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First things first: Wow. You guys killed it.
We spent weeks prepping for this and had planned for thousands of people showing up, but the level of enthusiasm for this one went far beyond what we expected.
At 6 a.m. PT when this drop launched, thousands of you tried to join all at once. This unprecedented level of traffic overwhelmed our transaction server and reduced our processing rate to a trickle, with many of your attempts (and repeat attempts) getting only partially processed, or dropped completely. Some of you ended up staring at the spinning checkout button the whole time, while others simply got an Oops page.
With the how and why out of the way, we wanted to first thank you for the overwhelming support and excitement over this drop. Without all your passion working with Sennhesier would never have been possible.
But we also want to apologize for the issues yesterday morning and to those who were unable to join this time. As someone who was there at 5:30 a.m. PT and didn’t get through, it’s a frustration I understand entirely.
Now, there are a lot of outstanding questions and we want to address them.
Existing orders Some users clicked the refresh/join button more than a couple times and ended up inadvertently joining the drop multiple times. In this case, the first order has been retained, but the additional transactions have been cancelled/refunded. Some users had their Paypal transactions confirmed without getting a transaction confirmation ID from us. If you don’t see anything under your Transactions tab then you should see the payment hold drop off. Otherwise you should see a Sennheiser order in the My Transactions tab.
Many people see multiple $1 charges on their credit card. These are just preauthorization charges and are there to confirm your credit card validity. They do not necessarily mean you are part of the drop, it simply means we checked to make sure your credit card was valid and they should be disappearing in the next 48 hours.
To summarize: at this point, all ambiguous transactions should now be sorted out. You can confirm if you are included in the drop by checking your “My Transactions” tab and seeing an HD 6XX order.
But didn’t you say some people had duplicate orders? As you read above, there were a number of duplicated transactions that have been cancelled. This means there are a handful of headphones that are currently unspoken for. However, way more than a handful of people encountered issues with checking out.
In order to objectively allocate these units our engineers have gone through the website logs to determine the order that users hit the “Join” button beginning at the 6 a.m. PT launch time. Starting today, we are going to email those users and give them a chance to join the drop. Based on their response, we will continue to work our way down the list (in chronological order) until all of the headphones have been allocated.
Did I get in?! Be sure to keep an eye on your email within the next 24 hours for the next steps. Verify you used an email you have access to and make sure you don’t have emails from Massdrop going to junk mail. If you don’t get an email in the next few days, then I apologize for all the suspense and hopefully we can bring this back soon.
Next steps for Massdrop We are implementing fixes now to help our servers function more smoothly in the future, and we've learned a lot about how exceptionally large traffic drops function in terms of flow and discussion. Communication specifically was an issue with this as things were getting buried immediately, and keeping people up to date as it was happening was almost impossible. A lot of good suggestions here in the discussion were brought up as well as internally for a lot of various teams that we will be looking into and working on implementing. Thank you all for the feedback.
And of course we are working to bring this back as soon as possible. We will keep everyone updated as we hear more and will be sure to email everyone here if anything is happening.
Thanks everyone, Alex
UPDATE: Email has been sent out.
And of course we are working to bring this back as soon as possible. We will keep everyone updated as we hear more and will be sure to email everyone here if anything is happening."
IMO although this is great news. You should be say contacting everyone that tried to join for one hour (or whatever other reasonable time frame, doens't need to be from 0600-0700), to see if they would like the opportunity to purchase the headphones before starting another drop. Or else you are telling these people, 'sorry your time isn't valuable to us, please try coming again when there is another drop, hopefully, this time it'll be better'
However, there seems to be an issue that weren't explained, how are the first 500 orders going to be determined?
I had a Q though, how can we tell if we were are one of the first 550 orders? Or have been bumped down the list due to duplicate orders?
That being said I would be very grateful to be given the opportunity to try and join this drop. However, if that is your actual solution, my money and time are better spent buying different headphones or the HD650 (which these are a near clone of) than waiting around for another drop to potentially happen, only to have the possibility of wasting more time and effort for nothing.
Also, I tried to pay with paypal but never even got redirected to paypal to proceed with payment. Am I eligible anyway?
Do you have a rough idea of how many users would be getting emails in the first wave, around when will they start getting the email and within what timeframe that have to reply to that email?
Regarding your statement: "Many people see multiple $1 charges on their credit card. These are just preauthorization charges and are there to confirm your credit card validity. They do not necessarily mean you are part of the drop, it simply means we checked to make sure your credit card was valid and they should be disappearing in the next 48 hours."
