BioWare's bizarre Bazaar

Epic Event, or Epic Fail?

If you are one of those people that thinks BioWare is the greatest thing since sliced bread and should not be criticized for anything, run -- don't walk to the nearest exit. Though there are some Good Things here, there's also some Bad. Those of you that remain, I leave it to you as to which side of the balance is weighed down more. Also, if what you read here prompts you to voluminous commentary, I'll post this article in its own thread in the forums. That way you can comment at length without any sensation of claustrophobia imbued by that tiny Comment box.

For those that would like to view the raw data spreadsheet, you can click here .

Ancient History
Back on March 23rd (depending on which timezone it first appeared), a countdown clock appeared on the BioWare social network. Speculation was rife, trying to guess what it was that would be announced on March 29th, 9:00 a.m. PDT. Something monumental enough to warrant a countdown clock, obviously.

Came the magic moment: -- and the BW server crashed. You _knew_ there were a LOT of people that wanted to know what was so special. Less than an hour later the servers were back up and people could read the opening announcement:

"To show our appreciation of fan support and to celebrate the 15th anniversary of BioWare, we have created the BioWare Bazaar – a week-long series of mock online auctions beginning April 6th that will feature over 400 items ranging from custom painted PCs, Alienware laptops, BioWare apparel and more."

Wow! Was that worth the wait, or what? I'll go with "what". Almost immediately, the exceptions started:

"We recognize that BioWare has a global community, and the Bazaar this week was originally intended to be an international event to reflect our truly global fanbase. Unfortunately, we encountered some last-minute legal complications around how contests can be structured in different parts of the world that prevented us from including all territories in this first event, even though that was our original goal. And for that, we sincerely apologize – our goal with this sort of celebration is to show all our fans worldwide how much we appreciate your support!

"BioWare definitely really values all members of our world-wide Community, no matter where you live. Accordingly, in the coming weeks, we will be announcing details about future events specifically for fans living in those territories which were excluded from participating in the first BioWare Bazaar."

Reading the rules was quite enlightening: US only. No Florida. No New York. Eighteen years old or older.

Gee, who is left? Well, even without FL and NY, the bulk of the BioWare customer base remained.

But wait! There's more!

Starting at 9:00 a.m. PDT on April 6th, auctions would begin. The "currency" of the auctions would be tokens which would be accrued by doing any of several things:

Signing up/ having a BioWare social netwok account (mandatory) -- 1000 tokens
For each copy of Dragon Age: Origns registered -- 1200 tokens
For each copy of Dragon Age: Awakenings registered -- 1750 tokens
For each copy of Mass Effect 2 registered -- 1500 tokens
For downloading a copy of the DA:O Character Creator and then uploading at least one character -- 500 tokens

All these are understandable and are aimed mainly at actual community members. But then these other things were added:

If you had a Twitter account, you could participate in "Twitter Challenges". Each Challenge would award 500 tokens to each of 100 winners. As "challenges" go, they weren't very challenging. Things like, "What was your favorite race to play and why?" Really, is there a wrong answer to that? Judges would select the "best" and award them 500 tokens each within 3 hours of posting the Challenge. Given a HIGH probability of _thousands_ of submissions, I can well imagine the frantic judges grabbing 100 submissions at random and declaring them the "best" of the lot. ("What makes these the best is that they allow us to move on to other things!") The REAL drawback of these though is that it required participants to have a Twitter account. You could own all the games and be super-active on the community forums, but you would apparently not be worth as much to BioWare as another member that had all that AND was active on Twitter. All in all, this made me wonder: Do the people at BioWare hold stock in Twitter?

And lastly -- and what proved to be THE deciding factor about who would be winning the coming auctions -- were the tokens awarded by referral clicking. Basically, every account-holder in the community was assigned a unique referral link. Post it prominently somewhere and anyone clicking on it was taken to the Bazaar homepage -- where they could sign up of course. For the first 50 referral clicks, a participant would receive 10 tokens for each of those clicks = 500 tokens. After the first 50, each additional click awarded only 1 token. HOWEVER, a participant could get those first 500 tokens for 50 clicks each day of the Bazaar. 500 tokens each day of the Bazaar. Those tokens could add up to a rather LARGE account total. All it took was the greed necessary to post your unique link everywhere and anywhere, and spamming everyone on ALL of your forums to "Please, please, please click my link!" MANY of the more clever sort posted "news" blips on their various forums announcing the Bazaar -- and it was only incidental that the link provided to direct traffic to the Bazaar homepage just happened to be their own, unique referral links. The truly inspired took to posting funny images and photos with captions that read "For a surprise, click on me!" The surprise was that you ended up at the Bazaar homepage and they just racked up another token.


D-Day to D-Day + 4

9 a.m. PDT, April 6th: The auctions start. The first item, a Mass Effect Shirt Pack, goes for a winning bid of 10100 tokens. 10k+? For t-shirts? Quick; let's go over the math. DA:O = 1200 tokens. ME2 = 1500 tokens. DA:A = 1750. Social network = 1000. DA Character Creator = 500. So there's a working base of 5950. And this guy had 4K+ more than that, to blow on t-shirts?

