Ellusionist: The Event

[cosmicsecret]

It has been confirmed that this is a pre-release.

I´m really tempted to buy stuff but black friday is comming....

[Paul Middleton]

They're still down. I would like someone from Ellusionist to come here and explain why this keeps happening. And don't bullshit us about how interest and demand were a lot higher than expected and they didn't anticipate their site to crash. I think most of us here suspect E knew all along this was going to happen and they went forward anyway. In fact, I think they're using this as a ploy to generate traffic to their Facebook site......

I'll second Paul's comments above. It is really, really hard to predict traffic spikes, surges and the like. Also, from what I gather it doesn't appear it was anything to do with traffic - they said it was a database issue which is certainly nothing to do with traffic. More likely it's to do with the new design - it looks like they changed a lot in the back end.

Even a small site that doesn't get much traffic like ours (200-300 uniques a day currently) is prone to issues like this and it's quite feasible it's their hosting company that caused the issue.

[MJF]

This is why if you actually want to successfully do e-commerce, you need a dedicated server (you own it, your site is the only site running on it) and you have it co-located in a metropolitan area with some hefty pipes (bandwidth) and are within a few minutes driving distance to it. I guarantee you many of the distributors are on shared services servers, competing for resources with numerous other sites. The boxes they generally tend to use for those are pretty crappy to begin with and really can only handle a small amount of traffic.

Someone mentioned "the cloud"... Ellusionist and the others, from what I can tell, do NOT use the cloud. I've seen data intensive sites using "the cloud" and their resources are able to dynamically shrink and expand depending on need... plus most of these sites are using the same canned e-commerce software packages available to everyone else, which is why we always hear "our systems/software won't let us do that, or doesn't support it"...

I really need to get into selling decks... I could write my own e-commerce suite and just use Paypal for payments (or Amazon).

Throwing more techies isn't going to solve their problems if those techies are forced to work with the limited software and hardware that these shops use.

*Note... I'm sure not ALL shops use this setup, but many do.

[neongrey]

They're still down. I would like someone from Ellusionist to come here and explain why this keeps happening. And don't bullshit us about how interest and demand were a lot higher than expected and they didn't anticipate their site to crash. I think most of us here suspect E knew all along this was going to happen and they went forward anyway. In fact, I think they're using this as a ploy to generate traffic to their Facebook site......

I'll second Paul's comments above. It is really, really hard to predict traffic spikes, surges and the like. Also, from what I gather it doesn't appear it was anything to do with traffic - they said it was a database issue which is certainly nothing to do with traffic. More likely it's to do with the new design - it looks like they changed a lot in the back end.

Even a small site that doesn't get much traffic like ours (200-300 uniques a day currently) is prone to issues like this and it's quite feasible it's their hosting company that caused the issue.

Yeah and honestly directing people away from the site where people spend money to facebook is just nonsensical really. Web servers can be touchy, there's no reason to think malfeasance.

Anyway, I'm not a fan of the glamour shots as always, but I do like what I see, so I'll buy into it. It does look good.

[lumpyliew]

I'm just going to place an order at $50 ... Have to save up for V7 . Top priority and I hope DND will not do such things like Ellusionist

[Evan]

I ordered 2 of the Fathom decks and one of their new wristbands which look awesome.

[Naxx]

God damn it. Should not have ordered my Sultan Treausury earlier... I want the free LTD and wristband!

[Joe Hadsall]

Saw a number of comments, and I'll check in real quicklike. FYI: The best way to get a response from us is on our forum, Facebook or Twitter pages. We check those much more often.

Right at the start, I want to address a sickening, nauseating, full-of-crap suggestion from Hikeeba: TEAM E DOES NOT STAND FOR TEAM EDWARD. We're Team Jesse Pinkman all the way. So take that back, yo.

Seriously: As we reported on our Facebook page, database issues complicated things today. We make more money from directing people to our site to buy E products, not from directing people to look at Facebook, which includes ads that have nothing to do with buying our stuff. (Sometimes, the ads direct members to our competitors. The nerve!) If you waited to buy or had problems with your order, then we apologize.

