How did you enjoy the event?
Astrologers proclaim the end of the event. Population of something-else-than-spam in SG discussions increases!
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When I first read the thread, it seemed like a great idea and I was excited, but then I saw everyone bidding 2500. I think it was a great idea, but the points system was flawed and I don't know how to fix it.
This is a game and people want to win the game. In the beginning we were getting credits based on the value of the game and the best strategy was to grab a high value game early, even if it costs 2500, and then bank a lot of credits from entries so you can keep grabbing more games. I have no idea why people were choosing to spend 2500 on low value games though. Also, I didn't go back and read the main thread or your update comment after you changed the rule about credits and I suspect most other people did not either. Once I read the rules, I thought I knew how everything worked, so I didn't need to go back and read them again. I saw the change the next day when I noticed I was not getting enough credits for my entries and checked the thread again. A lot of people probably did not see the change and kept their original strategy.
Also, there wasn't much point in even trying to gain credits because almost all the games were going to be posted publicly anyway. Without knowing what game we are bidding on, most people are going to get something they are not interested in or already own, so why keep it when they can get more credits by letting other people enter. This means that almost all the giveaways were posted publicly and the only ones that people were going to keep and invite a few people to enter would be if they won something really good. The only way to win that giveaway was to gobble up high value giveaways early and post them publicly so you could have the most credits when that giveaway was available.
Another problem is that there is a short period of time to bid before the bidding ends for each giveaway and the game runs 24 hours, which means you probably won't even be here to see the high value giveaways you are looking for when they happen. Because of this and the fact that most giveaways were posted publicly, there wasn't much point in trying to play the game, you could just wait for the event to end and enter all the public giveaways you want that are open for a week.
Overall, I think it was a great idea, but flawed and I think it could be a lot of fun if the credits system and bidding is sorted out, but I do not know how to do that properly and it probably won't be easy to solve.
Thanks for putting in the time and effort though, I couldn't imagine doing it myself. These events are a lot of fun and make SG a much better place :)
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As a creator of quite a few of the gibs, some decent, some trash, I was frankly disappointed with the outcome. I didn’t feel that the event was badly organised or managed, despite coming along with the discussion thread limit and what not, it was just that everyone raced to 2500, without actually considering if it was a gib even worth that 2500. The inconsequential bidding and sharing of giveaways certainly needs to be relooked at.
The fact that most of our big gun gibs were also almost all released in the first couple hours was also concerning. But that’s exactly how randomised and “fair” the event was. There were obviously good giveaways, and there were so obviously trash or “Unknown” gibs. People were supposed to guess, then bid accordingly.
The event was a disaster (we had to trash it and end it early), but it was also an experiment. And that social experiment sadly failed. (Except for the giveaways that actually got the desired outcome of bidding, winning, then sharing to hit 5 entries, then sacrificing credit collection in favour of a higher chance of winning the game.) Here’s to hoping for a good group recruitment, and for me to win all them gibs and profits hehh.
Special thanks to all members and non-members involved, of course, the event wouldn’t be possible without each and everyone of you(us).
In honour of Archi’s dead limit; https://youtu.be/ZAn3JdtSrnY
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I agree that the concept is fine but the event itself is not very effecient and kind of messy. It's just a game of waiting and the bot sometimes slowed down and missed valid entries especially toward the end. Not giving people so much credit right away can be a good improvement, and shortening it can get people more invested.
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Actually this event had two phases, a race phase where everybody bid 2500 like crazy and slow-and-wait phase where nobody had enough of credits to bid 2500 right away.
Neither is good, and if we ever wanted to make another iteration of this, then we'd think three times if it doesn't fall under any of those. I have at least several ideas how to fix it now, but obviously I didn't have those ideas before we started.
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I hope we get to see the break down of how many givs were made public and which ones were hoarded.
While a cool idea, I found it quite frustrating.
Like I was saying to Archi, my biggest frustration came from only the first bid every 30 seconds being counted, forcing you to wait for 30s for a chance to outbid the people that were purposefully upping bids by 1, to drag things out more.
