Hey guys,

I'm writing an article on behalf of a client, EnjinCoin (enjincoin.io) about the current hell of payments. Both technical and on the business end (which I'm asking about here) and I'm asking for opinions or past experienced

Some examples might be

* Getting stuck with some horrid plugin or external interface that you have to use, no real API that you can create your own controls or skin around

* Chargeback hell

* Long delays in processing or getting refunds on behalf of customer

* Anything pain points or features you wish current things do, but dont do or do horribly. 

* Offer and video ad/interstitial ad rants are good too. I know most of wish we had a better alternative (EnjinCoin potentially could be that)

What do you guys think are the best go-to's for payments right now? or best practices 

Also I used to be more active in gamedev myself and this is part of a long mulltistep plan to earning/self financing my way back lol. Can discuss here without the details but would also love 1-3 on the record statements if I can get them. Have already gotten some complimentary EnjinCoins okayed as thanks for anyone's time in participating, the specifics we've yet to agree on. For anything on the record, but not so public you can also email me at munly@vanbex.com

The only hell I ever had with payments is receiving them. Paying for something is so dam easy over the net you can do it by accident, receiving payments involves a huge amount of paperwork and setup.

2 hours ago, fathamburger said:

* Getting stuck with some horrid plugin or external interface that you have to use, no real API that you can create your own controls or skin around

Isn't this what EnjinCoin is just going to be. I mean Facebook has some of the best 3rd party tools around and anyone that has ever used it will tell you it's as buggy as hell.

I mean look at Facebook and Unity. With the Unity 2017 upgrade and Facebook Unity SDK 7.10 you loose a lot of the functions you had before because both updated and made changes. So most users prefer to use a older Unity and a older Facebook SDK  and a older JDK and a Older openSSL.

How is EnjinCoin going to avoid this?

2 hours ago, fathamburger said:

* Anything pain points or features you wish current things do, but dont do or do horribly. 

Allow people a way to create accounts for others. I often help out small indie developers and often these people have no idea how to setup adverts and sales in there games. Helping them with it is a huge pain because I often have to wait for them to create the necessary accounts and I can't do it for them.

Debugging tools. I can't tell how many times I have setup payments in a game not knowing if it's going to work when published or not. So some way to fake user accounts and payments would be nice.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

The only hell I ever had with payments is receiving them. Paying for something is so dam easy over the net you can do it by accident, receiving payments involves a huge amount of paperwork and setup.

Isn't this what EnjinCoin is just going to be. I mean Facebook has some of the best 3rd party tools around and anyone that has ever used it will tell you it's as buggy as hell.

I mean look at Facebook and Unity. With the Unity 2017 upgrade and Facebook Unity SDK 7.10 you loose a lot of the functions you had before because both updated and made changes. So most users prefer to use a older Unity and a older Facebook SDK  and a older JDK and a Older openSSL.

How is EnjinCoin going to avoid this?

Allow people a way to create accounts for others. I often help out small indie developers and often these people have no idea how to setup adverts and sales in there games. Helping them with it is a huge pain because I often have to wait for them to create the necessary accounts and I can't do it for them.

Debugging tools. I can't tell how many times I have setup payments in a game not knowing if it's going to work when published or not. So some way to fake user accounts and payments would be nice.

This is great stuff.  Really helpful. I would not have thought of creating accounts (i.e. an agency user) or debugging as being wishlist features myself.

As for whether Enjin will be just as half assed? maybe, maybe not. However the developers are highly aware of many of the common issues plagueing payments in general but they are also a more tightly focused team whereas Facebook has the Microsoft problem i.e. building very generally. 

As for the FB/Unity SDK Changes, are you talking about stuff completely deprecated? or stuff they have to leave out until they update for newer interfaces or dependencies? I would think that just relates to good general software architecture i.e. factory design pattern and other similar such techniques. I'm really fishing for specifically badly designed payment solutions or particular issues, whether unintentional or from lack of experience i.e. team has fintech but not gaming background or something

4 hours ago, fathamburger said:

As for the FB/Unity SDK Changes, are you talking about stuff completely deprecated? or stuff they have to leave out until they update for newer interfaces or dependencies?

I am talking about functions that use to work and then sudenly don't because of a clash between software.

For example in Unity 2017 the IGraphResult call from facebook no longer provides the profile pic as a texture. So you are forced to either use www redirect(Unity's www function is very bad) or you need to go into the Facebook SDK and fix it yourself.

Now as you can think this is just the very basics. When I was still using Unity 5.4 and I think it was the Facebook SDK 6 I spend hours online with there customer care because almost none of the payment functions worked. We had to rewrite more than half the code to get it to work.

At the start of this year I helped a small team where the developer submitted a game first to get publishing permissions then later decided to add payments. Of course the payments did not work and he was told to submit it for approval again. Except he was latter inform by Facebook that the game had already been submitted and approved. Then after a few days to fix this problem he was told to delete the app and to create a new one and submit again. He did this without telling the team. We logged in as normal using our testing tokens and got our facebook profiles blocked. Took me a week to get mine unblocked.

The worst part about that story is that it was probably just a boolean that was set wrongly and gave me a weeks worth of problems.

4 hours ago, fathamburger said:

As for whether Enjin will be just as half assed? maybe, maybe not.

It isn't half assed, that is the problem. Facebook SDK uses 3rd parties just like so many other payment methods, these days it's a miracle if you get any software that doesn't need a java update. The easier software is to use the more third party plugins you will need to keep updated to use it.

And as for blocking peoples accounts, that is just a factor we have to deal with if we want to protect our self and our clients from robbery.

4 hours ago, fathamburger said:

from lack of experience i.e. team has fintech but not gaming background or something

Normally a team like this has at least one real programmer on it, so more often the confusions happen because of poor or outdated examples and lack of documentation.

In truth all problems I have experienced with payment options is either related to software clashing when updated or code used wrongly because the function had one value changed and no one updated the documents because they thought people would see it and understand.

4 hours ago, fathamburger said:

I'm really fishing for specifically badly designed payment solutions

If you are really looking for badly designed payment gateways why not go to a user review site or check some of the smaller payment options?

If a gateway works it grows large fast, while the ones that fail die faster. With adverts developers are mistrusting from the start so only a few make it. 

15 hours ago, Scouting Ninja said:

Debugging tools. I can't tell how many times I have setup payments in a game not knowing if it's going to work when published or not. So some way to fake user accounts and payments would be nice.

This.  I've run into payment systems that don't let you test without actually spending money.  Seems like that would be an obvious one, hah.