Someone else in the thread noted that Fathom was in pre-release, and that is correct. They will be for actual sale during this pre-sale. Because they are actual objects, they absolutely qualify as a shippable order. Our policy about giving freebies with only shippable orders is older than most other magic companies on the Internet, so I don't foresee this changing like the Sultan Treasury details did. After the sale period, they will be unavailable until Nov. 23. The deck is unlimited, which means there are plenty for everyone, and anyone who buys one for more than $10 on eBay may be interested in my magic toaster that prints chosen cards on bread. For sale details, send US$1,000 to joe@youdontlikeyourmoneyverymuchdoyou.com.

If I was Jake, I'd add a TL;DR. But I'm not. I want you to read my wonderful words.

[max]

I don't understand the shipping cost policy at Ellusionist. I tried to order two decks some days ago and shipping them to Spain were insane (around $30) and now ordering 8 decks has a shipping rate of $17, much more understandable. Nevertheless, the shipping to USA is around $11 for the same 8 decks... Not sure where is the point of this....

[Russell]

... shipping them to Spain were insane (around $30) and now ordering 8 decks has a shipping rate of $17, much more understandable. Nevertheless, the shipping to USA is around $11 for the same 8 decks... Not sure where is the point of this....

Wait... Max, are you asking why shipping is cheaper in the USA?

[max]

... shipping them to Spain were insane (around $30) and now ordering 8 decks has a shipping rate of $17, much more understandable. Nevertheless, the shipping to USA is around $11 for the same 8 decks... Not sure where is the point of this....

Wait... Max, are you asking why shipping is cheaper in the USA?

No, no. The thing is that shipping abroad has changed along last days from the Ellusionist shop.

What I was saying is that $11 seems still expensive being in USA.

[neongrey]

The shopping cart there seems a bit janky in general really, I had to kick it a few times to keep it from charging me double.

[alric]

Yeah and honestly directing people away from the site where people spend money to facebook is just nonsensical really.

There are ulterior reasons why you would direct traffic to Facebook or blogs or forums. When you run an online business, its all about organic search engine optimization. In other words, if one types in "magic shop" in a Google search for instance, Ellusionist sure as hell wants their site to be at the top of the search results instead Theory11 or Blue Crown or anyone else, and then remain at the top.

To get this organic search priority, you have to cross-link as much other web content (such as Facebook) to your primary site as possible. This is how internet search engines rank search results. So if E is getting more hits and traffic on other cross-linked sites (such as their Facebook page, blogs, and forums like UC) than T11, D&D or BC, then they'll show up first in organic search results.

So E/T11/D&D hypes an event such as a deck release to have people flocking to their site, only to show you a clock counting down towards the actual release so you have to come back to them again at a later time. Then after E/T11/D&D whip up their fanboys into a frenzy, they unveil their super-hyped release event knowing full well their servers can't handle the volume that's sure to come. When their site goes predictably down, E/T11/D&D put up a page with a link encouraging their customers creating this surge in traffic to visit their Facebook site or blogs for updates. Their frustrated customers are pissed so they take to forums like UC to talk or complain about E/T11/D&D. That's fine with them because all of this is to their benefit because it helps optimize their organic search engine priority. Even if its at the expense of the convenience of their customers.

So its not non-sensical to direct people away from your pay site to places such as Facebook or UC, you are actually enhancing your organic search priority doing this, and again, this is the key to online commerce. We're the idiots for sitting here and wondering why E or T11 or D&D or BC always does this to us, one "botched" release after another, while they're probably laughing at us and patting themselves on the back for being such marketing "geniuses".

[Evan]

I don't understand the shipping cost policy at Ellusionist. I tried to order two decks some days ago and shipping them to Spain were insane (around $30) and now ordering 8 decks has a shipping rate of $17, much more understandable. Nevertheless, the shipping to USA is around $11 for the same 8 decks... Not sure where is the point of this....

