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PD -> RE: =AQ= 2023 Summer Season of Giving (9/1/2023 9:21:16)
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Now for the retrospective...
First of all: The Token Tracker has been updated with the numbers from the last day. I apologize for the delay but there was an unprecedented amount of activity preventing Wayback from indexing the data in a timely fashion.
Second of all another round of thanks to the entire community for an unprecedented performance! It'll be really hard to top this year but who knows, maybe we have it in us to do it again!
Now for some fun facts:
The previous record for donations was 21,185,000 tokens from 2020 [Veywild]. We completely obliterated this record!
The last day performance this year was the best single-day performance ever, going from 23 million to 36 million, contributing to 36% of the overall pool.
The top 5 donators contributed to ~37.8% of the overall pool.
Assuming that people bought packages from the most efficient tier ($250 for 200k tokens), this contest donated ~$45,035.4375 worth of tokens (total pool / 200,000 * 250).
And now for some commentary:
The cutoffs: While the cutoffs this year were higher than they were last year while having double the winners for the top cut, I think it's fair to say that the true "buy in" was much lower than in previous years due to the sheer velocity of token distributions. I didn't personally keep track of how many tokens I farmed and received over the course of the contest but I personally started out the contest with ~216k tokens in my vault and ended with ~180k. Since I donated 251k my guestimate is that I'd received and farmed ~215k tokens. Thus I myself only really "spent" 38k tokens for the top cut. Others were likely in the same situation of being heavily subsidized in their quest to be at the top. For those who spent nearly a same amount and did not win a top prize, this might be a little more heartening to hear. For those who did not go all in or even try at all, you're likely sitting on a mountain of freely-gifted Z-tokens and probably won't need to buy any more for a very long time if ever.
I think given the levels of enthusiasm that community showed it was capable of, another conversation could be had around adding yet more top cut slots. Perhaps we could expand it from 50 -> 60/75 for the upcoming Winter Contests or next years' Summer Contest. Despite our record performance, I don't think we've hit our optimal balance between the demand for winning an item vs the supply of winners to be awarded. Doubling the number of winners this year not only did not decrease the cutoffs significantly (purportedly last year's T25 cutoff was 280k vs this year's 285k) but one could even make the argument that the expansion actually made the contest much more competitive. When you increase the number of winners, more people will come in when they were previously discouraged from doing so.
The prize structure: I think it's fair to say that most people have come away with this contest very satisfied. While we likely haven't achieved the happy balance like the above point yet, I'm hoping that we'll continue to do it this way around going forward and also for the Winter Contests. Perhaps the upcoming Gold Contests could also have a similar structure of prizes.
Community suggestions: My big question around this point is what direction the staff will go. I think one of the reasons that the contests post-2019 have been as active as they are is because of the community's ability to input suggestions. After all, people want items that fit to their needs/wants. Yet my concerns around this are several in that this inevitably causes discussions about who's suggestion to pick and for what reason. Several people approached me asking me to support various suggestions (to which I wanted no part of) and I only ever put suggestions out there to have other people bounce ideas off of or get inspired by, never intending them to be taken seriously or even demand them to be implemented. Given that contests now occupy 4/12 months (plus 2 weeks to implement the contest prizes) of the year contests are becoming an ever more normalized part of the game.
There are valid discussions about why someone's idea should be taken over another but I am increasingly concerned about the state of the game where it is being increasingly premium-driven and the ability of the staff to execute on a desired technical-creative direction. With an increasing part of the game becoming premium/rotational we are going in a much more fraught direction. While it hasn't completely boiled over yet there have already been a few bad episodes of this dynamic. Of course this is the result of the game's state of affairs and this is one of the few paths that it can take to be a sustainable product given the dynamics of it all. My only hope here is that the increasingly stakeholder-dependent nature of product development doesn't become primary over fixing the technical-logistical issues that the game has.
A subpoint, but one way to reduce said stakeholder dependency issue is to think about advertisers. A long time ago Ballywho used to play 3rd party ads but not anymore. I'm not sure why this isn't the case anymore but perhaps it might be a good time to start thinking about bringing in advertisers and think about reducing the need for certain keep-the-lights-on releases like golden giftboxes and contests.
Being proactive about the Winter Contest: Now I've already said this as have others, but with the end of the Summer Contest comes the Winter Contest in a few months and we are demanding that the Gold contest's donation timer be fixed or removed. Or give us better donating options (1b or 500m options). I'm not really looking forward to the Gold Contest given the previous years' experiences. Hopefully since we've said it enough times now the staff will be more proactive about it.
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