well the result of this fiasco will hopefully be some new servers for SAE so some good might come of all this after all.
at least let's pray that happens. ;)

I also called the Fright Night sellout within a day.

But since I'm still trying to complete a pre-order for Journey and Big Heat too, there's no satisfaction whatsoever in saying "Toldya so!"

Thing is that SAE servers are perfectly adequate most of the time for their usual trickle of traffic. I highly doubt they'll go to the expense of upgrading their server or hosting package just for periodic promotions like this. What they really need to do is plan the promotions better, spread them out more, and even consider using third party sites to handle large orders during peak periods like major preorder launches.

In any case what a waste of a Saturday morning for me, and still no sign of when the site will be available.

8 out of SAE's top 10 hot sellers for the week are limited editiion CDs, so this is p*ss*ng off all those buyers who can't buy too...

SAE just learned the hard way that there's a busine$$ co$t of running with infrastructure unable to handle sales spikes like this.

It seems my order just went through.... fingers crossed... :)

Got em!!! Both Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Big Heat. Order number and confimed. :rock:

It takes about 5 mins for each page to load. Be patient and it will work - for now, anyway.

Edit: For some reason The Big Heat does not show up on their pre-order page with Journey, so I had to search for it. It may be there now.

signed copies are sold out

Had the signed copy in my cart, and it dropped it. Got the regular version though. Hour and 40 min. later and I am stressed. That's not the way to start a weekend. :(

Screw the autograph. I better get magnets. :)

Got in, pre-ordered The Big Heat, got out.

Now between the getting in and pre-ordering I went for a run, yes, but that's neither here nor there.

Good luck, all.

:banghead::banghead::banghead:

On the bright side, if the Big Heat sells out in less than an hour, good for Twilight Time and I can still get the Gaumont Blu-Ray if I miss out.

I would still be a little ticked off that they decided to start a promotion on the same day as the pre-orders.

I don't know what happened but after moving very slowly for the past 45 mins for me it all of the sudden it is working fine. Was able to order Journey.

Yep. It's a breeze now.

For now... ;)

Yeah, no problem now. Ordered both Journey and Big Heat. :rock: All autographed copies of Journey are sold out now which may have something to do with it.

Seems fairly obvious that most of the crush was due to people trying to get the autographed copies. After all, if you're a fan of the movie, and it costs no more to get a signed copy than a regular one, why wouldn't you want to get one? So come 4PM EST everyone jammed the site constantly refreshing in an effort to grab one, and hence it allegedly sold out within minutes and crashed the site.

Once the site become a bit more accessible - and they now make it explicitly clear that the autographed copies are SOLD OUT on the front page - it's returning to normal. The regular version will likely take a few more days, maybe weeks or even a month to fully sell out. Once again, as we all discussed before, a badly thought-out promotion which probably won TT/SAE more detractors than fans. In future they should find a better way to allocate goodies like signed copies.

By the way, I'm a bit suspicious as to how the signed copies literally disappeared so quickly. I get the feeling it was either pulled by SAE (i.e. a phony "sell out") to reduce traffic or certain collectors/buyers ordered large numbers of it despite the supposed 1 per customer limit.

In fact there's probably a whole bunch of messy server-related order problems for a lot of people who did manage to order during this period. Comments on Facebook indicate as much.

All up a very successful promotion, and I hope TT continues to have SAE handle their releases in such a smooth and pleasant fashion.

imo they should have made the 100 signed copies random. you place an order you have a 1 in 30 chance of getting a copy that is signed. makes a lot more sense than creating total chaos and frustration with "first 100 copies" etc. etc.
many people had the autographed copy disappear from their cart and thus you have a bunch of pissed people that thought they were going to get one.
overall, because of that issue, imo the promotion was a total fiasco--just like the entire pre-order sale.
trying to place an order for 4 and a half hours is a extremely frustrating to say the least.
SAE MUST improve their servers imo.

The site crashed at 4pm est. about an hour later it was up and running again. i have a firefox add on which makes it possible to automatically refresh webpages.
I went on watching a movie and peeked to my computer now and then.
About an hour later, the site was working again and i was able to buy an autographed copy. so they were not sold out at 4 pm or a few minutes later. they were probably sold out an hour later in a few minutes when the site was working again.

That jibes with my experience too Danny. There was a very brief window when the site kinda sorta worked. It was very slow and most pages would not load fully, but the key eCommerce pieces seemed to work well enough to get you to the Confirm button. Even though I received no SAE site response to that submission, I did receive an e-mail shortly afterwards. Then everything went to hell again.

Eye of the hurricane passing over? ;)

I was able to get a signed copy in my cart right as the promotion started but it took me over an hour, maybe more like a hour and a half, to get to the last stage of checkout only to find that the signed title sold out right before I could finished checking out. Wasn't too happy when that happened. SAE could have handled this much better and it sounds like we should expect the same type of behavior next month according to TT.