IMO some of those who are saying they "don't understand" the selling platform. Saying ZELOS would sell hundreds more making "Kickstarter" like pre-orders. If I was ET I would leave things alone and maybe do away with placeholder pop-up. As it stands, it has always been the luck of the draw with having that in place, but it's like hitting a wall while others buy. The only thing it might help with is throttling the site enough so it doesn't overload and crash.
He would get a lot more grief about where are my trinkets I ordered. It has been four, five, six months sines you took my money. This way he is in the drivers seat by using his own money to have the trinkets built. If something goes sideways he can release something else and put the one on the back burner. For instance the COMET. He had them all redone because of a name conflict with OMEGA. If it was preorder and he had folks money they would have been jumping off a cliff because of the extra waiting time.
I think many companies would love to have this "problem". Always selling out even after increasing the production numbers instead of being stuck with a bunch of leftovers. I would rather have the consistently selling out complaints. No matter what road is taken there will always be some who are unhappy. I think more and more scalpers are jumping on the bandwagon when they see some of the prices folks are willing to pay.
It sucks for the true collector, but there is no way to throttle greed without shooting yourself in the foot. If there is a better way ET will work on figuring it out, but it's not so simple. He always tries his best to help or please as many folks as possible. The ones who are mad threatening not to bother trying to buy ZELOS I hope they are being sincere. I appreciate any who are willing to help lighten up the buying traffic jam. It gives others a better chance.
From Elshan
Thank you for all the support with the Aurora drop! The new site has a queue system to handle the high volumes which allocates based on the time added to cart (instead of time to checkout previously). I do understand there's still some issues with that as it seems the queue page doesn't refresh even after its sold out. Also there seems to be some other bugs for the checkout page.
I'll be working to improve the system to prevent such frustration with the process. I've also checked the orders and there's no bulk buying of the same model as some people have suspected flippers of doing. Unfortunately I can't predict demand for every model and preorders are quite a painful process for customers with the many delays and months of waiting.