[bimkx]

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.

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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 @Doctor Internet 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.

[Vadar]

Futhering on from what @bimkx has said, We apologise on the oversight on the bring live of this update and will take the given feedback as to how Development release structuring is handled going forwards for future large updates.

[Project]

Quick and swift remedy

[Nudel]

Takes some courage to recognize that a mistake has been made.

Thanks for taking care of this.

[Taylor]

Lovely stuff, glad to see such prompt action from the team.

[Judge Rage]

I want to give a big congratulations to the team for recognising the problem and swiftly trying to make things right. Well done guys. For what was an update that probably didn't seem like it would be controversial at first. The plates update is pretty cool and I look forward to committing many crimes with my fake plate!

Likewise once this blows over it will be cool to see the custom plate market going forward - for crude words etc it's pretty funny.

Also a mention to the players who recognised the issue of people's unique plates being held hostage and decided to start buying them up and giving them back - @Taylor for dropping 2 mil on this and "@pufitee" for giving me my JUDGE plate back for free <3. I'm sure those two weren't the only ones.

[BasicallyMental]

Good to see swift action taken, although have a couple questions:

1. Will the plate seller be notified if their plate has been removed from them / will they be reimbursed in the sense of the 5k that was spent on the plate
2. This one’s more just of a curiosity but understand if it can’t be shared; how will you determine someone’s plate prior to the update? Just to prevent people from claiming random plates that takes their fancy from our marketplaces

[bimkx]

Good to see swift action taken, although have a couple questions:

1. Will the plate seller be notified if their plate has been removed from them / will they be reimbursed in the sense of the 5k that was spent on the plate
2. This one’s more just of a curiosity but understand if it can’t be shared; how will you determine someone’s plate prior to the update? Just to prevent people from claiming random plates that takes their fancy from our marketplaces

1) Absolutely, we're going to be transparent with all sellers to let them know what's going on when we're taking plates off them.
2) We have the original plates database which pairs plates to SteamIDs so we can verify.

[BasicallyMental]

Good to see swift action taken, although have a couple questions:

1. Will the plate seller be notified if their plate has been removed from them / will they be reimbursed in the sense of the 5k that was spent on the plate
2. This one’s more just of a curiosity but understand if it can’t be shared; how will you determine someone’s plate prior to the update? Just to prevent people from claiming random plates that takes their fancy from our marketplaces

1) Absolutely, we're going to be transparent with all sellers to let them know what's going on when we're taking plates off them.
2) We have the original plates database which pairs plates to SteamIDs so we can verify.

Amazing thank you <3

[Nacreas]

One of my favourite things about Limelight is that we have a team of dedicated and experienced developers who have the skill and sense to give things ago, and know how to modify things as circumstances arise.

Great effort by all. Keep it up.

[Vadar]

Google Form has now been closed as per the deadline (Wednesday 29th, 9pm GMT)
Plates Update Part 2 will be going live at 7PM tomorrow which will introduce the ability to detach plates and trade them (Allowing vehicle trading once again)

[BasicallyMental]

Google Form has now been closed as per the deadline (Wednesday 29th, 9pm GMT)
Plates Update Part 2 will be going live at 7PM tomorrow which will introduce the ability to detach plates and trade them (Allowing vehicle trading once again)

Are we required to wait to trade vehicles with the plate attached until tomorrow? Or may we begin trading plates now

[bimkx]

Google Form has now been closed as per the deadline (Wednesday 29th, 9pm GMT)
Plates Update Part 2 will be going live at 7PM tomorrow which will introduce the ability to detach plates and trade them (Allowing vehicle trading once again)

Are we required to wait to trade vehicles with the plate attached until tomorrow? Or may we begin trading plates now

Please wait for the update to go live which changes the way trading works. I'll post an update thread for it midday tomorrow with more info.