In a retrospective posted to Medium, Ember Sword detailed what exactly happened during its recent land sale at the end of May. The sale, which saw over 25,000 people try to access the land sale site, had a bumpy go of things, so the team is now looking back on the issues and detailing what they plan to do to mitigate the same problems next time.
Via the Medium post, the team looked back at the Solarwind Land Sale event which took place on May 27th. While many people were able to jump in and grab the digital land on offer, many others ran into technical problems which marred the experience. The team is analyzing the situation and provides some insight as to what went wrong and what they are planning to do for future updates and sales.
Firstly, the volumne of people hitting the server seemed to be more than it could handle, with the Ember Sword team stating that over 25,000 players assaulted the website at the outset.
"While our website performed well under the circumstances, the amount of pressure this caused led to 2 external services going down, as well as the block explorer. Although the Polygon side chain stayed operational throughout, the RPC endpoint went down due to the sheer amount of traffic."
As such, the Ember Sword developers state that this caused some other issues, such as map syncing to go down, muddling just how much the land up on offer was actually sold to that point. The team is still feeling the after-effects, stating that "some 300 or so plots to this day don't show their image on OpenSea and other marketing places."
Additionally, there seems to have been an issue with people trying to bypass the Ember Sword land sale website altogether, stating that as a result of the other technical issues, as well as this, it was just too "hard to keep track of in real time." Plots also seemed to sell out very quickly, and while only about 7.5% of the total land mass in the game world was available to buy up, this meant there was just not enough to go around with all of the people cramming into the queue to scoop up the plots.
"The process of preparing a land sale, even a small one, takes a lot of time. Despite this, we purposely limited ourselves to about 7.5% of the land available in the game world. A first time land sale, after all, is almost expected to have some problems, and now that we saw what to expect first hand, we’ll be ready to prevent what we can, and tackle the rest of them faster in the future."
The team is also commiting to improving communication with players and prospective buyers for future sales in te blockchain-fueled MMORPG, as well as improving the overall user experience. As far as people bypassing the site altogether, steps are being taken to ensure this is literally impossible in the future.
What lessons did we learn from the Solarwood land sale? How are we incorporating community feedback into sales going forward?The new episode of the podcast analyzing the land sale answers that and more. Listen here:https://t.co/EVxY2nPmDM pic.twitter.com/Oihusn8Z4P
— Ember Sword (@PlayEmberSword) June 17, 2021
You can check out the full retrospective from the Ember Sword team on Medium. The Ember Sword team also took to their podcast to explain more fully, which you can check out in the Tweet embed above.
