November was a busy month on Top Shot. We unveiled a new set of rules around rookies, saw the excitement around Wemby and Chet-mania, introduced a fun Thanksgiving promo, dropped thousands of Trade Ticket packs, and so much more. As we enter the last month of 2023, we're excited to answer some of the top questions from last month. Let's dive in:
Will there be some pack drops in the evenings going forward? During NBA games would be fun. Drops during weekday business hours aren’t always that easy for some people to access.
Thanks for the feedback. We are actively looking into the data to determine which times or drop methods on Tuesdays work best for our community. You will continue to see us iterate with the time of drops to best serve times when our community is most available and able to attend.
Could you please describe exactly how the weighted draws work, what the weights are, and how the draw is done? What is a weighted airdrop exactly?
One of the big updates for the 2023-24 season has been weighted airdrops for collectors on the top of relevant Team and Player Leaderboards for each drop.
These airdrops have provided collectors who’ve locked Moments with consistent opportunities to win rewards every time their favorite players and teams receive new Moments.
The methodology around these weighted airdrops is straightforward. For every Top Shot Score point you have on a given leaderboard, you essentially have a raffle ticket to win the airdrop. The more points you have, the more raffle tickets you have. In recent Leaderboards, we’ve constrained majority of winners to be of only those in the top 1,000 of the respective board, meaning the total number of points (or raffle tickets) is limited to the total sum of Top Shot Score points locked by the collectors in the top 1,000 of that Team or Player Leaderboard.
If Hardware will be minted to /50 and Honors will be minted to /150, what happens for collectors who lock Series 4 Hardware and Honors Sets with regard to Set Rewards?
Collectors who lock the Series 4 Hardware or Honors Set will receive an airdrop of a different Legendary or Rare Set, respectively, during the 2023-2024 season. We will provide more specific details about which Set and when later in the season.
What’s the latest with regard to your promise to burn unreleased WNBA Moments
This summer, we shared that we would burn unreleased Moments from the WNBA after the season ended, with the exception of special serial numbers, which we would save. This is still our plan, and the burning will happen very soon.
We’ve seen some more Flash Challenges in recent weeks, but it’s not clear if there’s a long term plan around them. What’s the latest?
As we shared at the beginning of the season, we are developing a new way to engage with live NBA action using your Moments. We have expanded our play test around this new game -- Fast Break -- to a wider group of collectors. We can’t wait to share this new experience with the entire community, and we expect it to be ready for full rollout in 2024. There will still be room for Predictive Challenges and Flash Challenges in our product as well, albeit on a less frequent basis than in year's past.
If you’d like to be considered for early access to Fast Break, email mailbag@nbatopshot.com with the subject line “I WANT IN” and we’ll gradually add more collectors to our waitlist for testing.
Why has Top Shot exclusively focused on Rookies so far?
This rookie class has been one of the more memorable classes in years, and the Rookie Debuts present a unique opportunity to give many collectors the chance to rip a genuine grail like Wemby or Chet's Top Shot Debut, while still preserving scarcity of rookies to just one /4000 Common Rookie Moment from these players for the season, ensuring their Common Rookie Moments will always be special.
One decision we made this season was to prioritize a fuller distribution of these Rookie Moments upfront. As a result, collectors saw more Packs in the early weeks of the NBA season than you could expect to see later in the season, when Rare and Legendary mint counts kick in, making Packs harder to come by. The first Rare drop of the season is currently live as a pre-sale, so be sure to place an order today!
What's the status of the pack marketplace rollout? I'd like to be able to list my S1 Common Packs, among others I've been holding onto.
Series 1 Sets will be available to be listed in the Packs Marketplace by January at the latest. Other Packs from later series will be made available to be listed in early 2024 as well.
Will Fresh Threads be a closed set after the drops this week or should we expect more Fresh Threads Moments after the trade deadline?
The Fresh Threads Set will remain open for the foreseeable future as we wait to see what happens at the trade deadline. Should star players get moved between now and February, we’ll look to expand the Fresh Threads Set around then.
Thank you for reading this month's mailbag. There's a lot of exciting things in the works, and we can't wait to share even more with you next time.
