A summary of what happened during today’s Oakland unlocking and what we’re going to do about it moving forward.
What Happened Today?
As Upland is experiencing unprecedented growth, today we aimed to launch Oakland in support of our growing economy. As we were stress-testing the system to ensure we can release the higher-stake properties, the Upland metaverse experienced lag which resulted in a poor user experience. This led us to the decision to postpone the release of higher-stake properties until we can fix these issues.
Players may wonder about the urgency of releasing new cities before other concerns have been fully addressed. The reason is that our number one priority is to keep the Upland economy stable at this phase of hyper-growth. The attempted Oakland release today saw almost 2.5X the concurrent players compared to the successful part of the previous Brooklyn release, which means the metaverse is scaling much faster than expected. As entire cities sell-out, not releasing new properties into the economy may create undesired consequences which can be harmful for the longer-term health of the economy. Additionally, not releasing new cities would hurt Upland’s capacity to onboard new players who are joining at an ever-growing rate.
However, we realize a few mistakes were made today, and we recognize the need to make improvements. We are committed to solving our growing pains by scaling our team to match the demands of the metaverse.
Scaling Talent Alongside Growth
As the metaverse continues to grow, so do the number of tasks. Bug fixes, new features, usability improvements and new cities while still sustaining the growing scale.
This is why we’ve been hiring and onboarding the right people to bring our development capacity and operational excellence to the next level. It will take a little time, but we are very confident that the improvements we’re making to our team will help solve more issues and help us scale operations and communications in a more efficient manner. We’re focussed on setting Upland up to be ahead of the growth, rather than constantly chasing it.
Moving Oakland Forward
We have already identified a significant portion of the issues that came up today and we should have a fix up by mid next week. After we are confident in our solution, we will run a small stress test, and if that goes well we will announce another attempt at releasing Oakland.
What we’re building together is cutting edge especially in the context of blockchain technology, so we thank all players for bearing with us as we work to improve this rapidly expanding metaverse. As we grow, we’re all on this wild rocketship together!
-The Upland Team