For community members that refused to run around going, "Please, please, please click my link!", they would be lucky to have @7K in tokens. Many of them sat by their computers, just to see if they could log a bid before the minimum bid surpassed their meager total.

Some of the more interesting auction tidbits that I mined from the data:

Of 412 auctions:

I missed the winner of the ME T-shirt Pack that occurred between Apr 08, 2010 @ 23:30:00 and Apr 08, 2010 @ 23:45:00 (GMT) and went for 11885 tokens. Anybody know who that was?

Winners that do NOT have a Profile (how could they even place bids with no Profile?): 14

Winners with Private Profiles (no info available): 8

Winners with 2 wins: 1 (Ecliptic Deimos) [Seems this was a software glitch. Before ED got confirmation of having won the first auction, she placed a bid for the next auction -- which was enough to win that one as well. When the software finally caught up, ED was notified that her balance was -9220. Oops.]

Largest winning bid: 16820 (Draugr)

Smallest winning bid: 8620 (OmegaKappa)

Most tokens spent on wins: 18571 (Ecliptic Deimos; see above for her story)

Winners with no registered games: 38
Winners with 1 registered game: 79
Winners with 2 registered games: 84
Winners with 3 registered games: 150
Winners with 4 registered games: 26
Winners with 5 registered games: 11
Winner with most registered games 7: desurge, who has all three platforms for both DA games, but just one platform for ME2

[Keep in mind that anyone that didn't register one of the three games that provided tokens had the option of filling out a questionnaire to receive the token value for that game. So pretty much _everybody_ started with a minimum of 5950 in tokens.]

Winners that registered on or after 3/29/2010 (Start of Bazaar.): 27 (20 of those have no games registered.)

Most unusual event during auctions: Three winners in a row (Uppermine, komenusai, and kinglyly2) all had the exact same avatar. Given that there are 105 stock avatars, the odds of three in a row are 1/105 x 1/105 x 1/105. BUT then add in that A) they each had enough tokens just to be able to bid, and B) they each actually won against all other comers, and C) they won 1, 2, and 3. As a racing Trifecta, the payout would be ENORMOUS.

Now the lowest winning bid was 8620. The last bid below 9K occurred at 2:30 p.m. GMT on the third day of the 5 day auction.The last bid below 10K occurred 7:30 p.m. GMT on the fourth day. For the balance of the fourth day and for the entire fifth and last day, if you didn't have at least 10K+ in tokens, you may as well have gone home. Oh. That's right; you were home already, glued to your computer, just hoping beyond hope that _something_ trivial would be shunned by all the big spenders. Well, in that case, you'd have been better off going to see a movie or playing a game.

The upshot of all this data crunching is that despite BioWare's assertion that the Bazaar was meant "To show our appreciation of fan support," they actually meant "fans with Twitter connections and don't mind grovelling and scamming to get referral clicks." Right. Show your Friends just how much you appreciate them by deluging them with spams of "Please, please, PLEASE click my link!"

The Good,

Supposedly, the Bazaar was meant "To show our appreciation of fan support." If one defines "fan" as someone that at least uses the product., then we should note that at least 351 of 412 items went to "fans". That's at least 85% of what was available showered on to people that actually play BioWare games. Not too shabby.

The Bad,

The main Bad thing was that soooooo many "fans", for whom this event was meant to show appreciation, were left out in the cold. AFTER nearly a week of BioWare's intimations that something _great_ was coming that would affect the entire community. Let's build up the suspense! Then the first words to appear are, "To show our appreciation of fan support and to celebrate the 15th anniversary of BioWare, we have created the BioWare Bazaar – a week-long series of mock online auctions beginning April 6th that will feature over 400 items ranging from custom painted PCs, Alienware laptops, BioWare apparel and more." Followed by, "UNLESS you live outside of the US. Or inside FL. Or inside NY. Or if you don't do Twitter. Or if you don't have a LARGE circle of Internet contacts to panhandle." But those people were given assurances that they would be taken care of! Soon! Trust us to do the right thing! Riiiigggghhhhtttt. _Why_ do I have the image of a professional politician spinning just why what a big company (contributing to his "campaign fund") is doing is what is best for ALL of us? Or of Wimpy (from Popeye cartoons) telling me, "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today!"

Of course, we were all assured that there was a Good Reason why so many people were left out. "Unfortunately, we encountered some last-minute legal complications around how contests can be structured in different parts of the world...." Last minute; riiiigggghhhttt. BioWare conducts business in scores of countries. They are familiar with the trade and commerce laws in each of them. Most importantly, they _know_ that there are variations in the laws. You can be quite certain that work on organizing the Bazaar had been going on for months. One would think that one of the first things brought up would have been "What are our obligations and liabilities for running a contest in each of these countries?" At which point, the almost immediate feedback would be something along the lines of, "Uh, this might not be a workable idea." Now, if it happens that whoever was responsible for looking into the legal technicalities did _not_ do so, then that demonstrates some serious incompetence. As in the "You're fired!" level of incompetence. After all, his negligence just made BioWare look foolish and incompetent, as well as pissing off about half of their total customers. But that aside, the Official Contest Rules MUST have been run past the Legal Department far enough in advance for them to scrutinize and cover BioWare's corporate behind. That is, it is incredibly, extremely unlikely that someone whipped those things off in WordPerfect just hours before the Bazaar launch announcement. So "last minute" is anything but last minute. Probably several days -- if not weeks that they knew the limitations but didn't let anyone know the Bazaar would be for The Chosen Few.

