The Good
We dropped the first Holo packs of Series 2 yesterday and the drop had some highs and lows. 2,300+ packs sold in minutes injecting 27 new Legendary plays into the ecosystem.
Not everything went as planned though.
What Happened
As some had suspected, our technical investigation showed us that the cookies from the first test of the queue drop process on Friday evening were allowing some people to proceed to the pack “BUY NOW” button without joining the Saturday queue.
This queue had a completely unique identifier compared to Friday night's line, and we had no reason to suspect that Friday’s queue would impact Saturday’s at all.
What actually happened was that the queue provider we worked with to set this system did not check the identifier we expected to be checked. It correctly checked that the user was a valid Top Shot user, but it did not check specifically the Holo Icon drop on the date in question.
Here’s a simple analogy: You go to a dope nightclub on Friday and get your wrist stamped. On Saturday night, you go back to the club and instead of checking to see if you have the right stamp, the bouncer sees you have *a* stamp and you’re allowed in. The check is on a valid thing, but doesn’t validate the right thing.
This is not what we meant to happen, we now know why it happened, and it will not happen again.
Learnings & Commitments
We owe you an apology for not following through on what we said was going to happen. We are sorry. Our drop had a flaw and our communications were unclear and inaccurate along the way. We respect you, your time, your feedback, and your collections and this was not the best way to show that.
Our commitment: To communicate more. Communicate more clearly. Communicate more detail. We also commit to fixing this problem. We will not drop another pack in this manner, using a queue system, until this issue is completely fixed.
We thought there could be less demand with price change and there wasn’t. 25,000 people lined up for this drop. This means Legendary drops will continue to be in high demand, with a small number of collectors being able to access them.
Our commitment: We will continue exploring ways to make the pack drop process fair. There is no single solution to this. We’ll need to use multiple tactics to keep scarcity modelled for the economy, but will also need to find ways to get Moments into peoples' hands.
We have a robust testing environment that lets us test things extensively, but testing internally can only take us so far in product and feature validation. Even with extensive internal testing, we were unable to replicate this specific set of conditions.
Our commitment: To improve our testing environments further to catch issues that are closer to live scenarios.
A Word on the Beta
We would never get real signaling on NBA Top Shot without the beta being on-chain. This means there are going to be some complexities that are truly unprecedented: We don’t have the benefit of others paving the path here, and that unfortunately impacts our collectors’ experiences from time to time.
Your continued patience during this process is appreciated by us personally. We are humans who want to make this product great for you and we talk every day about fairness, delivering value to collectors, and being transparent.
How Can My Voice Be Heard?
If you have an idea of how we could do better in the future: Share your idea on nbatopshot.featureupvote.com to submit your feedback. We check there constantly.
If you have an issue that needs our attention: We ask that you contacthttps://hoo.ps/support if you have an issue that needs to be resolved to make sure we can track tickets.
Thanks as always for your patience while we all (you and us) create a new industry that will change fandom forever.
Yours in Hoops,
Caty
