Three Strikes You're Out...
Here is the scenario... Bottom of the ninth inning, down by three, bases loaded two strikes three balls. One good hit can win the game with a walk off.
If you recall, I wrote this post and this post recently about the WAX/TOPPS Major League Baseball NFT sale. Well it happened yesterday right around 1:00 PM EST and to say it went smoothly would be gracious.
Let me break it down for you:
Strike 1
About five minutes before the sale was supposed to start there was a relatively obscure post on the WAX Discord that they were pushing the sale back 30 minutes. The fact is, if you weren't on the WAX Discord server, I am not even sure if you would have known. When 1:00 PM finally rolled around the website finally started working and it said all of the packs were sold out.
I am guessing those who didn't see the message about the 30 minute delay just assumed it sold out that fast and went on with their day. That is probably what I should have done...
Strike 2
So 1:30 PM EST rolls around and once again I am ready to go. The sale site is working marginally better, so I am thinking they must have gotten things sorted out. Go time hits and I load up my cart with the items that I was looking to purchase.
I fill in the required information and click the checkout button only to be greeted by a "Stripe" error. Apparently, since it was a credit card only sale, they were having trouble with their payment processor. No big deal, I refreshed the page and re-entered my information and tried again. Same error.
I checked on the Telegram group I am part of and others were getting the same error. I must have tried about twenty times, same error, no joy. Probably the crappiest part was that I had to retype my email address and physical address every time I tried. I was pretty annoyed by this point.
Strike 3
At one point, I actually made it to the cart and entered my credit card information only to get another error that the transaction wasn't processed. I jumped over to my credit card site to see that there was in fact a charge to my card. I decided to sit and wait for an email from TOPPS and WAX with a receipt.
I could have kept trying with my credit card, but I didn't want to end up with a bunch of charges to my card. It likely would have gotten suspended or something with all of that activity.
Out
So I waited, and waited, and waited, still no email. Finally, the pack opening timer counted down to zero and I logged into the site only to find that I had received zero packs. They were sold out by now and when I checked it appeared that a refund was being applied to my credit card.
Sadly, my story isn't an isolated incident. Many people experienced the same results that I did.
With the exception of Alien Worlds, I have failed to see a smooth NFT launch on the WAX chain. It makes me pretty sad because WAX has so much potential. I am a believer in the chain and I promote it whenever I can. This track record needs to be fixed if we expect to be a contender with ETH. There are many metrics which WAX currently outshines ETH, but these failures put a black mark on those accolades.
Perhaps if they had done a crypto based sale versus credit card... Maybe they should have checked with Stripe to make sure they could handle the volume. I don't know.
This one was definitely a whiff for me and I am not sure how likely I will be to participate in similar TOPPS sales in the future.
Hopefully some of the people on Leo that were taking a chance on this sale had better luck than me. I know @cryptictruth struck out as well.
Sports Talk Social - @bozz.sports
@eos.detroit Staff Writer/BOID Team Leader
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