I apologize if this breaks any forum rules. That isn't really my intention. I just wanted a place to vent a bit without fear...

After having to deal with the insanity of DAZ's marketing department, I want to thank Rendo for providing straight forward sales and non-gimmicky coupons.

I was thinking, the best thing that could happen for DAZ customers is to have a forum on a site not controlled by DAZ. So they can't delete your comments or just call you an idiot and lock the thread so you can't reply (as they did when I made a valid complaint about a flaw in a product).

Renderosity seems much better. The only major downside I see personally is, despite abandoning DAZ as a marketplace, I still use DAZ Studio (3.x, with no weightmapping whatever). And Renderosity seems fairly hostile toward DAZ Studio and its users. So I have to swim through the sea of "not tested or supported in DAZ Studio" tags that they copy and paste on everything and just guess at what looks like it might work.

And there are a few times I've mentioned that I'm a DAZ Studio user and asked vendors questions about the products to help my cause. Some of them are really nice, but some of them just bluntly reply "this product does not support DAZ Studio". I'll get this reply even if the question is about a missing file or an incorrect path to a file, something that would surely affect Poser as well as DAZ Studio.

The harsh reality is, DAZ Studio users need DAZ to step their game up so things will be better when they're skipping DAZ to buy from the competition.

I find RDNA much more receptive to DS users, here I'm afraid its just a no go, look at this months freebie Posser only I gather.

I visit here less and less and I thought Dawn would make me visit more.

Concerning DAZ I think they are starting to step up their game again things have been different in the last month, its subtle and small and slow but I think things are getting alot better.

If they sorted out the over zealous mods a bit the forums would improve no end.

 I think Rendo ought to be careful and perhaps start treating Daz customers with a bit more respect tey might find they need them one day.

I think you need to recognize that the DAZ store and Rendo are operated differently. I don't know all the details, but it is clear that DAZ itself provides the first line of support for the products sold in its store. At Rendo, if you find a problem with a product or have a question, you have to contact the PA directly. Rendo makes it easy to contact the PA. DAZ makes it difficult, because they are the first line of support. DAZ wants you to contact DAZ support.

My experience with contacting Rendo PAs has been very good. On two different occasions I found problems in the DS version of recently released products. Both PAs responded quickly and got fixes out. These were both products that supported DS.

Some of the PAs at DAZ frequent the forums, and are fairly easy to contact.  Sometimes DAZ support is pretty good, sometimes they get backlogged and it can be a long time before they get back to you.

Because DAZ does first line support, they also have a QA process for products in their store.  I'm not sure Rendo has any QA process for the products. They may leave that to the PAs. One of the problems I found in the DS Mats for a product should have been caught by any QA, so I doubt there is any QA from Rendo atleast for the DS versions.

Rendo and DAZ both rely on PAs for most/all product development. At this point, DAZ probably will not accept new Poser only products for their store. They can get away with that because they are the biggest store, and realistically a lot of their customers are using DS.

Rendo is probably not in a position to insist products support both Poser and DS. Rendo wants products that sell well, and since the DAZ store has very few new V4/M4 products, customers that want new V4/M4 products generally come to Rendo. Realistically, many DS users mainly use Genesis now, not V4/M4. That means most of the customers for the new V4/M4 products are Poser users. I cannot recall seeing a Poser only Genesis product in the Rendo store or anyplace else.

The biggest obstacle to most products at Rendo supporting DS is the PAs don't know how to use DS. They are busy making new products and don't really have time to learn how to use DS. Perhaps they don't think the extra sales would be worth the effort. Perhaps they are just reluctant to learn something new.

We will have to see what happens with Dawn. I get the sense Poser users are much more interested in Dawn.  I was one of the people that helped crash the HiveWire servers the day Dawn was released. (The server did actually crash when I hit the placed order button. I never got the confirmation page, but the order had gone through when the servers came back up.)  I bought most of the early Dawn characters/clothes that supported DS.  At this point I've decided to wait and see, before buying more. Dawn needs a more complete morph set, like morphs++. HiveWire is working on this. I'm concerned that a lot of the conforming clothes for Dawn being created now will not support those morphs when they are released.

My experience with Dawn in DS is clothes did not work quite as well on Dawn as I was use to using Genesis 1/2. I had more problems with poke through/not fitting on morphed Dawn characters than I would have expected. I think a lot of that is probably inexperienced PAs and lack of a good QA process.  It was clothes from PAs I was not familar with that had most of the problems.

I find it very encouraging that a few PAs (outoftouch, MEC4D) are now starting to make the same clothes for Dawn and G2F. If this is not too much extra work, then this might be a good way for PAs to sell to both Poser and DS users.

For the past few months I feel like Daz's approach to running the company is they're going to do what they want and what the consumer is asking for is irrelevant to them. Lately they're quicker with the posts deletes than Clint Eastwood is with a handgun ad the finale of a spaghetti western. I'm wondering what a customer satisfaction survey would show at this time, but no polls are possible over there. If Poser lowers the price of the 64 bit 2012 version I will jump ship. If they made a limited content version for free I think it would destroy Daz overnight at this point, they don't appear to care if they make enemies, this kind of thing can catch up to a company very quickly.

I think they're basically counting on two groups of customers moving forward: (those DAZ3d fanatics who will buy their products no matter what) and (new people who have no idea what is going on). Those are the two groups of customers they can milk the most by deleting any negative comment that would help new people make a good decision or discourage a fanatic from buying as a trained reflex reaction. Maybe they're gambling that there are enough people in those two groups to make them wildly profitable. Maybe they are wildly profitable.

It's not Daz who are removing posts its the admin some of who appear to want the forums run their way.

As to the 2 types of customers well I think there may be a certain truth in that, but then I think other sites operate the same at least as Daz if you buy a product that doestn't work as it should or even you just don't like it when used then you can return it.

Here you have no such choice, less and less products mention Da,z to me this is a way to get newcomers to buy things whether they will work or not, and why oh why can't venders find someone to at least test it in DS for them - come to that if rendo really do want my money and value me as a customer perhaps they could have items tested in DS during QA (I presume they do test products) and a note put on the product page, I'm not asking for support just to know if the product will work in DS or not.

I'm starting to think they're breaking things on purpose over there, especially with content and functionality for older models. Older gen figures still appear to be popular over here but have pretty much vanished from new release support over at Daz. They're no longer making money off of them so why would they support the customers who still use it. Newer always equals better, right?