Tytus wrote:I know you guys are disappointed that you're only getting "lame" answers, but are you really expecting Hasbro to share their business plans with you? That is how toy companies, and any companies selling a product for that matter, operate. They don't comment on leaked information, don't discuss certain things until they are formally announced, etc. They're not being lazy, they are just protecting their product. It's good business practice.
I have little to no experience with communications with Hasbro, but from years of Q&A with LEGO employees I've come to understand the kind of questions they can answer, and the kind that would be a waste of time on both ends. Discussions on current products are wide open, but upcoming stuff is off limits until that information is officially released by the company.
That's just the way it is.
Granted, the person who answers questions for LEGO is more or less a saint, receiving waves of questions every day and answering all of them even if it's with the generic "I am not allowed to discuss this at this time". He is even a member on the fan site, participates in the forums, and takes pm'd questions directly.
Limiting an entire website to two questions of your choosing is absolutely ridiculous.
I think that most of my frustration comes from how much time is put into sending the questions to Hasbro. While it might seem ridiculous, it somehow takes me about twenty minutes or so to do the initial news post asking people to submit their questions, and then about an hour to sort through the questions users submit to figure out what to send. I read through all of the questions, try to figure out which ones I already know the answer to, put the email together in the format which Hasbro requires, and then send it. If that doesn't happen by 10am on the Monday the questions are due, we just never hear back from them.
I got really frustrated after this happened with BotCon. The questions were due the day after BotCon. God forbid I forgot about the Q&A during the week of BotCon. It would have been very courteous of them to move the deadline back a week or at the least to remind us that the questions were due. I sent them an email asking if they would be flexible on the deadline because of Botcon and I initially got a firm "no", explained my frustration, then got a "we'll see what we can do". Ultimately, they never answered our questions and the answer I was given was because we didn't have it in by 10am the day after BotCon. The day after the weekend where I worked 12 to 18 hour days for five days straight doing nothing but promoting their brand. The day after when I expect many Hasbro employees weren't even back to work after having worked all weekend at BotCon. That was ludicrous. I also noticed that many of the other Transformers sites didn't get Q&As answered from the Monday after BotCon so I know we're not alone with this scenario.
I hate wasted time. I have so much on my plate with this site that I hate it when a moment is wasted on something that doesn't come to fruition. I have better things to do with my time to keep this site up and running than attempt to get two restrictive questions answered hastily.
Some of you might be wondering why I don't have someone else on the staff handle this if I'm so busy with Seibertron.com. As Tigertracks24 can attest, we tried that for about a year, and it ended in disaster because they couldn't figure out that Tigertracks24 wasn't the owner of Seibertron.com once I got him involved with handling the Q&A. After several incidents happened where they were sending him emails that were meant for me, I decided it was too much having more than 1 person involved so I went back to being the primary contact. All this for two questions to get answered.
I'd rather spend my time answering all of your questions every six weeks and have a rewarding experience with the people on this site than trying to get two questions answered (or not answered if we miss the strict deadline) and hearing people complain about the worthless questions we sent or the worthless answers we received. There has to be a more productive way to do this.
So, on that note, I spent about 3 hours last night going through the questions that were asked and answering them to the best of my ability. Some of the more involved people on this site will think it's a waste of time, but I think the casual fans (which far out number us die-hards) will find the answers I provided to be informative and perhaps entertaining. If anything, it will provide a great platform from which we can all discuss the answers to the questions -- some of which you guys might be able to answer better than I was. Either way, it will be a far better way to spend our time than on the two questions that were answered in this topic.
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