Edit final: I have received and installed the software after over 5 fulls days of hassle. It was a pain to get going, but I must say the software , Autodesk Flow Design, is pretty cool.
Edit, I have still received nothing from Autodesk, 80 hours after ordering downloadable software. It appears I am not the only one. There seem to be others with the same issue like mine. Chat operators are busy all day every day, support ticket system broken, no recourse. It seem entirely possible that the company is in some type of trouble and may be triaging resources only for large customers, and just stealing from small ones.
I paid $35 for a monthly license for Autodesk flow. I wanted to test some of my models in a wind tunnel. The money was taken without problem and I received one ‘Order Confirmation’ email from Autodesk Friday at 2:33pm stating they had received payment and within 24 hours I would receive further codes and links to install my software. 42 hours has passed and nothing. I have checked my Spam folder. I am unable to chat with support as ‘All agents are busy’ all the time (7 attempts). I attempted 3 times to create a support ticket, filling in 15 fields and a captcha, each time it serves up a “Down for maintenance” error. I made a forum post on autodesk, and a couple other people seem to have the same issue. I’m writing this to document my attempts to deal with Autodesk.
And I always thought you pay such a high money for Autodesk products to have that extra pro support
I still remember my frustration when my AutoCAD started crashing during my attempts to save the file. I had two weeks left to deadline and this bug polluted all my project drawings. I filled a bug report and I’m still waiting for a reply. It has been two years now…
I have received no further communication from Autodesk regarding the delay. Their chat continues to be ‘all agents busy’, support tickets fail with a ‘under maintenance’ message, and forum posts have been ignored by Autodesk.
I called customer support at 1 855 872 7702. It’s not actually Autodesk, but ‘Digital River’ and spoke to a person. She looked up my order number and told me it had not been ‘fulfilled’ She said all she could do is forward a message to Autodesk, and I could expect a response in 2 Business days.
This is the reality of paid subscription based software. They hold all the cards. They can charge what they want, and treat you how they feel. Autodesk has shown themselves to be unprofessional, underhanded, and shady.
The reality of subscription based software is that the parent corporation would rather rent their product than sell it. Makes it seem less expensive, and they always have money coming in regularly, rather than in spurts. It’s a shame you can’t find a Free Open Source Software solution to your wind tunnel testing requirements.
Believe me Orinoco, if there is a FOSS solution please point me to it. I don’t need NASA level wind tunnels. I’m messing around with a concept airplane and I just want to see some basic simulations, wind, turbulance, pressure… I searched around and tried a handful of downloads, mostly grad student stuff, nothing really worked. Do you know of any?
well, I don’t know if it this can help but, did you think about X-Plane simulator? this soft has the ability to show the forces on the body of the plane… …and since you have the possibility to design your own plane with plane-maker bundled with… …I don’t know if there’s any way to obtain the raw data you need…
That looks really cool, I may try the demo. But it seems geared towards traditional airplane design with fixed wings, this is an off the chart design I have. I wanted to import it as an STL and just throw some wind at it. I’ll let you know if I try x-plane, looks impressive, thanks!
Hey Photox, I know you said you checked your spam folder. But awhile back I had a wierd situation that when using gmail I had something “arrive” in one of these folders. you have your regular inbox, but there are these other 2 areas (social media and promotions) where mail can show up… If your using Gmail, perhaps check there.
That’s funny. Nice touch on the bag! We are, after all, talking about a *&^:eek:%ing download.
UPDATE: I Have received a new email, a “FULFILLMENT NOTIFICATION”, can’t be long now.
This is, I am told, the next normal step (Autodesk normal that is) to actually getting something. My target download is set for St. Patty’s Day!
Fed ex will be bringing in the binary headers, one by one – ones or zeroes that is, daily – until my first byte. 1 is represented by the middle finger, and 0 by swift kick in the…
Autodesk has posted a sitewide alert stating in short that they are unable to fulfill orders and asking for patience.
The homepage message: "Autodesk Alert We are experiencing a backend sync issue that is preventing new Autodesk Store purchases from fully processing. Contract Managers are also currently unable to assign user and product usage permissions from accounts.autodesk.com. Our apologies for the inconvenience and thank you very much for your patience as we actively work to resolve these. "
Autodesk is crazy. It took me some weeks to figure out how to install media creation suite on centOS6.6. The automatic activation ends always with a timeout. For manual activation you need a key but then again the box where the key should be displayed shows a blank field.
I asked support about this and they gave me instructions how to activate. On Windows. Great!
Some other user with the same problem found a XML created by the installer in /tmp/ that can be used to activate.
