Kind of risking a Streisand effect by talking about this, but whatever...
The Nintendomax community is holding a new wii homebrew contest this year.
I presented this game on the 2011 edition and got 1st place (I presented it to the 2011 Homebrew Bounty as well, I got 5th
)
So I got 3 prizes from 3 different sponsors and I gave Nintendomax my address to receive them.
After a few weeks I received one of the prizes (A Supercard DSTWO), but no news about the other 2 (A 3DS+100€ valued lot of products, and a Shenron doll)
Give or take, a month passes by, so I ask about it on Nintendomax forums...they ask me wich color I want the 3DS...I feel like if I didnt come back to ask, they wont send anything to me, I didnt even think of choosing a color for the console, but if it was necessary...why didnt anybody contact and ask me?...anyways, im told to directly email the sponsor who owes me the 3DS and the 100€ lot, telling them the 3DS color and what I want for the lot amongst the products available on their shop, so I do that, and also ask this sponsor if It would be possible to get the 100€ lot on several shipments since some products I liked were out of stock by then, of course, I offer to pay shipment costs for the additional shipments.
I wait like a week and I dont get any answer from them, so I PM the organizer of the compo on the Nintendomax forums asking him if there is any problem. Another week passes and he doesnt even bother to answer me either, so I PM him again repeating myself. He tells me to just get the 100€ lot in one shipment...fair enough, so I email the sponsor again telling them what I want, the color of the 3DS and all that.
At last, I get a response from the sponsor...they try to get me to pay the shipment costs because "they are so expensive" (I must note that im from Spain and them from France, my neighboor country...the DSTWO wich arrived perfectly and for free to my house was from Australia, pretty much the other end of the world from Spain...). Since I only offered to pay for aditional shipments, but apparently thats not an option, and also because I was already pissed off of everybody ignoring me, I refused, since as sponsors its their responsability, and not mine, paying shipments. They apologize and compromise to send me my prize immediately.
From that moment came FOUR MONTHS of amazingly bad, vague excuses and blatant lies, but only when I go out of my way to ask where the hell is my prize, because nobody bothers to inform me of this imaginary problems. Even when they feel like answering, its only after several emails just asking the same...they just ignore me, they probably do this to see if I give up and just forget about it.
Their main excuse is that the package was sent back to them because apparently something was wrong with my address. Since the sponsor from Australia had no problem with my address I find it hard to believe.
After 4 months of dealing with this I take action, I gather a bunch of friends, and we begin to spam this sponsor's Facebook page with this story, showing their potential customers how untrustful they are. Seeing the bad publicity in a place so open to the public as their Facebook page, they suddenly begin to answer my complaints with no delays, and in a few days, suddenly my address magically is not wrong anymore, they send me the prize, and finally I receive it. (I must note that I won the contest before the huge price drop of the 3DS...they even got to save money on my prize)
About the last sponsor, I never received that stupid Shenron doll (I took part on the compo for the 3DS anyways) and I will never receive it. They gave me the same "bad address" excuse. I have been living on the same address for almost 8 years, and I never got any problem receiving packages from places like UK, USA, Korea, and now, Australia. I live in a pretty much regular apartment, not on some hermit cave on the mountains.
The thing that pissed me off the most is that while this people tried to weasel out of giving me my prize, my game displayed a splash page with publicity of their bussiness, so they were taking advantage of my hard work.
-Wow, it sucks, but it looks like Nintendomax is just another victim of this crappy sponsors, right? Its really not their fault.
Actually, Nintendomax themselves pissed me off more than anyone...they ignored me as much, if not more, as the sponsors, they just didnt care at all. They had me wasting my time posting on their forums just to try to find out where the hell was my prize, only to receive crappy excuses and being told to email them instead of "polluting" their forum. I told them more than once that I was perfectly ok with dealing with the matter on private, but guess what? They ignored my emails and very rarely answered them, so I got no other choice that to complain publicly. In response, they gradually began to treat me like some forum troll (Im currently banned)
They didnt even had the manners or the education of trying to answer me on english, although it was an international contest. They insisted on answering me on French, so I had to rely on crappy online translation...They even had the nerve of telling me to post in French, like if I was not going out of my way and wasting my time enough, they tried to make me learn a new language to demand what was rightfully mine on the first place...
TL;DR Version:
Summing up, dont take part on any Nintendomax contest, you may never receive your prizes, they have no ethics, shame, or decency and will use your work to get free publicity.
Here is the 2011 contest thread on their forum, so you can see im not making this up. As I said, its mostly on french, but you can kind of follow it through my posts, wich are onmy awful english.
