DD Sailor Jupiter

All of the event dolls still show “in preparation”

My own suspicion has long been that the traffic overload on their site is due to scalpers. What I noticed this morning is every quarter hour their pages became inaccessible due to load for a brief period. While it's possible that a lot of people are just checking every 15 minutes, the timing does make me think of bots.

If scalpers are doing this, then they are probably opening hundreds or thousands of connections when they try in hopes of snatching up everything they can, and if normal folks can't access as a result all the better because it means they're cornering the market.

 

15 minutes ago, Ylse said:

Twitter update! Seems they wont say the starting time because of site traffic but how will that help when everyone wants their order in NOW 😅😀

Volks has been pretty clear that everyone who orders will receive, and my guess is they understand their market demand and their pre-order sales pretty well. The only real question is how much additional production is needed and how long it takes for them to get it done. I suspect they came up with a realistic estimate based on sales of Mercury and Mars, and the only real surprise would be if Jupiter proved far more popular than those two did.

My earlier comments about people needing to be prepared for a long wait is less because I think a long wait is likely, and more because I know how frustrated people got when Luka when from an expected 6 month delay to a year (I think it was a year it might have been a bit less.) I kind of took in stride and I was just happy to be getting her without an after-market markup, but some folks came unglued.

Edited June 5, 2020 by BeyondTime

4 minutes ago, BeyondTime said:

My own suspicion has long been that the traffic overload on their site is due to scalpers. What I noticed this morning is every quarter hour their pages became inaccessible due to load for a brief period. While it's possible that a lot of people are just checking every 15 minutes, the timing does make me think of bots.

If scalpers are doing this, then they are probably opening hundreds or thousands of connections when they try in hopes of snatching up everything they can, and if normal folks can't access as a result all the better because it means they're cornering the market.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Even if several hundred to a thousand people try to access a website at one time it can usually handle that load at least for a short while. There would have to be thousands of people trying at once to get in unless Volks just really isn't shelling out for any decent server hosting and I doubt that's it. So lots of bots trying all at once would be much more likely than just a regular order load.

The only thing I think is weird is that these are basically mini preorders so why would anyone pay reseller fees on them? Sure if they come along late and didn't know, but that's a long time to hold onto an expensive purchase to make back a couple hundred dollars months/years later

Edited June 5, 2020 by Katiazza

it doesnt help that i am also one of those "5 minutes refreshers" lol, i wish they would just post them so i can lose out on this click war too lol

5 minutes ago, creationdss87 said:

i can lose out on this click war too

The worst that's likely to happen is that you can't order till tomorrow, and too many orders means they need lead time for production. If you want her, you will get her.

Yea I'm already happy it's a pre order thing instead of a clickwar. I can have some patience but also excited for her hehe 😂

20 minutes ago, BeyondTime said:

My own suspicion has long been that the traffic overload on their site is due to scalpers. What I noticed this morning is every quarter hour their pages became inaccessible due to load for a brief period. While it's possible that a lot of people are just checking every 15 minutes, the timing does make me think of bots.

If scalpers are doing this, then they are probably opening hundreds or thousands of connections when they try in hopes of snatching up everything they can, and if normal folks can't access as a result all the better because it means they're cornering the market.

 

Volks has been pretty clear that everyone who orders will receive, and my guess is they understand their market demand and their pre-order sales pretty well. The only real question is how much additional production is needed and how long it takes for them to get it done. I suspect they came up with a realistic estimate based on sales of Mercury and Mars, and the only real surprise would be if Jupiter proved far more popular than those two did.

My earlier comments about people needing to be prepared for a long wait is less because I think a long wait is likely, and more because I know how frustrated people got when Luka when from an expected 6 month delay to a year (I think it was a year it might have been a bit less.) I kind of took in stride and I was just happy to be getting her without an after-market markup, but some folks came unglued.

Some people at Anime Expo were quite annoyed, they hadn’t received theirs yet but they had enough to sell at Anime Expo. My guess though is that they have learned from that problem.  Most of the sailor moon items have been handles quite well.  A part of me does hope that some scalpers get screwed and have to refund enough buyers to make them go away

2 minutes ago, Tokimemofan said:

they hadn’t received theirs yet but they had enough to sell at Anime Expo

I would honestly expect that they had those dolls set aside before the original lottery.

It's also hard to say how popular Jupiter will be compared to Luka. I mean it's Sailor Moon and that's major history, but Vocaloids are huge in the now.

She's up! I was able to grab her and complete my order without any issues. Good luck everyone!!

5 minutes ago, BeyondTime said:

I would honestly expect that they had those dolls set aside before the original lottery.

It's also hard to say how popular Jupiter will be compared to Luka. I mean it's Sailor Moon and that's major history, but Vocaloids are huge in the now.

I just dont see there being a major problem production wise, none of the Sailor Moon items have been hard to get near the time of release 

it's available now!

