Having sat through and enjoyed, for the most part, several of these long haul GOGstravaganzas, I can't help thinking that it might be to everyone's benfit if GOG increased the pace of things slightly and kept the community less in the dark by giving us more information. Initially, my email notification came when the sale started, as did those for the two Insomnias. Unfortunately I don't spend my day with an eye on my email account, so I discovered this weekend's sale by chancing to visit the site, as I do on a fairly frequent basis, to find that a new sale was in full swing and that I had missed the first dozen or so games. Thanks to the list-keepers, who really do a marvellous job (providing information, you see...) I was able to check back and note that only one of my wants had passed through. Luckily, it came around again this afternoon and I was able to buy it. Good for me. But I find the information on the site during the sale equally and as unneccesarily unforthcoming as my email. To have two or one hour left on a game means it has anything between around two hours and half an hour respectively until it leaves the list, which I personally think is both too long and uninformative. If, for example, each three game row remained available for forty minutes (remember, this is just an example), spending ten minutes on each row (or fifteen, totalling an hour) as the list currently stands, there would be plenty of time for potential buyers to do the required research and the turnover of purchases/sales would be significantly and comfortably (due to the shorter waiting time) higher. The cycle could go around Insomnia style for three or four circuits and everyone would have a reasonably good chance of seeing everything available. Of course, no one is being forced to stay awake from beginning to end, but the object of the sale is to make GOG money by supplying us with the games that we want to play. And this, I feel, would be better accomplished by giving us more information to base our buying on (including being told when each circuit begins/ends), and by increaseing the speed at which the games circulate. This is clearly how I would like to see things run, being one of the bum-on-seat-to-the-bitter-end brigade and I freely admit it would not suit everyone. I doubt very much there is a single solution that would please us all. But I do feel that chance (lack of information) and saintly patience (due to unduly slow game rotation) play too great a role in these sales to make them all round enjoyable and beneficial. The demand appears to be there, in my opinion GOG just need to up the pace and fill in the blanks to allow both parties to make the most of it before people start to get too bored or, worst of all, lose interest completely.
This diatribe has not been put forth to provoke debate or to attack GOG, who are a fantastic group of passionate and helpful people, its simply my way of letting off a wheeze of steam because of once more experiencing the (in my opinion significantly avoidable) stasis I felt previously during the Insomnias.
Stilton out ;-)
Post edited June 14, 2014 by Stilton
