Less undermining, more being ignorant of. Hence why I asked for the opinions of knowledgeable folks like yourself. If it's a cost issue, couldn't another group crowd-fund the capital based on promises of a better infrastructure? Again, that probably sounds like a simplification, but I'm just curious if it's possible. Assuming the money is there, roughly how long would the process be to build it from the ground up?
Fair, sorry for the tone of my reply (this is why I start so many replies with "not to be an ass").
It's tough to say, largely because it's a very resource constricted problem. That said, I'll break it down as best as I can from a very coarse grained standpoint as a thought experiment.
First, let's assume cloud based hosting (AWS, Google, whatever) because that knocks out the infrastructure problems right out of the gate.
Second, let's assume you'll need a team of at least 4 engineers: probably 2 with back end experience, 1 with front end, and at least one full stack person. You'll also want someone reasonably competent in the product management and user experience space calling the shots in terms of features and usability (lest you get what we have now). It's a gamble to walk away from a $100k+ salary to work on something like this, so if you were to take the low end and call it $100k, that's $500k to have that team for a year as full time resources.
Third, you're going to have to break things down into milestones: if you try to deliver the entire thing up front you're almost guaranteed to go bust and/or get it wrong. The first iteration is going to require that you have your infrastructure set up as well (I'm only familiar with CloudFormation and it's not the friendliest technology in the world), so you need to account for some overhead there. You'll also need to have set up other tools like a version control system (Github).
I'd say the first milestone for a system like this is probably a good 4-5 month endeavor, and that's for a baseline product: simple UI, very basic card support, nothing as complex as paid memberships, packages, or trends. This would need to make a reasonable effort to take basic scalability into account (the way in which an increasing amount of load affects the system) since unlike a lot of other sites you have to start off with an enormous product catalog due to the number of cards in existence.
That said, your job is just starting at this point. Getting that first milestone live really means an open beta starts, and you give things time to bake in. At this point you also need to get users to use your site regularly to get any kind of meaningful data.
The second milestone would be a combination of fixing bugs in the beta and getting a membership system in place so you can make money (doesn't mean you need to turn it on yet; people may not be willing to pay for your product yet). This has different constraints in terms of security (you won't be storing credit card numbers, but you will have to integrate with a payment provider). Assume this second milestone is another 3 months, bringing us up to 8.
I'd say the third milestone should be focused on community feedback (assuming you've established a community at this point) to see what your users want most (and what they'd pay for). Assume it's probably going to take you another 4 months to deliver a feature set worthy of a monthly subscription fee. It's unlikely you could make an ecosystem like this 100% a subscription model because the interests of people vary so much, and inventory is a more important component of the system than anything else, which you won't get if the barrier to entry is too high.
Keep in mind that as you move through all of these milestones, usability testing should be a central player in the evolution of the product. Get early backers, community members, and even people who know nothing about the game using the site to see what's easy, what's unintuitive, and what's outright broken. You'll be surprised what people do in your site, it's often not how you were intending people to use it!
So, after that overly verbose summary, I'd say it's a year before you can make something people would pay for, it would require half a million dollars to get a full time team to work on it, and it would require enough popularity that you'd build a community to use it.
I'm sure people would make an argument that nothing that formal needs to be in place, but since you're creating an economy with its own currency and asking people to commit resources to that currency, I'd argue that you'll never gain the trust of people to do so unless your system is an actual business where professionals work full time to maintain it.
@purklefluff: I admit that I am not a long-time user, being registered on Puca since approximately October/November 2015. I never found Staples easy to come by, and if that was the case before, well then it seems I missed the Golden Age of Pucatrade. I primarely want stuff for casual decks and I actually happens to get them relatively easily, even since FS.
You actually raise a good point regarding the trading interface, which isn't as fonctionnal as the old one. I, for one, would have prefered they kept the old interface and simply add the features that were asked by users (package sending, langage/condition support, for example). If it ain't broken then don't fix it as they say.
You also have a point on the Powertraders problem, as I understand what you're explaining in your post from your past experience. However, it doesn't affect my trading experience as much as it seemed to affect yours. It's a shame that Puca has gone this far with the unpopular changes, but I personnaly still find this ressource useful for my trading needs.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"De potentia juvenis somniabat, nunc de Mundo somniat..."
I think its really come down to one large aspect that will inevitably hit any and all sources of cards either for cash selling/buying or trading. Competition.
Early on things like bounties (from what I could gather) were a relative rarity, cards got traded around slowly at first (due to a small population using the site to start) but eventually began to grow steadily in numbers and thusly the trade volume of a wide variety of cards, including staples were steady and people didn't have a terribly difficult time eventually getting said staples and such.
However as the growth of the user base continued rapidly, eventually the use of bounties became more and more prevalent, the effects on the overall value of the pucapoint began a slow downward spiral in part from how many points were now required in order to be able to offer up bounties to immediately get those staple cards that many people were inevitably after (once again the concept of being able to trade your lower value cards, or medium value cards for staple cards that they needed, eventually when everyone is trying to do this, the system collapses as trading begins to dry up of said staples compared to overall demand.)
What we are seeing now is a continued spiral upward in offered points via bounties for those that do have points trying desperately to be able to get rid of the points for stuff they actually need, no longer content with simply accumulating points without consistently or even slowly getting the staple cards they are after. And now with shops/businesses getting involved, the points offered are spiraling upward, inevitably causing many to get frustrated with the sheer amount they are having to offer to even get some of the cards (and thus the relative low value of pucapoints now as a result of how much would have to be offered in order to get to the front or close to the front of the line to get some of those staples.
I've seen this sort of thing many times in the past over the years. Looking at MTGO, looking at ebay, and other sources. For normal trading though this really is the ultimate progression of how a system like this would inevitably work. There are only so many people that are going to be looking for casual cards, or staple commons/uncommons or lower end rares and such that can allow someone to trade their "junk" for awesome stuff. That's why trading up inevitably tends to happen to some degree no matter what practically when trading in person. People aren't going to be willing to trade, say, a fetchland for a bunch of random stuff without either getting a premium for accepting the random stuff.