Yup she is up! Ordered her and outfit. Had one time that it said the site was busy when checking out the outfit but other than that no problems 😁

1 minute ago, Ylse said:

Yup she is up! Ordered her and outfit. Had one time that it said the site was busy when checking out the outfit but other than that no problems 😁

Yay me too ^^ *excited *

I managed to get my order in, but I was panicked for a bit. They added my postal code back in to the Zip code, and the transaction kept failing. I was sure the site would go down before I managed to get it corrected.

Jupiter is mine.

Edited June 5, 2020 by BeyondTime

i just got her and her outfit too! 😄 

Got them both.  Wells Fargo Debit cards will work for future reference 

Oh speaking of cards, when I entered my card info last week (so that it would be already saved for this purchase), I got a 1$ temporary authorization charge on my account from VolksJP- I think this would be a good way to make sure your card will work with Volks in the future?

Edited June 5, 2020 by Serena-Hime

I got my order in dor Jupiter.  

1 hour ago, BeyondTime said:

I managed to get my order in, but I was panicked for a bit. They added my postal code back in to the Zip code, and the transaction kept failing. I was sure the site would go down before I managed to get it corrected.

There's a notice on the site about this, it is something that happened when they had site maintenance recently. Though the way the message read, I thought it was saying you now needed to go add it there lol.

1 hour ago, BeyondTime said:

My own suspicion has long been that the traffic overload on their site is due to scalpers. What I noticed this morning is every quarter hour their pages became inaccessible due to load for a brief period. While it's possible that a lot of people are just checking every 15 minutes, the timing does make me think of bots.

If scalpers are doing this, then they are probably opening hundreds or thousands of connections when they try in hopes of snatching up everything they can, and if normal folks can't access as a result all the better because it means they're cornering the market.

It appears also to me that the site has some kind of not overly intelligent DDoS protection. I have maybe 20 bookmarks to various items that maybe I'm interested in getting eventually, and once in a while I'll select all those and have Firefox open them all, in order to see what is still in stock. Invariably, on at least half of the resulting tabs, I will get that page with the unhappy Volks store and the message about how too many people are accessing the site at once.

22 minutes ago, cfx said:

It appears also to me that the site has some kind of not overly intelligent DDoS protection.

That would make sense given the issues they have with scalpers.

Edit: Just to clarify the part that makes sense is having DDoD protection. I have no idea if it's a good product or not.

Edited June 5, 2020 by BeyondTime

46 minutes ago, Serena-Hime said:

Oh speaking of cards, when I entered my card info last week (so that it would be already saved for this purchase), I got a 1$ temporary authorization charge on my account from VolksJP- I think this would be a good way to make sure your card will work with Volks in the future?

As long as you are paying attention, your bank will probably panic when they see a fairly high transaction, if this were a click war I would have been screwed, no problem at all on the second transaction for the outfit.

17 minutes ago, BeyondTime said:

Edit: Just to clarify the part that makes sense is having DDoD protection. I have no idea if it's a good product or not.

I don't either; it may work fine as it's supposed to. It's certainly overly aggressive if it interprets ~20 simultaneous-ish requests as an attack, though, and with that I'd expect that's why it's so hard to access the site during the clickwars, it's locking people out more than it needs to.

AHHHHHH!  A good friend of mine texted me about 30 minutes ago telling me Jupiter was up!  I was *just* about to head home from work so I bolted as fast as I could from there and hit 90mph on the way to the house to order her.  LOL

I had no issues at all ordering her except for the fact I couldn't add her school uniform to her same order.  So I had to do two separate orders for her and the school uniform.  😛  At least I got both of them tho!  Email confirmations went right thru in less than a minute from me finalizing the info on the computer.

I am SOOOOOOOO excited!  Jupiter is my early birthday present to myself this year.  I'll be 50 years old ( seriously wtf  XD ) in August so I figured why not celebrate a tad early?  😄 

I just hope I was fast enough to warrant being in the first batch to be delivered.  Congrats to all the others here who went for her and got her!  I cannot wait to see the flood of awesome Jupiter photos being posted here!   

 

 

Billy

21 minutes ago, cfx said:

it's locking people out more than it needs to.

Given how predatory scalpers have been at events, I'm not sure Volks has good options in front of them. It's like with any other online criminal activity where as fast as you find a way to stop one attack the criminal element finds a way to do it a different way.

For the record I know scalping isn't a crime per se, but I think the large scale scalpers aren't really much higher on the social conduct scale than criminals.

Edited June 5, 2020 by BeyondTime

Just now, baldylox said:

I am SOOOOOOOO excited!  Jupiter is my early birthday present to myself this year.  I'll be 50 years old ( seriously wtf  XD ) in August so I figured why not celebrate a tad early?  😄 

Congrats on both counts. I turn 50 in August as well.