If there's one thing that gets fans of Warhammer 40k (and all its attendant media) even madder than their favorite army getting nerfed - it's scalpers buying up all the stock of GW's shiny new thing to resell online at wildly inflated prices. The question of whether Uncle Geedubs is really doing all it can to make sure 'real fans' can get the new box set at RRP is a constant refrain. Quite a shock, then, that on Tuesday it deliberately crashed its own Warhammer webstore, just to stop a network of bots bulk buying special editions of the new Horus Heresy book.
GW announced in its Saturday pre-orders list that the new Black Library anthology Era of Ruin - the 65th instalment in its series of Horus Heresy books - was coming out this week. The regular edition was available immediately (and remains so) - but the fancy, limited stock, faux leather special edition was to drop at 5am ET/2am PT/10am BST on Tuesday, June 10, with a queue system in place to keep the bots at bay.
But that system evidently failed. When Tuesday came, Warhammer 40k book fans descended upon the Warhammer.com webstore to find it crashed and inaccessible - and GW later posted the statement above via its social channels to explain the temporary outage. It's not clear exactly when the takedown took place or how long it lasted - but the post went out at 11.35am ET/8.35am PT/ 4.35pm BST on Tuesday, so it was certainly down at that time.
"[W]e've paused Warhammer.com for a short period," the statement explains, because "scalpers attempted to use bots to bypass our normal safeguards" in order to bulk buy the special edition of Era of Ruin.
GW says its team "caught this happening in real-time, so we pulled Warhammer.com offline" - and as a result it's "pausing the launch of Era of Ruin and have removed it from Warhammer.com for the time being". Fans wanting a copy now have to sign up for an email alert to be told when it's going back on sale (while GW works out how to prevent the bot surge happening again, presumably).
It's very unusual for the entire Warhammer.com webstore to be deliberately taken offline for any reason except essential maintenance (and that happens rarely, with prior warnings).
In fact, it's unusual for any large scale web store to feel the need to shut down its entire website, globally, to deal with a bulk buying issue - at least based on my experience working at a PC games webstore. Most often, these bot waves come from sources localized to IP addresses in a specific region, and the website's operator can simply put extra protections like Captcha challenges in place for that region only, to filter out bots before they reach the site.
If the bots are sophisticated enough to get around that stuff, it's typical to temporarily block all users from the problem region(s), while keeping the site live everywhere else in the world. Suddenly taking an entire store down worldwide, even for less than an hour, would usually be seen as a nuclear option.
The obvious reason is all the other sales you'd lose while the site's down, but that's just the start. It takes staff's time and resources to turn the website off and on again, which sets back other projects. And - depending on the circumstances - making the site unavailable could lead to a lot of very angry customers, making a mess for your PR and marketing people to clean up.
In this case, Warhammer fans will probably be pretty encouraged to see that GW is willing to incur the cost of a website shutdown in order to stop a scalper attack - even if its expensive, limited print run versions of new books are more controversial among fans than a lot of other products.
At this stage, though, we don't know why GW had to take such a drastic measure in this case, when it hasn't tended to in the past. Wargamer has contacted Games Workshop asking for more details on what happened, and what action it's taking to prevent a recurrence - and we'll update this story with any response or comments we get back.
Did you manage to snag a special edition of Era of Ruin before the Abominable Intelligences invaded? What's your take on it - either GW's ongoing efforts around scalping, or the special edition books themselves? Come join the Wargamer Discord community and say your piece - we love a good Warhammer chinwag!
No spoilers for Era of Ruin though, please, I want to read about all the Warhammer 40k primarchs going full revenge mode for myself.