The point of something like pucatrade initially was supposed to be a medium for people to be able to trade more fairly and evenly by massively increasing the amount of people the cards could be traded to, and eventually received back from, without requiring the cards to come from the same person receiving the cards being sent.
That said, it is possible for the current spiral to be gotten out of. It will take some work in bringing the site back up to full functionality and to be made at least as convenient as it used to be, and presumably moreso once all of the old functionality is restored alongside all of the new upgrades that people were looking forward to.
Personally I felt the attempts to make a site like pucatrade look more "pretty" or "eye catching" were rather pointless, especially if it reduced the ease of use of the main point of the site in the first place. I would rather have a rather dull and boring looking site, that has the easiest and simplest setup to use for the purposes of the site in the first place (sending and receiving cards), than one that looks nicer but makes all that other stuff more difficult. To many sites and individuals rush into things like this, giving significant value potential to the visual upgrades when in fact most people who may use such sites could care less and end up actually getting annoyed by the changes because there was nothing wrong with the old system. Basically, take the old system, just add the mechanical trading upgrades and leave the rest of the visual stuff at the door.
Right now all the negative press, caused by the plethora of bugs and the problems with the ease of use, have caused people to back off from points accumulation as people are now trying to get even with the points they have previously accumulated in all trying to get the same general batch of most commonly sought after staples at the same time, causing the bounties to spiral upward and inevitably frustrating a large portion of the userbase who hadn't already cashed out as it were.
Its entirely possible for the site to get out of the current spiral downward that it is experiencing, if all the bugs get fixed and full functionality is restored and endorsements come back to the site things will begin to improve again, but the inevitable systemic problem of the majority of users hoping to trade low level stuff for high level stuff is not something that is going to go away, and bounties are only going to continue as an issue going forward.
We will have to see how things go, but the current prospects for the site I would say are at about 50/50 at the moment. I am hoping for the best, but I still worry that the systemic issues could still bring the site inevitably down in the long run. How long from now I could not say, but perhaps some big fix can be thought up in the meantime to resolve that issue, even if I cannot fathom exactly what that would be just yet.
I'm sure people would make an argument that nothing that formal needs to be in place, but since you're creating an economy with its own currency and asking people to commit resources to that currency, I'd argue that you'll never gain the trust of people to do so unless your system is an actual business where professionals work full time to maintain it.
I appreciate you breaking that all down. It definitely appears as though there would be a lot of moving parts.
Some good news after adding 200 cards to my want list have gotten trades for about 18,000 points today including some good cards on my want list for months like Sensei Diving Top and Chrome Mox. I agree with those above once the bounty bull***** started to get widespread things really slowed down. I also had in the last month before the FS multiple people sending PM's seeking trades for cards that were not even on my have list. Example I was searching for Through the Breach and other Mono Red Sneak cards and the guy was saying I can send cards but do you have Lili of the Veil or Goyf. Hell those were not even on my have list. People started to not trust the point system. I hope, really hope the site can recover.
I think its really come down to one large aspect that will inevitably hit any and all sources of cards either for cash selling/buying or trading. Competition.
Early on things like bounties (from what I could gather) were a relative rarity, cards got traded around slowly at first (due to a small population using the site to start) but eventually began to grow steadily in numbers and thusly the trade volume of a wide variety of cards, including staples were steady and people didn't have a terribly difficult time eventually getting said staples and such.
However as the growth of the user base continued rapidly, eventually the use of bounties became more and more prevalent, the effects on the overall value of the pucapoint began a slow downward spiral in part from how many points were now required in order to be able to offer up bounties to immediately get those staple cards that many people were inevitably after (once again the concept of being able to trade your lower value cards, or medium value cards for staple cards that they needed, eventually when everyone is trying to do this, the system collapses as trading begins to dry up of said staples compared to overall demand.)
What we are seeing now is a continued spiral upward in offered points via bounties for those that do have points trying desperately to be able to get rid of the points for stuff they actually need, no longer content with simply accumulating points without consistently or even slowly getting the staple cards they are after. And now with shops/businesses getting involved, the points offered are spiraling upward, inevitably causing many to get frustrated with the sheer amount they are having to offer to even get some of the cards (and thus the relative low value of pucapoints now as a result of how much would have to be offered in order to get to the front or close to the front of the line to get some of those staples.
I've seen this sort of thing many times in the past over the years. Looking at MTGO, looking at ebay, and other sources. For normal trading though this really is the ultimate progression of how a system like this would inevitably work. There are only so many people that are going to be looking for casual cards, or staple commons/uncommons or lower end rares and such that can allow someone to trade their "junk" for awesome stuff. That's why trading up inevitably tends to happen to some degree no matter what practically when trading in person. People aren't going to be willing to trade, say, a fetchland for a bunch of random stuff without either getting a premium for accepting the random stuff.
The point of something like pucatrade initially was supposed to be a medium for people to be able to trade more fairly and evenly by massively increasing the amount of people the cards could be traded to, and eventually received back from, without requiring the cards to come from the same person receiving the cards being sent.
That said, it is possible for the current spiral to be gotten out of. It will take some work in bringing the site back up to full functionality and to be made at least as convenient as it used to be, and presumably moreso once all of the old functionality is restored alongside all of the new upgrades that people were looking forward to.
Personally I felt the attempts to make a site like pucatrade look more "pretty" or "eye catching" were rather pointless, especially if it reduced the ease of use of the main point of the site in the first place. I would rather have a rather dull and boring looking site, that has the easiest and simplest setup to use for the purposes of the site in the first place (sending and receiving cards), than one that looks nicer but makes all that other stuff more difficult. To many sites and individuals rush into things like this, giving significant value potential to the visual upgrades when in fact most people who may use such sites could care less and end up actually getting annoyed by the changes because there was nothing wrong with the old system. Basically, take the old system, just add the mechanical trading upgrades and leave the rest of the visual stuff at the door.
