Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

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.