Amazon does this a lot, actually. (As do others using the Amazon platforms.)

ObTopic: Not much to say. I don't own RotR's RW content (though I suppose I could take it from the Kickstarter substitutions) so I don't know what it looks like. Refund discussions are for LWD and Medriev off-forum.

Admittedly, I'm only one voice.

For a product you didn't like? Or for a product that was physically broken?

Plus Amazon probably was a bad example, they can write off millions of dollars for returns without it affecting their bottom line.

Better example, asking for a refund from Paizo for a PDF. They do not.

https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2uo11?refund

There are two issues in this, for one of which reporting the problem as a bug report is more appropriate than the other.

Issue #1: Some content links are connected to incorrect locations.

This is something that should be reported so that LWD can make corrections to the product for future downloads; the affected users can then download the corrected product and re-import to have the corrections made.

Issue #2: Having seen the way the data is organized, not everyone agrees this is the best way for it to be organized.

This one is something that is a matter of opinion. I happen to agree that the organization is awful. I had previously done my own version of Rise of the Runelords. MY Sandpoint has an "Individual" entry for every named NPC in Sandpoint (50+), now updated to include those in the Sandpoint: Light of the Lost Coast sourcebook. Likewise, my Sandpoint has separate Location entries for every keyed Location.

Why? Because I can't predict which NPC the Players will warm up to, nor which businesses might be destroyed or change ownership, over the course of a campaign. Separate entries allow me more flexibility to respond to how the Players make their choices.

If the conversion process was simply to cut-and-paste from the PDF (or an automated version of that), then I can understand why the incorrect links are there. Locations named "Kitchen","Pantry", and "Storeroom", repeat across multiple locations in the overall Adventure Path.. and sometimes even within one 'parent' location (there is one adventure site, for example, that has 3 rooms named Storeroom in its key). An automated tool is quite likely to be confused by this, and even a manual process is likely to get some of them wrong. Someone who knows the content will make fewer errors, but even someone very familiar with it will make some. I know; I've had to go back and fix errors I made in my own process.

At the same time, because the original work was written to be read by the GM, and for the GM to share selected details from it orally or in his/her own handouts, there are paragraphs which mix information for the GM to run the campaign with information to be shared, and sometimes information that could likely be revealed in several steps. I have previously give the example of a single paragraph which, during my conversion, I broke up into 7 separate snippets that needed to be moved to multiple separate Topics. 3 of those also had some of the content of that one paragraph also made into GM Directions attached to them. That's one paragraph separated into 10 discrete nuggets of information (a snippet is supposed to be one "unit" of information).

It is arguable that I have made too much of separating the content. But that's the point of internal hyper-linking it.

Either; it could happen with any refund request where a factor (like the shipping cost or item personalization) makes it not worth recovering the item.

True. :)

The issue with how Sandpoint was handled shows a serious lack of insight into how the player's will act during the AP. Sandpoint is the home base for the PC's for the whole campaign, essentially first level through the high teens besides being an iconic location not just in Pathfinder but in all of FRPG's. They're going to spend a lot of time in Sandpoint interacting with the NPC's and locations in the town. If they're all broken out as separate topics then it isn't that hard to make additions as the players interact with things. Which is what RW is shines at.

It seems pretty obvious that RotRL was primarily, if not exclusively, entered using LWD's automated tool. I get that that is a lot easier, faster and cheaper than having someone read the whole AP, get familiar with it and then copy and paste the material into a format appropriate to RW but the results seem to speak for themselves.

Thanks for all the replies.

I have taken this up directly with LWD through email correspondence but what I would say here is that there are enough issues with the RotRL package for it not to be worth anywhere near the $34.99 it cost me. I could wait for the issues there are with the package to be addressed and if I had paid something like $10-15 and been warned this was a Beta version I might but at this price point I expect a finished product professionally executed. I have been a LWD customer for more years than I can reliably say here and spent literally hundreds on products. During all that time I have never asked for a refund for an electronic product because I have never been disappointed before. I genuinely feel ripped off and I expect a full refund regardless of whether LWD can trust me to delete the package or not.

To borrow the Amazon analogy above I feel like I ordered something from Amazon and it arrived in pieces in the box. Now, Amazon could insist I return the wreckage but why would they bother (and as some have noted above they probably wouldn't)? Incidentally, as a Paizo customer since their inception, their policy has, in my experience, been similar for wrongly shipped physical products at least (ie. they ship a replacement or refund me and don't expect me to return the incorrectly shipped product). The equation for LWD really is whether my continued custom is worth $34.99 or not.

It seems better to equate it with a digital product. Some games that you can download at release time are full of bugs; over time they update the digital product with fixes and this moves towards a better product.

Thanks. As I've noted above, as a digital product this is worth perhaps $10 as long as users are warned it is a beta with a lot of issues. I paid $34.99 with no warning of issues provided so I am asking for a refund. I don't think that's in any way unfair.

I guess it's a case of a release, potentially with some bugs that will be fixed over time or possibly as a partial product and the rest released over time.

Versus waiting a few weeks (more or less) for the entire product to be released, in a more final stage.

I know I preferred the partial release of the Spheres of Might files, with a few bugs the user base has found (that get squished in updates) and the Technology class coming in a future update.
I could see some preferring the final release a few months later, but that's not me nor my group.