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Y'all should think about the x-mas'ly joy of having to jump all through these hoops to get some presents you really like, instead of just getting something without having to put some effort in first...
OTOH I recently got a free texture set for some product I didn't have at that time and, the next day, after putting that product into my WL, is miraculously appeared as my free present. Neither was something that I would ever have bought, but, as Gertrude Stein would say "A free product is a free product is a free product"
Thank you Daz for the coal. I have over 3500 items in my DIM. if the average, free and high price is $10 US I have spent more than $35,000 US dollars here. The two items today were a free pose set for Sadie, that I don't own and a $2.99 texture set for a product I don't own.
Daz will aways look after it self and make money, I am just sorry for the venders that will now miss out of my purchases.
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LD has been awful for a while - mostly 72% off - Likely because this sale has been, overall, among the worst I can recall. This here is The Grinch's holiday sale. >_>
Yeah they must have done some backend tweak to Daily Choice Item as for the first time both items are duds and neither is from WL.
In recent days, I've noticed that my daily freebie is still coming from my wishlist, but the $2.99 item is random. At present, I have 40-something DO wishlist items, about 75% of which are G8 era. They either came from holding on to items I'd put in a cart but that didn't quite make the final cut when it came time to buy (which I started doing a few months ago), or adding a few new ones every day or so.
They don't have to be from the WL, it is just influenced from your WL, but depending on the criteria it can pick from the WL
I know. I meant the original base price. Freebie is originally $20.95 and $2.99 item was originally $18.95.
Mine too - on 5 of the 11 days so far! So it seems a bit random how they choose which is which.
On the plus side, only one day did I get a non-Wishlisted item as the Free choice and the $2.99 ones have all been from my WL.
ETA: And my max price for a freebies seems to be $24.95 - which means I only have about 10 possible qualifiers in my WL now so I probably should go and add a few more with more than 10 days to go!
One time Lightning Deals offered me a bundle that I owned every single item of. They need to do one of those sales again where you get bundles for "free" if you own all the items so they can no longer show up in the store as purchasable.
Today was my first "dud day" as well. I guess if this is the end of the train I at least still got some good deals this month for free or three.
Agreed. I often get bundles in my LDs where I own all the items by virtue of having purchased the pro bundle.
I put that to a test from tomorrow on, as I put a shipload of DO products for G8 that are a couple years old and have a base price ~ $ 25.- or less in my wishlist. Let's see if the script chooses some presents out of those, or if I end up with a bunch of unneeded texture sets again...
*readjusts tinfoil hat* Nuh huh!!
Still every single item i had so far was from my WL and today neither was so a bit odd.
I no longer get a free advent item because I haven't bought anything for 4 days
they only offered me free WL items for 3 days after offering random free things the previous days and 2.99 WL ones which stopped
have plenty of cheaper things they could have kept selling me I would of bought including the ones I grabbed for free
but getting random textures etc I don't want there too and weird lighting deals
Last year, the division between free and paid seemed to be based on age, rather than price. I don't have enough data yet to tell if that's changed or not for this year.
Back to both calendar items being from my wishlist... let's hope yesterday was some kind of glitch or coincidence.
Bought something yesterday by chance.
So back on the free item offer after a day without, complete waste of time looking, last time I had a free item from my WL was the 6th
the offer today https://www.daz3d.com/scandalous-makeup-set
This might be the most offensive contiuned promo Daz has done, add that to messing about with the membership tiers, I'm Daz+ so I wonder if that why i'm getting the utter waste of time free offers, Most of the paif ones have been gen3 characters for 2.99
I'm D+ and every day so far, both advent calendar items on offer have been from my WL. (Knock on wood that it continues.) Some has been older stuff, but I've also gotten a few G8 things and a Fugazzi environment, so... /shrug
Same here, and both much nicer stuff than immediately before. But then, I bought some things and now have all three punches again. It does seem to me there's a relation. But I'll just buy my little things when I find something nice, and skip otherwise, and take the bonuses as they come.
Well, for all those people trying to finding out how to influence what one might get as presents:
My free present today is Virginia HD and the $ 2.99 present is Bjazel HD - both put on my wishlist yesterday. So now I get me an angel - Gabriel in this case - for x-mas and wait and see what the next day(s) bring...
XD Yeah, same here. This is what the Daz store has become, foraging through overpriced outdated items and obsessively checking the LDs every three hours to try and stay in the game. With full punches, general prices of 70ish% off sound like a lot to a new customer, but we know that the prices are way off what they've been before (especially with 'Daz-Deals' showing the price history). It's also painful that my high-priority wishlist items have been at full price for ages, although they'd still be too high with the current lack of decent stacking. Roll in a Daz+ item to the debut items each day and we might have something to work with. The PA sale feels like it was a loooooong time ago now. Even this glimmer of hope I hold... is fading. The only way I can take the chain off the wallet is for a decent wishlist sale so we can stack some offers and fill our stockings. And I would spend BIG on that as I'm in my last month as a member. Come on, Daz. Make this a glorious send-off :)
You had, at best, 24 items from a pool of tens / hundreds items but considering you said your wishlist is depleted, what you saw was 24 draws with some from a pool of likely close if not over 10k eligible items. I don't think you can be confident about an upper price cut being specific to each customer with such data.