Right now all the negative press, caused by the plethora of bugs and the problems with the ease of use, have caused people to back off from points accumulation as people are now trying to get even with the points they have previously accumulated in all trying to get the same general batch of most commonly sought after staples at the same time, causing the bounties to spiral upward and inevitably frustrating a large portion of the userbase who hadn't already cashed out as it were.
Its entirely possible for the site to get out of the current spiral downward that it is experiencing, if all the bugs get fixed and full functionality is restored and endorsements come back to the site things will begin to improve again, but the inevitable systemic problem of the majority of users hoping to trade low level stuff for high level stuff is not something that is going to go away, and bounties are only going to continue as an issue going forward.
We will have to see how things go, but the current prospects for the site I would say are at about 50/50 at the moment. I am hoping for the best, but I still worry that the systemic issues could still bring the site inevitably down in the long run. How long from now I could not say, but perhaps some big fix can be thought up in the meantime to resolve that issue, even if I cannot fathom exactly what that would be just yet.
I'd imagine that they only have a narrow window to stop the bleeding and get everything back on track before they lose more of the user base. I'd like to see them do away with their garbage algorithm and implement free-market trading; maybe keep it as a "suggested trading price", but otherwise make it so senders set the point range they'll sell at. There's obviously more that would have to go into it, but this way the users would be responsible for determining the value of a pp.
No idea WTH they were thinking with the new design, it's amateur hot garbage. Really reminds me of a web site high school media students might have made in 1998. Scrolling frames.. in 2016? Really? And all the blurry images as backgrounds, it's horrendous.
To fix the economy they need to do this:
1) Stop giving out free points.
2) Stop the ability to buy points.
3) Remove the function to send points.
4) Ban bounties across the board and actually enforce it.
5) Make sure there are plenty of point sinks.
6) Don't 100% guarantee trades, insurance as a point sink to get a percent of your value back is fine though. But there needs to be a rating system so scammers or people trying to game the system are quickly identified and people can avoid doing business with them.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I'm fairly confident I will think of something to say. Active Player: 1994-1999, 2016-
Good post from Mitch Trale on the site today, pointing out where they're at and where they're going. A lot of words in there that are going to make the skeptical a little less skeptical (and TBH, a really good response to a negative situation, in comparison to the hot mess that WotC itself has been dishing out in such situations in 2016 - e.g. the judge bannings, the pro player payment scheme).
Of note: they understand not everyone likes the new site theme, and are actively working on rolling out a simple "Day Theme". And Mitch (the site's head technologist, AFAIK) is as jacked off at the current site's performance as you are.
Less undermining, more being ignorant of. Hence why I asked for the opinions of knowledgeable folks like yourself. If it's a cost issue, couldn't another group crowd-fund the capital based on promises of a better infrastructure? Again, that probably sounds like a simplification, but I'm just curious if it's possible. Assuming the money is there, roughly how long would the process be to build it from the ground up?
Fair, sorry for the tone of my reply (this is why I start so many replies with "not to be an ass").
It's tough to say, largely because it's a very resource constricted problem. That said, I'll break it down as best as I can from a very coarse grained standpoint as a thought experiment.
First, let's assume cloud based hosting (AWS, Google, whatever) because that knocks out the infrastructure problems right out of the gate.
Second, let's assume you'll need a team of at least 4 engineers: probably 2 with back end experience, 1 with front end, and at least one full stack person. You'll also want someone reasonably competent in the product management and user experience space calling the shots in terms of features and usability (lest you get what we have now). It's a gamble to walk away from a $100k+ salary to work on something like this, so if you were to take the low end and call it $100k, that's $500k to have that team for a year as full time resources.
Third, you're going to have to break things down into milestones: if you try to deliver the entire thing up front you're almost guaranteed to go bust and/or get it wrong. The first iteration is going to require that you have your infrastructure set up as well (I'm only familiar with CloudFormation and it's not the friendliest technology in the world), so you need to account for some overhead there. You'll also need to have set up other tools like a version control system (Github).
I'd say the first milestone for a system like this is probably a good 4-5 month endeavor, and that's for a baseline product: simple UI, very basic card support, nothing as complex as paid memberships, packages, or trends. This would need to make a reasonable effort to take basic scalability into account (the way in which an increasing amount of load affects the system) since unlike a lot of other sites you have to start off with an enormous product catalog due to the number of cards in existence.
That said, your job is just starting at this point. Getting that first milestone live really means an open beta starts, and you give things time to bake in. At this point you also need to get users to use your site regularly to get any kind of meaningful data.
The second milestone would be a combination of fixing bugs in the beta and getting a membership system in place so you can make money (doesn't mean you need to turn it on yet; people may not be willing to pay for your product yet). This has different constraints in terms of security (you won't be storing credit card numbers, but you will have to integrate with a payment provider). Assume this second milestone is another 3 months, bringing us up to 8.
I'd say the third milestone should be focused on community feedback (assuming you've established a community at this point) to see what your users want most (and what they'd pay for). Assume it's probably going to take you another 4 months to deliver a feature set worthy of a monthly subscription fee. It's unlikely you could make an ecosystem like this 100% a subscription model because the interests of people vary so much, and inventory is a more important component of the system than anything else, which you won't get if the barrier to entry is too high.
Keep in mind that as you move through all of these milestones, usability testing should be a central player in the evolution of the product. Get early backers, community members, and even people who know nothing about the game using the site to see what's easy, what's unintuitive, and what's outright broken. You'll be surprised what people do in your site, it's often not how you were intending people to use it!
So, after that overly verbose summary, I'd say it's a year before you can make something people would pay for, it would require half a million dollars to get a full time team to work on it, and it would require enough popularity that you'd build a community to use it.
I'm sure people would make an argument that nothing that formal needs to be in place, but since you're creating an economy with its own currency and asking people to commit resources to that currency, I'd argue that you'll never gain the trust of people to do so unless your system is an actual business where professionals work full time to maintain it.
Im sorry but as a coder this is complete nonsense. It would cost about $100 to get a functional site up and running not half a million. This though process is the one that brought pucatrade to where it is now, there is no reason for all these expenses except to make the person in charge feel important.