In terms of "fairness" as your team has emphasized, I must admit I am confused how people who received a pre-authorization from Massdrop would not be considered "in line" for ordering. This is because the only reason Massdrop would have charged anything to these credit cards is if people had submitted their order on your website.
While I understand the true definition of being a part of the drop involves having your transaction processed by the Massdrop servers, many of us were unable to get through to that server, and subsequently are now being told "too bad." This becomes a real issue when one looks at how the servers were crippled in the first place: too many hits in such a short amount of time.
Those of us who elected not to DDoS your servers by continually refreshing pages and spamming new orders (I would define us as the "not trouble-makers") are now being left out of the drop, because we essentially played nicely and did not make the problem worse. This, in essence, serves as a sort of approval of the troublemakers' actions, and endorses those types of actions for future drops.
I am certain your team is able to see where this will lead you in the future, and how that makes your potential-clients feel?
But no matter what happens, I still greatly appreciate you working through all this and your amazing attitude towards all the comments thrown around! You guys may have messed up the drop but your damage control was definitely top notch. Hope Massdrop will keep this up!!
Unfortunately, I do not believe that is a fair outcome. That isn't making it right, that's like "Hey guys, so sorry you guys got trampled on and wasted your time last time, the solution is we are giving you guys heads up we are giving you the opportunity once again to potentially be trampled on, and not get a product! "
That being said I would be very grateful to be given the opportunity to try and join this drop. However, if that is your actual solution, my money and time are better spent buying different headphones or the HD650 (which these are a near clone of) than waiting around for another drop to potentially happen, only to have the possibility of wasting more time and effort for nothing.
What can be done to help me and others who face the same issue as I. All too left with the same sour taste in their mouth, some taking for granted this opportunity. I do understand that you are diligently working with Sennheiser to make another drop possible, but I don't think you understand that with the holidays fast approaching, a savings of $400 and a great gift is a hard pill to swallow. I find it unfair too people with this issue that other who made it passed this phase to put in their credit card info to get an oops page find their troubles resolved. It is also disheartening that you prioratize them over others, from my perspective being because they are a guaranteed purchase. But I understand, you need to make money. But what will you do for others? I know you care about the community. Please clarify. Or at least give the assurance that we can make a drop happen near Christmas, to your extent.
Another suggestion for sake of transparency would be to share something like, "hey we have sent requests to everyone for whom we have a record of trying to join the drop till x:xx AM"
So say for example a 2nd drop gets organised. Will people queued up for this drop who missed out given priority? Or will it be a first come first served free for all and hope servers will hold up?
Edit: Just added my address no problem..along with some tax.
Will the first 500 be informed of their number or will they just hope to find a low number when they open their 6XX?
So far you guys seem to have been doing a wonderful job resolving other issues. I respect the dedication you guys have for the community. Yesterday I was pretty heated lol. But then I realized that it was you guys who even gave us a chance at this deal with your successful group buying model
Thanks.
I'm pretty sure a big reason everyone was rushing in at 6am is because everyone wants to be one of the first 500
Should I contact support directly?
The first 500 who managed to click on "Join Now" at 0600 P.T. are clearly the members whom deliberately stayed up / prepared for the drop, and should be entitled for the sub 550 S/N units.
I didn't get the email therefore I really looking forward for the next drop for this. Cheers!
One suggestion regarding the first 500 orders:
I think the fairest method would be to cross reference the "Join" time of all the 5000 orders and offer them to the 1st 500 orders because frankly they deserved it. And maybe publish those 500 order numbers so that people will know who's got the first 500 units when keeping customer detail secure.
Has all the emails been sent about the unaccounted units or are there more emails incoming in waves?
The difference between all those people would be a matter of milliseconds. I also clicked Join when it started but I only got in when it's already 1k1 units. I can imagine it would be extremely frustrating for the people who joined when it was stuck at < 400 units and now suddenly they got bumped out of the list because of the change.
I'm sure if it were you, you wouldn't want to get bumped out of the line like that.
Can't make everyone happy though.
@ToAllWhoRNotLucky: Wish the new drop coming for us soon :D
If a member joined at a later stage, let's say 0604 , and then got through in one go. That is his luck, and if he got bumped out by someone who's truly dedicated to the drop then he/she is unlucky but this member did not have the heart to rush for the first 500 unit in the first place.
I think the first 500 units should be reserved for members who are truly determined to the drop, because if the payment system did not fail, those 500 units would be theirs.
