About Yesterday....

We want to take a moment to address the Shop outage that happened yesterday with the launch of GEN 3. We shared the trailer, we brought the hype and the excitement, but unfortunately things did not go as planned.

What happened?

The sheer volume of redditors trying to buy a Collectible Avatar overwhelmed our systems, which led to our decision to take down the Shop for approximately 4 hours yesterday to investigate the issue. Purchase attempts were 200x that of our previous drop and yes, bot attempts did make up a significant portion of that. The good news is we were able to thwart the vast majority of it - but it did impact sales. While we are continuing to investigate, our current estimates are that bots purchased less than 1% of all Collectible Avatars sold in our first day.

Based on our ongoing investigation and feedback from the community, we identified two key issues that impacted users. One, due to the overwhelming volume, some users were charged for avatars that they did not receive. Two, some of you may not have been able to acquire the Avatar you most desired.

What are we doing about it?

Because we identified that bots were hitting the web Shop, we are currently planning to leave GEN 3 as a mobile-only experience for the immediate future. Longer term, we plan to scale up and add to our safeguards – first by identifying those accounts, and then actioning against them.

As for users, we are actively working on correcting things for those users who were charged for an avatar but did not receive one. Lastly, we are still working through all of what happened in the last day, so please check back in r/CollectibleAvatars next week for an update.

Can we talk about it?

YES! We heard your calls for more communication. We prioritized sharing meaningful updates as we had them (here, here and here), but we also hear your calls about the location and prominence of those updates. The next time around, we will create a more prominent thread with live updates, in addition to updating the original thread with stickied comments.

We also heard your calls about CAPTCHAs as part of a bot-prevention strategy. We did consider visual CAPTCHAs ahead of this launch, but the team ultimately decided to prioritize more inconspicuous ways to battle the bots this time around because CAPTCHAs are easy for seasoned attackers to bypass and they can present challenges for user accessibility. However, they aren't out of the question for the future!

Yesterday was painful for many of you, as well as for our creators and our team. Months of planning and execution didn't meet the full weight of what we encountered at launch. Sometimes that happens, but we really hate that it happened under our watch. As we continue to evolve the program, please know that we will prioritize creating a safe, fair, and enjoyable experience for Collectible Avatar enthusiasts and Avatar creators alike.

Please visit the Help Center if you are experiencing any issues and for those who have already filed tickets, please know that we are actively working through those and will get back to you as soon as we can. If you are filing a ticket for the first time, please provide as much detail as possible (ie Order ID, Receipts, platform of purchase, etc). For everything else, please keep an eye on r/CollectibleAvatars for updates.

Thank you again for being here, and thank you for your continued support!