WOW buildings review - part 2

Two weeks ago I posted a review after we felt cheated by Paul at WoW buildings (see here). As I mentioned in an update on that blogpost, Paul then contacted us and offered to reprint (these are 3D prints) and resend. We agreed to that, and I promised to post a new review.

Paul promised to send immediately after the weekend, in the end he sent it on the Friday after (fair enough, things can happen, so no bad feelings about that). Yesterday Thomas got a slip for the post office and today he picked up the box. 

I'm not going to comment much, I'm posting a load of pictures underneath, you can check for yourselves. Just this - yes, the quality has improved, but no, these are not finished products. I had contact with Paul on this, and he says he's still improving the product, and should have it settled by now. What beats me though, is how you can willingly and knowingly send out products that you can clearly see do not have the right quality. Or how you send out products that are still in design phase to get customer feedback - without telling your customer...

In the meantime we'd also opened a Paypal case, and Paypal judged in our favour and refunded. We did this as the original order dated back of September, and we'd been promised the products several times without receiving them, so we didn't want to wait with the Paypal case, in order not to run out of time. Note that we'd promised Paul that we would pay him in case Paypal refunded before we got the new houses, and we were happy with them. He agreed to that. Now Paul feels that the matter is closed since we'd had a refund. 

This is all a pity, as the design and the renders looked good, and we were really looking forward to adding these to our tables for Dutch games...

Below are a number of pictures Thomas made...

WoW buildings review

Note: update below

One thing as a starter... The company may be called WOW, but the products are definitely NOT WOW.

We placed an order with WoW in September, planning to use the buildings at a con in December. After a lot of back and forth emails, we finally got our stuff yesterday (1 February). However, we were quite disappointed with the delivery (understatement). The packaging was crap: all the printed wall and roof pieces were just put loose in the box, not packed by building, no documentation, and with just 2 inflatable plastic packing bags as protection. Due to everything being loose, some sharp edges had perforated the bags during transport, so they didn't offer any protection anymore. This caused some of the pieces to be cracked.

Sadly the quality of the contents was beyond belief. Apart from damage caused by the crap packaging, most of the pieces are either warped or stringy, doors and shutters are only partly printed, corners and sides have come loose from the printer's ground plate during the printing process, causing warping, sides have come loose from flat pieces, dirt from the extruder has come out causing lumps on walls and roofs, some roofs are just long loose ends of string - in their entirety! All of this is obviously a result of (very) bad 3d printing (wrong temperature, no attention during the start of the process, etc...). It is also very visible and there is no way the seller did not notice this while packing. Which means he deliberately sent us products of bad quality, or couldn't care less that he was sending us crap. Not sure which is worse.

Obviously, from other comments on facebook, he must have good products, which makes is only worse that what we got is this bad. We were really looking forward to adding these buildings for Arnhem and other Dutch games, so we are extremely disappointed.

Equally obviously we opened a paypal dispute, and contacted the seller for a full refund. Waiting for his feedback now.

WOW buildings are trading from this website and from a facebook page.

Update: Paul has reached out to us in the meantime and offered to reprint and resend on Monday. We can also keep what we received to do with as we please (e.g. make ruins). I will update this blogpost with any news that comes out, and we will do a new review if and when we get the new delivery. He also mentions the light grey bits were bad prints that he added for us to use as ruins or whatever.

Update 2: see a new blogpost on this matter here