Disclaimer: The following are my reflections on how yesterday's land sale went. To the best extent possible I want this as personal reflections rather than a corporate position. I've been a blogger for 4 years. I've spent times writing 4 posts a day. It's hard not to document the process. That said, I also understand as CEO anything I say regarding Splinterlands tends to be seen as always official and always the official word. I'm sharing this disclaimer and requesting that you try to read this as a personal reflection on a pivotal day in the game and for me personally having helped design so much of this rather than the official standpoint of the company splinterlands.
First Pre-sale
Well, yesterday was chaotic and exciting. Splinterlands had our first pre-sale for the lands and it was an eventful day to say the least. Let's talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly, but first a quick note on what the first Splinterlands Land pre-sale was about.
What's the land do? Allows players to mint new cards!
Splinterlands is a trading card game built on a blockchain that enables gamers to play anytime, trade any time, and earn every win. The primary way they earn is battling for prizes. The higher your rank the more you can earn (roughly speaking, if you double your rank then you quadruple your earnings, though many factors come into play there). The battles themselves are blind draft pick. You get to see rules and a little history, but then both players make their choices without seeing what the other is doing.
Matt and I like the blind draft pick, but we also want it so that after you see the results of the blind pick you get a second round to pick cards knowing what your opponent chose. We decided we want to add items and spells for that second round.
After deciding on items and spells we then had to figure out how players would get them. We could put them in packs for sale, but that seemed too boring and not in the spirit of crypto and decentralization enough. So, we decided to take the revenue stream we depend upon and have been successful with as a business (card sales) and put that into player hands! Players get to mint the items and spell cards! We think this is revolutionary to the industry to hand over the printing of card reigns, which represent company revenue streams, to the player base.
This isn't a small deal. We've sold millions of dollars of cards and the cards themselves are worth millions on the secondary market. Putting the ability to print new cards in player hands means we're authorizing the users to print things that are collectively valued in the millions!
But it's not just a free for all for minting cards. There's got to be rules. We decided in order to mint items and spells you have to own land, improve the land, harvest resources, and craft the cards which will live like the summoner and monster cards as tradable, rentable, and playable cards in Splinterlands.
After we made this decision we then decided how we're going to structure it. We did some math to figure out how much money it would take to build the ambitious land development roadmap, and then started working backwards.
As a result we we came up with a structure of having 3 pre-sales with diminishing discounts and a main sale for the land. The pre-sales would be spaced 3 weeks apart, and the main sale would come sometime in early 2021. We were going to sell 150,000 plots. Each plot would retail at $20. We would sell 30k plots at a 50% discount, 30k plots at a 40% discount, and a 30k plots at a 30% discount. The rest would be promotional giveaways, full retail, or not sold.
We knew we needed to do some hefty discounts because we're very clear in sharing that the land pre-sales are being used to fund the development that has not yet occurred for land. We don't have this built and are selling a complete project. We have plans and ideas and players are getting early access to the land at a major discount in exchange for some tolerance for things as they shift around and concepts get explored, built, changed, or abandoned.
We were worried about "would there be enough demand for this considering it's not even built yet?" Keep in mind we had at least one major account leave the game entirely with public emphasis on leaving Splinterlands because we chose this path. So, we have some trepidation here. However...
Players were going crazy over the idea. It seemed like there might be enough interest to sell a good amount of what we proposed, so we built a lottery system. We carved out 90% of the land for full region purchases into the lottery and 10% of the land we left as a first come first serve for smaller purchases. We wanted to ensure the smaller buyers would have a reserved section that only they would participate in and that the region buyers couldn't even purchase a full region. We thought it would be more than enough...
The lottery system was further adapted to help with player groups, especially guilds, that wanted to own land together. Some wanted to save money. Some wanted to own land with friends. Players and groups of players entered into the lottery, and we modified the lottery to help them.
The lottery went according to plan and far exceeded expectations. At the time we had over 50 regions trying to get 27 plots. The lottery was drawn. Those that got land were rewarded immediately, and those that didn't were able to get refunds in credits or DEC. Those who purchased credits who didn't want to leave it as credits were able to refund their credit purchase with the exact same amount of fiat or crypto they used to purchase it. We processed the refunds quickly so anyone who missed the lottery would have a chance at the free-for-all tracts and plots.
While the lottery went as expected the carve out of land did not go so well. The site crashed as we experienced an intense load on the system. What we thought was a well reserved amount turned out to be drastically too small. In the region sale we had supply to meet roughly half the demand players wanted. In the free-for-all we had closer to 1/10th the supply that players wanted. When the dust settled 21 seconds was all it took and all the remaining land was gone.
The Good
Starting off on a high note, Splinterlands had the highest sales day in the 2 year history, the land sold out in 21 seconds, and the demand for land outstripped the supply of land by at least 2:1. Additionally we saw players buying cards on the market and had one of the highest if not the highest amount of secondary sales being placed by players. This seems to have driven the secondary market value up to the highest level I've seen recorded of over $5.8M as tracked by the discord bot with the command $marketcap. The uniswap liquidity pool is nearly $300,000, and had one of the highest volume days we've recorded. Lastly, we saw a spike in DICE sales, which permanently removes DEC from circulation.