Im sorry but as a coder this is complete nonsense. It would cost about $100 to get a functional site up and running not half a million. This though process is the one that brought pucatrade to where it is now, there is no reason for all these expenses except to make the person in charge feel important.
$100?
You're talking about a model that only works at scale, and you're asking people to commit financial resources into it right out of the gate.
My thought process isn't what brought PucaTrade to where it is now, it's the antithesis that brought it to where it is now: breaking your own business model in half by doing something your users hate when you launch off an avalanche of changes on them they didn't ask for.
I'd love to hear a coarse grained plan of how you would get a site like this up and running, including how much your own time costs you, that would cost $100, bearing in mind that it only works at scale meaning you have to pay for infrastructure usage as well, that has its own currency.
If you eliminate the custom currency aspect, then this system already exists: it's called TCGPlayer.
Ok, technically you got me there, when including the value of my own time it goes well beyond $100. I was thinking more from an out of pocket cost, to which yes i believe $100 to get it online signing people up as members with the ability to trade at least standard cards is a serious number. From there things can be added...
Ok, technically you got me there, when including the value of my own time it goes well beyond $100. I was thinking more from an out of pocket cost, to which yes i believe $100 to get it online signing people up as members with the ability to trade at least standard cards is a serious number. From there things can be added...
That's a bird's eye view into the complexity of what they're dealing with given the size of their community. This is not a one man band.
Also, and this is not a slight directed at you personally, but if you're one guy running that site, why would I trust you to send my cards to someone else in exchange for funny money in the hopes that someone else on the site has the things I want which I can get in return?
Yes, i read about how they wasted time and money doing things no one wanted, then got butthurt when everyone told them they sucked. They are real good at that and personally i would not hire any of them for anything
You are forgetting something, they were not always this big and a competitor would not instantly be that big, everything starts somewhere, most websites start real small, pucatrade included.
Why did anyone ever trust them (i never did by the way, but still have used the site) and send out cards, there are ways to build trust, especially when you havent just smashed that trust to bits with one failure after another. Also why does it have to be funny money?
Yes, i read about how they wasted time and money doing things no one wanted, then got butthurt when everyone told them they sucked. They are real good at that and personally i would not hire any of them for anything
You say that as if they're the only engineers who have ever done something like this. Companies have made this error before: delivering something the users don't want that ultimately doesn't work.
Also, for better or worse, engineers have egos. Sometimes those egos get in the way of common sense, but if you were to never hire an engineer who made mistakes like this, you'd cull a hell of a lot of people. I know I've made mistakes like this early on in my career and I know plenty of other engineers who are fantastic at this stage in their career but made similar mistakes early on.
This is why I was advocating that the act of taking this on as a business would involve a product manager who gave clearer direction to the engineering team with regard to what the users want rather than the engineers going off on their own.
You are forgetting something, they were not always this big and a competitor would not instantly be that big, everything starts somewhere, most websites start real small, pucatrade included.
You're correct, but the point I was trying to make is that Pucatrade's model is one that only works at scale. You are exchanging your own valuable goods for money that is only usable in that ecosystem, and ultimately only usable on cards other people offer up. In order to assign any value to that money, people have to be able to spend it, and they can only spend it if the products they want exist. Given the size of the number of cards available in Magic, the hit/miss ratio on this is such that you need to have a breadth of cards available.
While you do have to start somewhere, think about this as something other than a website. Let's say there was an LGS that was very small and only offered you in store credit for trading in cards and never money. Let's say they had very little inventory and essentially nothing you were interested in. Would you trade your cards in to them for in store credit? Probably not, because you're not able to get something back in exchange for that credit that you want. PucaTrade (or a clone) as the same problem, except that they can't procure inventory themselves (or at least not easily). An LGS could carry a balance of thousands of dollars to procure inventory so that it encouraged people to trade stuff in to jumpstart their economy, but you also need people to trade in cards other people want to keep your economy running, otherwise you're just sinking money into inventory you can't move.
Why did anyone ever trust them (i never did by the way, but still have used the site) and send out cards, there are ways to build trust, especially when you havent just smashed that trust to bits with one failure after another. Also why does it have to be funny money?
Funny money was the basis of my argument because of what the other person I was originally replying to suggested: creating a clone of PucaTrade without the bugs. As I was saying before, if you eliminate the idea of a custom currency from the equation, then you're talking about systems that already exist: TCGPlayer (who now even has buylists you can set up) and eBay. Both allow you to sell your cards on an open market for actual dollars which you can then apply to anything you want.
My argument around trust is that, when you make it clear that you have a team of people maintaining something and make major investments like hiring an economics expert to cultivate the economy of your business, it's a stronger indicator of commitment that the site will be around than one guy creating something and releasing it to the public. What happens if that guy croaks that week and the no one pays the bills and the site gets shut down? Am I out hundreds or thousands of dollars?
Yes, i read about how they wasted time and money doing things no one wanted, then got butthurt when everyone told them they sucked. They are real good at that and personally i would not hire any of them for anything
You say that as if they're the only engineers who have ever done something like this. Companies have made this error before: delivering something the users don't want that ultimately doesn't work.
Also, for better or worse, engineers have egos. Sometimes those egos get in the way of common sense, but if you were to never hire an engineer who made mistakes like this, you'd cull a hell of a lot of people. I know I've made mistakes like this early on in my career and I know plenty of other engineers who are fantastic at this stage in their career but made similar mistakes early on.
This is why I was advocating that the act of taking this on as a business would involve a product manager who gave clearer direction to the engineering team with regard to what the users want rather than the engineers going off on their own.
Totally agree - I work a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees across the globe, and they seem to deliver software at this standard for sport. And that's with thousands of employees. Expecting ten guys in a garage to hit it straight off the bat is displaying a fair lack of knowledge on how software engineering behaves in the real world. That's precisely why there are people in this world making their coin as auditors, testers, verifiers etc. etc.
