all the other stuff. Can’t we get a petition going or something so they can see how many of us are unhappy?

Jandgalf wrote:
It’s just unfathimable that they would put so much money and energy into something that is worse in every possible way and lacks nearly all the features that made the old website good. The reason people like GW are the miniatures surely? So what we want to see are lots of miniatures that are easily findable. They had that. The only change that makes any plausible sense is the merger with Forgeworld but that could have been done without changing all the other stuff. Can’t we get a petition going or something so they can see how many of us are unhappy?

Are you unhappy enough with the new site that you will not buy direct from GWs webstore? And will enough users do the same so that GW will notice a significant shift in volume compared with the old site or other online retailers?

Is this new site layout going to lead to abandoned shopping carts or no click through to purchase? It'll take a lot of either for GW to consider the site to blame.

By all means let GW know, they do occasionally listen.

It's not so much that I'm so unhappy that I won't buy from the store. I'm not going to refuse to use it to get what I want. The problem is that the new website makes it far less easy to get ideas for what it is that I want. I'm now FAR less likely to stumble across things that I might want to buy. Over the last couple of years, since getting back into the hobby I must have spent hours and hours browsing the site and drooling over models I'd like to buy. Everything was easy to find and all in one place. I also bought tons of paint because it was recommended for the GW paint jobs. Now that I don't have that information I'm sure I'll spend less because I just won't see so many possibilities. And I'd bet I won't be the only one.

Jandgalf wrote:
It's not so much that I'm so unhappy that I won't buy from the store. I'm not going to refuse to use it to get what I want. The problem is that the new website makes it far less easy to get ideas for what it is that I want. I'm now FAR less likely to stumble across things that I might want to buy. Over the last couple of years, since getting back into the hobby I must have spent hours and hours browsing the site and drooling over models I'd like to buy. Everything was easy to find and all in one place. I also bought tons of paint because it was recommended for the GW paint jobs. Now that I don't have that information I'm sure I'll spend less because I just won't see so many possibilities. And I'd bet I won't be the only one.

Absolutely. As a gateway to 'the hobby' the previous incarnation of the site was okay. Good enough access for buyers such as timmys mum to get what their little monster wanted and a resource for hobbyists.

A one stop shop.

And make no mistake if a decline in sales occurs because of the new website, it will have to be acted upon. But thats a high bar.

that is why they do it before Christmas, so sales will always be higher with the new Website in November/December than in September/October

 Mr. Burning wrote:

Jandgalf wrote:
It’s just unfathimable that they would put so much money and energy into something that is worse in every possible way and lacks nearly all the features that made the old website good. The reason people like GW are the miniatures surely? So what we want to see are lots of miniatures that are easily findable. They had that. The only change that makes any plausible sense is the merger with Forgeworld but that could have been done without changing all the other stuff. Can’t we get a petition going or something so they can see how many of us are unhappy?

Are you unhappy enough with the new site that you will not buy direct from GWs webstore? And will enough users do the same so that GW will notice a significant shift in volume compared with the old site or other online retailers?

Is this new site layout going to lead to abandoned shopping carts or no click through to purchase? It'll take a lot of either for GW to consider the site to blame.

By all means let GW know, they do occasionally listen.

I think it's going to be far harder to measure. I mostly used the GW site for browsing, not actually buying. Sometimes I'll even be in a physical store flicking through the GW online store to check what the physical store has available versus the full range.

So for people like me, it's not going to be a measurable drop in sales from the GW store, but it will be me being less aware of what GW are selling these days and thus less likely to buy from other shops, which ultimately is less sales for GW but perhaps in a way that they'll be able to attribute it to their crappier online store.

Back in the day they used to have their Citadel Annual books which were awesome, I'd just sit there for hours flicking through the range and inevitably buy some stuff that wasn't previously on my radar. The Annuals were basically replaced with the online store for me.