Author's note - "Of course I am not Shane. This is just my imagination and assumptions of what Shane would confess / declare after the UAE launch in Earth2.io."
I'll start this by apologizing to all of you who participated in the "UAE blood bath": the ones who managed to buy, the ones who didn't buy, the ones who used scripts and auto-clickers, and the ones who screamed "scam", once again. We, as a team, failed you all. Me, as your God, made you lose some of the faith.
We've hit more than $2M in revenue in less than 6 hours. We also lost weight and aged maybe 3 years in less than a week. It was an important milestone for us, an exercise, a test from which we (and mostly I) had so much to learn.
The vision remains the same. We still have one of the best MMOPG live, at the moment. But we need to fix a lot, and I, specifically, have learned my lessons.
Few words about the bots and auto-buying scripts
We've talked and promised we had systems in place to stop auto-buying bots & scripts. We even bragged about it so many times. We only looked for outside solutions and I disagreed on making hard rules in our platform to limit the impact of high traffic, high server requests and high frequency auto-buying. We had nothing for what hit us. Now, we have a lot of work to do to fix property distribution, freeze accounts, and a lot more that we don't even know about yet.
What we will do better with Iran and the other closed countries:
We will implement a basic tag management system for event tracking in our website. Google Analytics (GA) provides a wide spread solution of web tracking and with a basic implementation of their Data Layer. We can do it also by using other solutions, we can afford it. We will be able to properly measure:
- click events per user - to see how often users click the "buy buttons" and instead of subjectively deciding they used bots we will use actual data.
- basic user behavior - we will know exactly how many unique users are online during the countdown(s) and not be surprised that the traffic quadrupled. On top of this, we will known the metrics split by logged in users and not legged in users. On top of this, knowing the exact number of server requests needed for a purchase we could easily scale our infrastructure, so we won't get (that) surprised by the quadrupling.
- purchase funnel - we will know in real-time where users are bouncing in the purchase funnel and properly optimize those steps.
- user profiling, audience segmentation, revenue per user, revenue per visitor, and lots of interesting metrics that our future agency will love to use to properly target the whole Earth1 when we'll start advertising.
We can afford Google Analytics license for the first year only with the income from Predict, and the implementation with the income on Improvement Taxes we got yesterday.
We will have rules implemented in our platform, not put all our hopes and dreams (and your time and money) in the hands of a simple captcha. Here, I must confess it's 98.3% my fault. I just said "No" to everything:
- Maximum number of purchases per user per second(s). This way, bots will behave just like users, and we won't care what skills you have in using bots. Maximum 1 purchase request every 10 seconds per user. Same rule for everyone.
- Limit the login to one device (maybe 2). This way when the next "Black Friday" event will happen, we will discourage "farming" and have the "shopping experience" be a personal experience.
- Have automatic cooldowns every X minutes. This way the users will have time to plan, select tiles, do their art without adrenaline and frustration. Of course, everything above with proper transactional messaging in the front end ("cool down countdown", etc.)
- Have a setting in "Settings" where the user can select if they want to eliminate from the purchase the overlapping tiles. This way more players will be able to buy without getting the "Invalid property" error message. Our platform would automatically remove the overlapping tiles and process the transaction with remaining tiles. Of course, we can get creative and give also the possibility to set a minimum amount of tiles to get trough.
We will have a more firm and well thought rollback plan. We've been here before, in January, when bugs were exploited by scammers. An instant rollback process will save us a lot of time in "investigating" and a lot of money in the law suits we will get when we will start frizzing accounts because "we think" bots were used, but have no actual proof.
We will have a pre-launch session where users will have to add funds to their accounts and remove the option to buy tiles directly with Credit Card. This way we will save a lot of time in processing support tickets for payments that went trough without purchases.
I (we) will just quit Discord and implement proper in-platform and via email official communication channels. This way, no matter the hiccups, we will keep it all professional.
I will buy Catalin a coffee using the button bellow.
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