Players Are Missing Arena Direct Shipments and Being Ignored So We Reached Out to Wotc to See Whats Going On
I'm Jake, the Chief of Content at Draftsim. I recently began getting DM's asking us to investigate the widespread delays with the Foundations Arena Direct since we covered the last time this happened with MH3.
Over the last few weeks, tons of players have been trying to get information from WotC, and their 3rd-party distributor partner Scalefast, regarding their missing winnings. The Arena Direct and the "Confirmation" email after players ordered their won boxes said that they would ship immediately and arrive within 3 weeks. We're now approaching the 5-week mark with most players being on the wrong end of WotC's radio silence.
So, we reached out to our PR contacts and asked what was going on. Here's what they said was the reason that this is happening for the second time and why player's haven't received anything.
- There is an "error rate" of about 5% of shipments being marked as ordered/confirmed, but never actually shipping. This is down from 10%.
- They've added additional staff to the Arena Direct management team and are working with their partners to resolve the underlying issue and to ship out the remaining boxes.
That's great, and we're glad WotC is addressing the root of the issue, but there are a few other concerns here:
- Players with little to no social media following, like those represented in our article and in our DMs, are not being responded to by WotC. They're also unable to get responses from Scalefast, which is claiming to have extremely high ticket delays due to an influx of demand.
- Players with a large social media following are getting responses and help directly from WotC team members. The little guys are being passed over since they don't have the weight to make a big stink.
- This happened last time, too! MTG Pro Player Luis Salvatto couldn't get his box either time, and both times had to resort to being loud on social media to get assistant. As he told us last time we covered this issue, "I think that if you keep quiet they don't care at all."
- Scalefast has also been reportedly having issues and delays shipping out orders of Secret Lairs, causing large delays without much information in that sector of Magic as well.
To top things off, after we reached out and established contact with WotC for this issue, those who had DM'd us finally received a follow up email regarding the issues. It could be odd timing, but it's a little coincidental that their unanswered requests finally got an answer right as WotC was working on our official response.
Full story, quotes, and screenshots here: https://draftsim.com/arena-directs-ongoing-problems/