I have a few ideas about this. I read through about half of the comments so not sure if these have been proposed but...
People who didn't enter the extra Vouchers for bonus packs should be allowed to get those bonus packs BUT those packs should NOT count towards the promo card. I'm one of these people so I have some skin in the game. I will be unhappy not to receive the extra promo card(s) the bonus packs would have given me, but my biggest concern is the fact that I'm not receiving a few hundred dollars worth of packs I feel I should have received if not for the mass chaos in those first couple minutes. The bonus packs and Vouchers should have been autofilled based on the number purchased. That's just common sense IMO and was definitely an oversight by the UX.
100% agree with this. Anyone buying under the impression they were getting pre-sale packs deserves a refund if they want it. They didn't get what they thought they were paying for. I will point out that although they now can buy those packs cheaper on the secondary market, those secondary market packs WILL NOT count towards the remaining airdrops so...even though they may be able to buy more with the same money, they will definitely lose some future value for doing it.
In my opinion, there's no fair way to allow this number to go higher. As others have stated, you are benefitting the few at the cost of the many. You are penalizing the people who did what they had to do to get in on time to benefit some people who didn't. In point number 2 above, you are refunding people who didn't get what they thought they were paying for. Here, you are delivering less than what was promised to the people who DID get in. Not fair. It sucks but it kinda is what it is, right?
In the future, I think what needs to happen is there needs to be a defined number of promo cards being delivered. Then, you could do a 3 minute, 10 minute, 1 hour, 50 block (whatever parameter you wanted to set) and fit those promo cards into that window. You could then promise every purchaser 1 promo card for buying their first 50 packs or 100, whatever, and then divide the rest out between whatever the final number of purchased packs turns out to be. You could even do something like 100 gets 1 promo but 150 gets 2. Incentivize people to reach a higher tier. Then divide out the rest based on total packs sold/number of promos left. There's a bunch of math that could be done here to figure out the best way to do it, but at least this way, people who want in can get a promo card or two, and the whales will still be able to get larger quantities if they want them. They just won't know exactly how many until the sale is over. Instead of getting one for every 50 packs, it might be one for every 62. It might even be less than 50 if there aren't a lot of small purchasers. Like I said, I'm sure you've got people there that can take a few days to do the math and run some hypotheticals.
One final note, I will echo a few other peoples' comments regarding this/these proposals. I hope you will break them up into separate issues because they really all should be decided individually. Other than the fact they all happened on the Riftwatchers pre-sale, they're not really related.
I will also add, that if you take my solution on point one, you would be able to extend the 500,000 out to include a few more people. If, for instance, 8000 Vouchers did not get added correctly, you could deliver those 8000 packs as post pre-sale packs and add the next 8000 above the 500,000 into the pre-sale. That would at least cover a few of the people who barely missed. Like I said, while I would rather get the extra promo cards, I am ultimately responsible for not entering the voucher number correctly. I feel I deserve the packs as the UX was confusing while the rush was on, but I can see forgoing the promo cards. That will suck for the people using the bonus packs to get to 1000 for the gold foil, but they'll still get their title and will still have a legitimate chance to get one on the drop.
Overall, I think it was a great day for the entire Splinterlands economy. The best lessons in life are almost always learned the hard way. There's no substitute for experience. Hopefully the lessons learned here will serve this community well going forward.
Totally agree.
i think there are some great points in here. Love your thinking. Im, not sure whether the 8000 packs thing works, but if it did i would vote for it and pretty much the other ideas here. the other nice response is from @cherute below about how a future sale might work. Basically I think you two are thinking in the right direction (in terms of my own personal sentiment)
Yeah, upon thinking about it further, the hypothetical 8000 packs I'm talking about above were actually already sold as part of the 500,000 since they were obviously not counted during the sale. So, if they were to give out the bonus packs to the people who missed, I now really feel they need to be post pre-sale packs and not count towards the promo card. If they give out those bonuses as pre-sale packs, the final number will be 500,000 PLUS those missed bonus packs, so again, they'll be giving out more promo cards than originally intended. That said, it would probably only be a couple hundred so...not a huge increase compared to the guaranteed 10,000 plus airdrop already coming out but....still an increase.