An Update on Challenges
What’s up, NBA Top Shot community!
We know you’ve had some questions about the recent number of concurrent challenges, so we’re sharing some insight below.
Challenge philosophy
We initially created challenges to reward the individuals in our community who set out to build robust collections. When there’s a new drop, we like to celebrate those who make a point of going out and collecting them all. What better way to do this than with special Moments, never to be sold in packs?
How do we pick challenge rewards?
Whether it’s with a killer crossover from a future Hall of Famer, a record-setting jumper from the reigning two-time MVP, or a thunderous slam from a prodigious rookie, challenge rewards are a great way to give back to our most passionate collectors.
As we build out our sets, we’re mindful of earmarking particularly memorable Moments as potential Rewards. If we can set aside an appealing Reward without compromising the set itself, we build out a challenge that gives avid collectors something worthwhile to chase without stealing the thunder of the main set.
Why join challenges?
Challenge rewards are designed to be epic, so if you’re an avid collector interested in owning the best of the best Moments from NBA history, challenges are a great place to start. These Moments are never sold in packs, making them inherently harder to acquire and more valuable to the community. Also, these Moments are necessary additions for those interested in completing sets.
Challenges aren’t for everyone
Challenges are a fun way to keep the community engaged, but given that some are less accessible than others, they’re not for everyone. Having more challenges, with varying levels of accessibility, means collectors have more choices about which ones they will participate in and which ones they will skip.
Most challenges are tied to the release of new Limited Edition Moments. Due to Marketplace issues related to an influx in demand, we started to run challenges over longer periods of time. This led to several challenges overlapping. We generally like to space them out, but there are times when calendar realities take priority.
What’s the hold up?
When a challenge expires, we have a system that calculates all the eligible collectors who have completed the challenge. Sometimes, the system doesn’t catch them all. We’ve had scenarios where collectors purchase their last challenge requirement right at the buzzer but don't see it in their collection until right after the timer has expired. These situations are frustrating, and we’re doing our best to capture these unfortunate cases as soon as we discover them. Our current solve requires some manual intervention before we can safely add these accounts to the list of collectors who completed the challenge.
It is also the main reason why we keep these Challenge Rewards as a CC for a week. With any potential edge case, we’d like to award the collector with their rightful reward, as long as we can validate they completed the challenge on time.
Help us improve the process
We are continuing to explore different levels of challenges and learning every step of the way.
We always welcome feedback. If you have ideas on how to improve our challenges, please offer constructive feedback here.
