Due to him being restricted by SG's anti-spam measures and being unable to post a thread, I am posting on the behalf of Archi, as a co-organizer of the event.

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!