I'm from Fire, so I'd like to chime in. Eieru has been inactive both on FR and Discord and it's likely he does not have any internet access, or if he does, it could be spotty and laggy. Running both raffles was not right imo because now both raffles are being held up but I don't believe the dom team ever asked if people were willing to run at the very least the IF raffle. It's a very unfortunate timing and I absolutely understand how frustrating it is and does not help with Fire's dom bad reputation, but there's nothing we can do about it since he can't contact us at all :(. I believe Eieru holds most, if not all items from the raffle, and I don't believe drawing and pinging people who will not receive their prizes within 24 hours would alleviate the frustration.
Please don't let this be a bad experience with the "new" dom team - they're all very kind and are starting to organize well. It's just a really shitty and unfortunate timing.
If anyone has questions and/or reserves about the raffle, I can ask them in the discord on your behalf! While not a fire dom team member, I love dom and would like to help push Fire in the right direction, so any feedback is always appreciated.
And thank you again for your patience and understanding; we really appreciate it! I don't want people to think we're hiding and running away with the prizes. :')
An alternative that the new team might consider using (in this very outlier circumstance) is remaking the primary raffle threads and pinging everyone over to the new one to do some prize drawing, with the understanding that prize distribution will be delayed due to the emergency. Collect receipts and document the final drawing outcomes, and then (once the 'out in an emergency' organizer is availabe) do the actual prize distribution.
This has the benefit of communicating the situation to everyone impacted by the outage.
I don't believe drawing and pinging people who will not receive their prizes within 24 hours would alleviate the frustration.
Every discussion of alternative paths has mentioned making it clear that prize distribution would be delayed. I don't get the idea that frustration would only be alleviated by people getting prizes and so nothing should be done until there are prizes to give out.
People can be reasonable about emergencies and with the host's situation being up in the air, probably most will happily wait for them. (There are always the jerks.)
The very first post on this matter was about the lack of communication and I think that's the feedback. Since the update about the host not being able to get online there has been no further communication. No one saying, "we've discussed and think waiting is best for now, please have patience and we're sorry" or something like that. Just silence again. That last post was over a week ago. I think the main frustration stems from the absence of anyone willing to face the situation.
Maybe after a week had gone by someone could have posted again outlining steps going forward or some sort of timetable for when next steps would be taken. Like say, "After 2 weeks/3 weeks/a month we'll do [this thing] next." Which would give the host's troubles time to resolve themselves so maybe that next step won't be needed or if things are actually super bad for them, set expectations for people. But really just saying as mentioned above, "Yeah, there is no plan yet/the plan is to wait. Apologies," would be/would have been enough. It's the lack of ...anything really that makes it seems like there isn't anyone that cares.
My assumption was based on personal feelings; I would not like to be pinged for something and not get my thing in a timely manner (max one week), because I’m so likely to get the thing on my own, or lose interest in it by the time it arrives. I’m curious to hear more thoughts about this, however! If any IF/OOF raffle participants read this, please let me know if you’d rather be pinged and choose your prize now, but only be sent the prize at a later date (on which we have no visibility right now), or if you’d rather be pinged when all things are sorted out and you can get your prize within 24 hours.
You’re correct when you say it makes us look bad/uncaring. I believe with how small the dom team actually is, and Eieru holding the raffle prizes and most of the dom team’s funds, none of us can fill in and distribute prizes on our own for now, which is not to say we don’t care, just that we can’t do anything substantial except saying we don’t know when the drawing/prize distribution will resume. :o(
But I am okay with doing a drawing and updating the prize list in the same message so people can at least pick something out of an updated list. I just don’t know if it won’t make them more upset, to get a gift weeks later.
Personally, I’d be fine with either a message saying “our runner has had rolling blackouts. We are working to resolve this as much as we are able and will resume drawing when they return” or a message with “our runner has had rolling blackouts. We’re going to move the raffle to a new page so that people can select prize packs so that when they come back they can just ship things out”. Either of those are better than radio silence, especially when FireDom is coming off a rough spot.
