100000520842029 wrote: Seriously, read my post and you will understand that I didn't ment your communication in 'service' but ment your external communication.

I do not understand what you mean. :(

PhyrexianLibrarian, thank you for understanding, and for the positive feedback :)

sebi wrote: I said it initially, but it seems people did not notice, so it perhaps bears repeating: nothing that was free yesterday is now for money.

But it is. Private and password protected decks are now premium only option. I don't care if I'm exempt from this due to having an account prior to December 2014. You moved a free feature behind a paywall.

Don't get the wrong idea that we're against a premium model. Many sites successfully use it but the features offered have to justify the price.

sebi wrote:

100000520842029 wrote: Seriously, read my post and you will understand that I didn't ment your communication in 'service' but ment your external communication.

I do not understand what you mean. :(

If I can paraphrase, what I believe he meant is that there is always many ways to solve a problem, but not all of those ways may work for the users. Since you, yourself, are only one user of the site, and probably not the best example of an average user, it may be difficult for you to surmise what the best option is for the community at large. Being open about the problem, that you aren't making enough money to support the site and its development, and raising up the concern alongside a series of possible solutions, or even asking for ideas for solutions, would give people both more control over how they would be willing to support the site and a greater sense of community as they help to preserve it.

Nahezu jede große [kostenfreie] Community hat in diesem oder im vergangenen Jahr mehrfach Probleme mit dem Kosten bekommen. Was war ihre Lösung?

Sie haben nicht länger geplante und angekündigte Features hinter eine Paywall versteckt oder einen Premiumaccount für fast den Preis eines priv. Drafts angeboten.
Das Problem wurde analysiert, Auswege aufgezeichnet und der Community mitgeteilt. Was folgte daraus? Ein reger austausch wie die Seite am Leben gehalten, zukünftige Arbeit finanziert und jeder glücklich gemacht werden kann.

Was tust du?

Du siehst das Problem, schweigst darüber 6 Monate stillschweigen, um von Heute auf Morgen uns deine Lösung vorzuzeigen. Und wenn du selbst ehrlich bist, die meisten Funktionen davon sind wirklich nicht viel Arbeit.
Öffne dich der Community, zeig den Weg wies weitergeht wenn wir dahin dahin oder dahingehen.

Die angesprochenen Seiten benutzen heutzutage folgendes:

- Donations
- Flattr
- 'Premium' ala, keine Werbung mehr 2-3€/monat - (3€ die monatliche Variante..)
- Die Bitte Adblock auszumachen

Und allein das hat bei denen gereicht um die Server am Laufen zu halten und ne Gruppe von mehr als 10 Leuten tagtäglich Arbeit zu verschaffen.


------------------------------------------
Rough translation, if anyone is interested feel free to translate it for me:

Nearly each [for free] community had those problems this or past year with their costs. What was there so0lution?

They did not long planned and promised features lock behind a paywall or offered a premiumaccount for the money of a private draft.
They analysed the problem, showed solutions and involved their community to it. What was the result? Their was a lot of discussion on how to be able to keep the site online, gather the money to pay for future features and get everyone happy.

What are you doing?

You see the problem, do not say a word for 6 months and show us your solution from one day to the other. If you are honest to yourself, you'll see alot of those feature will not require thousand of $$$ to implement them.

Open to the Community, show your problems and maybe some solution - and we will work out one with you.

Sites I talked about in the first place solved this issues by:

- Getting Donations
- Using Flattr
- Sell Premium (no adverts) for about 2-3€ a month (being 3€ the monthly sub)
- Just a polite request to turn of adblock

Only this did it to pay the costs for hardware and more than 10 guys going to work each day.



Personal endcomment:

You do not have anymore money left. You do not know how many guys will buy premiummembership.

