Has anyone here ever regretted buying a scene or video? I'm sure someone out there has, just curious if any one wanted to share. Try and keep it anonymous

I haven't had that many disappointing buys, as I tend to concentrate on my A-list of favourite producers who I know deliver the goods.

However, on the few occasions I have been caught out there have been some common denominators. One is not as much mess as the hype has led you to believe. Another is excess padding, where the pre-mess preamble goes on and on with no sign of any pies or gunge.

Both lead to a anticlimactic "Is that it?", which is the kiss of death for anything you were hoping to find sexually exciting...

Do you need oxygen to breathe? Well the answer is of course yes, the stores that sell clips that always come with a nice side of regret with any purchase, not to name names, they start with an A or J, I love a good kinky video from time to time, but don't tell me it's epic when its clearly a fizzle, it's not a race to get to the orgasm, so I shouldn't pay twenty bucks to watch you play with her pussy for all of 30 seconds, and of course leaning back using a Hitachi wand laying there like a dead fish, while belting out ear piercing screams or useless babble. What makes great clips? cute noises, big mess and jiggling titties, so use a non-vibrating dildo and spend some time WORKING for it, and make them titties jiggle and get them messy too. But I know this will rant will fall on deaf ears, welcome to the UMD!

Yes, I won't mention the producer's name but I contributed to a few of his shoots about 6 years ago in exchange for the associated DVD's of what he shot. I've found over the years a lot of the DVDs won't work anymore in my DVD player and are basically useless. I contacted the producer at the beginning of this year to see if he would replace the DVD's but he never responded.

I also have downloads I've purchased from his store which don't play right after you download them. If you try to fast forward or skip ahead the scene just stops and starts over. I mentioned this to him as well in the same e-mail as above. These simply didn't download correctly so all I was looking for was the ability to download them again. I even gave him a few of the file names which didn't work correctly but there was never a response.

My solution...never purchase from this producer again.

Scenes where the clip purchase price is higher than the supplies used! I've seen more stuff in a £5 bag on Ready Steady Cook than is sometimes used in a $10-20 scene!

Sorry to hear that. It doesn't sound good. I did have a similar experience with...okay, I won't name them, but it's a UK producer who got kicked off this site about six months ago...

This was about five or six years ago (way before things went wrong for them), and there were a few occasions where I'd download a batch of films from her site and find that one didn't work, such as it didn't play, or ended abruptly, or didn't download at all.

The same thing then happened each time. I'd send a PM explaining what was wrong, and get an apologetic reply saying she'd sort it out. A week would go by, during which I'd hear nothing. I'd send another PM (polite, I can assure you) and get another apologetic reply promising to fix it. Well, another week would go by...you get the idea. I eventually gave up each time as I wasn't getting anywhere.

In the end, I took a view on it. Her films were dirt cheap (at the time anyway), so I was only losing a few pounds, and I bought a lot of them so had plenty of others. I also knew from things she said on here that she had a lot on her plate in her personal life, and having an ex running her site wasn't ideal either as he seemed only semi-competent and not that minded to do what she tried to tell him. In truth, I felt a bit sorry for her. So, I just shrugged it off.

The point of explaining all this isn't to convince people to forgive unreliable producers, as in most cases users are quite right to complain if they don't get what they pay for. Nor am I sticking the boot in, as she's long gone so that would be pointless!

No, I'm just curious to see if anyone else had the same experience with this producer. (Clue: her name rhymed with "Messy".) I never mentioned this on the forums as she was so well-loved (then) that I was wary of getting flamed to death for it, even though any criticisms would have been valid. Lovely as she was at the time, I'm afraid she was also hopeless at sorting out problems. I can say it all now though...

I've been disappointed a few times, but it's usually my own imagination that screws me. I can think of only one or two producers who might be accused of misleading people.

Here are a few rules that I try to follow when I consider purchasing a video:

1. If there's only one camera angle in the preview pics, it's stupid to assume that there will be additional/better camera angles in the full video. Maybe the model(s) will come closer to the camera at some point, but don't count on it.

2. The preview pics usually show the best bits, or the moments right before the best bits. They're meant to help sell the video, after all. If you aren't satisfied by what happens in the preview pics, don't buy the video hoping that it contains much hotter stuff that simply wasn't shown in the preview pics (unless this is explicitly mentioned by the description or reviews).

3a. If you buy a producer's first-ever WAM video, temper your expectations accordingly. Buy it because you like the producer and want to encourage him/her/them, but don't expect perfection. Making videos is harder than it looks. Chances are good that there will be a bad camera angle, poor lighting, not enough mess, or all three. They'll figure it out eventually. Think of this as an investment in a producer or model you like.

3b. Fetish video producers who are trying their hands at WAM for the first time almost never have enough mess.

4. If the video's description doesn't mention the model getting naked/topless/whatever, the model doesn't get naked/topless/whatever. That's why it's $2.99.

Also... beware of producers whose 25-minute videos only have WAM in the last six minutes. Unless that's your thing. Not naming any names, but one of them might rhyme with "Ballantine".

Yes! Some sites it looks like they did the shoot with a cell phone camera from 1998; terrible quality.

Except I've started taking the OPPOSITE tact. I've found that I often give "too much" away for free.... in terms of pics, video teasers, or both.... and by showing the best bits (even if it's some stills or a super-brief vidclip), I'm basically giving the non-buyers free wank material.

But conversely, if I offer some clean pics of a very hot model pre-mess, and then only a handful of messy pics (none of which show the "best" stuff or immediate aftermath), it will actually rope in MORE buyers. As they can't see anything of value otherwise.

