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Donation Points System Changes Delayed

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We planned to release the Donation Points reports for April, May and June this week along with adding April's DP to your wallets. However, we're sorry to say we will be unable to meet that deadline due to an unexpected issue with the new system. The bug resulted in some inaccuracies in total DP for each author and we want to take the time to ensure that this is fixed, tested and verified before we publish any new reports. We messed up with this and we're sorry! 

Our development team have been working non-stop to try and get the fix in so that we could release the reports to you when we said we would, but this system is very important to both us and you so we're not going to rush it through or crunch. We're revising the estimate to the end of next week (15 August 2024).

We've also set a clear expectation internally that if we cannot resolve the problem by the middle of next week we'll release April's DP report using the old unique-download-based system instead and start using the new algorithm once we're fully confident everything works as intended. We'll pin a comment below as we know more. 

We appreciate that the delay is not ideal and we'd like to extend our humblest apologies to all the mod authors who have been eagerly (or anxiously) awaiting their Donation Points. It's very frustrating that the individual impact of the changes will remain unknown for a few more days. We shouldn't be announcing hard deadlines if we can't hit them, and we understand the anxiety and concerns this has caused for many of you. Whilst we continue to work on this on our end, we're grateful for and appreciate your patience and understanding.

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  1. Pickysaurus
    Pickysaurus
    • Community Manager
    • 725 kudos
    Important Update
    There seems to be a bit of confusion about what's happening with the latest DP reports. Hopefully this post will help clear a few things up:


    • The April and May reports have been published. These are both using the old unique-download-based algorithm. 
    • We've put $325,000 per month into the system for April and May (plus Patreon). This is the same amount we've donated every month since January 2024.
    • April was the month which saw the release of the Fallout TV show. As a result there were huge spikes in traffic for Fallout 4, New Vegas, Fallout 3 and other games in the series. This means that these games commanded a significantly larger share of the total unique downloads and therefore modders who make content for these titles will see an increase to represent that. 
    • Modders who create content for other games (including Skyrim!) may see a decrease over this period as large chunks of the DP pool that would normally have gone to their games have been swallowed up by the Fallout traffic. You can see this represented in the graph below and on the Donation Points statistics page.




    The Fallout traffic has returned more or less to normal from June 2024 onwards, so the distribution of Donation Points will reflect that in future reports. 

    I hope this alleviates some of your concerns about seeing less DP this month.



    Update 15 August 2024 15:00
    The Donation Point reports for April and May are now available. DP for April has now been paid into your wallets.



    Update 12 August 2024 15:00
    After a lengthy discussion with the team, we're going to release the April and May reports using the (old) Unique Downloads algorithm. These should be available before the end of this week. I will update this post once the reports are available. 

    A deeper investigation of the issues identified with the new algorithm highlighted that we need to do more work than initially planned to ensure it works as intended. This won't be done in a week. We don't feel it's reasonable or fair to our mod authors to keep them waiting while we do this. 

    Our community team will use the new moderation tools to address some of the behaviours we previously highlighted before the reports are available. If this affects you, a Community Manager will be in touch via the forums. 

    I know this is a frustrating situation for mod authors - we're frustrated too! It's fair to say the launch of the new algorithm has been a mess. Our communications to you were based on bad information internally that the system was ready to go when it clearly wasn't. 

    Rest assured, we are devoting all the time and resources necessary to getting this right. We're just going to take a little longer than anticipated. Thanks for your patience.