But than you will promise an iOS and androidapp for this site? Although you are promising an open API for years? Ah come on. This is work and money you could have saved easily. Only this point shows, that you are not only interested in getting enough to go on with this project.[/for free][/kostenfreie]

Hi Sebi!
First, a big thanks to you and your team for all your hard work, this website rocks!

I am a filthy casual, so while I appreciate the premium features, at your price points I don't feel like they are really aimed at me. Like others I had sticker shock at the prices. Just to give you some data/feedback from a casual's perspective I could see myself paying for those features at about $20 per year.

The idea of a Mobile Application is cool, but I was wondering if you had any plans to create a responsive, mobile-friendly website/css? I generally never use custom apps for websites and prefer to use my device's native web browsers to interact with websites.

I have asked about this removed feature before https://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=94130#p94130, but I am curious if you have any plans to allow us to view a user's profile and compare our inventory with their wishlist? Perhaps a future premium feature? I loved being able to do that as a way to quickly see cards from my inventory that I would normally not be willing to trade, and hence do not have them marked as such, but might consider trading for a high priority card I want.

Thanks!

Cheers, Paul

sebi wrote:

100000520842029 wrote: Seriously, read my post and you will understand that I didn't ment your communication in 'service' but ment your external communication.

I do not understand what you mean. :(

My interpretation of the issue is that it seems like it would have been useful to have some sort of conversation on this stuff beforehand, to help generate ideas and feedback on how a premium service should be implemented. I don't see how springing it on users is a good thing, even if you think such a discussion would generate zero useful ideas for you (which would be surprising..)

I have to agree with whoever mentioned a Kickstarter or some other sort of crowdfunding. Promise a bunch of features on a timetable and raise donations to implement them. You probably would've gotten a lot of good-will contributions.

I would suggest you create a user survey to find out which features users would be willing to pay for to prioritize what you add. Right now you are just getting random ideas flung at you through your fora with no organization...which is fine for a free service, but when you want to monetize features you will benefit from a bit of market research.

A neat idea would be to allow users to place a donation with their survey response to "weight" their priorities. This gives you a bit of an idea about who is will to actually put money on the table and what features would bring them on board.

Another possibility is what mtgprice.com did when they launched. At launch, the premium/pro features were fairly weak and buggy; but they raised 10k by offering a limited number of lifetime subscriptions at around $200 a piece. Lifetime subscribers would always receive the highest level of service. The smart thing they did was not the money-raising feature of this promotion in and of itself...but rather it identified a population for them that was willing to spend money on their services; and they could get valuable information from this population. Lifetime subscribers were aggressively surveyed in initial months to get insight into the development cycle that people were most interested in spending money on.

I for one would be willing to pay 200-300 for a lifetime deckbox premium membership trusting that the features will come; I'm sure you have a population of several others who would be as well. As weird as it seems, that is much more attractive to some than $120 for 2 years with no guarantee of price changes or additional service levels.

9700377 wrote:If you actually read the post you're alluding to, the accusation is that Deckbox purposely reduced the matches per page in order to offer a high number of matches as a premium service. It would make the site look sketchy if true.

I don't think framing the concerns as whiny entitled children vs. business-savvy adults is particularly productive.

I wasn't trying to frame it that way, I was literally saying that the majority of MTG players are high school and college/university students, or recent grads, and a very small minority are working professionals who have been in the working world enough to understand the situation sebi is in. Being expected to work for free, or having your work disparaged because you had the gall to charge for it, can be very psychologically damaging.

I work for a news agency that has experimented with an actual paywall since last year, and we've decided to go back to a free model that focused more on ad revenue. But we didn't make that initial paywall decision because we were trying to hurt the community or be greedy; we were made it because we were trying to find a new way of making profit digitally in the 2010s, which is really hard to do. Once we decided it was not profitable to maintain, we cut it because that's what businesses do. The amount of income generated by making previously-free features cost money is usually dwarfed by the loss of income caused by alienating your clients.

