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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."