They were having problems with their shipping prices recently, and they fixed them now.

[Xntrix]

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but our new site launch had less to do with conspiracies then whether or not Bryll Cream paid Lee Harvey Oswald to do the deed after JFK switched from their hair product to California Poppy Oil. In case you were wondering - they didn't.

As the guy actually in charge of SEO, sentiment and all those other acronyms and buzzwords we marketing guys use - I can tell you that increasing our SERP ranking had absolutely nothing to do with the site launch. I'm good at my job - we're already number one result for 85% of our keywords, and top 8 for the remainder. That has more to do with keyword positioning strategy and adwords spend then it does anything else. Any SEO impact we receive from Facebook is purely coincidental - basically just icing on the cake, it doesn't fall into our SEO strategy at all, otherwise every post we write would have a link back to the site. Facebook is used as a marketing tool - to spread our message, and an engagement tool - so we can receive feedback and gauge sentiment. There endeth the conspiracy.

The launch yesterday was a comedy of errors. It was our intention to launch as soon as that counter hit zero - and I'd brought this up in meetings every day for the previous week - that if that counter hit zero and we weren't ready, we'd look liek right pillocks standing there with our todgers in hand. And.. we did. Yep - we're on the cloud. We can add as much memory to our stack as we want with the click of a button, however - we can only allow one write pathway to our database - with multiple write pathways data gets overwritten and best case scenario, people don't receive their orders. Worst case - we corrupt our database something shocking, crash and then have to spend six months trawling code line by line to find the errors, a la Demonoid.

So causes for yesterday's delays; when we updated our DNS from our Staging Server to our Live Server (still with a Countdown splash spage) we found that our host had copied across the wrong database - our Development database, rather than the site we'd spent the last 6 months updating. Fail. So that meant a rollback and re-import. We then had SSL errors, because our Staging Database has been on an IP address rather than an A Name, the certificates would not resolve. Back to our Host to fix. We then had caching errors - which meant a ridiculously slow site speed as our memcache continued crashing - so the entire page was being loaded to each connection individually, rather than running off a server cached file. We then had product indexing problems. Cart caching problems again (which was doubling the subtotal of peoples orders... oops) and the list went on. Despite us testing thoroughly over the past week on our staging server, the proverbial hit the fan in the last 2 hours of release - much of which was on our host, but our customers don't interact with our host - they interact with us - so we ended up looking the fools. Trust us - there will be much chewing out of our Host's executive team in the coming days, but I can assure you - we did not experience all this just so we could bump our SEO up a couple of points.


Real issues then;
FATHOM PRE-RELEASE - If you buy Fathom, yes - your decks will ship with your order normally. You won't have to wait until the actual release on the 23rd for these to go out.
LTD PROMOTION - The actual details of this are; If your order value (after discounts, before shipping) us over $50 AND your cart weight is over 0.1 Ounces (so... something needs to be shipped to you) - an LTD deck is added to your cart Free.
SHIPPING - We believe this to be fixed. There was a problem when we initially 'released' Treasury, that for some reason USPS were not reporting our Negotiated Account Prices, and that they limited the options to the most expensive (Priority instead of First Class or something...) Honestly - we've got no idea how this happened - we've refunded the excess shipping to those people who let us know about it, and it's working again now (apparently).
DANIEL MADISON - Himself is now on board as an official Team Ellusionist member, as both an artist and part of our top-brass creative team. I believe T11 own the rights to Players - so if there are more coming (like Players 'Titanium' or whatever) then they'll be released through them. We've used d+M in a couple of projects recently - but that was because of the friendship that exists between Daniel and Peter McKinnon, rather than because he was 'working with us.' I haven't read Daniel's contract myself, but from what I gather - he's now exclusive with Ellusionist (and dm.co.uk) and what i can say for sure - is he's part of the actual business operations of Ellusionist from here on in, he's not just a beardy magic man.