When Deckbox launched the Marketplace, they had the same situation; they saw a way to generate revenue that didn't depend on page views. And our community's immediate reaction was to complain and try to find ways to sell cards without having to pay sebi and the team. That attitude of "everything I want should be free because I pay you in good feelings" is not sustainable for anyone who wants to grow their business.

(For everyone suggesting crowdfunding, I think you're overestimating what those are capable of. Look at how many people are complaining about simply being given a choice to pay more for extra features or not; imagine how they'd react if they were asked to just give money with no guarantee of anything)

kavselj wrote:

sebi wrote: I said it initially, but it seems people did not notice, so it perhaps bears repeating: nothing that was free yesterday is now for money.

But it is. Private and password protected decks are now premium only option. I don't care if I'm exempt from this due to having an account prior to December 2014. You moved a free feature behind a paywall.

Don't get the wrong idea that we're against a premium model. Many sites successfully use it but the features offered have to justify the price.

I tested the privacy functionality for decks, IT IS STILL FREE!!! Don't confuse decks with inventory folks!

PhyrexianLibrarian wrote: (For everyone suggesting crowdfunding, I think you're overestimating what those are capable of. Look at how many people are complaining about simply being given a choice to pay more for extra features or not; imagine how they'd react if they were asked to just give money with no guarantee of anything)

That's simple math.

If the community wants X and its cost is Y, Y have to be raised.
It's either us or sebi who does it in his free time.

With skipping sebi due to his financial status (which you shouldn't misunderstood - noone wants him to starve) there is us left. And there are literally hundreds of options to get that needed money.
Premiummembership is one of the worst ways to do so - which you encountered as well.

I understand everything that was written above.
I would like to take the time to thanks SEBI for all the hard work.

I strongly believe that making a survey about what people would like to pay for the premium services would be appropriate.
Also, personnally, I don't need a premium service. However, I would gladly make a donation to deckbox if a "donate" button existed....

Good luck for the futur!

If we have to pay to use the "Built Deck vs. Deck Idea" Indicators, can we have an option to not use them altogether? Being stuck with lightbulbs next to every deck looks crappy.

Apart from that, I see nothing wrong with offering a premium service. I do think the price is a little steep for what you're getting, but as long as this website is still as usable and helpful as it is without having to pay for most of it, I see no reason to complain.

So as from what I could read, there are a few valid arguments about the new version of Deckbox.

For premium services:
-Potential increase in the number of features that will be implemented in the future
-Reduced waiting time to get support for premium users (see negative comment)
-Access to a few new features
-Mobile App

Agains't premium services:
-No user input for the $$ (surprise buttsex)
-Supporting free users will no longer be a priority
-Lots of those features do not seem like they needed to be paid for in order to get them (ex: password protection for decks, built deck, scratchpad...)
-Too expensive

I personally find that the previous version of Deckbox was exactly what I needed for my MTG card collection management.
I will continue to use it for its forums and the deck containers, but I will not pay such a high price for such a low return on investment. I just don't see a point in investing money into this. I understand there are costs, but there are other ways around them.

PhyrexianLibrarian wrote:

9700377 wrote:If you actually read the post you're alluding to, the accusation is that Deckbox purposely reduced the matches per page in order to offer a high number of matches as a premium service. It would make the site look sketchy if true.

I don't think framing the concerns as whiny entitled children vs. business-savvy adults is particularly productive.

I wasn't trying to frame it that way, I was literally saying that the majority of MTG players are high school and college/university students, or recent grads, and a very small minority are working professionals who have been in the working world enough to understand the situation sebi is in.

Deckbox users are not a random sample of MTG players; I imagine most of us are young professionals. Furthermore, the quote you posted was not criticizing Sebi for merely trying to monetize the site. While I admit that this whiny attitude sometimes exists (look at a lot of the complaints about the MSRP of MM2015 being $10..), it is not dominating the nature of the criticism occurring in this thread.

