Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne looks at Wizards of the Coast's new retailer portal and the latest from Palladium.

Wizards of the Coast has really pushed retailers to set up an account with the website this week, stating that direct email communication to account reps would end October 4th and all further communications would have to flow through the portal.  Unfortunately, the new Customer Service Portal proves pretty awkward to use.  I have had to get assistance in logging into the account twice now.  Three times if you count the request to have the password sent to me from the site, which I never received.  I have heard stories from other retailers about difficulties they have had communicating through the portal as well.

In addition, emails sent to the system come back formatted in such a manner that you must write your response in a specific area of the email, between an up and lower bar.  Any message or portion of a message written anywhere else in the email winds up discarded.  Means we will have to place our responses in the email much more carefully than we have in the past, since we can't just hit reply and type away.  Another problem I see is that this new system adds another level of difficulty to email communications with Wizards.  Prior to this system, if I had a question or wanted to put in an order, I could quickly shoot off an email directly from my email client to my sales rep and get a response.  Now, responses come back to my email hub, but to send one out, I have to log into my Wizards account and send the email from there.  I notice that my account does keep a record of emails and communications I have with WPN so I can be more certain that the representatives received the email, but any level of difficulty put into place between retailer and WotC decreases the likelihood of the retailer sending the email.  I have not bothered to send any emails to the sales reps since the portal went live, simply because of the inconvenience of having to log into my account.  I have heard from several retailers who say that, since phone communications remain the same, they have started to call their reps much more often, skipping email completely, the converse of what the program was designed to accomplish.  The account pages also need better hyperlinking and I don't see any way to easily get back from the "Edit Account" page to the actual account so I can read over or send emails.  Hopefully, that will get fixed quickly.

There are a couple of positive things about the new program.  I had difficulties (again) logging into my account about 7:30 on Saturday night.  The company is now staffing their 800 number 7 days a week until 6 p.m. so was able to reach someone on a Saturday night to get the problem fixed.  Additionally, as I understand it, one of the purposes of the portal is to funnel all emails through one account so retailers don’t have to worry if someone reads our emails if our sale representative is out sick or on vacation. as the next available rep will handle them.  This does raise concerns as to whether the sales reps will have the same level of knowledge about our individual sales histories and patterns that our current reps do

On a completely different topic, I happily received a copy of the Vampire Kingdoms New Revised Edition this week.  Palladium Books has slowly but steadily released a quality stream of product for a quarter century now.  Though the line has never reached top seller status, both Rifts and the Palladium Role Playing Game have a dedicated fan base, large enough to justify a dedicated annual convention and good for sales of two to four copies of any RPG supplement the company releases, a far better track record than most other RPG lines out there.  I'm looking forward to, maybe not another quarter century, but at least another five to ten years of selling the company's products.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect th views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.