I thought the ICO was very well executed personally. It provided a nice contrast to how Status.im conducted their ICO the same day.
Civic:
- queued their contributions to prevent network congestion
- ensured everybody had a space in line.
- provided clear information on when it would open (9am), so just get in line before that time and you're pretty much guaranteed a spot. Also communicated to users while they were in the line with a notice box.
Status:
- no queuing, and disrupted the entire network for hours with what amounted to a DDoS attack on the network by its own users
- no guarantee for a space in line, just an address that you need to send money to asap
- communication breakdowns while the entire network slowed to a crawl and people were sending money to a smart contract with no response. They took down their Slack channel after the blowback.
Civic conducted their ICO responsibly and professionally and I hope other ICOs follow their example.
Maybe for many it was great, but for me it was the worst ICO of all. Not only the app didn't work on my phone (was brand new 1.5 years ago, android) after using another phone, getting a spot in the queue, after I sent out an ether transaction exactly as the civic.tokensale page told me, it just gave an "bad jump" error, I tried it another time, just wasted more gas...
Brand new is not 18 months old, especially in the phone market. If you have an android you could/should update the phone to the latest software when released, then your phone would have been able to download the app. It's not Civic's fault you don't keep your devices up to date.
please read carefully before smartypanting!
I said it _was_ brand new, just to state it is not like 5 years old. However I got it to work with a 3 year old android phone... Of course keep the android updated, thanks for this advice
What made my experience so bad was not the problem with the phone but rather that I was early enough in line, I got a spot, Civic told me which amount of ether to pay, what data to append, but still in the end the transaction failed. Furthermore nobody can tell me what the problem is. Civic support doesn't answer (I suspect they get a lot of tickets). So of all ICOs, which I tried to get in, this was the only one that didn't work for me.