The Land Debacle

Guys, don’t blame the splinterland team for what happened the other day. During the incident, I was on discord and read all the enraged messages by the players. I don’t know if they were the vocal minority or representative of how the player base feels, but I just want to justify the actions of what the team did.

I know some disliked how they split it such that most of the plots, 27000 of the 30000, were sold via the lottery, and people might not be willing to pool together such a larger amount of money to one person. This made it so a large majority of the land was not accessible to most of the player base.

I think that they intended to reward those who are willing to contribute large amounts of money, but what it instead did was alienate those who were not social or trusting enough to join a pool.

Maybe they had also intended to decrease the audience who would attend the pre-sale when it went live, which did not work bring me to my next point.

The entire API crashing during the Pre-sale. I was there during the Pre-sale, waiting a few minutes before watching the clock tick down, along with many others. And when the timer reached 0, my browser couldn’t even load the pre-sale page for a while, and when it did, it couldn’t even load my account, saying that I didn’t have enough DEC to buy the land.

I know I’m probably a much smaller player than whoever is reading this, and your failure to buy the plots probably hurt you more than it hurt me, but I can at least sympathise somewhat with your anger.

They definitely didn’t expect as big of an audience as there was, apparent from they discord, where they suspect that a DDoS might have happened. There was probably a better way in which they could have carried out the Pre-sale, but I feel that the team shouldn’t be blamed too much.

They already prepared for a large amount of the player base to show up, as they have said in the discord, but we clearly far exceeded their expectations, completely crashing the API. Some of the webpages went down with a “down for maintenance” sign. I couldn’t even access my account as seen in the photo.

I feel that we can classify the cause of this event to be under “unforeseen circumstances”, and therefore, I feel that some anger is justified, since they could have handled this land Pre-sale better, the extent that I saw in the discord chat was not.

How do you think they should have handled the Pre-sale? Have all of it be the lottery style like they did for the 27000 plots, or another method?

-lzh1703