How some people seem to have a level of entitlement that those same ten guys in a garage need to keep a site up for them 24/7 so that they can continue their God-given right to be gifted Modern staples is something that just gets further beyond me day after day.
It's been about a month since FS launched, how have things been going for everyone? I'm getting cards, but only small, recently printed stuff. Mostly full art basics and bulk rare specs. The last 1,000+ PP card I got was in March.
It's been about a month since FS launched, how have things been going for everyone? I'm getting cards, but only small, recently printed stuff. Mostly full art basics and bulk rare specs. The last 1,000+ PP card I got was in March.
Since Future Site launched, I've had three 1K+ trades - all involving multiple copies of the BfZ duals that I've been chasing copies of while they're cheap. The last was not last weekend but the one before. There's a lull on, but how much of that is the general populous being spooked by Future Site and how much of it is the traditional pause before a pre-release, I don't know (particularly given Kaladesh looks pretty damned good). I guess proof of the pudding will be the Monday after Kaladesh pre-release (when the site usually goes bonkers).
I've gotten some smaller stuff for decks like in the $$1-2 dollar range, a phyrexian obliterator and a bayou and plateau.
Both dual lands involved me sending cards in exchange.
Don't know if anyone else has the same issue, but I have standard cards on my wants for brews and haven't had people send them. (Abbot, bedlam reveled, reality smasher,Chandra tod)
Most of my wants are high end (duals,chains of meph, fetches), so those I expect to take a while anyway although I'm offering 15% bounty.
pucatrade
big receipts
alpha mox emerald
beta time walk
4 goyfs received
3 liliana of the veil
4 karn liberated
3 force of will
4 grove of the burnwillows
snapcaster mage
3 horizon canopy
2 full art damnation
I've received some foil standard mythics around $40 each. Otherwise it's been pretty quiet, including not receiving EMN rares and other stuff on my list.
I haven't sent any cards since future site either, since I can't figure out how to do so and the graphics make it impossible to send the way I used to (scanning the list to see what I wanted to mail out that day). Also, why bother sending cards when I can't receive Temples and Elder Deep Fiends when I had 20000 points anyway?
It's sad too since I consider(ed?) myself a power user, and have traded $8000 both sending and receiving and am a gold member.
I'm seeing ads on MTGO for tix at 60% and even one last night for 200pp/tic. In a world of funny money, the ticket is like a gold standard now.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
It's been about a month since FS launched, how have things been going for everyone? I'm getting cards, but only small, recently printed stuff. Mostly full art basics and bulk rare specs. The last 1,000+ PP card I got was in March.
I've received one trade (<500pts) in this time. I've only recently been able to send since very recently now that the card importer is fixed. I suspect I'm not the only user who was dealing with this problem.
Yes, i read about how they wasted time and money doing things no one wanted, then got butthurt when everyone told them they sucked. They are real good at that and personally i would not hire any of them for anything
You say that as if they're the only engineers who have ever done something like this. Companies have made this error before: delivering something the users don't want that ultimately doesn't work.
Also, for better or worse, engineers have egos. Sometimes those egos get in the way of common sense, but if you were to never hire an engineer who made mistakes like this, you'd cull a hell of a lot of people. I know I've made mistakes like this early on in my career and I know plenty of other engineers who are fantastic at this stage in their career but made similar mistakes early on.
This is why I was advocating that the act of taking this on as a business would involve a product manager who gave clearer direction to the engineering team with regard to what the users want rather than the engineers going off on their own.
Totally agree - I work a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees across the globe, and they seem to deliver software at this standard for sport. And that's with thousands of employees. Expecting ten guys in a garage to hit it straight off the bat is displaying a fair lack of knowledge on how software engineering behaves in the real world. That's precisely why there are people in this world making their coin as auditors, testers, verifiers etc. etc.
How some people seem to have a level of entitlement that those same ten guys in a garage need to keep a site up for them 24/7 so that they can continue their God-given right to be gifted Modern staples is something that just gets further beyond me day after day.
I didnt say people never make mistakes i said in a properly run company that gets them fired, especially when the mistake is anywhere near this big. Yes my system culls a lot of people as you say, guess what that works in business, whereas what you describe does not.
As to my knowledge of how software engineering works in the real world, trust me i have alot more experience then either of you...
Yes, i read about how they wasted time and money doing things no one wanted, then got butthurt when everyone told them they sucked. They are real good at that and personally i would not hire any of them for anything
You say that as if they're the only engineers who have ever done something like this. Companies have made this error before: delivering something the users don't want that ultimately doesn't work.
Also, for better or worse, engineers have egos. Sometimes those egos get in the way of common sense, but if you were to never hire an engineer who made mistakes like this, you'd cull a hell of a lot of people. I know I've made mistakes like this early on in my career and I know plenty of other engineers who are fantastic at this stage in their career but made similar mistakes early on.
This is why I was advocating that the act of taking this on as a business would involve a product manager who gave clearer direction to the engineering team with regard to what the users want rather than the engineers going off on their own.
Totally agree - I work a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees across the globe, and they seem to deliver software at this standard for sport. And that's with thousands of employees. Expecting ten guys in a garage to hit it straight off the bat is displaying a fair lack of knowledge on how software engineering behaves in the real world. That's precisely why there are people in this world making their coin as auditors, testers, verifiers etc. etc.
How some people seem to have a level of entitlement that those same ten guys in a garage need to keep a site up for them 24/7 so that they can continue their God-given right to be gifted Modern staples is something that just gets further beyond me day after day.
I didnt say people never make mistakes i said in a properly run company that gets them fired, especially when the mistake is anywhere near this big. Yes my system culls a lot of people as you say, guess what that works in business, whereas what you describe does not.
As to my knowledge of how software engineering works in the real world, trust me i have alot more experience then either of you...
Okay, so Pucatrade fires some software engineers during their (failed) Future Sight rollout. So... who is going to fix the bugs? How quickly could they onboard someone in order to fix the remaining issues with Future Sight in a timely manner (not to mention dealing with the blowback from users who dislike the new UI)?