PhyrexianLibrarian wrote:When Deckbox launched the Marketplace, they had the same situation; they saw a way to generate revenue that didn't depend on page views. And our community's immediate reaction was to complain and try to find ways to sell cards without having to pay sebi and the team. That attitude of "everything I want should be free because I pay you in good feelings" is not sustainable for anyone who wants to grow their business.

I don't recall the marketplace getting a huge amount of pushback, because it was clearly implementing a new (and unexpected) feature and monetizing it in a way that other sites have monetized transactions. If you look at the market announcement thread there's almost zero negative feedback from what I can tell. This really is different.

^^ Re: Marketplace, there wasn't a lot of negative discussion like here, but there were a LOT of "well I guess I'll just sell my cards somewhere else now thanks for nothing" responses.

As for the paywall vs. premium, I'd say the opposite is true. What we did (that didn't work) is take away the content and features that used to be free. That's what I find most people mean when they talk about a "paywall", and I don't think that ever really works. Premium membership is a far better way of raising funds, as you offer a product or service that people are willing to pay for.

The discussion of "which features should be premium" is important and worth having, but no one is having that discussion here. All I'm seeing is a lot of "good luck getting MY money!" talk, which is unproductive at best, and even worse when you consider the disposable income necessary to play MTG as a hobby at all.

PhyrexianLibrarian wrote:^^ Re: Marketplace, there wasn't a lot of negative discussion like here, but there were a LOT of "well I guess I'll just sell my cards somewhere else now thanks for nothing" responses.

As for the paywall vs. premium, I'd say the opposite is true. What we did (that didn't work) is take away the content and features that used to be free. That's what I find most people mean when they talk about a "paywall", and I don't think that ever really works. Premium membership is a far better way of raising funds, as you offer a product or service that people are willing to pay for.

The discussion of "which features should be premium" is important and worth having, but no one is having that discussion here. All I'm seeing is a lot of "good luck getting MY money!" talk, which is unproductive at best, and even worse when you consider the disposable income necessary to play MTG as a hobby at all.

That's the point where I want to go a step backwards:

It should be a question of is premium the only one and correct way to go?

sebi wrote: I said it initially, but it seems people did not notice, so it perhaps bears repeating: nothing that was free yesterday is now for money.

Sorry to be so anal but thats not entirely true. New users don't get private decks and private inventory features on free account. So those features were moved behind the paywall.
My personal opinion is that those should remain free for everyone.
Also - the marker for built decks - the lightbulb is visible for all decks on free accounts, does not add any functionality that is limited by not having premium account and serves no purpose other than to annoy people.

Please think about what kind of image of a website those things convey to a new visitor.

100000520842029 wrote:It should be a question of is premium the only one and correct way to go?

It's certainly not the only option, and without knowing the full history of the site I can't say whether or not it's the correct one. I do know it has worked for other MTG-related sites like MTGPrice, Star City, PucaTrade, and so on. So I totally understand why it would be worth trying.

Kickstarter and other one-time donation schemes are good for infusions of cash, for things like initial print runs or individual features, but they aren't meant to be a recurring source of income.

PhyrexianLibrarian wrote:

100000520842029 wrote:It should be a question of is premium the only one and correct way to go?

It's certainly not the only option, and without knowing the full history of the site I can't say whether or not it's the correct one. I do know it has worked for other MTG-related sites like MTGPrice, Star City, PucaTrade, and so on. So I totally understand why it would be worth trying.

Kickstarter and other one-time donation schemes are good for infusions of cash, for things like initial print runs or individual features, but they aren't meant to be a recurring source of income.

One of the most used sites does use donations.

Its wikipedia.

I don't understand all of the complaining. The free services sebi's given us for so long (which haven't changed for any of us) are fantastic, which is why we've all been using the site for so long.

Don't want to pay for the new stuff? Don't.

Have some gratitude for everything we're gotten so far and keep getting for free and don't hate on sebi because he's trying to get paid for his time without actually impacting any of us.

