Quote Originally Posted by Saphinara View Post
I am very disappointed in this promotion. The main reasons are and I'm not going to start bashing either side of this are.

Accessibility
Purchasability
Time- Scale

Accessibility ~ While I admit the site is easy enough to navigate and it's easy to find the purchase area, it takes at least a good minute of reading to realize that you do not need to subscribe but can wait the 3 months and "Back Buy" as needed however this is something that is not as easy as say buying something from Amazon game department or walking into 7/11 in Japan and buying a few cans of drink~ It feels as if we're getting rather pushed aside with this, who knows what the deal will be for the other countries. "Angry magazine customers" aside, how did they think we would receive this campaign honestly?

Purchasability ~ I have not seen this magazine in stores? Is it sold in specialist newsagents because it doesn't seem to be around? I live in Sheffield in England (Or the UK to those not familiar) It's a pretty large city, certainly not somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Now I'll admit sure it's there online but is there any guarantee that if we back order instead of subscribe that we will DEFINITELY receive a copy, will they print one specifically for us who order or will we have to succumb to supply and demand? I want my items as much as anyone else, I will likely still go through with this promotion regardless of me voicing my negative opinion on it.

Time - Scale ~ America got their promotion deal 74 days? I think give or take a couple after Japan, now YES America did try to cheat their codes but this was fixed with only giving out the codes when the order got shipped. Now I don't know about you guys but my average shop on Amazon.co.uk does not take a whole 3 months to ship items, however if you are to without subscribing (Which you can only subscribe for the October issue not the August or September ones) you must wait until whatever release day you can back order from, which yes means the whole 3 months basically, while you can probably buy them one month at a time that's still a HUGE gap between codes.

I'm going to go into a final couple of points which are more my opinion or personal grievance with this campaign. First of all, to those of us who do not purchase this magazine anyway, why should we suddenly have to buy it now? What use do we have for it if we're not going to read it. Why not simply put the codes on the cash shop instead, this is literally all we are doing, paying for codes. Those of us who really want these items and I mean REALLY want (I've been waiting months for maid attire) will likely do it anyway and I really, really have to point out the grudge we're going to hold against you Yoshida-san for making us jump through hoops to get these items.

Finally, I really dislike the idea of using a photo to authenticate the Chocobo promotion, I am very self-conscious about my appearance, even my passport/drivers license was a huge ordeal for me, I don't have to provide photo ID to Paypal when registering my debit card details. I don't have to provide a photo to Amazon when presenting my delivery address instructions, why is it not possible to break up parts of the Chocobo code in each of the 3 magazines and have them fit together to form a whole? Or send the serial code of your receipt with the ISBN number of each magazine/barcode. I'm going to probably not do the picture part as I'm really hesitant about sending it via email to a company I've never used before but maybe that is just myself. Like I said, these are personal things.
Games Master has been around since 1993 when the TV show Games Master came out. I haven't purchased it since the days of Megadrive. I still see it in majority of newsagents and it is also in WHsmiths.