You are absolutely right, Decks. That is why I'm irritated about the whole thing. In addition, their customer service...I emailed Syd a couple days ago and got a reply last night. I asked about getting a couple decks signed. He replied with a "yes" and even remembered that I did not get a signed Clip Joint when I asked and he is throwing in a free signed Clip Joint without my asking...so maybe their customer service is good? I would say so.
On the other side of the coin...if I were in a boat and a shark was making waves around me, I would rather kill that shark than feed it.
Wait - am I the shark, or the guy in the boat?
There's been a lot said since my last post, so I'm going to try keeping this succinct. Knowing the way I write, it's unlikely, but I have to try...
Gareth, they can find these decks under the floor boards, in the back of the warehouse, wherever. It's their product and we have no idea how many were made or for what purposes, in the long run. On the surface, yes, they were made for MC2012, but it's not like they went into this blindly, with no clear idea of what they planned on doing with the extra packs. I personally don't care if they build a new warehouse out of them to house the version-3 deck.
Do I think their customer service is terrible? No. But it's NOT, as they've suggested, "world's greatest". If it was, they'd never have an unhappy customer, period. I'd call Ellusionist's customer service better, easily - but again, I'm not saying theirs is BAD.
D&D are catering to bulk purchasers. They buy the decks in chunks, help them sell out fast, and their cachet increases as the aftermarket price goes up, helping to make the next one a big hit. This hasn't worked so well in the deck-glut days since Halloween, but the Magic-Con and Smoke & Mirrors series are practically paper gold to them.
The thing is, though, that this selling model can't sustain itself forever. It's the same model we were operating under with dot-com stocks and real estate. There's a bubble that's building and it won't last forever. I'm proposing that rather than letting it burst, we find ways to let the air out gently and under control, but not many people seem interested in hearing that - they all want to see the next S&M v1 or J-Nuggs come out and they want to buy enough of it to pay for a new car... Operating without transparency, not revealing size of "limited" print runs, "finding" extra decks behind the Funk-&-Wagnalls Encyclopedia...whatever reasons they have for doing this, it makes it look all that more like a shell game or a Ponzi scheme.
But it's their business, to run as they wish. They're in the business not of selling to their fans as much as they are selling the idea that their decks are highly exclusive and a must-have item, regardless of the actual amount that's out there. To them, it's not a big deal to leave unsatisfied customers wanting more. But the problem lies where those unsatisfied customers just stop wanting more, and get tired of being treated in this manner.
I've often joked about how only in the software business could someone sell a product with so many disclaimers about performance and as-is condition. If a piece of software was an automobile, the NTSB would never let it see the asphalt outside of a test track. Well, only in this business is it considered "best-in-the-world" customer service to leave individual customers hanging while favoring those who purchase in bulk only to later resell to those same customers at a serious markup. The only thing stopping them from eliminating the middle man and doing the marking up themselves is that the market would collapse under the hubris. That, and that it's those middle men that create that "I-must-have-this" aura.
