Black Library fiction The End and the Death - Volume III

[Kastor Krieg]

2 hours ago, crimsondave said:

An are you human test would fix this.  I’ve been saying it for years now.  Not a “are you human” checkbox.  One with pictures you have to identify.  This has been around forever.  That’s the fix.  They know it.  If GW wanted this fixed it would already be fixed.

If only. Those "tests" are easily bypassed by bots these days, it fixes nothing.

[OpossumStrong]

3 hours ago, Etruscan said:

I wonder how many complaint emails they will receive. They’re obliged to reply to any emails so I wonder if internally there will be discussions or whether they simply don’t care. Fundamentally unless people kick up a stink and create some bad PR I can’t imagine much will change.

 1 reply per 5 working days, all following replies within 72 working hours 

[Osteoclast]

5 hours ago, Matcap86 said:

 

I mean there's quite a scale difference between someone having the store open on their phone and laptop at the same time and people DDOSing the site with 1000(0)s of requests through botscripts. 

Sure, but some people here were explicitly saying that they had a dozen tabs open plus other people queuing for them. Bot scripts don’t help, but pretty sure that there was enough natural interest and “gotta get in!” shenanigans to screw things up all on its lonesome. 

[Halandaar]

59 minutes ago, GenerationTerrorist said:

I think I am going to give up any hope of getting my hands on the Deathwing box when it goes up for pre-order. Save myself the dismay when the inevitable happens, as it appeared to do for so many with this release.

 

I'm not saying they won't sell out of them, but it's a completely different kind of product with a completely different demand profile.

 

The LE Heresy books are a one off, never again release, strictly limited in numbers direct-only release that people are apparently willing to pay 600% of the list price (or more) for to not miss out on, which makes them extremely enticing for scalpers.

 

Deathwing Assault on the other hand is just a discount bundle on models that are going to be part of the regular range just a couple of months later. The scalping appeal for this is way lower because they can't completely control the supply, not least because those sets are also available to third party stockists.

[Bryan Blaire]

38 minutes ago, Osteoclast said:

Sure, but some people here were explicitly saying that they had a dozen tabs open plus other people queuing for them. Bot scripts don’t help, but pretty sure that there was enough natural interest and “gotta get in!” shenanigans to screw things up all on its lonesome. 

There’s a huge scale difference there.

 

A few people with multiple tabs plus other people queuing have very little chance of screwing things up compared to the 10K plus bot scripts (or more) run per scalper.  If you took away all the scalper bots, it is very unlikely anyone would have even noticed the impact of the actual people.

 

Let’s all be realistic here and stop blaming those that really wanted this as if their efforts caused the problems.  The problems were caused by scalpers running bots, then GW, in that order.

Edited January 14 by Bryan Blaire

[crimsondave]

43 minutes ago, Kastor Krieg said:

If only. Those "tests" are easily bypassed by bots these days, it fixes nothing.

They’re not even bypassing the que system.  They’re just flooding it.  It’s not genius hackers.  They’re just getting bots to block everyone out.

[Marshal Rohr]

2 hours ago, WrathOfTheLion said:

I've suspected something similar, where they'd keep a pool of queue connections with the bots for a bit before, allowing a continuous stream of them that will eventually be in the valid time slot. Then, when the appropriate time occurs and the item is up on the store, they can expend one of their now valid tokens per purchase, if a queue token expires when a purchase is made.

 

I originally thought they might be able to bypass it, but the abnormal queue traffic I think is evidence that they're interacting with it.

They are simply blocking the redirect with their browser or an adblocker. Ie, you both click games workshop dot come at the same minute, you’re hijacked and throwing in the queue, the blocked url or script extension is denied and the scalper in not redirected. 

[crimsondave]

24 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

They are simply blocking the redirect with their browser or an adblocker. Ie, you both click games workshop dot come at the same minute, you’re hijacked and throwing in the queue, the blocked url or script extension is denied and the scalper in not redirected. 

 

Please tell me that’s not how they did it.

[Vazzy]

3 hours ago, Osteoclast said:

Sure, but some people here were explicitly saying that they had a dozen tabs open plus other people queuing for them. Bot scripts don’t help, but pretty sure that there was enough natural interest and “gotta get in!” shenanigans to screw things up all on its lonesome. 

I mean if you really wanted the book, and have a complete collection you know the drill or practiced the last time the queue kicked in. 
 

I’m one of the people it seems like you’re blaming and yeah, I did have a bunch of tabs and devices up because I knew I didn’t stand a chance just trying one tab. I doubt my gf being in the queue really made a difference. 
 