I also found it hard to figure out if I wanted to bid on games since many didn't have much useful info, while others had like 6 metrics on display.
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It'll be hard to deduct it from entries alone. We had a total of 184 giveaways, all were auctioned at least one time, no one was auctioned more than 3 times. I could give you current data but it's very ambiguous and can't be used for anything that is supposed to be at least half-right.
You could do the math from jbond's thread yourself, but it won't expose all of the giveaways to you, as not everyone decided to put it in the thread, not everyone decided to share it explicitly on SG, and not everyone decided to share it with just 4 other people. This is on the top of the fact that there might be giveaways that do not get a lot of attention even when shared, which further complicates such discovery.
However, based on my gut and observations, I can say that there are cases of gibs that weren't shared at all but to reach minimum (there was monster hunter world gib in case you were wondering, it's on exactly 5 entries), however majority was indeed shared right away, which didn't necessarily break the event or the concept in any way, but was a bit too odd, people didn't know what they bid, why do they bid, and then why they bidded, throwing giveaway like everybody else could.
I know the root cause of that though, everybody expected to keep something nice for himself, but in the end it was all shared anyway to farm credits. Well, that part didn't work as I thought, I explained it in the OP.
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I guess it'd take a while, aside from discounting the ones form jb's thread, the rest would need to be checked individually in case they were shared publicly elsewhere, so it might be a mess to do well.
If I may, what was game was the one you won near the end? I think that one had the most wishlists within the Touhou group, and it was released in August, so I was curious.
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if I counted correctly, 167 games were exposed in jbond's thread, meaning 91% got exposed
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The forum creation cap could be bypassed possibly by creating the threads in the week prior to the next iteration of the auction. You can create "TouhouAuction 1" close the topic, then 2 and so on, for how many you need. then instead of creating the new topic you would just open the next one and edit in the details (if you wish for the auction details to be hidden)
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Yeah that is the least problem, if I knew it beforehand I'd do it right away, but how could you know if even support didn't mention it, despite of 6 different people responding to my initial feedback. Still, this would only make it a bit less messy, wouldn't solve all the other problems we had.
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(chuckles) I can only make suggestions for problems I know a (possible)answer for. on the others, well I'll let you know if I think of anything workable
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I didn't mean anything bad, I just shared a response so others can know why it wasn't done this way to begin with, and I don't like myself for not knowing before, but what I could do about it... I appreciate all the feedback and as this event proved, it's better to have 10 people ensuring that thing X works properly rather than just 1 or 2.
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i love the idea, but i dont think the ideas you had will help enough :/
the problem: people dont know what the credits are worth. they can only get something during the event with it so they try to do it. and as there are too many people out here, we always had to spend at least 2500 credits to win the auction^^
with links for the first 5 people to get +x credits its like they will instantly win the next auctions. so we already know how much they will get^^
with the "knowing" idea, this might be the same... and others who dosnt know, may already stop with the event. there need to be much more ways to gain credits to diversify the amount of credits. we need rich people as we also need poor people... probably it even would be better if we would in most cases know what we are biding on. this way people would probably think about how much they are willng to spend on.
to diversify the amount of credits: (just ideas) you could in addition gain credits by creating giveaways, you could also let the people start with different amount of credits. this could be a random amount (would be nice to share how much the max is, so we could know if we are rich or poor) or it could depend on prior giveaways/comments/registrationdate what ever
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I totally agree with you, lack of real credits value caused this mess, and also the fact that everybody started "rich" so they had nothing to lose and it was more like playing in the casino for your friend's money that you can only play for, but without any consequences if you lose everything at first pull.
This is also why next iteration (if it ever happens) will have the credits system reworked entirely, based on my initial thoughts in the OP. All of your points are good too, there is a lot to improve here and I never said otherwise, except you sadly can't know all of that before trying at least once first. It's like trying to learn how to swim without ever swimming in your life before.
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Well, maybe there should be also a shop, where you can buy entry in giveaways created by users. For example, You can pay 10 points to get entry in giveaway and creator gets 5 points to his wallet. It might solve problem of gaining new points and create sense of value of points, since aside of bidding you can also use them in other way.
