After initial hiccups involving site access which Earth2 described as 'suspicious activity targeting the earth2.io website during the first hour', the EPL launch went better than most feared. Nightmares of the UAE crash came haunting when users were unable to access their profiles/ properties as they queued up to buy their desired EPLs. However within the hour the E2 team managed to bring the site on-track as people rushed to grab their EPLs.
As per Earth2's announcement over 10,000 EPLs were sold in the following hour once users could access after the launch. That number would have likely climbed much higher through today.
It was pleasant to see the EPL launch go smoother relatively, and from a process perspective this could be described as one of their best feature launches - from a user experience perspective. Many users were able to get their desired EPLs and rather seemed happy with their purchases. The 2-minute cooldown seems to have helped towards this. The utility of the feature itself (EPLs) remains to be seen in future, however as per Shane they have plans and the EPLs will aid discoverability and help in teleportation.
Overall, this launch seems to have brought some joy to Earth2 users after a long time as they proudly flexed their EPLs on social media and in E2O discord. For this we congratulate the Earth2 team and we hope that this experience is carried forward to future launches.
E2News secured its own EPLs - /e2news and /e2-news. We cant be more happier!
EPL Trading
As of now trading standalone EPLs is not possible, however that didn't stop some users to buy EPLs on single tiles so they can flip them easily. As the EPLs are attached to a property the only safe way to trade them currently is by trading the property itself. Some users were able to trade EPLs in this fashion. However, for other many users the value of the underlying property may have improved if they managed to secure some cool EPLs and may help them trade some properties in an otherwise slower property market off-late.
Round-2 starts tomorrow 1 pm UTC (Erroneously blocked words)
While we were aware that Earth2 maintained a list of blocked words, it was a mystery why users were unable to acquire certain generic words for example anything that had 'gold', however somehow 'platinum' was not on the block list and neither was 'silver' or 'iron'. Earth2 clarified this with below announcement
With that, E2News wishes luck to all the Earth2 users for EPL Round-2!