GW screwed this up and the scalpers are the problem not a Joe blow like me who just prayed he got lucky 

[OpossumStrong]

2 hours ago, crimsondave said:

 

Please tell me that’s not how they did it.

Similar to some hacks for multiplayer game, "injection" of data, you shoot the sky, the server receive info that you hit the guy in the head, of course its oversimplified example, they can as well use queue skipper...

[Marshal Rohr]

3 hours ago, crimsondave said:

 

Please tell me that’s not how they did it.

I’ll be testing it on Saturday to confirm, but the logs with the redirect URL are present in chrome Dev tools. If it actually works we should be able to skip the queue from now on or until they fix it, which I doubt they will devote manpower to do. 

Edited January 14 by Marshal Rohr

[Scribe]

23 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

I’ll be testing it on Saturday to confirm, but the logs with the redirect URL are present in chrome Dev tools. If it actually works we should be able to skip the queue from now on or until they fix it, which I doubt they will devote manpower to do. 

 

I would not be surprised if this works, GW is absolutely clueless, and has been in regards to their IT work for 20 years.

[crimsondave]

4 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

I’ll be testing it on Saturday to confirm, but the logs with the redirect URL are present in chrome Dev tools. If it actually works we should be able to skip the queue from now on or until they fix it, which I doubt they will devote manpower to do. 

Yeah.  That’s just in the settings in chrome.  How on earth could the designer be so clueless?

[OttoVonAwesome]

I woulda kept that info to myself.

4 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

I’ll be testing it on Saturday to confirm, but the logs with the redirect URL are present in chrome Dev tools. If it actually works we should be able to skip the queue from now on or until they fix it, which I doubt they will devote manpower to do. 

 

[Marshal Rohr]

5 minutes ago, OttoVonAwesome said:

I woulda kept that info to myself.

 

We need to see if it works first. 

[WrathOfTheLion]

5 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

I’ll be testing it on Saturday to confirm, but the logs with the redirect URL are present in chrome Dev tools. If it actually works we should be able to skip the queue from now on or until they fix it, which I doubt they will devote manpower to do. 

I was thinking you'd at least have to do something clever with a Python script or something, where the queue would give you some sort of temporary authentication token. Then again, I do mostly desktop stuff, not web, so I'm not up to date on whatever mechanisms they'd use there.

 

Even what I was thinking wouldn't be terribly complicated to implement, probably like 100 lines of Python.

Edited January 15 by WrathOfTheLion

[Karhedron]

9 hours ago, OttoVonAwesome said:

I woulda kept that info to myself.

 

Maybe that is how the scalpers are already doing it. If the info gets into the wild then it will set them back to square 1.

 

[Wisesamwise]

Im pretty pleased to see that there are stacks of copies on ebay... Hopefully those of us that missed out don't bow to FOMO and let the scalpers sweat. 

 

[son of the forest]

22 minutes ago, Wisesamwise said:

Im pretty pleased to see that there are stacks of copies on ebay... Hopefully those of us that missed out don't bow to FOMO and let the scalpers sweat. 

 

I've reported a bunch and ebay have come back saying they've removed the listings

[Kastor Krieg]

15 hours ago, Scribe said:

 

I would not be surprised if this works, GW is absolutely clueless, and has been in regards to their IT work for 20 years.

We need to do this and then send GW HQ a bill for 10.8 million.

[firestorm40k]

34 minutes ago, son of the forest said:

I've reported a bunch and ebay have come back saying they've removed the listings

Saturday afternoon I reported over 70 listings; Ebay only removed 4 of them  apparently their AI determined the rest didn't violate their listing policies..!

[Joe]

The more people report, the more the AI will pick up on it.

 

 

[OpossumStrong]

7 minutes ago, firestorm40k said:

Saturday afternoon I reported over 70 listings; Ebay only removed 4 of them  apparently their AI determined the rest didn't violate their listing policies..!

Depends on the report, if the title missing "presale" or wrong description, those require just relisting 

 

Price gouging applies only to essential items afaik, but there are some exceptions.

Edited January 15 by OpossumStrong

[Dried]

How do you report? I can't find the right reason in the list.

[OpossumStrong]

25 minutes ago, Dried said:

How do you report? I can't find the right reason in the list.

The first one will require relisting  (the title/description missing presale keyword)

 

The second you can appeal to price gauging.

 

You can use misleading title as well, if they include "order confirmation" you can say that you think they sell pdf of confirmation, but it's just to force the scalper to relist 

 

 

Edited January 15 by OpossumStrong