If you're someone who got through at number 499, you're now happy because you got the first 500. Now Massdrop decides to change the order based on attempt time, you're now out because 2 other guys who didnt get through managed to click the Join button milliseconds before you. We can't exactly say the effort or determination is different between all these people now can we? Even if you were to say the one who click Join first deserve it, there's still the problem of the whole site refusing to even load at 5:59, making some people click Join after others, just because they're unlucky that they couldn't load the server in time. There are too may random factors to determine whether someone "deserves" it or not.
Sent in a screen shot to the CS team, no reply as yet, but that's understandable given what's gone on in the last day or so.
I see no counter argument behind the website loading argument, because without the network traffic data you have no way to determine whether at 0600 there was more than 500 join attempts.
And lastly, refer to my initial scenario. If you are early to the party, and went through all the errors and got to 499, you won't get kicked out because ur initial attempt is within first 500.
But if you were late to the party, and simply got lucky and got to 499, then I'm sorry you were just lucky, you should get a place in the drop but the sub <500 unit should go to the early comers.
TLDR: The solution should honour the "first come first serve" nature for the first 500 orders, because if you were late then you did not have the heart get it in the very first place.
From everything I have seen in these three discussion threads, Massdrop are doing everything they can to make everyone happy.
I also decided to just wait on the spinning circle, but it saddens me that the way that you're supposed to do it is to just make a bunch of tabs and try to mass join increasing the load on the servers. I chose to try and let my initial payment process, but because of that in the end I get nothing, but a wasted 4 hours waiting anxiously for the drop to commence and then anxiously for my spinning circle to be resolved.
Also, I was video chatting with my friend at the same time and I'm sure that I was able to get to the payment screen and try to pay before him because we were chatting about the drop in real time. Cue him somehow getting in the drop after the duplicates and not me. I don't think I can see myself using this site anymore after the mockery that occured. I didn't rush to complain the entire time because I thought Massdrop would be able to resolve this situation favorbly for the people that were here and waiting, but my hopes have been dashed. Thank you for the other drops I've been a part of that were executed flawlessly, but this one was utterly unacceptable.
Finally, as I'm an IT professional that works directly on servers making sure that a situation like this occurs, I highly doubt you guys didn't see this coming. You must have gotten a predictor of concurrent users by the number of users that had visited the page to learn about the drop before the drop began as well as with the data from the people that had been requesting the drop. Preventative measures could easily have taken place beforehand.
Keep up the good work we all appreciate it.
If someone that submitted at 6am got the oops page, then again, it's their luck that their transaction didn't get through again. Those that go through was lucky to.
From what Alex said, there were 7000 people trying for it at launch. If u determine the first 500 by attempt, it's not fair for the first 500 that was lucky enough to get through.
You can't be fair in a situation like this to everyone. It was all luck and we should just leave it as is. Could've been better but having the chance at this drop was already a great thing.
My opinion is that 1. Massdrop should honor the concept of "first-come-first-serve" to the best of their ability and 2. Eliminate the effect of the payment system failure based on obvious reason.
I do not agree with the fact that we could not be fair to everyone in this scenario, because frankly we could, and I have already explained in my earlier comments.
Let me remind again, if the first 500 units were to be allocated to the luckiest member, then it should have been randomly allocated acros the 5000 orders in the first place. All I'm suggesting is for Massdrop to honor their own words, to allocate the first 500 units to the 500 who joined first, NOT the luckiest 500 members.
P.S. I see no reference as to Alex saying there were 7000 drop attempts at the moment that the drop started, his exact wording was the moment the drop started.
EVEN IF it did have 7000 entries at the exact same moment, randomly allocating the 500 units amongst those 7000 true supporters would honor the original concept more than the current state.
They should just get Sennheiser to do a special run and give all the ones in that run the same serial number of "5XX" or "500*" (with the asterisk), and give that to anyone that is complaining about how they "deserve" one of the first 500 because they had a checkout issue.
Do you: Kick the 2nd guy out because he clicked Join later and give it to the first guy OR Keep the same order?
There is just no way to make it fair for everyone.
Oh well, I suppose you can't win them all. Thank you though for your efforts and communication.
They've already handled the situation after the fact as well as they could in my opinion. They've went to the trouble of looking through all the logs to determine who should get the duplicates that were freed up and such instead of just reopening the drop after the duplicates were released. They've constantly been communicating with the community and are taking suggestions seriously. A+ for effort already.
Also, thanks for all the hardwork on this :)
After that (the people who are above the first 500) would receive a serial number at random. So for example person #501 could get a serial number 1003, while person #4012 could receive the serial number 600.
