First of all, I'm sorry that this worked out this way, but it's not a "stunt" by us to get you to continue subscribing to Pathfinder. It's us finally correcting a really bad situation that's been dodging the Pathfinder line since the start. We've tried to keep our customers alerted and aware of the fact that this was going to be a big month with a double shipment... but I can certainly understand how email alerts can get lost in junk or spam filters.
No one's at the office over the weekend, but if you call up our Customer Service and explain what happened, I'm 100% sure they'll make things right for you. If they don't, shoot me an email at
james.jacobs@paizo.com and I'll see if I can't explain to them what the situation is.
That out of the way... read on to see what happened with the double shipment of #12 and #13.
When we began Pathfinder, we were still doing the magazines AND getting ready for Gen Con. As a result, although Pathfinder #1 was on time, Pathfinder #2 was about 5 weeks late. We can't just "adjust" the schedule of the monthly product (we rely on the money coming in every month for Pathfinder, for one thing, and if we readjusted the schedule to account for that lost time, that meant that next Gen Con we wouldn't have a new adventure path to kick off, which would have been disastrous).
As a result, we had to get Pathfinder caught up and back on schedule. That basically meant doing two of them in one month, which is close to impossible. Over the next year, we've been scraping and scratching to get the thing back on schedule. We had another two-volume month in there too, but that one happened during the holidays and Chinese new year (where our products are printed) and we lost a lot of ground immediately after. In short, it took us a whole year to get back on schedule, and as a result, we had #12 and #13 come in on the same week. As a result of THAT... we had to ship the two in a VERY close window.
The whole process of shipping out Pathfinders is done by hand, but there's thousands and thousands of them that go out in the space of a few days. It's a pretty frenzied time, and as a result, it's easy for a cancellation notice to come in while that process is going on and a volume could ship out at the same time we're processing the cancellation. That problem was compounded in your case because we had to send out two volumes in such close proximity. (Rest assured, that hopefully won't be happening again in the future, since if Pathfinder gets that far off schedule again, that's probably the sign that I get laid off and start looking for a new job!)
Anyway, that's the sordid story. Again, sorry it put you in a tough spot with your subscription, but tomorrow when our office is open shoot customer service a call (or email them at
customer.service@paizo.com) and we'll get it sorted out for ya.