I would not feel confident about establishing a rule with what I was offered (outside of 'it's random from my wishlist because it's far too unlikely for all of them to have been from my wishlist when I don't have all Daz Originals in it' and because last year, once people added lots of DOs in their wishlist, they started to get items from there), and in my case, it's 24 items out of 'only' a couple of hundreds items (they were all from my wishlist).
The $31.95 item is clearly an outlier in the 24 draws I saw (I don't remember all the ones I didn't chose, but most were textures packs): the mean price of what I 'purchased' is under $20 (less than $17 if I remove the costlier item).
The system could simply be built to pull every eligible items from your wishlist, placing them in a list, then checking if you had enough to be over the threshold put in place to reduce people gaming the system (in other words, having a very limited selection of items to maximize their chances to get the ones they wants).
If you have enough or more, the system then draws two items out of that list (either a list with enough items to get to the threshold or the whole list of eligible wishlisted products).
If you don't have enough, the system may fill the empty slots with either items chosen randomely (which is a waste of ressources I think) or with 'Chose a random item among all the eligible ones in the store' tokens, then, if and only if the system drawn one or more tokens, it'll do the required number of draws to fill your advent calendar (which mean it may simply not have to do such draws at all if the two items are from your wishlist so it feels like the better choice among the two possibility).
It feels like a good compromise to offer items people will be enticed to get (because it's maximazing the chance to draw items from their wishlist), making them purchase something regurlarly (every three or four days, I don't remember which number was found) to keep the advent calendar open, without allowing them to chose to precisely their gifts (an advent calendar is also supposed to have an element of surprise).
My WL was not depleted. What was depleted was the item pool in what i later 'found' to be my 'eligible zone'. I still had a lot of DO (over 60) outside that area and bellow what others got for free and my freebies became completely outside my WL and old. Adding lots G8 and G3 over $16 and the pool below $20 being over 100 did not got them eligible for freebie (but yes for $2.99). Once i added a few G3 era bellow $16 got EXACTLY those items in my freebies consistently for a few days now. Considering i only added a few and removed non of the others, is statistically improbable that i got it wrong.
So yes, i can say with confidence that that seems to be MY cut. What got me into that particular cut i don't know. Maybe a combination of subscription, purchases over weeks/month/year, could be a lot of things. Clearly for other is very different. I think anyone trying to establish how to improve their chances should make their own analisys.
Well, today is the first day when the advent calendar served me a free item that wasn't on my wishlist. Not only that, it's an ancient product for Victoria 4, Aiko 4, and other "4" crowd. And since the $2.99 item is a set of textures for the outfit I don't own yet (though both textures and the outfit are on my wishlist), I'm not getting it either.
That aside, it's feeling more and more expensive here. With the prices taking into account tokens and punches, if you have neither, the offers don't feel good enough. Even Daz+ items feel more expensive. In the past, you could get them for $2.5-3.5. Now, they're $4.9 each. Sure, you can get them cheaper, if you buy both, but that's the luck of the draw. While I could consider getting Dasher Outfit, those expressions feel to me like they don't bring anything new to the table and many look so subtle that I don't see the point in using them as dials to mix and match. So, as a result, I won't be buying either.
I did have punches in the beginning, but when I forgot to check out once, I lost all of them, which definitely disincentivized building them up again and keeping up with them again (especially when the Holidaz Deal or the $2.99 calendar happen to be unappealing, and everything else doesn't seem like a deal good enough to keep buying daily). I have a few tokens that I'll likely let expire again, because with the higher prices for everything, they only have value when stacked.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I understand that everything's getting more expensive, I can't help but wonder whether Daz will price itself out of business by discouraging people without big budgets to keep buying. Those who can afford an expensive (more and more expensive) hobby and those who can transfer their expenses to their clients will, of course, stay and keep buying. I just wonder if there's enough of them to offset the departure of those who spent $50-100 monthly (or less). One $1000-a-month spender is not going to offset 100 people who stopped spending their $50-100 a month.
Even with Premier and 8 tokens for the last month and a half, the store has felt more expensive. I'm still getting the best prices, but I've not seen best prices like the previous best prices on Daz+ before Premier was a thing. It's a creeping inflation - almost imperceptible - but I'm sensing it. I won't be taking Premier up when my 'free' (and, from my perspective, stingy) trade-in ends. I'm getting ever-so-slightly less for what would be a massively increased buy-in. My switch to Premier was strategic - pragmatic. With the caveat that I'm one data point only, I'm on my exit strategy from the Daz store. I agree with you that Daz are pricing themselves out.
I feel quality is slipping too. Don't get me wrong - most of the best artists are here. Or artists who're creating specifically for Daz. But when I look at what the store offers and size it up to elsewhere - yes, things are more expensive elsewhere, but I'm going to put my neck out and say that the best Genesis character artists aren't on the Daz store - people who are creating distinctive, varied characters without access toproprietary sub-division tools that artists here have. Maybe it's because they don't have sub-division and an HD label to rely on? Maybe it's because Daz is simply one string to their bow?