@edit: Buying more info about game on auction would be nice too.
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As much as I like to create GAs, I don't think earning points from GAs is a good Idea in a community event...
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If you do this again, I don't think that you should remove the credits for entries. It's a good incentive to share the giveaways with the rest of the community, which I understood to be one of the goals of the event. To help prevent new threads from being created, perhaps have a specific message with guidelines, including a link to the sharing thread, that the creators put in the descriptions of the giveaways themselves.
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I also have the similar view on this and I also consider it a good idea, but it definitely can't be the main (and the only!) factor, where people are explicitly told that this way they get credits and there is nothing else they can do. It should be like some extra on top, but without any way to get your credits back through sharing, otherwise you only feed infinite loop which we suffered from on the beginning.
Later on when I changed the rules and rewarded less for entries, things went more sane while people still kept sharing anyway.
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I do hope you'll do this or something similar again in the the future. I enjoyed taking the tidbits of information from the bot and trying to work out what game was being auctioned.
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As soon as I read the rules, I knew dominant strategy was to race for 2500 and spam your link if you got something you didn't want. I think this could have been curbed in two fashions.
(1) Bid fee - for each bid you are subject to some small bid fee regardless if you win or lose
(2) A table containing possible contents of the giveaway (this was partially done in the form of achievement count, but i think more info is better as you want ppl to figure out that a game is bundle trash and not waste their bids)
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I think that lack of game details (or rather making them randomized, same stuff) actually bit me in the back in this, but I'm also positive that people would bid anyway, blindly or not, just to get their hands on the giveaway, even if they didn't even intend to join or keep it for themselves. I might be wrong in this and we won't know for sure until we try again, but I see the problem more as people having nothing to lose so trying regardless with intention of getting something back, while wanting to participate and try out something new they didn't see before. Whether the game was worth it or not didn't matter (you had enough of details to guess the game in majority of cases if you only tried to).
So the problem wasn't necessarily that exact formula, but the fact that they all started "rich" and instead of us slowly rewarding participants with more and more credits, we blew up all our cards at the start and waited good 150 giveaways before all big whales (that were still interested) ran out of 2500 credits to make the event look how it was expected to look from the beginning. Well, this was too late.
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I think they should all have the same amount of information available. Having giveaways where you could figure out the game, and others, where you have nothing to go by, is a bit odd. making it more streamlined might make it easier for people to choose what to bid on, rather than just going "fuck it" and picking any giv to drop all their points on.
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I don't say no, this would definitely improve things and I agree with it, but in this context with all other details of this event run it'd not necessarily help to make things better, people would bid as they did imho. There are other changes needed to go with that one in order to change it.
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Yeah, obviously, It's just another thing to tweak a bit.
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there was autcion with 4 or 5 lines in table that said 'undefined', the only information you could have was starting bid, which was less than 10 IIRC. Ended up 2,5k anyway. The gangnamstyle idea of fee for participating in aution would change the whole event, not sure if for better if rest would be still same, but with other changes could be good.
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Yeah, the thing is that some people didn't care which auction they won, while others tried to pick one that seemed good to them, like I did with SouthPark, which I already owned. I'd expect that other people were luckier, so they didn't feel the need to share their giv or keep playing after they won access to something they wanted.
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Just got home from work and finally wanted to participate only to find all auctions gone and all my giveaways exposed. A little disappointment but I hope winners will all be good people and no leechers with 1 game shared and 100 won as I saw in one of my auctions.
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Apparently, as high as 9% were not shared publicly, so who knows who won and who entered them.
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Hmm, one possible way to encourage people to statically spend points would be to do a blind auction
people would place various bids on the giveaways and the top X bids get the giveaway link
This would also let you customize the number of entrants to a giveaway as well. If you hide the games, you may offer a partial refund, maybe half the points the person bid if they wish to pass on the giveaway, and then the next highest bidder will get the link.
Secondly you should plainly state how many auctions are remaining, and possibly what game will be coming u[ later. that will encourage people to balance saving their credits or future auctions vs trying to get anything fast.
