v4.0: Deckbox Premium: Features Galore! (Page 3 of 8)

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.

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

http://www.techspot.com/news/42607-wiki … -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.

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 match feature auto trade and making it only available to people who pay, that would be really sad.

I'm disappointed by this change.

Last edited by gumgodMTG (2014-12-15 18:56:26)

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.

Last edited by gumgodMTG (2014-12-15 19:25:36)

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.

First off, I do think Sebi deserves a lot of thanks and appreciation for a pretty damn good site, and a free site at that. 

That being said I find a simple workaround for the near future would be:
1) The addition of a "Donate" button
2) Perhaps a premium rate similar to Humble Bundle, where users can pay whatever amount they like (for x number of games), but must spend at least the average that users are spending to get the bigger name titles.

I find the rates for the premium memberships to be incredibly steep, especially for the services offered.  I personally would never spend more than $25 for a year of being a premium member, and that is assuming that there is a reason to do so.  I think at the moment that this "premium" patch/update looks like a stopgap solution to financial issues that maybe wasn't thought out completely.  But like I said I think the addition of a "Donate" button would work wonders, especially as all of this is being sorted out. Also, I think a good idea for a premium membership would be some sort of trading insurance where you could be backed for up to $X amount or something like that.  I feel as if that could be a good starting off point rather than the current premium services.

As a side note, I like my decks being automatically organized by Cost.  I honestly don't know what other user would disagree here, I mean I would strongly appreciate a setting option for that as well.

It seems to me that much of the objection to this is that it's unclear as to what the primary motivation is.  If the site simply isn't making enough money and needs to become monetized, that's one thing, but if you're trying to say that these new premium features are legitimately worth $7/month, that seems unreasonable.

Personally, I do not see these new features as being worth nearly that much.  That said, if deckbox truly needed money to get back, I'd probably consider making a donation or paying a small regular fee to use the site.  I do, however, object to this "in-between" approach, where rather than ask for donations or develop true premium features, lackluster features (relative the cost) are developed and hidden behind a high monthly fee.

Also, rolling out premium before an app is completed seems like poor timing.

I do appreciate all the work that goes into deckbox-it is a great tool.  I hope that in the future, major changes are applied more tactfully; moving away from TCG prices and the premium release do not seem like they were introduced in the right manner and have likely alienated some users.

Yes, I understand why they did it, but the shift could have gone much smoother.  All of a sudden, many prices were simply gone or were wildly different than they were the day before.  And it was a long time until most of the prices were fixed.

Once again, I'm less commenting on the changes themselves and more about the manner in which they were introduced.

I've been using the site for a while now.  I post on the forums and read many more posts.  I'm what you would call a spike player. I play to win and use the site with that mindset. I look for value on trades when i can, try to trade up.

My .02 about the new features listed...

• priority support - What does this even mean? if there's a bug it's probably affecting everyone and you need to fix it anyway right?  Can you clarify what this means?  Do you mean better support for trading issues?  Are you offering a TCG player like guarantee for people that don't receive their orders?

• no advertisments - seems okay, but the adds weren't really a bother anyway, unless they start becoming nsfw, if they did. I'd have to leave the site for sure.

• emergency collection backup recovery - umm... i guess this is okay... the site really isn't structured in a way that these types of accidents should happen often. Unless you get more requests than we know about.

• Built decks - the only built decks that matter are the ones on my shelf at home. Anything on the internet is impermanent by it's very nature. I don't know that this is a valuable feature. You can only ever use 4 of a given card in a deck and you can only play one deck at a time and i just use proxies in the deck i'm not playing atm.  I don't know many players that keep multiple copies of cards, especially high dollar ones.

• Public and Private notes for each card - what kind of notes?  like small text messages? what does this feature mean?

• The Scratchpad section - largely useless imo.

• Private or password protected decks - this could be somewhat relevant, but if it became relevant for me, i'd just remove my decks from deckbox.  There are lots of places that offer deck building/saving that are private. You could be hurting yourself on this one.

• Mobile Application (iOS & Android) - This is the thing i might actually pay for. a one time $5 charge for a robust version of deckbox on my phone. the site works fine on mobile, but it's a little cumbersome. It's not really touch intuitive.  More development time should spent here.

• Collection Tagging & Card Scan Attachments - i don't even know what this is.

Other things I might actually pay for.

• Better price comparisons - ebay. amazon, etc... It's a lot better than it was, but i still have to check TCG and SCG to make sure. I'm not sure what kind of deal you could work with TCG to get their prices into a premium feature, but it's still the go to source for pricing.

• Market analysis tools - price histories, matrix cross sectioning of cards played in recent tournaments and counts of those cards in top decks.

• Tournament reports - lists of cards played in top tournaments and who has those cards for trade.

• Meta Data - Lists of cards that are most traded on deck box, and reports on overall trade histories. Does deckbox trading habits mimic real world purchasing habits?

• better deck building analysis tools - the current analysis tool doesn't take into consideration dual lands in decks or hybrid mana symbols etc (at least that's the way it looks).

• Built in tournament matching tools - especially in a mobile app. I want to draft a box with my friends etc... it'd be nice if deckbox has a built in swiss match maker.

• Player performance tracking -  Allow import/export of player match histories and allow that player to edit those matches with extra meta date like (type of deck played), specific # of games won so players can get a sense of how they do from game to game and what they're tough matches are. I've read some pros say they might enjoy a feature like this and have been having to track it themselves.

Last edited by elpablo (2014-12-15 20:48:58)

Haha, turns out I posted that exactly after ElPablo wrote a very big post on the topic at hand, isn't that some weird coincidence

Will post reply to your questions now, reopened this.

It means if you have a problem and write me an email or post on the forums, I guarantee to read it and answer it as fast as I can. It basically means I reserve some time for you to solve the issues.

People accidentally delete their inventories, or mess things up importing or exporting. We have more tools now that allow mass import by edition, which can cause issues.

It also might happen that there are bugs which cause you to lose card information unless you personally made a backup. If you are premium, I will take time to help you recover your data.

Sorry the features provided by the premium plan do not seem to satisfy you, I hope other users (which have been asking for many of these for years) will find them useful.

They are, but it seems that is my mistake. Puca trade have a healthy business I presume, and employees, developers and support staff. I do not even have an income for myself, and feedback seems to be that people are pissed off even when they are daily using those free features...