Solved

Free Parts Bug

We only have three full-time developers (including me) and we're extremely busy right now finishing an update, and various other administrative tasks in my case. With just three guys addressing half a million players you can probably imagine it gets tough to keep up. I've been made aware of probably 100 situations of similar severity to investigate currently. Sometimes the best we can do is have Yunus talk to you about it, so that when I do get on to it I can address it quickly.

That said... I think this one will be fixed later today, because....

Now it all makes sense. Because of this post, I think I know why this is happening. There is a check for how many adverts you have watched in the past 24 hours, rather than on the current date. So, in the case of anybody claiming they "can't" get 10 parts like everyone else, actually they can, but they only get access to another view in bursts across the day.

All I will need to do is change the way it checks to be date-based instead of timing out over 24 hours to resolve the issue. In other words, I think there was no such bug that you could only get 2-3 parts, but there was a scattered series of ad views over the previous 24 hours which meant you'd keep capping out at 10 views within 24hrs every time you viewed 2-3 videos. By making it date-based you'll be guaranteed access to 10 views every night at midnight.

Please try now, it might be fixed. I've changed it to work the way described. Bear in mind, it will deduct all your ad views done within the current day in your timezone from 10. So if you had viewed 4 already earlier today you'll only get 6 now.

When we were doing finishing touches on the new update earlier, I suggested to the other developers that we add error messages when video ads can't play for any reason. It has been added, so please let me know after the update if you receive any error messages. It will inform of reasons they might fail, e.g. video failed to load, was interrupted during playback or there are no ads available currently.


Sarcasm detected! Anyway, I've hired as fast as I can with the resources available. It's a free game, and the races can be up to 2 hours of non-stop data streaming. Most companies providing comparable services rely heavily on constant funding from investors or crowdfunding, but we manage on a shoestring with a small team and ask for nothing. It's something we're quite proud of.

That said, we haven't grown to this size audience by being complacent. We're not settled or taking anything for granted, but our story isn't "whoops, 500k people just turned up and gave us a load of money, let's hire 100 staff". We've spent everything we had energetically, financially etc. building a free platform, a team and making people aware we exist and now the work really begins. If you feel our response to individual support requests is too slow, that's something I also want to improve, which is why a support panel is currently being built to help us manage the workload and streamline everything. It will take a while to finish though, as with everything.

The update a few days ago didn't change anything on video ads directly. The most recent work done on that was just to uncap something which had reached capacity. If it is anything related to recent updates it's very tough to say what it might be at this stage. The next update with the livery editor is going to be the next thing we can check together. It includes new error messages for any reason a video ad can't play. It isn't released yet. It will be available within a few days. Once it's out, we'll have to try again.