Cerulean_Shaman

EVGATech_DanielM

vgerik1234

EVGATech_DanielM
 
Every single order is vetted and verified to be actual human beings. Anything that looks out of the ordinary is cancelled and refunded. You are one of thousands who have attempted to get a card at launch. 
 

Would it be safe to assume you guys have metrics on stuff like time to order, time to check out, time item sitting in cart, etc? And that is how you vet if it was human or not? Or 'no comment' to keep the method of verifying a secret. Totally understand if that is the case.

Well, putting a item in the cart does not reserve the product from our stock. We absolutely have the data to see what time frame it takes for a person to check out but with launches and sales, the crush of traffic some times skews those numbers. We review all orders that are placed and each are verified by the accounting team. I wish I could provide more information but I can tell you newer accounts are scrutinized more than accounts that have a standing history in regards to orders. If an order looks off, we will cancel it and require the customer to call in from the billing to verify information on the order. 

This craziness that bots took everything is obviously silly, as it's obvious some regular Joes managed to snag one, and there were very real, rational issues like server stability and limited stock. However, on the flip side, and with all due respect, I'm not sure you understand why people might want to use bots. There isn't a machine revolution trying to get GPU power or something, it's usually a human who use scripts to help give them an advantage so they can attempt purchases at multiple stores at the same time faster than most people. If the heart of your investigations is simply gut feelings about something being off and/or verifying there's a human on the other, then it's not really doing anything. Someone will obviously reply, or hand wave it and say they were just quick. Something like captcha is designed to prevent automated processes from successfully ever getting to the end and tend to be very effective from my limited understanding. A lot of limited edition-type stuff elsewhere - like sneakers - often use stuff exactly like captcha (among other similar systems, and some backend ones I hear) to prevent this exactly, and it's become kind of joke that the difficulty of some of those is what keeps people from getting their limited edition whatever.
 
But I've never seen any general tech merchant ever adopt this, so eh, and I guess I can't expect a place like the EVGA store or Newegg to be specialized for the handling of limited stock like what you see with the constant fight from vendors against ticket scalpers and limited sneaker hoarders, etc.

Jldowning85
I wonder if the 3090 will sell out as quickly, seems more niche of a product. Its supposed to go on sell today as well right? 

q5sys
 
Seriously, someone at EVGA needs to take fiasco as a hint that your infrastructure needs a refresh and be properly managed.

Shield Wulf
I could've gotten a Zotac today

liquidblue1985

USALion

the_Scarlet_one
Bots aren’t the issue. You may as well stop feed that rumor mill.

Do you actually believe that? I know you work for them (or volunteer for them) but the objective signs and data point otherwise. EVGA is having its ass handed to it on Twitter right now, not a single user has replied that they got a card, but ebay has tons listed. Having family in the music industry, I see this all the time with concert event tickets. Bots are absolutely the issue. You are doing a disservice to your customers by lying and saying otherwise.

I got one, so does that automatically mean I'm a bot?

Intoxicus

EVGATech_DanielM

Airikay

EVGATech_DanielM
Every single order is vetted and verified to be actual human beings. Anything that looks out of the ordinary is cancelled and refunded. You are one of thousands who have attempted to get a card at launch. 

I think the bigger issue here is that your site can apparently only handle traffic from a few thousand people then. If the site wasn't mostly down I don't think you would have many people complaining, of course there would still be some. But the stock is out of your hands, how your website runs is completely your fault.

Few thousand is quite possibly the farthest away from the actual number you can imagine. Customers from all over the world visit the site, not just the US. As far as I am aware, we are one of the only manufacturers who actually sells on their own website. 

Definitely more than a few thousand. Off hand would guess probably well over 1 million.
Generally websites accomodate for regular traffic numbers which is why these big release can overwhelm servers. It's a tricky issue to mitigate. Even if using rental servers to boost capacity for a day or so things can still go wrong. And the cost of those extra servers could be cost inefficient enough to be preventative to using that option at all.

Using recaptcha could have helped, although is not perfect either. For example I've been having issues with completely broken recaptchas on Chrome. Which could feel unfair if only some customers can get through based on the luck of the Captcha throwing up errors or not.

Canada only had allocations in the range of 90-100 per retailer if that chat someone posted was accurate. The stock was very extra limited and this it would have been difficult to get one no matter what. Would speculate there was maybe around 15,000(almost definitely under 20k) units allocated across all brands and retailers for *all of Canada.*

I saw that post about a "First Right of Refusal" and it might be a decent idea. Some people will whinge about "unfairness" no matter what truly. If we can at least keep the cards away from scalpers that would be a hugely positive change. Long time customers get priority and first dibs. If they're caught scalping they get banned from "Advanced PreOrders" or whatever EVGA wants to call it.

Memory Express is doing in person and over the phone PreOrders(Canada only; RIP their phones lines when Canadians catch on.) And that is how I will get my FTW3 Ultra.
Maybe online PreOrders are a flawed concept and we need to get back to waiting in lines and camping out over night?

the_Scarlet_one
Bots aren’t the issue. You may as well stop feed that rumor mill.