Reply To: What’s the point in GW releases?

[phaidknott 7023xp 1]

Well you’re trying to “beat the bots” (and the fact that the ordering system and the baskets crashed sounds almost like a DDS attack with the “purchases” by these bots swamping the GW system). There’s a few things that GW could do to dampen down the bot purchases. From the simple “One item per address” (after all what gamer would be likely to buy more than one item, never mind five or ten of them), to commercial software that picks up on rapid purchases from the same IP on your storefront and disallows the transactions (although that would cost GW money, and after all perhaps they don’t care as long as “someone” is buying the minis).

 

I’ve even seen a LGS/GW stockist advertising their stock via eBay on short supplied items for scalper prices. But mostly there’s a small group (probably hobbyists themselves) using bots to buy up “limited” release items (perhaps five or ten copies) using the bot software (it’s pretty easy to configure, and you can start spamming the website 10 minutes BEFORE the pre-orders go live (although that requires them to know what the items EXACT webpage to run before it appears on the GW site (dunno how they manage that, but there obviously a way as the bot software hits loads of commercial webstores)).

 

But perhaps GW needs to look at why they allow multiple customer purchases from the same address (or even better STOP with the whole FOMO/Limited release marketing they do and just release the item individually (no more buying a large box with sixty percent of the miniatures you don’t actually want to gain access to the ones you DO want), which I feel is the BEST way for GW to handle things. I do actually wonder what the percentages here are for Scalpers vs “Normal Customers” (we probably knee jerk with our perception of the problem and it’s not a big as we presume it to be)? All I do know, it’s VERY annoying to pay four to five times the recommended retail price for an item you know GW will not be restocking ever again (as I did with some Necromunda Tactics cards), causing the vendor to no doubt cackle with glee 🙁