Order #1 could get randomly assigned serial #00550 for example but nothing higher than that - Order #501 can't get anything "better" than serial #00550 and could potentially get something completely random like serial #04324
#disappointedfrommassdrop
I guess this is a way to manually fix the purchases although my account already has the required information on file.
Is it really that hard to understand the simple concept that if the payment system did not fail, the first 500 purchasers would be the first 500 members whom expressed interest in the initial join attempts?
I've explained myself enough already.
For your interest, Alex himself did confirm that allocating these units according to join attempt times were the fairest option in the 1st discussion thread. So I honestly do not know what we're still debating on.
Anyway, kudos for the response but I'm not so sure of joining anything that kept me awake from 10pm to 2 am in the morning, without even having anything to show for it.
If I don't then it sucks, but you guys did tried to amend this chaos, thanks for that.
Daemos actually did receive his confirmation email, according to one of his posts. He's fortunate and lucky to have been granted the headphones, but that doesn't preclude him his right to voice his opinion about how the transactions proceeded -- or rather, didn't fairly proceed.
What if the 700 people who are getting emails all happened to click the join button before I do, and those of us who technically "purchased" the headphone first per the drop rules all get bumped from getting serialized 6XXs? There is an inherent unfairness in that scenario as well.
I pose this in order to say that I don't think there is a clean way to resolve this one.
Also, going really far down the hypothetical rabbit hole, I don't know that those 700 that pressed the join drop button would have had all their transactions clear, maybe they mis-keyed a card number, or had an expired card, no funds in paypal etc.
I only say this to illustrate that no matter what they do, some segment of people are going to be upset, and there really is no omniscience here with respect to timing.
Anyway, good job over there trying to clean up the mess.
And again, the current 500 orders are prioritized based on luck, not based on first come first serve.
To me this is a very simple choice, because from the beginning these cans were meant to be first come first served, sticking to this concept is both justified ethically and economically.
Ethically this is unexplored territory, so until the community establishes what is right or wrong there is no ethical truth.
Economically they are going to sell 5,000 headphones in this drop. Any damage to future purchasers has been done, and will not likely be significantly impacted by their handling of 500 serials on this one drop.
Ecnomically, to maintain the happiness of the original 500 members, Massdrop will have to be unfair to ALL the early adopters whom were failed by the payment system. Take the example raised by yourself, that is 700 members. To keep 500 members happy, you have to be unfair to 700 others and upset them. To me this is VERY clear.
Also, currently the 500 orders includes individials who were not early adopters and also those who effectively DDoS the payment system by multiple payment submission. Prioritising for them is outright unfair.
On the contrary, to prioritise according to initial join time AT LEAST honor the "first come first serve" principle, and I believe loading of the drop page is not a lottery but effectively a queue. I.e. If you did refresh the website at 0600 sharp, you should be the first who got to the website, if you are 5 seconds later than you are later and there's no argument around that. The unfairness in this is the latency between the member and the server, but this is clearly a lot fairer than the complete chaos of the payment system does not exclude bias towards members who performed multiple submission which block connection attempt by other more considerable members.
Please elaborate how the payment system has fulfilled its function as a queue in this specific drop.
I'm sure there are many others that are in the same scenario as me, it would not be fair to them either.
If you think harder, if the payment system did function properly, this discussion would not take place.
With 7,000 people all trying to get the same thing at the same time, what does everyone expect? It's a total crap shoot, luck of the draw type situation. This time I lucked out, next time I probably won't. Take it with a grain of salt and move on. It is what it is!
"If you think harder, if the payment system did function properly, this discussion would not take place."
I have never disputed this fact, and throwing personal insults around is not necessary.
Both of your assumptions were that the drop page were swamped which rendered the webpage to fail to perform as a queue system. However, may i direct your attention a step backwards, what evidence led you to believe that the queue system has failed? By no means I have a definitive proof that it did not happen but the contraindication did not exist to my knowledge either. And may i remind you, keep refreshing your page actually replace your queue number to the base of the queue, and if the server did not crash you were better off waiting for the webpage to be loaded.
Again, let me clarify my position. I am putting forward a suggestion for Massdrop to honor fairness TO THE BEST OF THEIR ABILITY. If this solution is fairer than the existing state, the solution not being perfect is not an argument against implementing it.
I tried to order about 5 minutes into the drop when only 250 units were claimed. I saw a charge on my card, but no transaction in my order history.
Am I safe to say that since I didn't receive an email yet, that I have to wait for the next drop?
Thanks.
