DragonSoul wrote:Um, question...
According to Mike's email "I will be announcing the first 12 winners of both "promo decks" tomorrow night. I have already downloaded the first 300 pledges". Yet the site is currently showing 30 backers for Venexiana, 14 for Brimstone, 11 for Can-eh-diana, 49 for the Good deck. That's 104.
So, with all of the folks saying they got multiple notifications of successful pledges (because they tried more than once) does that mean there are pledges being counted more than once or are there people who got through but aren't showing up as backers?
I'll pick that one off since it's the last one here: I got the numbers wrong: we took more than 150 pledges from 300+ backers out of 400-something registered users in the first hour of it actually working - which was split into three pieces while I reset the payment connectors two or three times. A little over $4000 in pledges from people that were hardy enough to press on in that mess that the vendor said was ready two weeks ago and we beat with hammers until it was black and blue.
There will be 6 winners announced, when I have the time to review the pledges. It doesn't matter if they keep their pledges or not, they were hardy enough to put up with the mess and pledge.
There will be at least 50 Early Bird rewards added to the Venexiana Dark and "Good and Evil" decks projects. Gambler's Warehouse's "Brimstone" is all limited editions, so I can't expect them to just chunk another 50 decks out for a discount, they already lowered the price $2 per deck right before we started. That's where the problems began: something in the code is messing up the payments connector when the project is edited. Obviously, that's something you have to be able to do and something we hadn't tried during beta testing, but of course in hindsight we should have.
Everybody who is registered and made a pledge will get a little reward just for putting up with the problems, I can't say exactly what just yet because I haven't gotten permission to give a couple hundred of them away, but I'm fairly certain people will be pleased to have these.
We identified a half dozen major problems that just didn't show up during testing because they all involved live payments processing, not to mention that at the last minute we had to switch off PayPal because after 6 weeks of showing "Approved" on their website it now shows "Needs more information" as of yesterday. It doesn't help when a vendor has a maze of walls around their technical support and finally someone that doesn't speak English (much) calls and can't understand what I'm saying. I mean, heck - I'm a southern boy and we do talk funny, but I can speak in just about any dialect - except Arabic, and I just never needed that one. Live and learn, as they say.
After having been a coder for 20 years before I have now put 20+ years in with various branches of the government doing cyber security, I know what a mess you can make out of code by making major changes.
Beside the point, but I feel sorry for their programming staff this morning, as if I don't have egg on my face. CrowdEngine is a good company, they will get things fixed, and I'm sure after talking to their CEO things are going to be done a little more carefully and a little better tested before they push code from the 'code staging' server that only I saw into production. Again, kind of beside the point and I'm not trying to make excuses here. My fault, I wear the 'badge' and I accept the blame.
People that have already pledged will get the correct rewards even though the outbound messages were wrong. We had already tested that and fixed it one time, so some last minute change reintroduced that bug into the code (again). The problem with PayPal will go away as soon as I show them my receipts for an hour of time online, I can assure you. Somehow between us testing 'live fire' on Thursday and Friday when we went to open the first time their status page for our account went from "Approved" to "Need more information", even though I provided every single thing they asked for back about June 20th and it's been working in sandbox mode for more than six weeks.
Also, as I already announced, at least 50 Early Bird decks will be added back to the Venexiana Dark and Good & Evil decks campaigns. I can't expect Phil's Can-eh-diana project or Gambler's Warehouse's Brimstone LE decks to just sprout wings, although they did lower the price by $2 per deck - at the last minute. That's when we started noticing problems: about 15 minutes before launch time both GW and Venexiana Dark's funding connectors were broken. It has something to do with editing the project after it was approved, but again - that's a fundamental thing for crowd-sourcing or funding: being able to modify the tiers, add things, add pictures, etc. Obviously, another thing that wasn't adequately tested during the six weeks we did everything but slice and dice the code - or so we thought.
Again, hindsight is always 20-20, but I should have known better with my computer background than letting anything at all be changed in that last week. I surely do now!
Once I have a way forward and timetable from the software vendor and permission to announce that free reward for anyone that put up with the mess last night - or the night before - I'll publish it both here and by way of MailChimp. Honestly, that's a fantastic piece of software if you've never used it, makes everything look so polished and professional that if I could quit from running off at the mouth those notifications would all be golden.
Timetable is part of that obviously, I fully expect to be back up and running in a few days, but this time we're going to assault the code with Gatling guns and until I can throw a hammer at it and all I here is a nice solid ring, we won't be trying to open again. When that occurs, you will hear it here first, as always. Sorry I haven't been more responsive, but I've had a few emails and nastygrams to respond to this morning. The fact that my wife could have us both laughing to the point of tears this morning speaks volumes for our resilience. There's not one damn thing funny about it, especially to those of you that have looked forward to it as much as most of you have. I even see a pledge from VJose32 in there, so that tells me something. I'm not about to throw my arms up and scream - already did that.
I know I didn't address a lot of specific questions, but frankly, it's much easier for me to punt another MailChimp message than it is to try to resolve each individual issue. I'm not a hands-off CEO, I'm right here - although - as I noted, I've been just a little busy for the past two days. This board will remain free as it always has been, that's for certain. I hope everyone can tolerate a couple more days before they have their pledges in for Venexiana Dark decks and the others, and will appreciate the fact that as we've always maintained: we're "Passionate About Playing Cards".
Who was that guy that just ran by with the silver stake? Oh, wrong movie...