Private Mod Note
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Playing with proxied cards at sanctioned events is good, actually.
Another gold member here who won't be renewing. Future site is awful in every sense of the word. The only cards I can get sent to me right now are cheap new stuff. I haven't received a card that I've actually really wanted for going on 3 or 4 months now despite sitting on 120,000 points. I used to be a top 15 sender on the site in terms of quantity and I now haven't sent a card in 2 months. I don't see the point. I've started just filling my list with anything of value to squeeze what I can out of it, but even still nothing seems to be coming my way.
I used to be a huge advocate of Puca, but that time is definitely long past. Now admittedly I'm clueless about coding, but here's what I can't figure out for the life of me though: They claim to be making a more streamlined, easier to use interface called "Day View" or something of the sort.... but don't they already have the code in place for all of that anyway? Isn't that exactly what the old site was? I don't think any of us would have an issue with simply going back to that. Is it impossible to just implement some sort of toggle where we can simply go back to the old UI should we so choose? I'd gladly give up any of the crappy new "functionality" to just have a UI that worked again without me wanting to tear my eyeballs out.
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Any Puca trades you can send me would be greatly appreciated! Big want list and lots of points available.
Fair, sorry for the tone of my reply (this is why I start so many replies with "not to be an ass").
It's tough to say, largely because it's a very resource constricted problem. That said, I'll break it down as best as I can from a very coarse grained standpoint as a thought experiment.
First, let's assume cloud based hosting (AWS, Google, whatever) because that knocks out the infrastructure problems right out of the gate.
Second, let's assume you'll need a team of at least 4 engineers: probably 2 with back end experience, 1 with front end, and at least one full stack person. You'll also want someone reasonably competent in the product management and user experience space calling the shots in terms of features and usability (lest you get what we have now). It's a gamble to walk away from a $100k+ salary to work on something like this, so if you were to take the low end and call it $100k, that's $500k to have that team for a year as full time resources.
Third, you're going to have to break things down into milestones: if you try to deliver the entire thing up front you're almost guaranteed to go bust and/or get it wrong. The first iteration is going to require that you have your infrastructure set up as well (I'm only familiar with CloudFormation and it's not the friendliest technology in the world), so you need to account for some overhead there. You'll also need to have set up other tools like a version control system (Github).
I'd say the first milestone for a system like this is probably a good 4-5 month endeavor, and that's for a baseline product: simple UI, very basic card support, nothing as complex as paid memberships, packages, or trends. This would need to make a reasonable effort to take basic scalability into account (the way in which an increasing amount of load affects the system) since unlike a lot of other sites you have to start off with an enormous product catalog due to the number of cards in existence.
That said, your job is just starting at this point. Getting that first milestone live really means an open beta starts, and you give things time to bake in. At this point you also need to get users to use your site regularly to get any kind of meaningful data.
The second milestone would be a combination of fixing bugs in the beta and getting a membership system in place so you can make money (doesn't mean you need to turn it on yet; people may not be willing to pay for your product yet). This has different constraints in terms of security (you won't be storing credit card numbers, but you will have to integrate with a payment provider). Assume this second milestone is another 3 months, bringing us up to 8.
I'd say the third milestone should be focused on community feedback (assuming you've established a community at this point) to see what your users want most (and what they'd pay for). Assume it's probably going to take you another 4 months to deliver a feature set worthy of a monthly subscription fee. It's unlikely you could make an ecosystem like this 100% a subscription model because the interests of people vary so much, and inventory is a more important component of the system than anything else, which you won't get if the barrier to entry is too high.
Keep in mind that as you move through all of these milestones, usability testing should be a central player in the evolution of the product. Get early backers, community members, and even people who know nothing about the game using the site to see what's easy, what's unintuitive, and what's outright broken. You'll be surprised what people do in your site, it's often not how you were intending people to use it!
So, after that overly verbose summary, I'd say it's a year before you can make something people would pay for, it would require half a million dollars to get a full time team to work on it, and it would require enough popularity that you'd build a community to use it.
I'm sure people would make an argument that nothing that formal needs to be in place, but since you're creating an economy with its own currency and asking people to commit resources to that currency, I'd argue that you'll never gain the trust of people to do so unless your system is an actual business where professionals work full time to maintain it.
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You actually raise a good point regarding the trading interface, which isn't as fonctionnal as the old one. I, for one, would have prefered they kept the old interface and simply add the features that were asked by users (package sending, langage/condition support, for example). If it ain't broken then don't fix it as they say.
You also have a point on the Powertraders problem, as I understand what you're explaining in your post from your past experience. However, it doesn't affect my trading experience as much as it seemed to affect yours. It's a shame that Puca has gone this far with the unpopular changes, but I personnaly still find this ressource useful for my trading needs.
Early on things like bounties (from what I could gather) were a relative rarity, cards got traded around slowly at first (due to a small population using the site to start) but eventually began to grow steadily in numbers and thusly the trade volume of a wide variety of cards, including staples were steady and people didn't have a terribly difficult time eventually getting said staples and such.
However as the growth of the user base continued rapidly, eventually the use of bounties became more and more prevalent, the effects on the overall value of the pucapoint began a slow downward spiral in part from how many points were now required in order to be able to offer up bounties to immediately get those staple cards that many people were inevitably after (once again the concept of being able to trade your lower value cards, or medium value cards for staple cards that they needed, eventually when everyone is trying to do this, the system collapses as trading begins to dry up of said staples compared to overall demand.)
What we are seeing now is a continued spiral upward in offered points via bounties for those that do have points trying desperately to be able to get rid of the points for stuff they actually need, no longer content with simply accumulating points without consistently or even slowly getting the staple cards they are after. And now with shops/businesses getting involved, the points offered are spiraling upward, inevitably causing many to get frustrated with the sheer amount they are having to offer to even get some of the cards (and thus the relative low value of pucapoints now as a result of how much would have to be offered in order to get to the front or close to the front of the line to get some of those staples.