Now for the problem for this approach, it dose NOT incentivize link sharing like the prior auction did.
And it still may end up with some people just going for the maximum bid. You would also need to make sure that peoples outstanding bids did not total more then their current credits.
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I once read somewhere a frase that applies quite well to what happened "given the opportunity players will optimize the fun out of a game".
It's simple human nature, we're hardwired to exploit anything that can be exploited and some of us even feel a bit of pleasure from cracking it. You need to consider that people will go for crazy strategies if they're are perceived as easy or at least simpler to execute than the intended one, and they'll even work in groups to accelerate the process, and this will happen in no time in a community full of gamers used to breaking down stuff into a mere number's game. As an example you can look at what happens every time valve introduces a new sale event, within hours the community has organized and are pushing the "game" to the point of it no longer being fun, but theywe're more interested in seeing the numbers grow than anything else.
As soon as the unified thread for posting revealed GAs was created it gave a common objective to the casual observer "populate this table as fast as humanly possible", the game stopped being about the individual winning an auction and became about winning as soon as possible to share the maximum amount of GAs. The fact that winning an auction and keeping it for oneself was stipulated to not work due to the reauction of GAs with less than 5 entries meant winning was as trivial as spending the imaginary points used to win the auction in the first place.
If I had to design a second iteration of this I would get rid of the "share to get points" machanic, decrease the initial points by a lot, and auction every GA a minimum of 5 times(so you wouldn't need to share if you don't want to do it and the minimal entries would be reached). Also shorten the auction by adding a fixed time-limit of 15 minutes and prevent users from bidding in more than one auction at a time, you'd have to commit to the one battle and compete until the last second.
Maybe running a few tests with a few GAs each to see what happens with different rules could shed more light into how to pull this off cleanly.
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event was nice and fresh. Keep it coming.
Limiting the timeframe to few hours, especially without prior notice, will increase 'action' but limit no. of participants. Two biggest communities on SG are from very different timezones (tho, considering forum users might be bit skewd, but is there any stat for that?).
The initial rule of points generation had quite big infulence on later stages of event due to points generated above initial amount and advantage some of those peeps had (and I would do same obv).
on a side note: would be nice to know more numbers, probably after 11/11. How many ended up with exactly 5 entires, less, and 0 (like the Dungeons II I've won in reauction, shared and still on 0 entries).
I am sure there will be few with just 5 or 10< (the preorders, no price esp. I presume)
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I didn’t enjoy this event at all, but I love your events regardless, please bring more, but not in this format.
On the other hand, it's only my opinion, and people who like competition may liked that event, so who am I to judge?
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I had idea during the event that players should get 1 point for each valid bid. That would mean there is incentive to play the long game specially with cheaper titles.
An other thing is quality of titles. Which is expected here, but leads to throwaway culture where spamming is done to recoup the loss...
Which actually leads me to thought... Albeit one being very heavy to implement. People should know if they have the game or not. At least to level that SG supports.
And it might make sense to implement own website for this, which is lot of extra work and removes it from community eyes...
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Thanks to all of you for all the giveaways, and especially for trying to make it not "just another classic train"!
Even if it didn't play out quite as you planned, I'd call it a success! (Of course, I won an auction!) Many people got involved and this is good for the community :)
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At first thank you for the work on this event and all the GAs. Even with my small calendar I know how hard it can be to plan such an event.
In the end there where some real auctions like it was planed I guess where not the first person that could screamed 2500...
But yeah, I will try to explain why I reacted like I did (try to win a game fast, spamming the link...).
In the beginning you didn't know what you bid for. So the small infos you got could be any game and with teasing that there might be bigger AAA games behind every auction people where fixed at that and try to win. And so it started.
And while everyone had 2500 points and wanted to win there was only one way to win, to bed the 2500...
I won the 11th game. The game details didn't reveal anything (because it was a bundle by itself) and when I saw my price it was nothing I was into it... In this moment I was down to 0 points and my game gave only 1 point each entry... The topic of jbond was not active already so the spam begann.... And with me some other people did... Not a big problem tbh because it could be worse over all and it was just for 2 days...