I had previously paid $30 for MTGStudio and dropped it for this site because it was easier to use. I'd happily have paid $30 for this site as-is without any of the updates. Like others though, I'd be ok with paying for it, but not at the asking prices. =o(

PhyrexianLibrarian wrote: Kickstarter and other one-time donation schemes are good for infusions of cash, for things like initial print runs or individual features, but they aren't meant to be a recurring source of income.

This is a bit myopic, they are also very good at getting an initial paid customer base for third party partnership purposes, identifying paying early adopters of your service and being able to gather data about those who are willing to pay for your service. They give you information on how best to monetize your service.

When somebody buys the $x,000 tier of a kickstarter they typically meet and/or communicate with the developers...this is not just for the edification of the "donator" but rather a recognition that the developer values the input of someone who values their service to that level.

fistyke wrote:

kavselj wrote:

sebi wrote: I said it initially, but it seems people did not notice, so it perhaps bears repeating: nothing that was free yesterday is now for money.

But it is. Private and password protected decks are now premium only option. I don't care if I'm exempt from this due to having an account prior to December 2014. You moved a free feature behind a paywall.

Don't get the wrong idea that we're against a premium model. Many sites successfully use it but the features offered have to justify the price.

I tested the privacy functionality for decks, IT IS STILL FREE!!! Don't confuse decks with inventory folks!

And you haven't bothered reading the ! sign next to them which states that feature is free to use for all users who had a Deckbox account prior to December 2014.

100000520842029 wrote: One of the most used sites does use donations.
Its wikipedia.

http://deckbox.org/users
Found 77647 results.

http://www.techspot.com/news/42607-wikipedia-wants-1-billion-users-200000-editors-by-2015.html
"The site serves between 400 and 500 million unique users per month and has 18 million articles between all supported languages. As of December, the site had some 80,000 "active editors" -- those who make five or more edits a month."

Wikipedia has a slightly larger user base.

freshluggage wrote:

100000520842029 wrote: One of the most used sites does use donations.
Its wikipedia.

http://deckbox.org/users
Found 77647 results.

http://www.techspot.com/news/42607-wikipedia-wants-1-billion-users-200000-editors-by-2015.html
"The site serves between 400 and 500 million unique users per month and has 18 million articles between all supported languages. As of December, the site had some 80,000 "active editors" -- those who make five or more edits a month."

Wikipedia has a slightly larger user base.

So whats your point?

Wikipedia has as well a higher amount of staff and cost for their servers, hell even electricity will cost them a shitload.


I am not saying donations WILL work. I am saying they COULD work.

If you ask for my opinion - do all options simulationously

I understand the need to monetize the site, but I thought that was what the marketplace was supposed to do. I've been buying and selling cards on here, and I paid the deposit for the option to sell.

I've seen the ads return (when surfing on my ipad - I have adblock on all my other devices) and I didn't say anything about that. But why are you now trying to push users to pay you more? And why is it so expensive? $6.99 a month? really? The ability to add some notes to cards is not worth that. Also there are other sites for private deck lists for free if someone really needs that feature. There's nothing advertised on the premium page that justifies that price tag to me.

Also since I saw it on the page, I feel the need to say that I don't think I'd want auto-trade either. That sounds like a mess. It almost makes sense on Pucatrade where you would get credits for cards, but cards for cards? Nope. That's why I sell cards, that's auto trade to me. - Cards auto trade into money, then I use money to buy cards I want. Deckbox takes a cut (possibly both ways depending on if I can find the card on here or not). To put some perspective on this, I've canceled 17 trades in the past week alone due to not being things I was prioritizing/just didn't want to trade x for y even though values were similar. Unless you mean you're calling the auto [u]match[/u] feature auto [u]trade[/u] and making it only available to people who pay, that would be really sad.