By those metrics the day was a smashing success beyond all hopes, dreams, expectations, and previous measurements. I can't stress it enough that the community support for this project is amazing. The damn thing isn't even built yet! It's a gift that Matt and I are able to dedicate ourselves and our skilled team members to this project full time!
The Bad
The buyer experience was frustrating for sure. An unexpected consequence of moving to the lottery was that people could see the ticker slowly rising. As it rose people were realizing that their chance of getting land was decreasing, got nervous, and put in for extra spots. This escalated the supply deficiency, and players became heated and anxious.
The immediate feedback to the lottery system included a lot of "I hate my luck." Players were mad at their luck, which is in contrast to the free-for-all purchases where they said "I hate splinterlands."
Other players were frustrated that since they don't interact much in discord they didn't have much knowledge or realization of the pooling that was happening to help all accounts access region purchases.
Other players didn't like the security issue of joining pools and were worried that players may steal the money, but there wasn't another option than waiting for the free-for-all.
Many players vocalized strongly that the price of missing out on the first one was pretty drastic in that the second pre-sale increases the price for a full region by $1500.
Several players were adamant about allowing everyone that wanted land in this pre-sale to get it at this price. They wanted us to open it up to anyone that would want to purchase whatever amount they wanted at this 50% discount amount. While we understand the sentiment it wasn't practical for the business and honestly the safety of building the whole expansion.
Others wanted us to change the system entirely to either allow or inhibit certain accounts to purchase based on past activity or intention when purchasing.
One thing about blockchain that is amazing, infuriating and facsinating is that so many people come into it with very different wants, desires, motives, attributes, politics, beliefs, financial footing, and the list goes on. What I've found is that there are decisions that we can make that anger everyone, but there's almost never a decision that pleases everyone. That's because so many people have different ways they interact and not every decision is equally beneficial for all in the ecosystem.
A recent example is closing loopholes for what I consider exploits via collection power. I'm not talking about the finer points of what's the exact number of this league or that, but the high level one of stopping level 1 cards from entering champion league. Doing that cut inflation going out to low level bots by ~30M DEC/month along with other benefits. To the people who were exploiting the system this was a terrible change. To the rest of the community it positively impacted the amount of DEC on average people were receiving. That's an extreme example of what I'm describing. But it illustrates how it's impossible to make everyone happy.
In cases like this I try to think of the various project stakeholders: the players, the game, the traders, new accounts, accounts that haven't joined yet that we'd like to have involved, hodlers, and media/bloggers. What can we do and how can we do it to get the maximum positive impact for everyone. It's impossible to make decisions that equally help all groups all the time, but we strive to provide benefit to the ecosystem as a whole.
While there are other options for how yesterday could have gone and lessons to be learned, I think the lottery was an exceptional compromise of fairness and if anything we needed more lottery-ness and easier access for all. I think I'd argue we moved in the right direction from 100% free for all to 90% lottery, but there's more ways to put that spirit of open but organized accessibility to include for the second attempt.
The ugly
Yikes, well, obviously the thing to talk about here is the fact that the site crashed. it's still not clear exactly what happened. However, some combination of massive player activity on the site, bots spamming us to get into the purchase, and potentially some kind of deliberate (angry or money seeking users) or accidental spamming (purchase bots gone wrong) of the game system crashed it.
I think it's ok to say it was infuriating for players. This part certainly wasn't by design or at all intentional, and may have been deliberately caused. We're checking that out.
We'll be looking into figuring out how to mitigate these issues in our second sale like this.
Feed back
We've gotten feedback about this over time and in the very heated moments. We'll look to integrate feedback into how we operate. Some of the feedback was helpful, some was supportive, some was comical, and some was negative ranging to intensely negative.
While we welcome feedback we've noticed one negative aspect of player feedback is that it's not always productive.
Good feedback isn't just complaining or attacking. Good feedback starts with a concern and ends with a suggestion.
A concern is like a complaint or a statement of what isn't working from your perspective. A suggestion is what you'd like us to do about it.
Bad feedback is simply a complaint which often leaves us wondering what solution would actually fix your problem. Terrible feedback is personal attacks. In the future I'm inclined to setup standard rules for how players can interact with staff and if they fall outside of it I'd welcome staff to block players. You have the liberty to complain and speak about whatever. We have the liberty to block you if you are being belligerent.
Takeaways
I know there were a lot of frustrated and angry players, and that particular moment was especially heated because of all the FOMO and the intense stress of the site going down. So, while fomo is good for the game the anger and frustration are not.
In my brain I think the lottery system is great and need to make all the available land lottery style and make it easier for lone players to enter the lottery system rather than having to rely on pools.
I think going full lottery also helps mitigate the likelihood of tech spam right at the second the sale starts.
We have to protect staff from angry players. The best solution is to not anger them, but that's impossible so we also have to introduce ways to mitigate it for the team members. Devs have a job to do which they can't do when directly answering a million questions. It's also not good for the long term health of all staff to directly address players, and may lead to mixed messaging.
Next steps
Meet with Matt and team to crowdsource additional considerations.
Implement an improved lottery system. Scrap the free-for-all portion.
Protect staff and implement guidelines for players interacting with staff.
Keep making an awesome expansion that many players want to get into.