The problem with this: for the most people that won one Link the game was over. Even with the change to get 5 points each entry. And with the some games that gave way more points each entry in the beginning there where only two users with over 2500 points.
Jbonds topic than was a good idea but! the more GAs where postet, the lower went the entries in each giveaway.
I think these changes might be a good Idea for a future event:
- you already have the eventpage so why not make the bidding in this page. With this a just in time auction would be possible and you would not wait till the bot says something.
- give more (and the same) infos about the game you can win (no need to name it but people should have a little idea what it is)
- maybe it should cost you some points to take a bid...
- I like the "earn yourself some points" idea...
- the next max bid should not be 3x the last one... At least 1 but max 50 or something would be better
- the timeframe from once to winning should be around 2-3 minutes I think...
But overall I liked the Idea and it was funny to see the eventpage-numbers moving
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I didn't even participate to this event. The description of the hidden games was, usually, not enough to understand anything about the games. Like, it would only say if it was bundled or not. I know you didn't have to say anything to describe the games, but I just didn't want to throw my points away to a random game. xD
Most of the time, whoever would say "2500" first, would win. Even then, the bot wouldn't immediately recognize the bids and that would make the bidders repeat their comments.
I didn't like almost all of the exposed giveaways (I'm pretty sure they didn't all get exposed though), but that's just about my taste. Still, you should have warned people that there was a possibility not to be able to see the giveaways they won, because the giveaway creator could have blacklisted them.
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I definietly wouldnt cut the auction timer down to 10 seconds or anything like that. Thats insane. The archie bot needs to progress all posted comments, before it accepts the next bid, which means that, if your lucky, you need 40 seconds to up the bid.I recommend getting rid of "going twice" and just jump to "sold" after 3 to 5 minutes.
I'm sad to say, but the bot is just not good and responsive enough for any lower times than that. Even during this last event I lost some auctions because it "didn't hear me", because it was still processing the previous comment, which lead to another guy commenting the same amount and winning.
You're definietly right about the 2500 thing, that was my biggest complaint and usually the only way to win anything. Heck, thats how I did it too, because there wasn't another way. So, just like on eBay, there should be no cap that limits your bids. Whoever is willing to spend the most will win. That being said, there has to be a new way of earning credits without any limitations but also without going out of hand.
Another thing was that it often times didn't matter, who spend the 2,5K, since the invite link was often shared shortly after. Of course, thats the main idea of the thing, but forcing the winner to share it with at least 4 other members is... questionable, I guess. Of course you guys want your CV and I respect that, but it kinda invalidated the whole auction thing, seeing how it gets rerolled if you dont manage to get more entries, forcing more spam, whether the winner gets the entries or not.
Anywho, thanks for the event
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First of all, thanks for the event!
A small correction:
we got a race to 2500 with exactly three auctions getting 2501
There are actually 6 auctions won with 2501 credits
(curious fact: 4 of them are won by the same person, who won 5 auctions in total and decided to share all of them openly).
Finally, game progress each 15 minutes was far too much for action-oriented event. Very likely in the next iteration I’ll cut game progress based on the bid, where it reaches insane low like 10 seconds if the bid is high enough. This will obviously cut the event to maybe a few hours at most, but maybe it’ll be for the better that the event is shorter and much more packed with action than longer where nothing is going on, we’ll see.
I have to disagree with this. 15 minutes was too much, but 5 minutes was already much closer to the ideal in my opinion. Cutting it to 10 seconds even in some instances would probably discourage a lot of people from participating because the action would become too fast to be comprehensible. Also, obviously, an action-packed event that lasts a few hours will be missed by most of the community who happen not to be in the same time zone or in inappropriate life circumstances (like school or work). Personally, I think that there should be a balance between action and time for thinking.
About credits
I very much like the idea that credits should start at a low value and be slowly generated over time with additional options to obtain credits in the form of mini-games or puzzles or something like that. I think that more ways for obtaining credits are better than less ways so that different people would end up doing different things and no one could possibly have time to do everything and max out the credit game.
