TOPIC: my experience... not good

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Steve wrote: I never really figured it was about paying a player to do it, more of a spot check by 'unrecognized staff'. Giving up the profit from that run, as opposed to giving it to some random person.
Think 'Quality Control'.

Giving away a ticket you could have sold is exactly the same as paying out money. Either way, it's money off the bottom line. Then there was talk of unspecified "thank you" rewards on top of that. So yes, a secret shopper program as described would cost Jeff real money.

Ever notice that you usually pay more for an item that advertises "free shipping?" That's because there is no such thing as "free" in business; there are just things you pay for without noticing, or whether you use them or not.

I don't know why people assume the mystery shopper would get their run for free. I never said it.

Clearly there are people who would volunteer to do it for less than the cost of a full run - perhaps for free.

Certainly for the minor volunteer token.

Sometimes people build on.

The last thing I remember was someone saying it would "only" cost Jeff $416 a day in tickets. That would be asking Jeff to take over $1600 out of his pocket. Tickets are a limited resource, so they cost something to give away. I'm glad to hear that wasn't what you meant.

But even "just" giving them the red volunteer token to comment on their 2-hour adventure is a slap in the face to those who put in 20-plus hours of hard work for the same reward. Some of those people sell their tokens to help pay their expenses, and flooding the market with easy volunteer tokens hurts them. Now we are shifting the cost away from Jeff and making other volunteers pay for the program. I say it again, nothing is free.

Brad Mortensen wrote: Sometimes people build on.

The last thing I remember was someone saying it would "only" cost Jeff $416 a day in tickets. That would be asking Jeff to take over $1600 out of his pocket. Tickets are a limited resource, so they cost something to give away. I'm glad to hear that wasn't what you meant.

I was the one who 'built on' - so to speak. Really it was more me thinking 'out loud'.

I was thinking more along the line of a traditional 'mystery shopper', where you train someone to walk in with a critical eye, looking for problems. *Not* someone who gets a 'free run for fun' and just happens to point out things at the end.

$1,600 to assure that even 50% of new players 'convert' and become at least a single PYP token buyer is chump-change from a ROI stand point. I'm not sure what the current conversion rate of returning new players vs. PYP packs bought vs. abandonment is at .. but I'm betting Jeff knows it

At GW, we knew that selling a starter box was a nice sale, but more importantly, it drove sales of 5-6X the initial rules cost over the next six months.

Converting new players makes the additional sales almost effortless. Desire begets sales. Every time. [I'm a great example .. eagerly awaiting the pre-order flag to be dropped ]

Really, this is more me thinking on paper than anything. I'm a bit of a business development geek. If the goal of TD is to maximize returns in a single year .. then this will hold no water. However, I suspect that TD is still in a growth mode, and that will require more token buyers to fund that growth, which requires new player conversions.

Lets guess, and say that 20 groups run through every 15 mins on average. that is 800 people an hour. Over 10 hours (roughly) for four days .. lets average and say 30k people go through. If we assume as a guess that 50% of these players are new (15k), and that by making sure everyone has a friggen blast 20% of them buy a PYP, that would be a ROI of 469:1. I would play those odds all day

The problem is TD has serious constraints on growth. If you double your demand every year, you just crank up the presses. If TD doubled every year, it would be a catastrophe. There's no way to meet that kind of demand.

And there are enough experienced volunteers who love TD and Jeff to do this for free. We play anyway, we know how it should work. Just open our mouths.

TD is Jeff's only job now, AFAIK. I'm not in a position to say whether $1600 is "chump change" to him or not. It seems like real money to me.

bpsymington wrote: Providing an opportunity for feedback again would probably be a good idea. Comment cards would be good, or perhaps the XP cards could give a link to a forum thread for feedback, or an email address for providing feedback.

I think this is a *great* idea.

TD already gives out a card for volunteer recruitment, and a card for XP... Another "customer satisfaction" card would be a good way to let people give feedback - or even just to let them know there is a way to give feedback, since many people are unaware of how to contact an AC.

This could be combined with the XP card, or be separate. Maybe together would be better, since people are better at not losing those cards.

Raven wrote:

bpsymington wrote: Providing an opportunity for feedback again would probably be a good idea. Comment cards would be good, or perhaps the XP cards could give a link to a forum thread for feedback, or an email address for providing feedback.

I think this is a *great* idea.

TD already gives out a card for volunteer recruitment, and a card for XP... Another "customer satisfaction" card would be a good way to let people give feedback - or even just to let them know there is a way to give feedback, since many people are unaware of how to contact an AC.

This could be combined with the XP card, or be separate. Maybe together would be better, since people are better at not losing those cards.

I like your idea Raven! When you enter your XP card number you get a pop up on a survey! Sweetness of an idea.

Where is your cookie!

Kaledor wrote: Where is your cookie!

Funny you ask...

Steve wrote: At GW, we knew that selling new rules every 30 seconds and invalidating armies would force sales of new models

Fixed that for you

One thought would be to make a survey or feedback form for those of us who are volunteers and running anyways. Give us a few pointers of specifics to watch out ot observe and put a request for feedback on the XP cards.

Arcanist Kolixela wrote:
Jeff does not control who buys tickets.
Jeff does not have the ability to limit how many tickets players get for multiple runs.

The ONLY thing Jeff can do is lower the rewards for ghosting players which would penalize people who legitimately failed to fill a space and do not want new players due to negative experiences.

You are right. They can still purchase the tickets to keep their negative experience with new players without get enhanced treasure token pulls.

mattnaik wrote:

Steve wrote: At GW, we knew that selling new rules every 30 seconds and invalidating armies would force sales of new models

Fixed that for you

HA! That was after my time

OK, to reply to some of the things that all you nice people have said:

The DM in the lava room expressed that he thought it was excessive to have only one shot and lose the treasure. Also, that taking away the boots was something that he disagreed with, when we asked. He also said that he was instructed to be hard on people as to stepping on the right tiles. There was no "leeway."

Whether TD has an interest in avoiding treasure stamps or not is not the point, the point is that it appeared they didn't want anyone who didn't have certain tokens to lose out. 2 of the treasure rooms in that dungeon looked to have less than a 10% completion rate, and to new players it looks like TD wants to force them to spend a lot of money to "guarantee" the reward that they felt they earned. The puzzle was solved in time, not forced, and a token that looked like it was designed to circumvent was explicitly excluded. And when you factor in that I know there is a lot of fire resistance floating around, the lava boots were useless. half damage didn't make any difference to me or a lot of red equipped players.

I understand that management can't control ticket sales to people, and there are times you can't get slots filled. But I don't check the forum while at Gencon, I don't have access to wifi. I know a lot of people don't want to waitlist, cause in previous years you might wait a couple hours for a ticket, and you had to have generics in hand. Also, you don't know if you will be able to get 2 or 3 together, and from what I have seen rarely do. And at least one person I know didn't get their badge until after tickets were sold out. So between volunteer shifts, and the other things they want to do they have to add 1/2 wait (if they are lucky) to a 2 hour event.

I don't think that a mystery shopper would help with the biggest complaints that my group had, they were deliberate designs that hurt new players, while hardly phasing veterans.