The one bright side I see to this is that the Marketing/PR department feels like it's running at 5:95 in terms of Manhours and capital in comparison to the development side. The fact it's not closer to 50:50 like some early access or opened development/crowd-funded projects who spend much of that time creating and selling individual jpegs, is a welcome sign. If the capital matches that, then that's both good for development and explains a bit as to why the Pledge system and Merch store have been heavily (and deservedly) criticized. The issue with early development processes who place too much emphasis on marketing this early on, it then becomes less about the overall game and more about developing individual objects to sell for profit to push feature creep into the unforeseeable future.
Closing the Merch store for a redesign and to search for more reputable vendors/manufacturers was a smart choice, but the mistake should have never been made in the first place. However, reading another comment on this issue, and from hearing in the past as well from a few friends and my own Sister who works Marketing for Amazon, this issue happens to everyone, even Amazon.
fazool said:Don't feel bad. Seriously. My company is a large ~$400M manufacturing company and we had a merchanidise store, as well. We went through 3 (or was it 4?) different providers becuase of quality, ddelivery, selection issues. It's a difficult process to get a good merch store going.
I guess collect the pre-nerf merchandise and sell for profit in 20 years when Project Pantheon 2022 EMU roles around with their first Blue server.