I'm disappointed by this change.

gumgodMTG wrote:Also since I saw it on the page, I feel the need to say that I don't think I'd want auto-trade either. That sounds like a mess. It almost makes sense on Pucatrade where you would get credits for cards, but cards for cards? Nope. That's why I sell cards, that's auto trade to me. - Cards auto trade into money, then I use money to buy cards I want. Deckbox takes a cut (possibly both ways depending on if I can find the card on here or not). Unless you mean you're calling the auto [u]match[/u] feature auto [u]trade[/u] and making it only available to people who pay, that would be really sad.

The auto trade is apparently something about automatically adding cards to your trade list, not... automatically trading your cards.

But yeah, the more I personally think about it the more I think a Kickstarter would've been the right way to do this: Outline a lot of premium features you want to add and crowdfund their development. People can buy into these features through the crowdfunding (they don't need to be available initially), and those that don't can subscribe normally. It'd raise immediate revenue and also give people an idea of what they should expect to see in the future. Like, I think it'd be interesting to have a discussion on well-targeted premium features: Stuff like access to special analytics, access to special tagging features (when tagging is implemented), hosted space to add card pictures, etc.

That perhaps touches on what's most-frustrating about this: That Sebi is accessible and appears to listen and there's lots of users sympathetic with the basic needs to monetize the site, but instead of making even a rough development timetable and trying to encourage donations he kinda just goes into the tank and rolls out new features in a way that's difficult to understand. The marketplace worked fine but I'm pretty sure this approach to adding premium features is suboptimal. It's an odd problem to have, but I think he needs to be more-willing to let his community help him out.

9700377 wrote:The auto trade is apparently something about automatically adding cards to your trade list, not... automatically trading your cards.

I'm still not interested. I think this is something you should survey users on. The way I build decks and use the site may be different than the way others use it. But to me this feature would add nothing.

I feel that a move like this alienates users as even though features were not specifically removed from free users, free users will now feel like they are lower priority. This is creating a caste system of users if you will, and makes it seem like the updates that have been promised for so long (like notes on cards) will not actually be given to them (free users) since they are no longer the priority. I understand Deckbox wanting to make some money, but $7 a month is too much.

more edits:
I know I am always vocal about the changes, but usually I'm very positive about it. I don't particularly like this change in focus for the site. I do wish you'd bring back flags mattering on the 'interesting cards for trade' stream.

Just want to give my thanks and respect to the deckbox-team.

I really don't get all the frustration about the Premiun Accouts, and certianly not the whole paywall-thing. The basic site, with all the same features, is still free. I myself am not going to pay for the Premiun, but that won't stop me from using deckbox. It's really an amazing site to trade and organize. Thanks for that!

100000520842029 wrote:

freshluggage wrote:Wikipedia has a slightly larger user base.

So whats your point?
Wikipedia has as well a higher amount of staff and cost for their servers, hell even electricity will cost them a shitload.
I am not saying donations WILL work. I am saying they COULD work.

Wasn't making a point necessarily, just an observation.

But if you'd like me to make a point it would be that Wikipedia is probably a poor comparison as scale should be a factor when suggesting a revenue model. If Deckbox got 10% of its users to go Premium (at $7 per month), they'd bring in $650k per year. If Wikipedia did the same, they'd bring in $3.36 billion (assuming 400 million users). Completely guessing here, but $650k would probably do a good job of covering most of Deckbox's yearly operating costs while $3.36 billion would cover Wikipedia's operating costs plus allow them to maybe cure cancer or something.

Additionally, Wikipedia provides a very different service than Deckbox (the same can be said of the Star City Games subscription which was listed for comparison elsewhere).

That's not to say, however, that donations couldn't be helpful or work for Deckbox. Unfortunately, I recall many people suggesting/offering to donate to Deckbox prior to the addition of the Marketplace feature when there were discussions about how this site could sustain itself and , to the best of my knowledge, every offer was declined.