Proposal for Future Sales instead of 3 min. rule
This would perhaps require a bit more coding, but it would make a process that is more equitable and less susceptible to network jams.
- Prior to the start of a sale, set up a page that allows users to enter the total # of items they wish to purchase in the sale and authorize the necessary funding for the purchase. Once the sale starts the transactions will happen automatically according to the rules below which would also apply to manual transactions
- Limit the # of items that a user can purchase in a single transaction
- Set a cooldown between transactions per user
- Set a maximum mint number
- A formula could be applied to both the item limit and the cooldown so that, for example, the limit could go up after a set time to allow whales to make larger purchases once the initial rush is over.
Examples
(Just giving the idea - these numbers would probably not be ideal)
- For pack presales set a transaction limit of 100 gems/transaction and a cooldown of 1 min between transactions. After 5 minutes raise the limit to 500 gems and after 10 minutes remove the limit.
- For items with smaller mint limits like the Runies set the limit to 1
Benefits
- This would allow users from any time zone, on any work schedule, with any kind of disabilities, etc. to participate in the sale
- Krill and Minnows would have an opportunity to get their small purchases in before the Whales swallow the bulk of the sale
- Automating the purchase transactions should give more control and prevent network congestion and related issues
- Having intended sales pre-entered would give the developers an idea ahead of time about the level of interest in the sale
- Having the limit/cooldown follow a formula allows a great deal of flexibility for different types of sales
Drawbacks
- You might lose a tiny bit of the FOMO factor
- Maybe some difficulties with the transaction authorizations? I'm assuming that since we can set up pre-authorized buy orders on PeakMonsters that we could do something similar for this.
The biggest drawback I see to this is it would mean that people would set up many multiple accounts in order to get all of their guaranteed packs. Unfortunately, it is what it is. If people want to game the system, they'll find a way. There really is no perfect way to do it. As an economy, they need to take care of the whales since they are the ones providing the bulk of the money, but they also need to make sure the little guys can participate or it just becomes a haves vs the have-nots situation.
I'm not sure what the best solution is but it's encouraging that they are at least putting in the time and effort to think about it. It's never going to be perfect as there's no way to make everyone happy, just like everything else in life.
love these ideas. I would vote for this to be persued as a sales mechanism (or at least to be further discussed in depth). I also liked the response from @dagger212 above in regards to the proposals. I think that between the two of you there is a line of thought that I can get on board with. Thanks for putting the effort in. I was struggling to find a middle ground between my heart and my head while reading through all these answers
Additional benefit - you wouldn't need to worry about hiding the page in fear of bots as the playing field would be level for everyone.
I think something like this is the fairest way. You can avoid multi-account shenanigans by having the smart contract randomly choose accounts weighted by the number of packs they wish to purchase instead of a transaction limit. They then get allocated up to 50 packs and the promo if they wanted the full 50.