'24 Summer Sale dates announced

**Note** - this is a pre-sale announcement. No prices have been changed yet... that will happen early on the morning of Friday, June 14th - EST. I would expect those to start changing between 6 & 7 am GMT -5.

We did an initial announcement of the date last Friday, but we wanted to do a more pronounced round leading up to the day. Additionally, there are several things we want to convey to you - so this blog post seemed like the best place to capture it all in one place.

Here's the items we will be covering today:

1. Specifics about the sale.
2. New enhancements to the Store and shopping cart.
3. Troubleshooting steps provided by Shopify in the event someone gets caught in an "are you a human" loop upon checkout.
4. Recent BitDefender issues.
5. Suspension of the specific GOTW posts till July 8th.

We'll try to keep this brief, but we want to communicate a variety of things... so let's jump in.

1) As the banner above notes, this Summer Sale will run from June 14th until the evening of July 4th, 2024. While we are a global company, I (Rich) am based in Virginia, USA - so all times are relative to my time zone. Generally speaking I will begin to shut the sale down about 10 PM on the night of the 4th. I do watch the traffic and won't shut things down if I see active shopping carts... but please don't wait till the last minute. :- ) 

We only have three games that will not have their price reduced this round. They are:

• Orel '43
• Thirty Years War
• Spring Awakening '45

All other titles will be reduced to $29.95 in the cart (which is a 25% reduction). Additionally, our automatic 20% discount for orders over $199 will still be in effect. So you can potentially see a 40% combined discount off normal pricing if you buy in bulk. All other discounts will be paused during this time period.

2) We have made a few changes to our Store software to try and make it a bit easier on you. In order for these to function properly you need to login to your Store Account before making any purchases. We suggest you do this upon every visit really, as that is what enables you to access your previously ordered games.

Those changes are:

When looking at your cart before you check out new text will appear if you already have a copy of that game in your Store Account. You can then remove that item from your cart before checkout.

On the individual product pages there will be a red banner if a copy of that game exists in your Store Account records.

3) We have been made aware that some people are receiving a reCaptcha "Are you a human" challenge when they go to check out - and despite completing it properly are challenged again, and again...

This is not something we have chosen to have active, but rather is dictated to us by our store software vendor, Shopify. We have a request in to have it removed - because if you have already logged in to your Store Account it is a redundant check and an unnecessary annoyance. Until such time as they remove that, they have provided these troubleshooting steps I will put in below.

As of now the only item we have noted is that Chrome has the most problems with this - so changing to another browser may take care of the issue for you.

• Clear the cache and delete the cookies of your browser. After this, completely close and reopen the browser and try again.
• Ensure the browser you are using is fully updated to the latest stable version available.
• Test if the incognito or private mode of your browser is giving you any different results.
• Try to temporarily disable any browser extensions you might have installed.
• Try it with one of the other browsers supported by Shopify.
• Try another internet connection (e.g. switch to a cellular network on a phone).
• Try another device (desktop computer, laptop, smartphone, etc.).

Again - this is something that WDS does not have as a policy and we are trying to get it removed from our Store... but shy of scrapping our entire package and building an entirely new website, we have to work through this. We apologize for the hassle.

4) With the most recent round of updates - starting with Modern Campaigns - the software vendor BitDefender has been flagging our games as infected with a virus.

This is a False Positive. None of our games contain a virus, and you can safely create an exception for any report you get.

We have directly contacted BitDefender and provided them copies our our software for them to analyze, so hopefully these reports will stop in the near future. In the world of software these days - you are "guilty until proven innocent" - and this is especially true for small software creators simply due to the small number of installs, as compared to big software houses like Microsoft, etc. Again, we apologize for this if you have had to deal with it and we are doing what we can to resolve the issue quickly.

5) And finally, just to be clear - since almost every title in our store will be on sale, we will not be having specific "Game of the Week" posts or mailings during the sale window. That program will resume on July 8th. We had originally planned not to run it during months that the sale took place, but it has been very popular - so we will run it every week of the year going forward - that is outside the normal sale windows.

Ok, that brings us to the end of our sale/store specific news. As always, if you have any questions please direct them to Helpdesk@wargameds.com and we will get them answered.

Enjoy the sale!