My refreshes loaded the page each time all the way up until 06:00, from there the page didn't load for about 90 seconds or so. I'm using that as the reason why I think the server was overloaded. Yes, it's not evidence but pretty apparent in my eyes. And yes, each refresh wasn't done again until the page loaded
I'd throw in a metaphor comparing what happened here with picking the "wrong" checkout line in a busy store and watching what you think was the fastest line actually be the one that takes forever because of the old guy writing a paper check for clothing items that are missing their tags followed by the lady that wants to argue about exchanging an item she didn't even buy at that store, or turns out to be the line they close right before it was your turn because the checker had a heart attack.
The truth is that no amount of logic, metaphor, or cold hard reality is going to sway certain people from their idea that the only correct solution is the one that satisfies their want for a low serial number.
Even if they went by the millisecond people loaded the page or clicked the "Join Drop" button on the drop page (as opposed to the Join button on the checkout page that isn't active until you've entered or selected your payment information and address information), there seem to be people here that would then demand proof that the first 500 were truly the first 500 if they didn't get into the first 500 (and then would probably argue if there was a 2000-way tie for that first 500 that it wasn't fair that they happened to not be one of the ones chosen out of those 2000)...
I'd really only be ok with somehow getting bumped out of the first 500 if everyone who is complaining so much about the "unfairness" of it all because they want so badly to be in the first 500 and are sure that they would be in it if checkout had worked correctly somehow also didn't make the cut for the first 500, because irony is fun.
If I were to disrespect your opinion, I would not have put forward a counter-argument in a logical way, and I recall you have done the same on my arguments, which I totally accept and welcome.
If anything it only showed that I took your opinions into consideration, and only point out the logical flaws behind them. This is disproving your argument, not disrespecting them.
I get wanting into the lower serial numbers for sentimental/superstitious reason (my favorite numbers are all less than 500, after all, so a chance at one of them versus zero chance is an easy choice to make for me), but if the only reason someone wants one of those low serial number units is because they think it'll make it easier to get more money should they resell them (either for a profit or to maximize how much they recoup for selling a used headphone)...that's not borne out to be true with previous serialized drops. The first run of TH-X00's saw some ridiculous markups on ebay based on demand, not serial number. (You won't see those markups on head-fi.org, where it's not allowed in their for-sale forums...)
And yes. I agree that there is no singular solution at this point, and which is why I am actively debating with fellow members to find out which is the most logical solution to honor the fairness of this drop.
1. We have no choice of tills, there is 1 till. 2. It's more like the only cashier had a heart attack and suddenly everyone start randomly throw money to the counter and the first 500 who hit the boss far behind gets to pick first. 3. You were suggesting it was the members' fault to try and support the drop from the very start as picking the wrong choice, while implying the ones who's late to the party and just so happened to hit the target from the back of the messed-up till as being "right". To me this does not sound right at all.
Also, may I ask whether you have any insight on the issue? I'm personally very interested in how the officials are looking to tackle the problem.
And may I boldly put forward a suggestion that when the next HD6XX drops is live, Massdrop should probably prioritize the members who were logged in the server attempting to join but failed, and offer them a rejoining chance like you did now. In this case those members do not have to waste their time again and the only downside to them would be the delayed arrival of the headphone.
It doesn't really matter what time you loaded the initial page or entered the checkout without successfully completed it.
In that situation, 500 people did complete the checkout and there is no way of categorically stating that any of the people whose checkout didn't complete or couldn't even load the checkout would have completed ahead of any of the 500 that did, because those people didn't actually complete it. You'll never know. You can only guess, and your guess would be biased by whichever outcome you want to be true/where you'd want this theoretical line to be drawn as to which specific second/action matters for setting some priority other than actual completed checkout. Any line other than that is inherently unfair to all the people who might benefit from the line being drawn elsewhere; especially the people who actually did complete checkout and felt lucky to do so.
The only truth here is that 500 or more people did manage to get orders through, and through the luck of the universe, those who managed to connect to sockets or servers (like checkout lines) that didn't jam up or otherwise die on them, were able to check out.
It sucks for those who got jammed up, but it's not the fault of anyone who didn't anymore than is the fault of any single person that did.
>I'm editing out this last part. I didn't manage to read a bunch of intervening commentary before I posted, and I was being a dick because of a misunderstood position. Apologies.
THIS 100%
The purpose of the first 500 order were to award the members who were truly dedicated to the drop, not to award 500 members who were the luckiest. If those 500 units were to be distributed by luck, then it would have been meant to be randomly distributed across all the 5000 orders.
Your entire argument was to push the fact that the failure of the payment system was inherently part of the purchase experience, which is completely false. If the random chaos generated by the payment system was part of the expectation of this drop, then the entire 5000 units should be randomly allocated to ALL members registered because of your concept "the luckiest gets the price". When in reality this should not be the case.