I've seen this sort of thing many times in the past over the years. Looking at MTGO, looking at ebay, and other sources. For normal trading though this really is the ultimate progression of how a system like this would inevitably work. There are only so many people that are going to be looking for casual cards, or staple commons/uncommons or lower end rares and such that can allow someone to trade their "junk" for awesome stuff. That's why trading up inevitably tends to happen to some degree no matter what practically when trading in person. People aren't going to be willing to trade, say, a fetchland for a bunch of random stuff without either getting a premium for accepting the random stuff.
The point of something like pucatrade initially was supposed to be a medium for people to be able to trade more fairly and evenly by massively increasing the amount of people the cards could be traded to, and eventually received back from, without requiring the cards to come from the same person receiving the cards being sent.
That said, it is possible for the current spiral to be gotten out of. It will take some work in bringing the site back up to full functionality and to be made at least as convenient as it used to be, and presumably moreso once all of the old functionality is restored alongside all of the new upgrades that people were looking forward to.
Personally I felt the attempts to make a site like pucatrade look more "pretty" or "eye catching" were rather pointless, especially if it reduced the ease of use of the main point of the site in the first place. I would rather have a rather dull and boring looking site, that has the easiest and simplest setup to use for the purposes of the site in the first place (sending and receiving cards), than one that looks nicer but makes all that other stuff more difficult. To many sites and individuals rush into things like this, giving significant value potential to the visual upgrades when in fact most people who may use such sites could care less and end up actually getting annoyed by the changes because there was nothing wrong with the old system. Basically, take the old system, just add the mechanical trading upgrades and leave the rest of the visual stuff at the door.
Right now all the negative press, caused by the plethora of bugs and the problems with the ease of use, have caused people to back off from points accumulation as people are now trying to get even with the points they have previously accumulated in all trying to get the same general batch of most commonly sought after staples at the same time, causing the bounties to spiral upward and inevitably frustrating a large portion of the userbase who hadn't already cashed out as it were.
Its entirely possible for the site to get out of the current spiral downward that it is experiencing, if all the bugs get fixed and full functionality is restored and endorsements come back to the site things will begin to improve again, but the inevitable systemic problem of the majority of users hoping to trade low level stuff for high level stuff is not something that is going to go away, and bounties are only going to continue as an issue going forward.
We will have to see how things go, but the current prospects for the site I would say are at about 50/50 at the moment. I am hoping for the best, but I still worry that the systemic issues could still bring the site inevitably down in the long run. How long from now I could not say, but perhaps some big fix can be thought up in the meantime to resolve that issue, even if I cannot fathom exactly what that would be just yet.
I appreciate you breaking that all down. It definitely appears as though there would be a lot of moving parts.
Link to Discord server where anybody from MTGS can keep up with thread topics while everything is being sorted out with the new site.
I'd imagine that they only have a narrow window to stop the bleeding and get everything back on track before they lose more of the user base. I'd like to see them do away with their garbage algorithm and implement free-market trading; maybe keep it as a "suggested trading price", but otherwise make it so senders set the point range they'll sell at. There's obviously more that would have to go into it, but this way the users would be responsible for determining the value of a pp.
Link to Discord server where anybody from MTGS can keep up with thread topics while everything is being sorted out with the new site.
To fix the economy they need to do this:
1) Stop giving out free points.
2) Stop the ability to buy points.
3) Remove the function to send points.
4) Ban bounties across the board and actually enforce it.
5) Make sure there are plenty of point sinks.
6) Don't 100% guarantee trades, insurance as a point sink to get a percent of your value back is fine though. But there needs to be a rating system so scammers or people trying to game the system are quickly identified and people can avoid doing business with them.
Active Player: 1994-1999, 2016-
Sign & Share Petition To Fix MTG: Arena's Economy: https://goo.gl/z8fop8
Of note: they understand not everyone likes the new site theme, and are actively working on rolling out a simple "Day Theme". And Mitch (the site's head technologist, AFAIK) is as jacked off at the current site's performance as you are.
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
Im sorry but as a coder this is complete nonsense. It would cost about $100 to get a functional site up and running not half a million. This though process is the one that brought pucatrade to where it is now, there is no reason for all these expenses except to make the person in charge feel important.
$100?
You're talking about a model that only works at scale, and you're asking people to commit financial resources into it right out of the gate.
My thought process isn't what brought PucaTrade to where it is now, it's the antithesis that brought it to where it is now: breaking your own business model in half by doing something your users hate when you launch off an avalanche of changes on them they didn't ask for.
I'd love to hear a coarse grained plan of how you would get a site like this up and running, including how much your own time costs you, that would cost $100, bearing in mind that it only works at scale meaning you have to pay for infrastructure usage as well, that has its own currency.
If you eliminate the custom currency aspect, then this system already exists: it's called TCGPlayer.
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Have you read this?
https://pucatrade.com/articles/2016/notesonaboatpt1
That's a bird's eye view into the complexity of what they're dealing with given the size of their community. This is not a one man band.
Also, and this is not a slight directed at you personally, but if you're one guy running that site, why would I trust you to send my cards to someone else in exchange for funny money in the hopes that someone else on the site has the things I want which I can get in return?
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You are forgetting something, they were not always this big and a competitor would not instantly be that big, everything starts somewhere, most websites start real small, pucatrade included.
Why did anyone ever trust them (i never did by the way, but still have used the site) and send out cards, there are ways to build trust, especially when you havent just smashed that trust to bits with one failure after another. Also why does it have to be funny money?
You say that as if they're the only engineers who have ever done something like this. Companies have made this error before: delivering something the users don't want that ultimately doesn't work.
Also, for better or worse, engineers have egos. Sometimes those egos get in the way of common sense, but if you were to never hire an engineer who made mistakes like this, you'd cull a hell of a lot of people. I know I've made mistakes like this early on in my career and I know plenty of other engineers who are fantastic at this stage in their career but made similar mistakes early on.
This is why I was advocating that the act of taking this on as a business would involve a product manager who gave clearer direction to the engineering team with regard to what the users want rather than the engineers going off on their own.
