SVGames SUCKS!

Ghostwind · Apr 25, 2003

RPGNow is offering the ESDs as a single file download rather than the multiple downloads that SVGames offers. For my money, I would rather do business with RPGNow for ESDs.

Agnostic Paladin · Apr 26, 2003

I had no problem assembling my multi-part file (still a stupid way to do it though); I'm not happy about the quality of my scan and the OCR was obviously not checked by human eyes even once. At least 25% of the text on any given page was never read by the OCR software.

Kinda sad when pirates do a better job of making pdfs from gaming books than the people who are getting paid to do it.

Henry · Apr 26, 2003

Considering that I already have my info with RPGNow, I may give SVGames a pass, now that RPGNow offers the ESD's too.

CCamfield · Apr 26, 2003

Henry said:
Considering that I already have my info with RPGNow, I may give SVGames a pass, now that RPGNow offers the ESD's too.

Henry, I think that would be a good idea, personally.

I bought the (1e?) DM Design Kit ESD in October. The scan wasn't good, I grumbled, and it got put on Bastion Press' list of things to rescan.

The good: Bastion Press did rescan the product. Jim Butler responded to my emails very cordially.
The bad: My emails to SVGames about how/if I can get a new copy (to which I think I am entitled; does that seem fair to you?) have not been answered.

2WS-Steve · Apr 26, 2003

I bought a couple of the WotC ESDs from RPGNow and that worked great. I'm a bit more comfortable with them since I've had such an easy time making purchases through their shop.

Zappo · Apr 26, 2003

herald said:
I purchaced the Die, Vecna Die from them and It worked out great. By breaking out the download into parts it makes it much easier for people on slow downloads. IMHO the winsplit its smart business.

I understand. However, making the download one huge file would make the procedure simpler, and it wouldn't be a big deal even for people with slow connections, because you can just use getright or a similar program which allows resuming (and I think everyone with a slow connection should use a download manager, it saves sooo much trouble even with small files).

ninthcouncil · Apr 26, 2003

The quality of the PDFs is very variable, partly because of poor source material when there are no pristine versions available, but partly because of some rather sloppy work by the scanners. As pointed out, this isn't an SVGames problem, but the responsibility of Bastion Press, who do the actual production.

That said, there seems to be a long lag between problems being fixed by Bastion and the corrections appearing on SVGames's site. Some of the problems marked as fixed by Bastion months ago have yet to be uploaded as corrections to SVGames's download section, which at best suggests poor communications between Bastion and SVGames.

Next time I feel the need for scans of old material, I'll probably give RPGNow a try instead.

Staffan · Apr 26, 2003

The older ESDs (most of the FR, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim and I suspect Dragonlance) are really neat, because they put a lot of time into the scanning process. The text on the page is actually text, not just a picture that looks like text. The files are pretty small (e.g. Forgotten Realms Adventures using the old process is ~6 meg, Tome of Magic using the newer one is ~25 meg, both books are about the same size physically), mainly on account of the text/picture issue.

I think the decrease in quality happened before Bastion took over the process, however, and the reason was of course the almighty dollar - the older process took much more time, and time = money.