"In that situation, 500 people did complete the checkout and there is no way of categorically stating that any of the people whose checkout didn't complete or couldn't even load the checkout would have completed ahead of any of the 500 that did, because those people didn't actually complete it."
This cannot be more false. According to the web traffic, it can be very clearly demonstrated who actually completed the purchase first, only to be rejected because the till failed. In other words, it is perfectly doable to determine who would have completed the order first if the payment system did not fail.
However, arguably this would in turn wasted a lot of our time but this would be a very fair move.
But as mentioned above, I do not agree the leaving the order numbers as is is a suitable move.
This whole problem seems similar to the Bourbon craze and especially the 'Pappy' bourbon. Trying to get that bourbon I have encountered the same problem as here. I would say to people who didn't get it, though luck and move on. The good thing about these HD6xx is that you can actually buy the HD650 for less then twice the price, and maybe even less when those HD6xx start showing up on ebay. With pappy you can count on paying 10 times more than retail, if you can find it at all.
Tip for massdrop, when you have a drop with (way) more people who listed that they wanted to buy than they have units, do a lottery. Let people write in for the lottery and then randomly pull the names. Of course I doubt they want to do this since it will get them a lot less publicity but then again it will give way less aggravations and give everyone a fair shot.
Nor have I seen you put forward any constructive counter-arguments against re-prioritizing the order numbers before he raised his tone.
When you have a drop with (way) more people who listed that they wanted to buy than you have units for sell, do a lottery. Let people write in for the lottery and then randomly pull the names. Of course I doubt they want to do this since it will get them a lot less publicity and probably demand but then again it will give way less aggravations and gives everyone a fair shot.
The truth is... I was more dedicated to the drop than everyone else. My top of the line computer (recently purchased for this drop) was faster than everyone else's. My internet speed (recently upgraded for this drop) was faster than everyone else's. I had www.timeanddate.com pulled up on a separate browser tab and refreshed the massdrop website just as the clock turned 6am. I've also been doing finger twitch exercises for the past few days to give me an extra edge.
I was faster and smarter, and I earned my place in line. It had nothing to do with luck!
This is not a physical lineup where people had a place in line. This was a MAD DASH at the start line trying to grab a place in line. You have said that the 7000 requests was not accurate, so let's take just say 10% of that number, 700 at the precise moment the drop started. That's still greater than the 500 there was to split. How do you determine who had more dedication? It's all luck of the draw.
First 500 people to submit a request were lucky to have made it through all those requests. First 500 people to actually place an order were lucky to have made it through the payment system.
You can't prioritize someone's luck over another in this case. Best course of action is to leave it as is as.
Regarding the first 500... Whatever? If people honestly thought they were going to be one of the first 500 then they are delusional. 500 people were going to luck out, 4,500 less so, and many more were going to go away empty handed.
My life experience and common sense told me that I had about a 33% chance of getting one of the headphones and a 3% chance of being one of the first 500. Not very good odds, but that was my expectation going into the drop. I understood the situation; I could roll with it and if it didn't go my way, chalk it up to experience and move on. Why anyone would react differently in this situation is beyond my comprehension. There are bigger problems for us to solve then not being able to save $100-$150 on headphones.
In the real world, we don't always get to cry foul, and we rarely ever get re-do's. Life isn't always fair! As adults, we know this, it's time to move on...
"Deleted additional comments"
And let's follow through your analogy that 700 members did join at the premise moment the drop started and submitted an order request at the exact same time. Your argument is that there is no way of determining who had more dedication, but it does not imply that they did not deserve at least a fair chance to get the first 500 units.
As stated in the last response you were mentioned in, "If an email shows up you'll have 24+ hours to resolve everything so you don't need to get stuck waiting around now. "
Keyword being 'if.'
Do you have a rough idea what whether the update is coming out today?
I understand the second attempt might put me too far down the waiting list, but the First attempt @6:05AM PT should be within reasonable timeframe?
Please simply ignore this comment if this isn't a right thing to ask for. I'm just giving it as a last shot. Cheers :)
Not sure if you have already addressed this (apologies if you have but I don't have time to sift through over 7,000 posts), but have you been working with Sennheiser to get another shipment of HD 6XX headphones? And assuming the answer is yes, is there a way that those of us who were trying to join right when the drop started but got shut out due to system issues can be given a head-start on the next drop? I think that if it can be done it would be consistent with your demonstrated commitment to fairness, so hopefully you and the team will consider it.