I can see why they wouldn't want to break the bad news early. Had they done so, there _would_ have been an outraged outcry from those that would be excluded. (As there was, indeed, such an outcry.) And enough sympathy from their US brethren that more than likely a movement would have been started to delay the Bazaar "until it can be done right, and we can ALL participate." But by delaying until that "last minute", any US sympathy evaporated as Americans started to salivate over all the goodies they could conceivably win. (And with over half of the competition removed by a technicality!)

Then there was the Twitter Challenges. The judges allotted themselves 3 hours after each Challenge to determine who the "best answer" 100 winners would be. But Reality got in the way. What happens when they have to sort thousands of submissions to pick the "best" answers? Random selection is what happens, turning the farce into a lottery or a race to be amongst the first 100. Furthermore, on the last day, quite a few/many/most of that day's Challenge winners didn't receive their winning notifications until after the auctions were done -- making their winnings totally worthless. All in all, not good.

And The Ugly (American)

Without a doubt, the ugliest thing about this event was the referral clicking. Twitter Challenges aside (which were bad enough), the referral clicking dragged the whole event down to the sewers. Members had a great choice: Either refuse to demean themselves by going a-begging for clicks from everyone whose path they crossed -- and sulk as others that _do_ demean themselves get all of the goodies -- or reduce themselves to a pack of adolescents panhandling change (clicks) from their relatives, friends, coworkers, strangers, and social groups. I've seen estimates that as many as 20+% of the auction participants got themselves banned on at least one forum or more for having spammed the forum with referral links. But, hey, _anything_ to win, right?

Perhaps just as bad is the rampant speculation by the non-panhandlers about how many of the auction winners had "obviously" cheated. And frankly, I can see that for a clever cheater, it wouldn't be that hard to do so. For instance:

The rules stipulate that a single person may have only ONE token-accruing account. _However_, when signing up for the social network, what differentiates one person from another is a unique name and a unique email address. Okay, so just how many different email accounts can you get for free just by surfing the Internet? Hmm. Lessee. Do a quick Search and we find mail.com, Hotmail, Gmail, AIM Mail, GMX Mail, Yahoo!, Gawab.com,...... It's a lllloooonnnngggg list. Next, sign up my "brother", my "sister", my "mother", my "father",.... And so on until boredom sets in. So now I have umpteen legitimate accounts, each registered to a specific individual. Now the clicking starts. Once each account has clicked on all of its companions' links, then time to bring in a circle of Friends from whatever social network(s) I happen to belong to. Then every day, we all swap clicks for all of accounts. By the time we're done, by the time bidding starts, each of us has several accounts with 10K+ tokens. If we don't, it's because somebody got lazy in the clickfest. Or maybe grew a conscience.

I have a strong feeling that if a survey was conducted outside of the US that had but one single item -- "List ten adjectives that describe the typical American" -- that in the overwhelming majority of responses you would find the words "greedy", "selfish", and "childish". And after the way this event has transpired, the percentage of such responses with those adjectives would be significantly higher than otherwise. But as many of the auction panhandlers said in defending their behavior, "It seemed like that was the _only_ way to win!". Maybe BioWare, being a Canadian company actually _wanted_ to give so many Americans the opportunity to demonstrate our sterling better nature in action. [Maybe they did it this way because they wanted some negative fallout to land on Electronic Arts, based in California, which is BioWare's lord and master. Hmm. Something to ponder.]


Is everybody happy?

This is actually easy to calculate.

412 prizes

411 (or very possibly fewer) prize winners: they are happy

Tens of thousands of BioWare social network members
- all non-US members in the network: nobody happy there (except maybe in a vengeful way)
- all members in FL: nobody happy there
- all members in NY: nobody happy there
-all eligible members that couldn't bring themselves to go a-begging (and seeing the others that do winning): not happy
- all eligible members that demeaned themselves and _still_ didn't win anything: mostly unhappy

Several hundred thousand members of scores of forums that got plastered with CLICK ME! spam: mixed bag

Then there's BioWare.
+ The damn thing is over!
- Now we have to start working on the next one
- We've got _thousands_ of people unhappy with us!
+ We now have a LOT more names in our emailing Marketing database. A _LOT_ more. All those clicks....

Maybe it wasn't BioWare's intention to piss off soooooooo many people. Then again, maybe they don't really care.

Soooooooo many new addresses in the database. All those clicks..... Ask again after the next quarter's Profit & Loss Statement comes out. And the one after that.