Updates on Game Key Drops

Hi everyone!

The last few weeks have been a bit crazy here in the Legion Gaming Community as we've attempted to resume our Game Key Drops giveaways. I wanted to briefly provide an update on what's been happening, and our plan going forward to address the issues. Will try to keep this relatively short so that it isn't a novel 😅

What happened?

Starting in November, we attempted to start our Game Key Drops campaigns beginning with Human Fall Flat as the first giveaway title. The first drop initially performed well for about 1-2 hours, until a sudden traffic surge overwhelmed our site. The traffic continued to rise to the point our systems could not keep up, so we paused the giveaway intending to relaunch at a future date pending stability improvements.

Since then, we have run a few cycles of the following:

We make significant improvements to site traffic stability, abuse prevention, widget functionality, and other systems.
We attempt to re-release the key drop at a new date & time, only to be met with even higher demand than the previous key drop attempt, which again overwhelms our site.
We pause the key drop with the intent to resume again at a future date after further improvements.

This cycle has been difficult to break. We appreciate our community's extensive patience while we work to accommodate the demand, and fully understand the frustration of members looking to claim a key. While a few thousand members have successfully obtained keys, the majority of you have not.

I want to stress that the level of demand we are seeing is unprecedented for these drop campaigns. At this point, millions of users are attempting to access the key drops each round, which is far beyond our expectations. We're blown away by your interest in the campaigns, and trust me, we want to get these keys to you as much as you want to get them! We just need to find a sustainable and scalable way to do that.

What's the plan?

Our team is discussing multiple ways to conduct these key giveaways going forward, including reserving keys for the most-active members of the community and other new formats. We like this idea and are exploring it. However, we see the popularity of the Key Drops format, and would like to try every possible option to support this format too before giving it up completely.

As a first step, we intend to run a key drop for Smoke and Sacrifice soon at an unspecified date/time. Much of the traffic overload issue comes from our countdown system, which helps create excitement for the drop, but also unfortunately causes a massive spike of demand leading up to the drop time. We would like to test a "random" drop time to see if this helps ease the burden on traffic demand. Theoretically, this format should also reward community members who are more actively checking the site for updates.

We have made another round of improvements to our services today, including:

Variable Waiting Room feature to help mitigate traffic flood as needed
Enhanced captcha verification systems in multiple areas
Live team monitoring of campaign to identify potential abuse & traffic sources
Additional bot protection efforts (must keep these vague)

If this random key drop tests well, we will continue to ramp up tests and explore the possibility of adding back a date/time schedule for each future drop. We are also working with Gamesplanet to explore acquiring an additional batch of Human Fall Flat keys so that we can run another full Key Drop for HFF in the future, after fixes are fully stable and secure. This should help alleviate frustrations if you had issues claiming HFF during the last few rounds.

Please note - there may be issues during the drop tests. We acknowledge this, but think the payoff is worth it if we can eventually get things stable after enough tests.

We will also continue to explore a priority system for our most-active members to claim keys separately. Ideally, we can run this new program in tandem with the wider Key Drops campaigns.

In the meantime, a few requests:

Please bear with us! Accommodating millions of users at once is challenging. We are working hard to find a way to make this a stable experience, but there may be some hiccups along the way while we get things right.
If you promote these key drop tests externally, please consider adding context that they are work-in-progress. We will acquire additional batches of keys for the future to make sure everyone has a chance to claim them once fully stable.
Please keep comments and discussions around key drops free from abusive language & other messaging that violates our Terms of Service. You can speak here in any language, and being frustrated is okay, but it's not okay to verbally attack staff or members for any reason.

If you have questions, comments, ideas, or concerns, please leave them below. I'll do my best to get back to as many as you can. Thank you for your extensive patience, your passion for the events, and for being part of the Legion Gaming Community!

TLDR:

We would like to continue testing the Key Drops format, and will run another drop test soon at an unspecified date/time. We've made improvements, but it will take more testing to get right. If you'll be patient with us, we'll explore every possible solution, and are purchasing additional keys to accommodate those who had issues previously.