v4.0: Deckbox Premium: Features Galore! (Page 2 of 8)

I also have many more thousands of email threads in my email, and thousands of emails sent to users here, be it for support or to solve trade disputes. I try my best to answer everything, although sometimes there just is not enough time.

I'll take whatever feedback you give, and try to learn something from it, but if you tell me this site lacks "communication".... that I have no answer for....

For free by the way.... to help you guys use this website.

I do not understand what you mean.

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.

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.

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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.

Last edited by 100000520842029 (2014-12-15 16:51:29)

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.

Last edited by 9700377 (2014-12-15 16:54:19)

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last edited by 9700377 (2014-12-15 17:35:40)

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?

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.