You're correct, but the point I was trying to make is that Pucatrade's model is one that only works at scale. You are exchanging your own valuable goods for money that is only usable in that ecosystem, and ultimately only usable on cards other people offer up. In order to assign any value to that money, people have to be able to spend it, and they can only spend it if the products they want exist. Given the size of the number of cards available in Magic, the hit/miss ratio on this is such that you need to have a breadth of cards available.
While you do have to start somewhere, think about this as something other than a website. Let's say there was an LGS that was very small and only offered you in store credit for trading in cards and never money. Let's say they had very little inventory and essentially nothing you were interested in. Would you trade your cards in to them for in store credit? Probably not, because you're not able to get something back in exchange for that credit that you want. PucaTrade (or a clone) as the same problem, except that they can't procure inventory themselves (or at least not easily). An LGS could carry a balance of thousands of dollars to procure inventory so that it encouraged people to trade stuff in to jumpstart their economy, but you also need people to trade in cards other people want to keep your economy running, otherwise you're just sinking money into inventory you can't move.
Funny money was the basis of my argument because of what the other person I was originally replying to suggested: creating a clone of PucaTrade without the bugs. As I was saying before, if you eliminate the idea of a custom currency from the equation, then you're talking about systems that already exist: TCGPlayer (who now even has buylists you can set up) and eBay. Both allow you to sell your cards on an open market for actual dollars which you can then apply to anything you want.
My argument around trust is that, when you make it clear that you have a team of people maintaining something and make major investments like hiring an economics expert to cultivate the economy of your business, it's a stronger indicator of commitment that the site will be around than one guy creating something and releasing it to the public. What happens if that guy croaks that week and the no one pays the bills and the site gets shut down? Am I out hundreds or thousands of dollars?
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Totally agree - I work a billion-dollar company with thousands of employees across the globe, and they seem to deliver software at this standard for sport. And that's with thousands of employees. Expecting ten guys in a garage to hit it straight off the bat is displaying a fair lack of knowledge on how software engineering behaves in the real world. That's precisely why there are people in this world making their coin as auditors, testers, verifiers etc. etc.
How some people seem to have a level of entitlement that those same ten guys in a garage need to keep a site up for them 24/7 so that they can continue their God-given right to be gifted Modern staples is something that just gets further beyond me day after day.
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
Pauper: Burn
Modern: Burn
Legacy: Burn
EDH: Marath, Will of the Wild - Ramp/Combo | Anafenza the Foremost - French | Uril, the Miststalker - Voltron | Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury - Goodstuff
Ghost Council of Orzhov - Tokens | Lazav, Dimir Mastermind - Control | Isamaru, Hound of Konda - Tiny Leaders
Since Future Site launched, I've had three 1K+ trades - all involving multiple copies of the BfZ duals that I've been chasing copies of while they're cheap. The last was not last weekend but the one before. There's a lull on, but how much of that is the general populous being spooked by Future Site and how much of it is the traditional pause before a pre-release, I don't know (particularly given Kaladesh looks pretty damned good). I guess proof of the pudding will be the Monday after Kaladesh pre-release (when the site usually goes bonkers).
My Stupidly Large Number of Current Decks
PucaTrade with me!
The Multiplayer Power Rankings
Cube: the Gittening (My Multiplayer Cube) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
The N00b Cube (Peasant cube for new players) - MTGS Cube List | @ CubeTutor
Both dual lands involved me sending cards in exchange.
Don't know if anyone else has the same issue, but I have standard cards on my wants for brews and haven't had people send them. (Abbot, bedlam reveled, reality smasher,Chandra tod)
Most of my wants are high end (duals,chains of meph, fetches), so those I expect to take a while anyway although I'm offering 15% bounty.
pucatrade
big receipts
alpha mox emerald
beta time walk
4 goyfs received
3 liliana of the veil
4 karn liberated
3 force of will
4 grove of the burnwillows
snapcaster mage
3 horizon canopy
2 full art damnation
I haven't sent any cards since future site either, since I can't figure out how to do so and the graphics make it impossible to send the way I used to (scanning the list to see what I wanted to mail out that day). Also, why bother sending cards when I can't receive Temples and Elder Deep Fiends when I had 20000 points anyway?
It's sad too since I consider(ed?) myself a power user, and have traded $8000 both sending and receiving and am a gold member.
I've received one trade (<500pts) in this time. I've only recently been able to send since very recently now that the card importer is fixed. I suspect I'm not the only user who was dealing with this problem.
Blue lives don't matter in the slightest.
I didnt say people never make mistakes i said in a properly run company that gets them fired, especially when the mistake is anywhere near this big. Yes my system culls a lot of people as you say, guess what that works in business, whereas what you describe does not.
As to my knowledge of how software engineering works in the real world, trust me i have alot more experience then either of you...
Okay, so Pucatrade fires some software engineers during their (failed) Future Sight rollout. So... who is going to fix the bugs? How quickly could they onboard someone in order to fix the remaining issues with Future Sight in a timely manner (not to mention dealing with the blowback from users who dislike the new UI)?
Blue lives don't matter in the slightest.
I used to be a huge advocate of Puca, but that time is definitely long past. Now admittedly I'm clueless about coding, but here's what I can't figure out for the life of me though: They claim to be making a more streamlined, easier to use interface called "Day View" or something of the sort.... but don't they already have the code in place for all of that anyway? Isn't that exactly what the old site was? I don't think any of us would have an issue with simply going back to that. Is it impossible to just implement some sort of toggle where we can simply go back to the old UI should we so choose? I'd gladly give up any of the crappy new "functionality" to just have a UI that worked again without me wanting to tear my eyeballs out.
https://pucatrade.com/profiles/show/23875
Pauper: Burn
Modern: Burn
Legacy: Burn
EDH: Marath, Will of the Wild - Ramp/Combo | Anafenza the Foremost - French | Uril, the Miststalker - Voltron | Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury - Goodstuff
Ghost Council of Orzhov - Tokens | Lazav, Dimir Mastermind - Control | Isamaru, Hound of Konda - Tiny Leaders