Best of luck to you and hope Eieru manages to come back soon!
I'll give you the other side then. Knowing that you're not forgotten and will get this chosen prize you claimed with patience is reassuring.
Also, I'll be blunt: you have either the POV of a ridiculously wealthy player or the prizes were garbage if you think the user is just going to buy it themselves or lose interest in the interim.(And I'm pretty sure they were good prizes.)
To me, it'd be closer to when I prepay an accent and have to wait a while.(Because they did prepay in dragons sent to you raffle) I know it's coming to me. It's as good as mine. Just need patience.
Also, did you guys seriously learn nothing about spreading out your bank from before? You seriously went from handing it all to Dutchess to handing it all to another player. The problem with that was not just the person. My flight has our prizes scattered through the bank holders and doesn't pull the stuff together until the prize gets claimed in case of someone having issues.
You don’t need to be ´ridiculously wealthy’. The prizes were good, but some of them are worth less than others and their supply has not ran out yet on the AH. A WC scroll is one month of fairgrounds which is maxed in 15 minutes nowadays and some side sales you can easily make selling food or coli drops or fodder. Especially after NoTN, most people managed to set aside some gems. I suppose you can always resell the item you picked if you don’t have a use for it by the time you get it, but /to me/, raffles are an opportunity to get something I want to use, not something I want to resell because I could have gotten the thing before my prize is sent.
And it’s great if your flight is organized (I’d be interested to know which flight it is!). It’s truly an enjoyable experience to be in a flight with an established dom team. But the problem is the same at its core: even if there is 3 person holding 3 different items you want for the raffle you’re setting up, and one of them goes missing for one reason or another, you’re still item-less. You just have two items instead of zero, but you don’t have all the items you need regardless. It’s a good way to organize, but it’s NOT foolproof (and nothing ever is, anyway). We could wake up tomorrow and FR would be gone. That’s just how life is, and I want to reiterate that none of us have any miraculous fix.
It could happen to anyone, any flight, it’s not a fun thing to deal with, and getting hit with a stick because ‘you should know better’ when this is about someone having power outages is wrong, and rude to say. But I thank you for your opinion on the drawing.
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Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-05 07:44 pm (UTC)(link)Please don't let this be a bad experience with the "new" dom team - they're all very kind and are starting to organize well. It's just a really shitty and unfortunate timing.
If anyone has questions and/or reserves about the raffle, I can ask them in the discord on your behalf! While not a fire dom team member, I love dom and would like to help push Fire in the right direction, so any feedback is always appreciated.
And thank you again for your patience and understanding; we really appreciate it! I don't want people to think we're hiding and running away with the prizes. :')
Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-07 04:28 am (UTC)(link)This has the benefit of communicating the situation to everyone impacted by the outage.
Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-08 08:56 am (UTC)(link)Every discussion of alternative paths has mentioned making it clear that prize distribution would be delayed. I don't get the idea that frustration would only be alleviated by people getting prizes and so nothing should be done until there are prizes to give out.
People can be reasonable about emergencies and with the host's situation being up in the air, probably most will happily wait for them. (There are always the jerks.)
The very first post on this matter was about the lack of communication and I think that's the feedback. Since the update about the host not being able to get online there has been no further communication. No one saying, "we've discussed and think waiting is best for now, please have patience and we're sorry" or something like that. Just silence again. That last post was over a week ago. I think the main frustration stems from the absence of anyone willing to face the situation.
Maybe after a week had gone by someone could have posted again outlining steps going forward or some sort of timetable for when next steps would be taken. Like say, "After 2 weeks/3 weeks/a month we'll do [this thing] next." Which would give the host's troubles time to resolve themselves so maybe that next step won't be needed or if things are actually super bad for them, set expectations for people. But really just saying as mentioned above, "Yeah, there is no plan yet/the plan is to wait. Apologies," would be/would have been enough. It's the lack of ...anything really that makes it seems like there isn't anyone that cares.
Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-08 10:54 am (UTC)(link)My assumption was based on personal feelings; I would not like to be pinged for something and not get my thing in a timely manner (max one week), because I’m so likely to get the thing on my own, or lose interest in it by the time it arrives. I’m curious to hear more thoughts about this, however! If any IF/OOF raffle participants read this, please let me know if you’d rather be pinged and choose your prize now, but only be sent the prize at a later date (on which we have no visibility right now), or if you’d rather be pinged when all things are sorted out and you can get your prize within 24 hours.
You’re correct when you say it makes us look bad/uncaring. I believe with how small the dom team actually is, and Eieru holding the raffle prizes and most of the dom team’s funds, none of us can fill in and distribute prizes on our own for now, which is not to say we don’t care, just that we can’t do anything substantial except saying we don’t know when the drawing/prize distribution will resume. :o(
But I am okay with doing a drawing and updating the prize list in the same message so people can at least pick something out of an updated list. I just don’t know if it won’t make them more upset, to get a gift weeks later.
Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-08 03:56 pm (UTC)(link)Personally, I’d be fine with either a message saying “our runner has had rolling blackouts. We are working to resolve this as much as we are able and will resume drawing when they return” or a message with “our runner has had rolling blackouts. We’re going to move the raffle to a new page so that people can select prize packs so that when they come back they can just ship things out”. Either of those are better than radio silence, especially when FireDom is coming off a rough spot.
Best of luck to you and hope Eieru manages to come back soon!
Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-08 04:46 pm (UTC)(link)Also, I'll be blunt: you have either the POV of a ridiculously wealthy player or the prizes were garbage if you think the user is just going to buy it themselves or lose interest in the interim.(And I'm pretty sure they were good prizes.)
To me, it'd be closer to when I prepay an accent and have to wait a while.(Because they did prepay in dragons sent to you raffle) I know it's coming to me. It's as good as mine. Just need patience.
Also, did you guys seriously learn nothing about spreading out your bank from before? You seriously went from handing it all to Dutchess to handing it all to another player. The problem with that was not just the person. My flight has our prizes scattered through the bank holders and doesn't pull the stuff together until the prize gets claimed in case of someone having issues.
Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-08 07:57 pm (UTC)(link)You don’t need to be ´ridiculously wealthy’. The prizes were good, but some of them are worth less than others and their supply has not ran out yet on the AH. A WC scroll is one month of fairgrounds which is maxed in 15 minutes nowadays and some side sales you can easily make selling food or coli drops or fodder. Especially after NoTN, most people managed to set aside some gems. I suppose you can always resell the item you picked if you don’t have a use for it by the time you get it, but /to me/, raffles are an opportunity to get something I want to use, not something I want to resell because I could have gotten the thing before my prize is sent.
And it’s great if your flight is organized (I’d be interested to know which flight it is!). It’s truly an enjoyable experience to be in a flight with an established dom team. But the problem is the same at its core: even if there is 3 person holding 3 different items you want for the raffle you’re setting up, and one of them goes missing for one reason or another, you’re still item-less. You just have two items instead of zero, but you don’t have all the items you need regardless. It’s a good way to organize, but it’s NOT foolproof (and nothing ever is, anyway). We could wake up tomorrow and FR would be gone. That’s just how life is, and I want to reiterate that none of us have any miraculous fix.
It could happen to anyone, any flight, it’s not a fun thing to deal with, and getting hit with a stick because ‘you should know better’ when this is about someone having power outages is wrong, and rude to say. But I thank you for your opinion on the drawing.
Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-08 04:31 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Dom Thread
(Anonymous) 2024-01-08 07:39 pm (UTC)(link)Thank you for your insight! I will look into resuming the drawing in the upcoming week if we don’t hear from Eieru.