Just wanted to let you know that my books should be waiting for me when I get home from work tonight! I will definitely request that you sign my books this weekend at Dresdacon. Thank you for all of your hard work putting this book together along with a bunch of really quality events to test these books with. I look forward to thanking you in person on Saturday.

You’re doing the best you can, and I think that “most” of us understand that and are grateful for it. In the meantime, you should definitely spend some time with your family before this weekend, you deserve it = )

Please fix this quickly.
The vol 2 is a nicely bound book, and glad I purchased it, but I did purchase both!
Thanks
Robyn

One note is that I’d like to second the comment about putting the info on the official DFRPG forum at Jim’s site. Especially given the holiday, I’ve just been occasionally refreshing there to see what is new, and just found this and other info via… hehe… I guess you might call it a form of crowd-sourcing.

Anyway, thanks again for the hard work. Still looking forward to getting the books, but information does help the expectant folks feel better.

I was a little pissed when I saw that I could have bought the book at my local game store and gotten it a week earlier and not payed shipping. But then again I had the PDF since April and no other company does any thing near that cool on an unreleased product.

I’m not upset, actually. My tracking information came through eventually and @dresdenfiles has been answering a few questions I toss that out on Twitter. The transparency has been wonderful. Small businesses and new business ventures have a learning curve. You took a few punches on this one but you’re learning from from them, you’re keeping your customers informed and it sounds like you’ve got a plan moving forward. That’s great.

But my frustration isn’t over. This has nothing to do with Evil Hat, it’s just continued frustration in the whole process. UPS is to blame this time around.

My tracking info was sent to me a week ago and, apparently, UPS either has a truck lost in the southwest desert or hired my grandmother as a driver. My package was picked up on July 2nd and has yet to arrive somewhere. Anywhere. It hasn’t even made it to a distribution center. I’m in Chicago, the warehouse is in Nevada. A tourist can drive from New York to Los Angeles in six days but a professional UPS driver can’t get a truck to distro in that time? Six days is a long time to have no updates on tracking info when shipping domestically. Even allowing two days for the holiday, it’s pretty damned frustrating. When I first got my tracking info, my books had been rescheduled* to be delivered on the 9th. That’s tomorrow. I’m hoping my books arrive but if they don’t, I don’t even know how I would complain to UPS. They usually tell me to check the tracking information when I have a question about a package.

*Rhetorical questions: What does that even mean? Were they scheduled for an earlier delivery and they got bumped back? It’s the first time I had any info, why would they tell me they had changed it?

Four years of waiting have finally been realized. Now to the play the darn thing!!!

Cheers to you all!

Come on, folks… between UPS and the warehouse, there were some snafus beyond the control of Fred and Evil Hat. He’s admitted there are things he could have done better, but most of this simply cannot be laid at his feet. So take your passive-aggressive alpha male bravado and direct it somewhere else, like whining about that godawful The Last Airbender movie released this past weekend or maybe even project some of that energy in a more creative direction and get a life.

Geez.

I do understand the problem though, and the white-paper above is very interesting.

I don’t want to request a PDF from you as that is money out of your pocket. Just get me the origins werwolf game (as I’ve mentioned on the other blog) and we’re even.

Admittedly, I spend more time on the Hive of Scum and Villainy that is RPG.net than the other forums involved, but the difference between “Yep, sorry guys, there’s a problem; our bad. Here’s what’s going on…” and “We’re working on it,” or “*silence*” is gigantic.

For one thing, it focused discussion on people noting that it was a bummer, but the reason it was a bummer was because they wanted in on The Awesome Thing you guys had made, rather than on being bummed itself.

One possibility for future reference, although I’ve no idea whether it’d be sensible, would be to try tapping a few people over Twitter or something. Possibly an open call to pass around a provided link if people are asking questions, maybe? They could be pointed at a core post (localised for each forum as desired) where you explained the problems, and then when the subject of shipping cropped up elsewhere, they could refer people back to the original post with a link and a quick comment.

RPG.net wrangling seems like something it could be worth distributing slightly, since it’s realistically Huge and Ornery, and would save you time for other things. From my perspective, being pointed at a post from The Guy Involved still qualifies as online face-time and contact on the subject; the core is that I might not have known about it without the direction.

I guess this would let people be directed to face-time, rather than duplicating face-time.

That said, my perspective might not be universal, but there we go.

My communication preferences are not typical, however. Still, I am glad that you posted information in your blog and that it is linked to your LJ.

One suggestion might have been to front-load the paperwork and processing. I’m not sure if this is possible, but could you have started the data entry to UPS and the creation of labels for the individual pre-orders ahead of time? So while you haven’t pulled the trigger you would still have your manifests and labels all ready, in numerical order, to be added to the completed package once the trigger does get pulled.

When I do large shipping orders, I usually find it’s the massaging of the data that takes the most time and requires the most attention. It’s crucial to decide on an order from the beginning and stick to it, that way if you have any new people who come on board part way through the process, you can slot them in (communicating the order and its importance to them) without messing up the flow. So if you have the luxury of having the data ahead of time, you can take the time to prep everything in the correct order.

Other than that, though, this fundamentally sounds like a resources issue and there isn’t a whole lot you can do about that except continue to grow more rich and powerful.

No, I don’t suggest relying on customers’ reasonableness as a business model… But still, you’d think people could grow up a bit.

And you’re absolutely right — I think I assumed the folks over at the DFRPG forums were already plugged into the blog post on the main game site, and I have been trying to link over to the RPG.net stuff when I could. Because RPG.net is more “out in the wild”, I think there’s more of a chance for the message to spiral out of control there, which is probably why it got the attention from me it did.

As far as the free PDF stuff goes, honestly I never look at that stuff as lost sales. If anything it’s a bit of an advertising opportunity. But I’m wired weird about that stuff.

I think giving a free PDF of the books to the pre-orders was a pretty darn good idea, however, and went a long way toward keeping people from frothing at the mouth. I really hope nobody has taken you up on the offer of a free Evil Hat PDF by way of apology, as you’ve already gone above and beyond in this situation.