Hopefully now the emails are all out you all can get some well deserved rest.
I am prepared to take slack from the community. I have been dishonest for the past 3 days.
Every day I wake up at 5 AM and check my email. Oddly enough ever since August I stopped receiving drop information. So when the day of the drop comes around I am unaware of any drop information for upcoming drops. The time passes, and then it is, from my recollection, 10 AM when I get my sister tells me about an email that just showed up in our shared family mailbox, from massdrop with a really good deal on headphones. The email, which I can confirm was received at 9:45 AM was when I first became aware of the drop. I went to the website to join the drop only to be confused as to why I couldn't join. Going through the forums, I come to the realization that there was prior information sent out to massdrop members concerning the drop reasonably in advance.
It is at this point where I am disheartened that I could have entered the drop, as I wake up every day at 5 AM, only that I was precluded by not receiving prior information of said drop , only to be told later that you involuntarily missed a savings of $300 on a would be great Christmas gift all because of a email error.
So it was at that point when I also saw that many were having troubles with duplicate orders and delays. Annoyed, I sought to take advantage of this. So I devised a plan to explain to the support that I was here at 6 AM, when I wasn't, and that I was unable to join the drop, praying of of others who seem to have had similar dilemmas. My end goal was to have another opportunity to purchase the headphones that I could have and wanted to purchase, only that I had an extremely odd situation that I didn't feel I could defend. And from the fake plan, I wasted supports time and, in that other's time and also a lot of grief.
Why is it that I am telling you all of this. Well this is an apology to the community and support. I am sorry that I did this all for the greed of myself. I took the road of dishonesty, when I probably could have been honest and resolved the manner without any vex. It is in this that I also would like to acknowledge the good intentions of the community, especially its honesty. From revisiting these 6xx forums I have noticed supports stride for the communities content derived from fairness. The support team is one of the most fair and diligent that I have seen and I really do, and hope you guys do appreciate as well. Mr. Alex, in tandem with engineering found that I was not here at 6 AM and told discussed it in public in a way not to draw attention to the fact that I lied, for my sake.
For me. I hope you will accept my apology and I respect the others who where honest in accepting what I was to greedy to accept. I appreciate your and the supports honesty and wish for it not to be taken for granted in the future.
Oh and also please fix me not receiving emails, so I don't miss your the wonderful deals you provided.
P.S. Community, give me slack, I deceive it.
I do not feel that I was extremely wrong in doing so for prior mentioned reasons concerning email notifications, however that does not excuse me from stealing from someone else who should have received, regardless if I was inhibited to be there on MD's accord or not.
This apology was to highlight the good of the community and MD and to apologize for my actions and speak out against what I did. Hypocritical yo may say but say what you will I accept the flac, no pun intended, but my apology's intent holds.
So, only about 1200 or so headphones were bought in the first few minutes. The rest were just luck of the draw for whoever could squeeze an order in during the few hours the drop was live.
Did you submit your resume to Massdrop yet? I'm sure having a Fairness Judge would be really helpful to have on the payroll but may also give you bonus points to being Most Committed To The Drop™.
Please see the previous discussion because all your accusations have been clearly dismissed quite a while ago.
Honestly, your solution doesn't solve the problem for everyone. Glad you got in, though!
(1) Not our fault. (2) Thank you for being our genie pigs and spending countless hours of doing our jobs of stress testing our systems to provide smoother shopping experience for future shoppers.... (3) ...because we know you won't be back, so we won't even bother offering any form of consolatory measures (or may be because "sorry" is good enough and it is not our fault after all). (4) Hopefully you do not have a life and continued spending hours glued to these discussions and email accounts as to not miss a brief window to potentially get a shot at buying these headphones. (5) This drop was success and we cannot wait to have you guy come back and kill it again O.o
Disclaimer; I realize this is just, like, my opinion, man, and only a single data point. So it is, like, really not worth anything. I do not have insight into MD's operations or strategies, so it is impossible to offer any meaningful solution. It is what it is sometimes.
Good luck to everyone. I hope people that got these enjoy then and this incident won't prevent future major labor collaborations.
Massdrop is trying to do the right thing by getting the extra headphones to the people they have a record of by time stamp. Personally I think that is above and beyond what many companies will do. They could have just listed them on Ebay and made a ton of money. Massdrop has launched collaborative headphones before and the demand wasn't even close to the HD6XX. Take a few days to calm down and realize that THIS WASN'T INTENTIONAL. They are doing everything they can to get the extras into the earliest customers that (They have record of). If you didn't get to the JOIN DROP button and push it (The second one), I wouldn't even bother looking if it was me. They are trying to find people who just entered the drop page and give them a chance to buy them. That is really awesome.