TL;DR (yes, Joe)
1. No Conspiracy, just a perfect excrement storm of Host ineptitude.
2. We had every intention of releasing as soon as clock hit zero - see point 1.
3. Fathom is shipping with orders. LTD promotion is staying as is. ONLY CHANGE TO BOTH - we're extending Promotion until Midnight EST Saturday (night).
4. Shipping prices appear to be fixed - any problems, don't order, just shoot our support team a message and we'll check 'er out. (ellusionist.com/contacts)
5. Daniel Madison is now officially, exclusively part of Team Ellusionist. Players aren't ours.
6. Fathom is the first in our Origin series. Expect more awesomeness next year on this front.
7. I'm not actually sure what hair product JFK used - but whatever it was, IT WAS AWESOME.

Anything I've missed, has probably been done on purpose in order not to let you in on our nefarious plans. World Domination FTW.

-Jake

[hikeeba]

According to then 19-year old intern Mimi Alford, JFK was obsessed with his hair. He let her administer his daily hair treatment, insisting on products only from Frances Fox and on a brush, not a comb.

[CBJ]

Welcome Jake!

I guess from a customer standpoint it's just insanely frustrating. We all make sure we're online a the correct time, and then er have to wait another hour or 2. It brings back horrible memories of the Red Artifice, and the white Monarch release from T11.

I'm extremely happy that you stopped by to let us know what happened, it does put us at ease. It's very appreciated.. Thanks!

so.. on a side note. Is there any way to get pic of the Fathom deck that aren't blurry?
Oh.. and I was told once that E will never release another "Bicycle" branded deck.. is this true?

CBJ

[[Gambit]]

FATHOM PRE-RELEASE - If you buy Fathom, yes - your decks will ship with your order normally. You won't have to wait until the actual release on the 23rd for these to go out.

I just received my UPS shipping notification, so unless the bracelet weighs 2 lbs, my decks of fathom cards are included in this shipment.

[Xntrix]

I'm extremely happy that you stopped by to let us know what happened, it does put us at ease. It's very appreciated.. Thanks!

so.. on a side note. Is there any way to get pic of the Fathom deck that aren't blurry?
Oh.. and I was told once that E will never release another "Bicycle" branded deck.. is this true?

CBJ

No worries. Always happy to jump in. Pics for Fathom that aren't under water will be up on our Facebook & Instagram shortly - and I'll shoot a few to 52Cartes (and if you hook me up with your email - I'll send some your way too).

As for the second point, Never say Never... but yeah, Never. Another "USPCC" brand deck is not out of the question though. We know how desperately you guys want a Black deck version of Ramblers...

-Jake

[hikeeba]

FATHOM PRE-RELEASE - If you buy Fathom, yes - your decks will ship with your order normally. You won't have to wait until the actual release on the 23rd for these to go out.

I just received my UPS shipping notification, so unless the bracelet weighs 2 lbs, my decks of fathom cards are included in this shipment.

Are you sure you didn't get the bracelet powered by the D-cell batteries?

[CBJ]

I'm extremely happy that you stopped by to let us know what happened, it does put us at ease. It's very appreciated.. Thanks!

so.. on a side note. Is there any way to get pic of the Fathom deck that aren't blurry?
Oh.. and I was told once that E will never release another "Bicycle" branded deck.. is this true?

CBJ

No worries. Always happy to jump in. Pics for Fathom that aren't under water will be up on our Facebook & Instagram shortly - and I'll shoot a few to 52Cartes (and if you hook me up with your email - I'll send some your way too).

As for the second point, Never say Never... but yeah, Never. Another "USPCC" brand deck is not out of the question though. We know how desperately you guys want a Black deck version of Ramblers...

-Jake

I'm sending you a PM with my e-mail address.

On the topic of another brand deck... A nice Ellusionist Bee deck would be awesome... and a Ghost Tally-Ho!

CBJ

[[Gambit]]

Are you sure you didn't get the bracelet powered by the D-cell batteries?

The disclaimer on my bracelet actually said that car battery power source was sold separately, so I'm still in the clear on this point. Thanks for the sentiment though!

