Wizards of the Coast delayed its Secret Lair Countdown Kit: An Encyclopedia of Magic sale (see “Special Package“) twice today due to “technical difficulties.” Shortly after putting drop item(s) in their carts on the Secret Lair website at 9 am PT, customers were sent to a Secret Lair Waiting Room. The screen in the Waiting Room told customers to that the sale was delayed till 9:15 am PT, and that keeping the Waiting Room page open would hold their place in line. At 9:13 PT, the page was updated again to say that the sale would be delayed again until 9:45 am PT.
The Waiting Room was a previously unseen feature of the Secret Lair checkout process, apparently created to handle delays in the start of the sale. It collected all of the first customers that could not check out due to the technical difficulties into a group, and once the sale was about to begin, the buyers in the group were moved into the Secret Lair Lounge checkout line in a random order, prior to customers that had not been in the Waiting Room. In previous sales without the delay in start time, buyers with drops in their cart would just go straight into the long wait in the Secret Lair Lounge checkout queue.
During today’s sale, at 9:49 PT, an update was issued to customers in the Secret Lair Lounge to inform them that the site was experiencing high traffic, which was creating extended wait times, a fairly typical situation for popular Secret Lair drops.
“Technical difficulties” were also cited as the reason for the delay of the Secret Lair x Marvel Secret Lair drops last year (see “Queue Pauses within Minutes of Forming“), but the addition of the Waiting Room feature for today’s drop reduced some of the chaos around what are apparently traffic-related issues with the Secret Lair website.
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