Character diversity is an issue here too. I recently went on a store crawl to bulk up my library of men after a realisation that, of the hundreds in my library, 95% of them have the same set eyes, chin and chiselled cheeks. I was trying to put together a cast of a few dozen distinctive men from my library and I... struggled. Now that I can see where the limitations of variance in the my library are, I can spot the lack of diversity in the store too. Ouch, is all I can say. I don't have the time to make dozens of non-main character men, so I've been looking elsewhere. It'll cost me more, but I've already so many characters that I no longer believe will be useful next to one another in the same project, so maybe I should've spent that money on less products of higher utility?
Then there's the packaging of products. I'm really fond of some the artists who recently moved stuff here, but I'm plain sick of the amount of time I have to take to package up products so they're discoverable in my library. If I'm having to do that here anyway, then elsewhere suddenly doesn't look so unattractive.
Finally, broken sales or items in the store. I've noticed many errors that weren't raised in the thread, but because I wasn't interested in buying the affected products, I didn't bother reporting here or via a ticket. And nobody else reported them either (at least publicly). Another ouch. I'll leave the speculation to others.
I'm certain I'll still buy from the Daz store after my exit, but it'll be on the same terms that I buy elsewhere.
My switch offer was stingy as well (give up 8 months of Daz+ for 1 month of Premier), so I didn't switch. But from what I saw on the forums, many people who switched aren't going to continue with Premier and after that, they aren't even going back to Daz+. Of course, we're always told that forum users are but a small fraction of shoppers and not representantive of the whole, but at some point, unless you're producing super-exclusive and expensive product people with a lot of money want, you'll likely feel the departure of those non-representative customers.
I don't shop at other places, mostly because of lack of Smart Content integration—to me, Content Library is such an unintuitive mess without any uniform structure, that it feels like a pain to use. I also don't shop at other places, because the ones I checked out look like a cheap fleamarket in comparison to Daz as it was until recent months. The quality slipping is visible even in the quality of promo pictures and messy item naming conventions (new PAs using their own with disregard to what's established at the store).
I'm certain I'll be shopping here too (and I still have months of Daz+ to go), but when the store gets too expensive, spending gets much more restrained and cautious. Instead of the "I don't need it, but I can afford it, and I like it", it becomes "do I _really_ need it?" I can already see that change of perspective when I browse offers (like featured artists). But when you have some odd $20 to spend at a given day, and in the past you could get 4-8 products for it, but now it's only going to be 2, it feels like getting less value for your money.
And yes, I understand inflation. I'm very well aware that artists have to eat and pay bills too. But at some price point, I won't be able to support them and Daz anymore, because, well, I have to eat and pay bills too. My cover designer raised his prices twice in the past 4 years. And, sadly, after the last price raise, I'm not going to use him anymore, because I simply can't afford him. In case of Daz, I've been with using it (and buying) for a few years now, so I do have assets to use, therefore I don't have to buy more save maybe for some odd item here and there.
Sometimes they just look more expensive, as the maximum % off one might get offered is lower, but combined with a lower base price the result is a lower final price. Here in DAZland many (if not most) people are used to buy when the base price is reduced at least by 70%, while at other shops even 50% off are interesting.
And it's not only a diversity in figures here, which is lacking. Due to coming out with a new generation of figures coming out every couple years, artists are motivated to redo many of their products done for previous generations again and again and again. And this trend seems to work better here at DAZland than elsewhere, it seems to me.
I'm not sure it's entirely true. Yes, many forum users are looking for at least 70%, but ultimately, for people with tighter hobby budgets, it does make a difference whether that 70% off is $5 or $10. I personally don't look at the percentage when making my purchase decisions. I look at the amount of dollars I will have to pay. And if someone has $50 to spend, a super duper pro bundle that costs $100 is still going to be too expensive even if it's 90% off. So the percentages would be only indicators of "can I get the price low enough". Most people won't buy more expensive things just because they're 70% off (unless they have a lot of money anyway and they want to feel they got a deal).
the thing really getting me is that pretty much everything requires a buy-in, usually of a new debut item, which are now $14 and up, mostly up. This offsets any savings unless you buy quite a bit at a time. My solution is just not to buy. I've spent $6.30 so far since Nov. 30, for 2 $2.99 items that I liked. Passed on everything else, even some of the free items that are not worth the effort to even pick up. I find that my interest overall here is pretty much done. I'm even losing interest in Ultrascenery, which is turning very boring with all the scens looking very similar in form. It needs diversity badly, not in biomes and ecologies but the actuall terrain, river flow, and trails and roads.
I'd love a product full of height maps to help with exactly that. Or some sort of paint by numbers hieght map creator. I find it's not worth the time to handcraft those myself, but I was was very pleased with US2 the one time I did. Are there any programs good for quickly creating height maps? Or some brush pack of ecological features? I thought maybe Bryce might have something in it, but the description of what it does is pretty thin.