Scott_Rouse said:
Wavy pages are caused by humidity in the paper. Mine are wavy too but when i talked with the product engineer and quality assurance managers about this they said it would settle out and flatten.
As for the paper stock and ink, the ink and paper are the same as we used in 3.5. The smudging can happen and it depends on many factors including the oils and acidity of your hands. We do test for this stuff through our QA process and we found the inks and paper durability was within normal tolerances (but obviously is a bummer if it happens to your books). I have tried the smudge test on books here at my desk (PHBs and KotSF) with my own hands and not had a problem. Could be my body chemistry is fine with the books although the oils on my hands don't like the inks on my car's buttons and several of them that I use often (like the radio on/off ) have smeared ink now.
Other issues like uncut pages, double prints, etc are quality problems and should be returned to the store or contact our CS department about an exchange.
It goes with out saying as with any purchase keep your receipt. You FLGS and our CS team will likely need that.
Yeah, funny when you take it to the mechanic:
"Nothing is wrong."
Sorry Scott, but I doubt you have never seen an issue like this.
Sure, if you hands are perfectly clean and dry, you should be ok.
But, I have never seen this level of smudginess (is that a word?) in a DND core product. I used the 1E PHB, DMG, and MM heavily for 10 years (and had to re-tape 2 our of the 3 edges) and did not get the kind of smear results I am getting immediately in these recent books. Ditto for the 2E, 3E, and 3.5 core and many of the splat books.
I don't buy the corporate line "it's not happening here" when so MANY people are reporting it in the field.
And it's annoying to "keep the receipt" on a one for one trade back. Who expects that a major company which has historically put out good product would suddenly put out a third rate one (paper and ink only, not content)?
Is an Amazon on line record of the purchase good enough?
And what is your company doing to improve the printing process? I think whichever printing company did this to you ripped you off (either that, or you got what you paid for). It's one of the worse quality print jobs I have ever seen. On par with a newspaper with regard to how much it smudges. I know it ticked me off when it happened the first time on my PHB. A section of my feat table is now hard to read. It's so annoying and should be unexceptable to your company.