[MagikFingerz]

and a Ghost Tally-Ho!

CBJ

This is so overdue. I needz it

PS. Thanks Jake, good to have you on the forum again!

[alric]

I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy....Anything I've missed, has probably been done on purpose in order not to let you in on our nefarious plans. World Domination FTW.

-Jake

lol. At the very least I appreciate that some of the Ellusioonist folk have come on our boards to provide an explanation, which is more than what I can say for other companies. Now do I completely buy the explanations? Most, but not all. Let's just say everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and I also do love a good conspiracy theory.

Having said that, this kind of $h!t just keeps on happening with major releases (as in, every f*cking time), and not with just E, but all the other usual suspects as well. I appreciate your thorough technical explanation of your SEO strategies, but the bottom line is that these shenanigans do bump up your organic search priority, so you guys may not be as heart-broken about these "botches" as we're led to believe (you guys are at the top result for 85% of your keywords and I assume you want to continue to stay at the top, so every little bit helps). You guys (E, T11, D&D, BC, etc..) are apparently married to your marketing strategies (overy-hype, blurry pictures, etc..) probably because it works and we continue to shovel money your way. I get that at the end of the day its about the bottom line, not our convenience or shopping experience, so it is what it is.

Btw, JFK's hair product of choice was Marilyn Monroe's hand cream - who knew it worked so well?

[walrus]

JFK was addicted to speed and painkillers. He was very much doped during the cuban missle crisis. He had his hand on the Nuke button while he was as high as finger of magic on a Saturday night.

On topic, E has produced some of my favorite decks. I also get a lot of mileage out of a # of their tricks like Smiley and jumpink. Having said that, I just do not get this wristband thing. Seems impractical and I would have no idea what to do with it. Seems like a bit of a let down for a relaunch. I do like the # of unlimited decks they have been releasing as of late.

[alric]

That bracelet is aimed at E's target demographic - boys/men in their teens to early 20's.....

[walrus]

That bracelet is aimed at E's target demographic - boys/men in their teens to early 20's.....

What are you trying to say, I'm unhip and old?

[alric]

ARE you unhip and old? Did you like the bracelet? Did you order one?

[DelMagic]

As for the second point, Never say Never... but yeah, Never. Another "USPCC" brand deck is not out of the question though. We know how desperately you guys want a Black deck version of Ramblers...

-Jake

We'd settle for the Ghost Tally Ho that has had our interest piqued for quite some time.

[Xntrix]

That bracelet is aimed at E's target demographic - boys/men in their teens to early 20's.....

Exactly. We know better than anyone else that at the end of the day, it's a light-up rubber wristband. We just thought they were cooler than an oversized-deck seal sticker... or something. It's just a line of merchandise we decided we wanted to add - and they do look pretty freaking sweet at night. If you're in your twenties and you frequent dark rooms of all sorts - then they're excellent at attracting attention. Did we make such a hype-storm over our release to sell these? No - but we couldn't deny that d+M picture on the homepage looked incredible with our new site, so we decided to launch these as well.

You are correct - we use virtually the same marketing strategy with every release because - it works. Plain and simple. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. What we would LOVE - is for a seamless release though. If we could have a release where the countdown reaches zero, people could navigate to the products they want, have a look around and load up their cart - and do so quickly, that would be awesome. And that's always the plan, but unfortunately never the result. If things take forever to load, then customers will get just what they know they want (or need - to qualify for a promotion) and then get the hell out. No extra spending. No impulse buys. Not a great experience. All equals less money for us. And that doesn't make us happy. That could be the difference between having our next staff summit in the Bahamas, or just at Brad's house (seriously).

CBJ, Del, Fingerz - Can't promise anything - A) Because USPC Legal have been notoriously difficult with anything that has their branding of any sort over the last year - so much so that both Ultragaff and Regular Gaff are being discontinued/redesigned despite the previous promise to 'continue producing artwork that has already been approved', and B) it'd probably throw a spanner in the works of all the mysterious hype I'd be putting together for it.

-Jake