Jan 22, 2025, 09:27 PM
Evening All,
Yesterday we pushed The Plates Update and there has been a lot of feedback following on from it. First off, we'd like to apologise. We made several oversights with this update, which I'll break down into sections and talk about what went wrong, and what we're planning on doing to fix it. I want to take accountability for these issues, I apologise for them and as a team we want to make things right and make sure they don't happen again in the future.
Update Push Time
I'm going to start with discussing the fact that the update was pushed quite late at night, when not many people were online. As a result, less than 10 players were online and the server scheduled a restart to go-live. This was an oversight on my part, but it's led to a good conversation about how we handle going live with large updates, especially those with economy impacts.
What are we doing about it?
Going forwards, we're going to make an effort to better co-ordinate releases, for example around 7pm for all large updates, with a forced restart scheduled to make sure everyone gets the opportunity at a reasonable time to play on the updated gamemode.
Unreserved Plates, and Plate Hoarding
When we were designing the changes, we knew the resetting of plates might cause a couple issues here and there but we made an assumption that these scenarios would resolve themselves through a bit of trading, and cases would not be common. What we did not anticipate is the extent to which some players would try to capitalise on this situation by buying, in some cases, hundreds of plates to sell back to players. For the most part, we don't have a problem with this, but in hindsight it is unfair that players lost access to the plates they had before the update and those plates have been held hostage by people for money.
What are we doing about it?
We want to strike a balance between allowing a free market, and having a fair market, and as a result of that we're going to allow players to request their original pre-update plates to be returned back to them. For starters, vehicle trading has been temporarily suspended - update will go live shortly. Any player who has already purchased their pre-update plate back from another player who reserved it, may request a refund, and if approved the amount will be returned to the buyer. Sellers will not be penalised.
As such, if you wish to request your plate to be returned or a refund for a transaction taken place to return your plate, then please fill out the below Google Form and your request will be triaged by the development team. We will let you know once completed.
Google Doc Form Link
It is very important that if you wish to do this, you do it soon, as we are setting a deadline of Wednesday 29th, 9pm GMT, to complete the form. Any submissions after this point will be disregarded, and players will be free to resume trading.
Additionally, if you believe you should have access to a plate which you did not own before the update, but believe there are exceptional circumstances which should grant you ownership of that plate, you may reach out to and let us know why. Your request will again be triaged by the development team. If you are one of the kind players who has purchased a plate back on behalf of another player and returned it to them for free, please also get in touch with Doctor Internet with as much detail as you can provide and we'll review.
Poor Trading Experience
People have rightly pointed out that the experience for trading plates isn't great at the moment. As we didn't anticipate the demand for plate trading, we hadn't included a system to allow plates to be traded independently of vehicles. Another criticism is that plate hoarding has been allowed to happen very easily, due to low cost of Trabants and Plates themselves.
What are we doing about it?
For starters, plate purchase cost has increased to 25k. This should have been included as part of the original update, but better late than never. Next, I want to talk a bit about the subsequent update we will be making to plates. We're working on the ability to detach plates from your vehicle for a fee (to cover the detachment and cost of replacing the existing plate with an automatically generated one). These plates will be stored in your inventory as a unique item, and you will be able to trade them or apply them onto your vehicle. Vehicles which have a unique plate applied to them, will be blocked from trading until the plate has been removed and replaced with an auto-generated plate. I'd expect to have this update ready within the next week or so.
I'd just like to end on a note to say we're pushing an update with another new plate font as people have quite rightly pointed out it's impossible to distinguish between 0, O, 1, I on the new font.
Once again, apologies for the poor update rollout, and we welcome any further feedback - especially on the topic of the 2nd update idea. Just please keep it civil :-)
Thanks.
Yesterday we pushed The Plates Update and there has been a lot of feedback following on from it. First off, we'd like to apologise. We made several oversights with this update, which I'll break down into sections and talk about what went wrong, and what we're planning on doing to fix it. I want to take accountability for these issues, I apologise for them and as a team we want to make things right and make sure they don't happen again in the future.
Update Push Time
I'm going to start with discussing the fact that the update was pushed quite late at night, when not many people were online. As a result, less than 10 players were online and the server scheduled a restart to go-live. This was an oversight on my part, but it's led to a good conversation about how we handle going live with large updates, especially those with economy impacts.
What are we doing about it?
Going forwards, we're going to make an effort to better co-ordinate releases, for example around 7pm for all large updates, with a forced restart scheduled to make sure everyone gets the opportunity at a reasonable time to play on the updated gamemode.
Unreserved Plates, and Plate Hoarding
When we were designing the changes, we knew the resetting of plates might cause a couple issues here and there but we made an assumption that these scenarios would resolve themselves through a bit of trading, and cases would not be common. What we did not anticipate is the extent to which some players would try to capitalise on this situation by buying, in some cases, hundreds of plates to sell back to players. For the most part, we don't have a problem with this, but in hindsight it is unfair that players lost access to the plates they had before the update and those plates have been held hostage by people for money.
What are we doing about it?
We want to strike a balance between allowing a free market, and having a fair market, and as a result of that we're going to allow players to request their original pre-update plates to be returned back to them. For starters, vehicle trading has been temporarily suspended - update will go live shortly. Any player who has already purchased their pre-update plate back from another player who reserved it, may request a refund, and if approved the amount will be returned to the buyer. Sellers will not be penalised.
As such, if you wish to request your plate to be returned or a refund for a transaction taken place to return your plate, then please fill out the below Google Form and your request will be triaged by the development team. We will let you know once completed.
It is very important that if you wish to do this, you do it soon, as we are setting a deadline of Wednesday 29th, 9pm GMT, to complete the form. Any submissions after this point will be disregarded, and players will be free to resume trading.
Additionally, if you believe you should have access to a plate which you did not own before the update, but believe there are exceptional circumstances which should grant you ownership of that plate, you may reach out to
Poor Trading Experience
People have rightly pointed out that the experience for trading plates isn't great at the moment. As we didn't anticipate the demand for plate trading, we hadn't included a system to allow plates to be traded independently of vehicles. Another criticism is that plate hoarding has been allowed to happen very easily, due to low cost of Trabants and Plates themselves.
What are we doing about it?
For starters, plate purchase cost has increased to 25k. This should have been included as part of the original update, but better late than never. Next, I want to talk a bit about the subsequent update we will be making to plates. We're working on the ability to detach plates from your vehicle for a fee (to cover the detachment and cost of replacing the existing plate with an automatically generated one). These plates will be stored in your inventory as a unique item, and you will be able to trade them or apply them onto your vehicle. Vehicles which have a unique plate applied to them, will be blocked from trading until the plate has been removed and replaced with an auto-generated plate. I'd expect to have this update ready within the next week or so.
I'd just like to end on a note to say we're pushing an update with another new plate font as people have quite rightly pointed out it's impossible to distinguish between 0, O, 1, I on the new font.
Once again, apologies for the poor update rollout, and we welcome any further feedback - especially on the topic of the 2nd update idea. Just please keep it civil :-)
Thanks.