I would be willing to bet that the next 2-3 HD6XX drops are sold out in minutes, and technical problems may arise. I completely called the issues with the first drop, and they will happen again, just hopefully not as bad.
I guess there goes my Christmas present for myself.
It really saddens me to see how entitled people can be. This isn't a fun experience for Massdrop either. Sorry to the people who wasted a whole precious few hours of your lives but you must've known what you were getting in to when you looked at the amount of requests on the drop and the amount of press it got.
They're headphones - they can always make more and you can be sure as hell they will after the success of this. Hell I bet they're already signing the contract for the next order.
It's ok snowflake millennial go seek out your safe space.
Thanks.
from "i spend so much money on MD" to "i've been at MD for years".....after what they've done to prepare (but not enough, lets be honest) and they probably didn't get them (unless its on the DL). Fucking grow up, you're not always gonna get what you wat i.e. Trump for Prez (yea i went there, fight me bruh)
That could be a blanket statement so that people in what might have been the high end of that normal range don't make any assumptions or that people with numbers outside that normal range don't assume they aren't in it if they were one of the insertions that came later or because of cancelled duplicates that were ahead of them. It could be a statement that no one should look at their order number for this drop to determine the order they settled on.
I doubt there will ever be transparency about it because no matter what happens, (as I argued before) some group of people are going to be unhappy about not getting the guaranteed low serial number because of where the line was drawn to determine "time of order".
I'd like to think that my argument before about the only true indicator from end-to-end of first 500 orders, for at least the first few minutes, was actual completion of an order since there are so many variables related to timing during the end-to-end order flow that can't be determined (even if everything worked for everyone, there's no guarantee that at any point before the order actually completing/registering that the timing at any given point during an order being placed would have put someone ahead of someone else due to so many factors [network latency, cpu load difference between servers, clocks being slightly off on different servers, disk access speed differences].) Massdrop may have a different take on how they handle this. At least I'm in the drop, so I can't be too disappointed with their decision making if they never explain it.
In my opinion, it would be stupid of them to announce something that could be taken as a precedent for future unprecedented events that might have similar symptoms but different causes, or that would give any group of people a documented reason to be unhappy. (However, I'm sure there are people who see the world as more black-and-white/fair vs unfair that would disagree with that statement. I don't really care; 17+ years in the e-commerce game [18 in December] informs me that people like that typically think any decision that doesn't favor their view is a stupid decision.)
Since MD is reserving something in the lowest 550 for the first 500, and there were really only like 10-20 people who were consistently replying to and arguing on this thread about the inherent "unfairness" of the ordering problems and clamoring that they deserve the low serial number, it probably wouldn't be that hard to change that first 500 to the first 520 or so behind the scenes without saying anything, and then making sure those loud people were in that extra ~20.
I guess it's time to step away and just wait for they headphones to arrive. Congrats to everyone that was successful, for those that weren't, I hope you get another chance in the future.
Thanks to MD for bringing this deal to the community and digging deep when when it all went south.
205 spots left for 2nd wave I guess.
My first attempt to join was about 20 minutes after the drop went live, where I got the "Oops" page a couple of. I couldn't spend anymore time trying at the time (approximately 850 sold at time of attempt, if I recall). I tried a bunch more times at just under two hours after it went live, and got an "Oops" page every time, with the sold count showing ~3k+ and very quickly going to 5k and then showing "sold out."
So much crying from everyone but the join count keeps dropping.
4789 now. More spot for everyone else I guess.
Do you have any official numbers how quickly this drop sold out? It's got to be your craziest and most popular drop to date.
I have just received an email from Massdrop allowing me to rejoin the drop. I indeed feel more just at this time despite my previous comments.
Thank you Massdrop for making this happened.
Seems like the second wave of email rolled out. Check your emails fellas.
Edit: Nevermind. Found it. Chalk this down to this being my first successful drop....
Anything that I missed out hence not getting the second email?
Peace
EDIT: I still have my pending PayPal transaction listed for $215 still.
Looking forward to it.
By the way, how can we check if we are under 550? Since we are "one of the first few".
I tried to purchase the HD6XX but was hit with server errors. A pending transaction was created in PayPal for my purchase, but nothing ever appeared in my transactions on Massdrop. I was told support would get to me, but that was over four weeks ago and I wrote two more e-mails to Massdrop about this, the last one was December 16th.
At this point it means I am probably not getting my HD6XX at all. This is ridiculous to have contacted Massdrop a few times and to get no response at all.