Quoted from PinMonk:If he thinks his role is a messenger, he's very uninformed about what a distributor's job is. A good dist will get involved if there's a warranty problem and use their clout as someone who buys a lot of product to help get customer issues resolved directly. Who WAS this? I can't imagine it was a top tier dist like Tilt Amusements, Game Exchange, Hemispheres, etc.
Nah, this wasn’t any of those guys. I actually had an issue recently which caused me to have to instead buy a machine from Tilt Amusements for the first time, and while I didn’t have an overly great experience in the buying process (which was surprising, as I was expecting great things due to the positive reviews I’ve read here on Pinside about them!), the machine had some big issues upon delivery that I wrote to Trent about, and he immediately replied and said he would get the defective items replaced. That was a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t heard anything since, so that’s not great communication either, but have been giving the benefit of the doubt due to the holidays. I plan to reach out if I haven’t heard anything by the end of the week, but still, I was very happy that Trent replied initially and confirmed that he’d get replacements out to me.
This particular DP playfield warranty issue, though, is dealing with Classic Game Rooms. I want to reiterate that I have had good experiences with them otherwise, and have purchased three pins from them this year, though I have not attempted to take any warranty issues to them before this playfield chipping. I can’t speak to whether this is a norm for them, or if it’s an isolated incident to this exact situation of mine, or maybe just to playfield replacement issues, etc. I don’t want to throw them under the bus, and again, can’t say if this is how they handle any or all other warranty issues, but in the interest of full transparency, and so my fellow pinheads can make informed decisions, that is the experience I’ve had with this particular issue. As I said, he did tell me to contact Stern support and to CC him on the communication, so he may well plan to step in if necessary, but we’ll have to see how things go!