The Nintendomax community is holding a new wii homebrew contest this year.
I presented this game on the 2011 edition and got 1st place (I presented it to the 2011 Homebrew Bounty as well, I got 5th
)So I got 3 prizes from 3 different sponsors and I gave Nintendomax my address to receive them.
After a few weeks I received one of the prizes (A Supercard DSTWO), but no news about the other 2 (A 3DS+100€ valued lot of products, and a Shenron doll)
Give or take, a month passes by, so I ask about it on Nintendomax forums...they ask me wich color I want the 3DS...I feel like if I didnt come back to ask, they wont send anything to me, I didnt even think of choosing a color for the console, but if it was necessary...why didnt anybody contact and ask me?...anyways, im told to directly email the sponsor who owes me the 3DS and the 100€ lot, telling them the 3DS color and what I want for the lot amongst the products available on their shop, so I do that, and also ask this sponsor if It would be possible to get the 100€ lot on several shipments since some products I liked were out of stock by then, of course, I offer to pay shipment costs for the additional shipments.
I wait like a week and I dont get any answer from them, so I PM the organizer of the compo on the Nintendomax forums asking him if there is any problem. Another week passes and he doesnt even bother to answer me either, so I PM him again repeating myself. He tells me to just get the 100€ lot in one shipment...fair enough, so I email the sponsor again telling them what I want, the color of the 3DS and all that.
At last, I get a response from the sponsor...they try to get me to pay the shipment costs because "they are so expensive" (I must note that im from Spain and them from France, my neighboor country...the DSTWO wich arrived perfectly and for free to my house was from Australia, pretty much the other end of the world from Spain...). Since I only offered to pay for aditional shipments, but apparently thats not an option, and also because I was already pissed off of everybody ignoring me, I refused, since as sponsors its their responsability, and not mine, paying shipments. They apologize and compromise to send me my prize immediately.
From that moment came FOUR MONTHS of amazingly bad, vague excuses and blatant lies, but only when I go out of my way to ask where the hell is my prize, because nobody bothers to inform me of this imaginary problems. Even when they feel like answering, its only after several emails just asking the same...they just ignore me, they probably do this to see if I give up and just forget about it.
Their main excuse is that the package was sent back to them because apparently something was wrong with my address. Since the sponsor from Australia had no problem with my address I find it hard to believe.
After 4 months of dealing with this I take action, I gather a bunch of friends, and we begin to spam this sponsor's Facebook page with this story, showing their potential customers how untrustful they are. Seeing the bad publicity in a place so open to the public as their Facebook page, they suddenly begin to answer my complaints with no delays, and in a few days, suddenly my address magically is not wrong anymore, they send me the prize, and finally I receive it. (I must note that I won the contest before the huge price drop of the 3DS...they even got to save money on my prize)
About the last sponsor, I never received that stupid Shenron doll (I took part on the compo for the 3DS anyways) and I will never receive it. They gave me the same "bad address" excuse. I have been living on the same address for almost 8 years, and I never got any problem receiving packages from places like UK, USA, Korea, and now, Australia. I live in a pretty much regular apartment, not on some hermit cave on the mountains.
The thing that pissed me off the most is that while this people tried to weasel out of giving me my prize, my game displayed a splash page with publicity of their bussiness, so they were taking advantage of my hard work.
-Wow, it sucks, but it looks like Nintendomax is just another victim of this crappy sponsors, right? Its really not their fault.
Actually, Nintendomax themselves pissed me off more than anyone...they ignored me as much, if not more, as the sponsors, they just didnt care at all. They had me wasting my time posting on their forums just to try to find out where the hell was my prize, only to receive crappy excuses and being told to email them instead of "polluting" their forum. I told them more than once that I was perfectly ok with dealing with the matter on private, but guess what? They ignored my emails and very rarely answered them, so I got no other choice that to complain publicly. In response, they gradually began to treat me like some forum troll (Im currently banned)
They didnt even had the manners or the education of trying to answer me on english, although it was an international contest. They insisted on answering me on French, so I had to rely on crappy online translation...They even had the nerve of telling me to post in French, like if I was not going out of my way and wasting my time enough, they tried to make me learn a new language to demand what was rightfully mine on the first place...
TL;DR Version:
Summing up, dont take part on any Nintendomax contest, you may never receive your prizes, they have no ethics, shame, or decency and will use your work to get free publicity.
Here is the 2011 contest thread on their forum, so you can see im not making this up. As I said, its mostly on french, but you can kind of follow it through my posts, wich are on