One idea that I can add is to implement bidding achievements that drop credits. All of them should probably be hidden from the start (with requirements unknown to the participants) but then gradually uncovered by the community and obtainable either by everyone who meets the requirements or maybe by the first 10-50 people who meet the requirements.
Some examples:
- Make a bid for a specific amount or credits (some nice numbers like 69, powers of 2, or maybe birthdays of Touhou members)
- Win an auction for a specific amount of credits (the amounts could all be the same as in 1).
- Win an auction for a specific game that's meaningful for SG in some sense (like Bad Rats).
- Win an auction for a specific game with a specific amount of credits (e.g., I think it's fun that I won a horror game with 666 credits yesterday).
- "Veni, Vidi, Vici": Win an auction with your first bid in that auction.
- "But You Have Heard of Me": Make N bids in one auction (where N is large) and lose the auction in the end.
- Have a member of Touhou place a valid bid after yours.
- Place a valid bid after a member of Touhou.
- Have your bid outbidded by a participant with exactly N times more/less credits than you.
- Place N bids (where N is very large).
- Place bids continuously with no more than 5 minutes between any two of your bids during a specific time interval (e.g., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 hours).
- Place N bids without winning even a single auction.
I'm sure anyone can think up lots of these. In any case, with achievements or without them, more variety and unpredictability in credit generation is always better than less variety.
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Cutting it to 10 seconds ...
Yeah, the site couldn't handle the spam as it was anyway. Many of the times I tried to comment the site just ignored me and reloaded the page, so a smaller window might make it even worse.
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I am sorry, but I still do not get why any of you thought that the bids won't be capped by triple-bids almost instantly. All of you have been on this site for years.
Heck, even without that, it is a simple free poker chip principle. Give people around a poker table a free wad of poker chips they won't have to pay for and what they cannot exchange to money, and you can see at least half of them going all-in before the deal could make just one round around the table.
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For sake of keeping all the comments together, I'll repeat the suggestion I made just before the original thread was closed:
I thought this was a really nice idea, (and, in retrospect, it's surprising how much fun I had considering most of my participation was just sitting, refreshing, and waiting to type "2500" as fast as possible) but watching how it went gave me another idea which I feel could work better. Basically:
Single thread on forum (so no-one can suggest spamming), with single post for each auction round.
Auction info posts working very much the same as this time, with a few little clues, but also: Post would advise the "auction window" for that particular giveaway, which could perhaps be randomised to be anything from 30 mins up to a few hours. The post would also include a link to an external site for bidding.
And, the most crucial changes: Bidding is blind. Highest unique bid wins. Starting points is also max points, so nobody can ever have an insurmountable advantage.
Obviously, I doubt anyone would be jumping to put in the enormous effort to run another event like this particularly soon, but I reckon that could work really nicely.
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If blind bidding is implemented, it would be even more fun to implement Vickrey auction, a type of blind auction where the highest bidder wins but the price paid is the second-highest bid.
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That would probably amount to randomly selecting one of the many maximum bidders to pay maximum -1 credits each time :D
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enjoyed this event as i did your previous ones, couple of notes that could help with this auctioning event.
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as you said credits were bad idea to start maxed, adding 15 per 10 minutes and such is a good idea, having people credit hunting is a good idea as well(links in comments, trivia, maybe the game 7 boom(every 7th comment will give the poster 1 credit), roulette that could not only reward credits but also giveaway links, puzzles that give credits to the first solvers), all of the above and more could help the game and make it more enjoyable.
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the length of the event, i disagree with you there, many people don't have a lot of free time and could end up missing on the fun, you could however have a giveaway posted every hour regardless of how long it took for it to end(5 simultaneously), and have even people create their own giveaway added to the pool(to avoid fake giveaways i assume people will need some sort of a bar like level/total sent/sgtools and have archibot add them to the giveaway pool, that way this event could continue even weeks(as long as the giveaways keep coming from the community aswell of course.
