Wave One, Day One. Thoughts From The Team and Next Steps
The team at Guardian HQ have completed their retrospective look at the activity that went down on Day One of the Wave One drop of our NFT Founder Sale. It was wild, and we learnt a lot!
We thought it’d be appropriate to share some key takeaways and messages that came out of it — both the good and the bad.
So… The Key Points!
1 . We encountered some issues!
As happens occasionally with these drops — we ran into a few different issues. Enough to keep our whole team busy for the whole day (and night).
The main point to understand here is that congested mainnet environments are always difficult to simulate in QA, so we will use Wave One as a valuable learning experience moving forward. That being said, in the interests of transparency, it’s worth highlighting our learnings, and some of the issues we identified.
These can largely be categorised into FIVE different groups:
- The Website: Some users weren’t able to access the website, running into error messages, or having 404 error messages upon loading/refreshing our landing page. The root cause we identified, was that spam refreshing of our website triggered our service provider to automatically IP ban offenders to ‘protect against an attack’.
- Failed Transactions: Some users lost gas funds in failed transactions. This happened for a few reasons. We clogged the network upon go-live, which saw the gas price rise from ~30 to around ~50 during the sale. This meant some users transactions were started but could not complete successfully. There was also a ~10 minute window where the default gas limits on purchasing were too low which we had to hotfix. There was also a ~1 hour window after Legendary Heroes sold out, where the front-end let users click “BUY” even though the website indicated no heroes were available, meaning those who didn’t realise, received transaction failures.
- Delayed Visibility of Heroes/Guilds in user’s collections: Some users reported successful blockchain transactions, but didnt’ see their assets appearing in their inventories/summoning tabs for periods of time. This is owing to a de-sync between our databases, which was not picked up during testing (again, difficult to simulate on mainnet).
- Users buying on the wrong Chain: Some users purchased on the testnet contract (potentially a cache issue which occurred for ~1 minute, for 7 transactions and $4,800 in lost funds). Some other users reported paying BNB to a Binance Smart Chain address when they were purchasing. Given we have never used BSC, this was an individual wallet usage error, affecting ~25 transactions and $1000 in lost funds).
- Accidental Mythic: Not an error, but when one of our developers was making a purchase on mainnet to ensure a hotfix was working, they unfortunately summoned a Mythic hero. We do not want our team to own Mythics, and we plan to raffle this off (more below).
We have solved the key issues, and we will use the learnings we gleaned from those slip-ups to ensure Wave Two has a better chance of running more smoothly!
2. Compensation
We have decided to compensate users who were affected as a result of some of the above issues:
We have decided to refund ALL gas from transaction failures that occurred as a result of our gas limit or frontend errors
Whilst none of the gas fees went to us, and it’s going to cost us gas fees to compensate users, we will refund lost gas for everyone who tried to buy but got a transaction failure due to the above reasons.
This totals roughly $25,000 and is our way of saying thank you for supporting the project. We will distribute directly to the affected wallets.
Please note: this action is a ONE-OFF. We do NOT plan to pay gas fees where it is caused by issues with the blockchain network and / or user error.
But hopefully moving to Immutable X in the future will make this point redundant!
We have decided to refund or compensate, with heroes from our developer pool, for transactions made to a testnet contract address
It is reported that there were a few minutes where users could purchase before the sale was live. This may have been an issue with cache/cookies in a specific scenario. We do not own the address those people interacted with — so those funds are lost.
We’ll give those users the choice of a full refund plus gas, or to mint their NFTs directly into the same wallet at a later date. Please let us know by messaging Nick in Discord ASAP with your preference. If we don’t hear from you we will assume you want the refund.
We do not plan to compensate for users interacting with the incorrect blockchain (e.g. Binance Smart Chain)
We have not found any explanation for why users interacted with BSC other than a user or wallet error. As a policy we do not plan to compensate for user error or 3rd party service wallet issues, in order to avoid setting an unsustainable precedent for the future. We want to give our sincere apologies for the buyers affected and hope that everyone is extra careful to make sure they are connected to Ethereum Mainnet for future waves.
We will conduct a MYTHIC raffle to giveaway a mythic hero
Exact details will follow, but our current plan is to give everyone who purchased a Legendary Hero in the founder sale a chance to win a FREE mythic hero. Each legendary summon purchase gets you 1 ticket to the draw (so 7500 tickets in total), and the winner will be given the Mythic once it is minted into Immutable X.
3— Enough of the bad, on to the good stuff!
Once things were fixed, we were relatively happy with the sale flow.
We were pleased to see:
- Over 2,000 players getting their hands on rare and exclusive Founder Sale assets.
- $75,000 in referral rewards distributed plus another $75,000 in discounts earned. Giving back to the community is vital.
- 1,829 people picking up Legendary Heroes, helping the allocation sell out in its entirety in only a few hours. No bot abuse!
- Importantly, we saw excellent and healthy distribution of Legendary Hero ownership — 782 people bought only 1 legendary Hero summon (43% of buyers), and 550 people bought 5 or less (85% of all buyers).
- 1,000 people grabbing Adventurer Guilds, 58 people purchasing a Warrior Guild, 9 Guardians snapping up a Legends Guild, and finally, 8 people nabbing the prestigious Mythic Guild.
- We’re about to tick over $3M USD in total Wave One sales, with further subsequent Waves looking to be as in demand as the first.
- We were (at our peak) the second most used smart contract on the entire Ethereum network that day. Crazy.
Whats next? When is Wave Two?
The first priority for the team is minting your NFTs into Immutable X, so that trading, selling and exchanging flows can kick-off.
In the interim, we will also be resolving the outstanding issues from the current sale, before we announce a date for the go-live of Wave Two.
Do you want to get involved?
Join more than 134,000 (!) other Guardians who have pre-registered:
- Sign-up your email on our website: www.guildofguardians.com
- Join our Discord channel to find out more about what we are up to!
- Follow our Twitter for spicy leaks and memes!