At this point, I'm a known commodity, and I think people know they're not getting some half-assed scene. It's gonna be a lot of pies... and cakes.... and slime... and lots of aftermath shots... from multiple angles. Giving away the best bits of the scene is fun, and it gets you more "likes," but until MM allows me to convert likes to actual cash, I'd rather have a couple more people on the fence plunk down some $$ for the scene because I only offered a tease of what the paid clip delivered.

YMMV, but I tend to have very satisfied customers. I've even offered to swap out for a different clip if someone was deeply unsatisfied, but no one's taken me up on the offer so far...

This. This in spades. The number of times it just seems like they just don't quite get IT. I find it much better to stick with producers who concentrate on WAM (or at least I can't see the crossover and WAM isn't an afterthought compared to the rest of the stuff they produced). I'd much rather see a clothed lady with a shit-tonne of gunge and mess than a lady in the nude with a couple of bits of squirty cream and maybe a small jar of yogurt.

While I also try and stick with producers I know and trust, even then I do for some foolish reason choose to buy scenes that I'm not really feeling on the preview pics but think maybe I'll be feeling the whole thing more and then don't. That's more my problem though really, no fault of the producer.

Okay, we're not naming names, but let's just say I ruefully agree with point 3b. My experience is far too much talk and too little mess from that type of producer. Very disappointing. Especially as one scene was ludicrously billed as "a WAM classic"!!

Mind you, I'm not sure I've much sympathy with anyone caught out by point 4. That really should be obvious...

FYI, commercial "pressed" optical disks may last 100 years. "burned" optical disks have a very short lifespan, typically on the order of a decade or less, although toward the end of the era, you could buy blanks for a dime apiece. Many of those are unreadable in a couple of years, especially if they were exposed to sunlight. You should always rip DVDs to your hard drive and then store away the original in a dark, climate-controlled storage location.

The "can't scan thru the video" thing is a result of editing and encoding by people who don't really know what they are doing. Things were especially bad in the 2000s because there were literally hundreds of combinations of codec, data rate, framerate, dimensions, and encoding methods. A lot of "free" codecs were just plain shit and cranked out garbage that barely played. (that's why VLC Player became mandatory back then - it will play damned near anything you can throw at it) These days, you really have the option of just mp4/h.264 because that's what is natively supported in hardware on all mobile devices, TVs, media players, etc. Even then, it's possible to choose the wrong framerate (30 instead of 29.97) during rendering and create a barely tolerable jerky, stuttering clip.

Any time we receive a playability complaint from a Vidown customer, I contact the producer and have them re-render the clip so it plays properly.

Yeah, I think about half of scenes I buy I regret. Possibly more than half. Sometimes it's my own fault for not reading something properly, or assuming that something will happen based on preview images which then doesn't happen, but usually it's because stuff is misrepresented, or badly filmed.

For example...

If it says that slime goes down some guy's underwear, but then they're obviously wearing something else underneath, then that's frustrating.

If a gunging is missed because the camera's wobbling around all over the place, that's frustrating.

If they tell a model to pour slime down their underwear then after one or two drops you hear the producer saying, "that's enough" that's frustrating.

When they show images of a particular thing then advertise a special "budget price" for the video and then you buy it and it turns out the video is "budget priced" because it's been lopped in half and the bit you bought it for isn't in the "budget version"...that's irritating. (Though in that case I did get a refund...after much discussion!)

When you buy a video which has no mention of a completely different fetish (e.g., nappies) and then it turns out they're all wearing nappies, that's irritating. (Not that I've got anything against people who are into that...just...I'm not into that and it's a turn off for me, so I wish it was mentioned in the description!)

I just realise it's always a gamble, buying scenes. It's lovely to know exactly what you're getting. I think it's more the case that some producers aren't very good at advertising their scenes more than, say, trying to be deliberately misleading.

Rarely does reality live up to our imaginations.


Robby

Any video with shaky camera work; invest in a tripod

Ok. So. Back in time to my pre-Internet gunge obsessed self having to make do with bits of stuff on telly. I walk past my one-horse towns local 'sex shop' every day for MONTHS building up the courage to go in and ask for what I want. When I eventually do, the guy who runs the (dodgy, dingy, dangerous as fuck place) says "yeah..." and relieves me of a lot of my hard earned cash. I'm underage, underpaid and terrified. The vhs tape sits under my bed for what seems like months for me to have the house to myself...I put it in....finally all my gunge fantasies unfold before me...Oh....er..nope...it's a hardcore amateur porn file culminating in a lady getting an enema which looks barely consensual never mind pleasurable. I summon up the courage to take it back and get threatened and laughed out if the shop. Good times.

Ya see? It's stories like this that keep me coming back to the UMD.

Robby

I do but they are a rare handful and like someone else mentioned they failed to push the right buttons but sometimes you gotta buy to find out, the other reason could be quality issues (like really poor resolution or lighting such as too dark or way too many bright lights). 98% of my purchases I have no regrets.

I tend to do the same thing too. A few hot screen shots that get the general feel of the video across is a better way to market IMO than trying to show all the best parts of a video (although recently I've been experimenting with animated gifs). After years of selling content I noticed the more previews I gave the less purchases I got because why bother buying a video if you can see the best parts for free?

However as a consumer I have been disappointed by other people who use this marketing tactic when the description makes it seem like there is more mess than the preview is showing. I've noticed not all producers are very honest in their descriptions. I stay away from clips that say "most extreme mess ever" or "super epic mess" because that type of hyperbole seems to be an indicator that the person is compensating for a lack of mess or general effort in their videos.

I prefer quality over quantity in both what I buy and what I produce. Posting a lot of scenes in a short amount of time makes me feel like the person didn't put much effort into what they shot. And like you said Rich, you and other people who have been doing this for so long are know commodities. If potential customers spend enough time checking out the forums I think you can get a pretty good idea of who's making worthwhile content.