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"sharing is caring", i myself opened a thread to spread the awareness and even posted a couple of public giveaways and included my shared giveaway inside, having people enter your link increase your credit is not a bad idea aswell, but it should be moderated(every person entering your game gives you 1 credit if the game was unbundled and 2 if the game was bundled(less entries for bundled games since they more likely had giveaways in the past and people own them), i agree that spamming threads was a problem, some of them could be avoided by having adding the thread link to the winner link when an auction end.
that's some of my thoughts on the event, if i had to rate it:
creativity 10/10.
enjoyment 8.5/10.
community participation 6/10(we participated to some degree but we weren't that impactful other than sharing links and spamming bids).
thanks for the event, looking forward to seeing many more coming ^^.
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3rd part would have been nice if our own giveaways gave us points too... so it would have created more incentives to make new giveaways, but that's my opinion. Also the fact that those who won auctions first had advantage over those that had links revealed later on... not enough time to gain points for anything if you already bid your 2500, which had to happen at the start to win any links....
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I enjoyed people spamming invite only ga's, but which seemed pointless, and don't enjoy spam by itself; though not the principle of the auction system, which I didn't understand at all, so didn't try.
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Would be nice if you run similar events during the weekend to allow more people to participate.
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Timetable change to shorter cycles really shortened event. I expected it to run a few days, but it was over in one or two which changes the tactics again.
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The whole thing looked way too complicated so I just ignored it to be sure.
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+1 I tried, but it was a fail for me and my 2500 points went to a busted game which had no time to accrue any real points 8 entries which equaled to a 40 points total... to bid on anything else... Would've been better if my contribution entries gave me points to "gamble" with instead, since it had over 100 entries, being non-bundled.
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The results of the event
In a single sentence, not everything went as planned, but this was expected considering we pulled off one of the more unique events where everything was one huge SG experiment with impossible outcome to deduct without trying. We couldn't foresee everything that would happen, although I think we still did a pretty good job and a lot of my past projects and ideas haven't had as much luck and thought as this one. This doesn't make it perfect though, and if it's not perfect then I'm not absolutely happy with it. There are things that need to be done, and they're mandatory before even considering another iteration of something like this.
What was good
I still believe that the core idea was neat. Giveaway auctions are a nice concept and people outbidding themselves was nice to watch. This was all Miku’s idea, and I consider that idea to be as pure as gold, only the logic that we implemented with it was a bit flawed to begin with.
We had a lot of good giveaways to share, which I was happy to see shared with the rest of the community. The event was first and foremost our way to share giveaways with you, the "auction game" was like a cherry on top to make it more interesting and unique rather than just another classic train thread. This concept worked, even if things next to it didn't have as much luck. This overall defined why I see this event as something that, despite of all obstacles, did succeed in the end, and I’m very happy about that.
I'm not sure if majority agrees with me, but I consider event organization on SG as rather positive as well. We kept it contained into a few threads, not putting too much pressure on SG neither SG community, although there were voices that even this was too much. I expected this to happen, and maybe I'm wrong, but I think it was "sane" enough. We can definitely improve a lot in terms of responses and game directly in the threads, but game threads alone I consider a good idea.
What was mediocre
People creating threads for every single one of their wins. Guys seriously, why did you do that ;_;7. I've asked jbond myself to create one single place for all of that, and you decided to go on a spamfest even bigger than my event as a whole :(. It's partially my fault though, as I shouldn't make entries the only way to get the credits. If that didn't happen, the situation wouldn't be entirely solved, but it'd be greatly improved for sure. Note taken, think of the SG fallout caused by the people as a side-effect of the game rules, I didn't foresee that one, only fallout from my game itself.
What didn't work
The biggest problem was seeing every single auction to end with 2500 credits. We've expected that people will eventually stop going all-in once we deplete the amount of people bidding like there is no tomorrow (considering giveaways were supposed to be mostly shared anyway), but instead of that we got a race to 2500 with exactly three auctions getting 2501. This was not good, auction should not be a race, and this is definitely something to fix because it's not enjoyable watching, neither participating in this. Once again my expectations of people clashed with the reality, partially because of me and my rules that weren't prepared for that, note taken.
