Hey, folks!

It's your friendly neighborhood non-wage slave here.

Please, please, please remember to back up any pdfs you purchase from us. External hd, usb drive, second computer, dog's brain, or clay tablets are fine, but don't forget to do it! You get multiple download opportunities when you buy so feel free to load it on your laptop AND desktop. Buy a usb drive or two and back things up and keep the drive in a safe place.

Starting on December 1, 2011 no replacement pdfs will be sent out if the purchase was made more than 30 days ago. I hate to do this, but too much time is being spent almost daily going in and finding orders, verifying orders, and sending out replacements.


Thanks for your understanding.

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"30s? " as in 30 seconds? Wow, I mean, OK, I get it. Off to do my back-ups.....

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My personal TQ = D4

Heh! Fixed! It should have said 30 DAYS, not 30s.

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Shawn Carpenter
Game Designer, Ambush Alley Games

"I don't wanna be remembered as the guy who died because he underestimated the threat posed by a monkey."

Can I dowload one of my multiple downloads indefinately or only those 30 days?


PS: I sent my stuff to myself via email (2 adresses). That usually fixes the storage problem. I recommend this to everyone for PDFs smaller than 20MB it's usually no problem.

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ad astra per aspera
liber et infractus

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." –- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

You get a certain number of downloads for 30 days automatically through the download service we use. I can't remember off the top of my head how many that is.

All we ask is that you please back your files up before those 30 days are up. Your e-mail tip is a great idea!

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Shawn Carpenter
Game Designer, Ambush Alley Games

"I don't wanna be remembered as the guy who died because he underestimated the threat posed by a monkey."

For those people without backup devices (or maybe even if you do have one) there is a good free service called Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) which lets you store up to 2Gb of data in a personal storage online. You download a small program to your PC which creates a local folder that is automatically synced to your online dropbox account. The best thing is you can set up all your computers, smartphones etc to sync to your account and anything you add on one device appears on all the others.
Just thought I'd mention it ...

Good idea!

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ad astra per aspera
liber et infractus

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." –- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

Or set up a Gmail account and email the things to yourself.

It's trivially easy to back up important documents these days.

I back up all my rules to my flash drives, 2 gigs $4 on sale. That will hold a lot of rules. If I go out to get then printed I copy them to another flash drive. The UPS store is the cheapest to get them printed and bound. Just don't leave them in your pants and wash them.

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Gamin Daze
http://gamindaze.blogspot.com/

Please allow me to contribute some polite criticism. The idea that you have a certain period of time in which to download a pdf a certain number of times, and then your purchase expires and you may not download it again, whether you actually download it or not, is a very strange business model. It happened to me that I made a purchase from AAG where I received a set of PDF documents. I downloaded some and then came back later for the others to find they were no longer available. This was dismaying. Also, I have lost AA Games purchased PDFs in the past by losing both the laptop as well as the backed up copy of the pdf (it is possible) and had to re-purchase the same item. You might say "well its your own damn fault" but that kind of approach merely alienates the customer and makes them less interested in purchasing your products in the future.

As a counterpoint, I can log onto Steam right now and review and re-download any game I have purchased via their system over the past several years. I would argue that this is a far better model.

Now, before you say that the fact that it is supposedly so easy to back up your pdfs is reason to maintain your "too bad, sucker" business model, I would say that the opposite is true. The ubiquity of available data storage is a good reason to adopt the Steam model and make downloads available to your customers indefinitely.

Sorry you feel that way, Zeph.

We don't feel we're being unreasonable when we ask our customers to take personal responsibility for their own purchases.

We reached a point last year where we were receiving three or four requests to restore lost PDFs a week at one point we clocked as many three a day.

Reasons for the lost PDFs included (no joke): "I lost my PDFs because my computer was stolen/I lost my job and they were on my work computer/My room-mate deleted them/I accidentally deleted/My girlfriend deleted them because she thought they were *beep*/My ex-wife took my computer with her when she left/I left the window open and it rained on my computer/etc."

Before we (and by "we" I mean Peggy) could provide a replacement file, we had to determine whether or not the PDFs had been purchased in the first place. Since our store software is rather rudimentary (we don't have the budget or software engineering staff that a software firm like Valve has, oddly enough), this entailed quite a bit of effort on Peggy's part. At least a third of the time we weren't able to confirm whether a purchase had been made or not, but we gave the (hopefully) customer the benefit of the doubt and gave them a copy of the PDFs anyway. A good percentage of the folks claiming to have lost their PDFs had actually purchased earlier versions of the games and were trying to get the new versions of the games/books.

When it became apparent that anywhere to a quarter to a third of Peggy's work day consisted of dealing with lost PDFs, I called a halt to it.

We explained our reasoning, we offered multiple methods of storing your valuable files for free or inexpensively, and we gave a time period for people to issue claims for lost PDFs before the policy went into place.

Our reasoning still seems valid to us and the free/cheap methods of backing up PDFs are still freely/cheaply available.

We're not Valve. We don't have Valve's resources. Valve doesn't work under our limitations. If you know a good software engineer who wants to build us a Valve style store for a few hundred bucks, we'd be happy to meet 'em!

I appreciate that your opinion differs from ours and I hope the difference won't alienate you as a customer, but at the end of the day I am not convinced that asking you to be responsible for your own property is an onerous request. We'll just have to agree to disagree on that point.

Respectfully,

Shawn.

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Shawn Carpenter
Game Designer, Ambush Alley Games

"I don't wanna be remembered as the guy who died because he underestimated the threat posed by a monkey."

BTW - just to reiterate the most reliable method of backing up your PDFs so that they are stored independently of any physical medium that might be lost, damaged, or destroyed:

E-Mail them to yourself. GMail works well for this, but so will your ISP provided e-mail if you select the option to save your mail on the mail server.

If your computer is destroyed, your PDFs will be waiting for you when you download your e-mail on your new computer.

There are also several online storage services, many of whom offer up to a gig in free storage. I've been using DropBox for over a year with no issues. A quick Google will get you up to speed on companies who offer Cloud storage.

Hope this helps!

Shawn.

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Shawn Carpenter
Game Designer, Ambush Alley Games

"I don't wanna be remembered as the guy who died because he underestimated the threat posed by a monkey."

Shawn

Personally I think your policy isnot only justified, but also completely fair.
Personally I have purchased all the AAG Osprey books to day. Heaven forbid, but if my home burnt down, and my AAG library was lost, I wouldn't be thinking of asking for replacement copies for free. I don't see any difference between hard copies and pdf's.

Ben