A lot of things were discovered too late to be fixed in time. We managed to fix initially-flawed way of getting credits based on initial bid's value, and we also managed to fix SG rate-limiting with new threads creation (even SG support didn't know this exists, they're not to blame anyway). Despite of that, core logic for credits went too deep to be fixed in time, which is why we couldn't break the chain of 2500 bids without rewriting major part of the event and completely revising rules. The system worked on paper and in our heads, we've spent a lot of time thinking of all edge-cases and otherwise game-breaking behaviour, but we forgot about the most basic SG trait - leeching to the massive degree, even if there is no freaking point in that :3. I think that too many people wanted to try out the game, and instead of going chill on it, they decided to bid everything, everywhere and every time. Once again, this is partially my fault, because I gave them power to do it right away, and that created a situation in which everyone bid just once, claimed their “win” and stopped participating. That alone is not necessarily bad, but it could definitely be improved. The race situation is something definitely to fix though, there is no discussion about that.
What we're considering for the next iteration (if it happens):
People are likely to start from some very low amount of credits, or even 0P. They should gain the credits in some kind of way, not be born with them. This will cut bidding everything possible just to get anything, if you want to win, you gonna keep trying.
Very likely we'll remove or revisit credits from entries, this simply doesn't work and causes only spam on SG from the users, even if not intentionally. Maybe we're going to keep it as a small "addition" but making it mandatory to not share in a standalone threads dedicated to it, I really didn't expect people to go crazy over it to this degree, this has to be fixed.
Credits will likely be generated over time, like +10 credits each 15 minutes, similar to SG. This will have healthy effect on the competition and will no longer make a chains of 2500. People will hoard credits more and decide when to use them, while "small fishes" will bite for everything, still outbidded by medium and bigger ones. This would go together with a requirement of outbidding somebody by e.g. at least 25 credits, so we wouldn’t have infinite loop and lack of progress.
We’re likely to implement alternative ways of getting credits, more community-oriented and less spam-oriented (even if existing way wasn’t really intended as spam-oriented way, but people proved me wrong in this). Right now we’re thinking about the idea of e.g. ArchiBoT randomly leaving a link to claim extra +50 points in the reply to the bid, and that link could be clicked by e.g. first 5 people that spot it. Other ideas include SG-based trivia where you could be rewarded for good answers to various puzzle-like questions. We had a few other ideas like optional roulette game where you could lose/win some credits, but that was rather inferior to other two. If we decide to go this route, very likely we’ll have more ideas for rewards in the future.
Finally, game progress each 15 minutes was far too much for action-oriented event. Very likely in the next iteration I’ll cut game progress based on the bid, where it reaches insane low like 10 seconds if the bid is high enough. This will obviously cut the event to maybe a few hours at most, but maybe it’ll be for the better that the event is shorter and much more packed with action than longer where nothing is going on, we’ll see.
Thank you for participation
You already know that personally I’m not very happy how everything turned out, but this is because I’m a specific guy who accepts nothing less than outstanding victory. We’ve got a lot of positive feedback from people, majority of people really enjoyed the event and even despite of all the cases I pointed out above, I want to believe that you’ve enjoyed our little game and join us in our next community game :3
Please feel free to discuss anything else considering our event if you’d like to. We want to gather as many notes as possible and evaluate all concerns so the next event will be truly close to perfection and even more enjoyable than the last one, which is our main motivation with all of our community events in which we spent our time, our money and our will to create something awesome for all of you to enjoy.
Final notes
Everything I stated above is my own observation which might not match what you think of it, which is perfectly normal and expected. I also do not believe that I’m always right, which is why I created a poll in which you can vote if you’d like to see something like this organized in the future, with much better rules in-place.
All in all I think that the event, despite of poor execution did work to some satisfying degree, and it can definitely only get better in future iterations, but I don’t want to spend time, money and willings of all of us on something that is deemed as unwanted. Tell me SG, would you like to see something similar in the future? Is there anything important you’d want to add? Positive feedback is much appreciated as well, it ensures us that what we’re doing has some point and that we should continue organizing something fun for all of you to enjoy.
Thanks for participation!
Wondering why Archi didn’t post this? Because he’s still on his daily thread limit :3
Psst, the giveaways won’t end for a while, so go grab them!
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