Hey everyone,

The past few weeks have been some of the most challenging in the history of this community. Players have been angry with us, media have written about us en masse and our volunteer moderators went on strike. For all the distress we've caused the past few weeks, I'd just like to take the time and say that we’re sorry. We've done a lot of things right in the past, but these past few weeks we screwed up.

We need to get better at many things, and we will do our best to improve as soon as possible.

Below is a short update on what’s going on right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDMRrYbBKio
For those of you who missed the talk with our volunteer moderators Ashley, Tessio and Jones, check out the video above if you want to. Thanks to JamesBlack47 for being a wonderful host and thanks to Ashley for initiating the meeting.

For those of you who are attending DreamHack Winter next week, we'll be hosting a proof-of-concept tournament where we test a heist in a tournament setting. This event is a test only and will have a small, symbolic payout for the three best teams that attend. Myself and several other OVERKILL crew members will be there if you want to come and say hi.

The 250K USD prize pool we have available will be split and used for many, many events to come when we have established a concept we think will work. During the coming months, we'll include members of the community in the design process in order to get feedback.

At DreamHack Winter, we'll have a special version of the Slaughterhouse heist, designed to work in a tournament setting. For this event, you only need to have a ticket to DreamHack as well as your own computer, and a crew of four heisters. More information will be available at the event.

We are currently working on a website update that will track where tournaments are and how much prize money is available at each and what you need to do in order to attend the event.

We look forward to hosting many, many tournaments across the world. Here are the dates again for the first few tournaments that we are planning:

DreamHack Winter, Jönköping Sweden. 26-29 November
DreamHack Moscow, Moscow Russia. 5-6 December
DreamHack Leipzig, Leipzig Germany. 22-24 January
DreamHack Austin, Austin USA. 6-8 May

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6koS7Vvw2Y8

Today we had a meeting with Ashley and Jones, two of our volunteer moderators. Ashley and Jones has been collecting questions from the community that we discussed during the meeting. Two of the topics were stat boosts and the latest COP reward. We're currently looking into what we can do to make up for the final COP-reward. Ashley and Jones gave several suggestions from the community that we are currently discussing internally.Our main goal is to try to find a way to reduce or remove the random elements of the final reward, whatever that reward will be. Regarding stat boosts, Ashley and Jones suggested that we introduce something similar to StatTrak as part of future safes, a feature used in CS:GO in their cases. This is something we've been thinking about as well, and something that we will discuss going forward. I must stress however that we cannot currently make any promises but these are things we will be discussing as we move forward.

We'll be looking to updating the B-Sides Soundtrack on either the 3rd or the 10th of December.

For those of you who are unaware, during the year we've recorded additional voice over material with the heisters that we'd like to implement as a part of a free update. We recently hired an additional sound designer to help us go through the massive amount of material that we've recorded for PAYDAY 2. This project is taking longer than we initially anticipated and as such, it sadly won't be out until next year. We'll revisit this topic again when we are closer to release.

For some time we haven't been active in our own forums. We’ve been reading your feedback and clearing bugs, but we haven’t engaged you in discussions. This has alienated us somewhat, and for that we apologize. Starting next week, you will see the presence 8 different OVERKILL members talking to you in discussions and taking an active role in the community. We’ll introduce these and what their role is in the studio in a thread in the forums during the week to come. We need to get better at communicating with you and this is one of our first steps in doing so.

We’ve invited Last Bullet representatives Great Big Bushy Beard, AJValentine and Tatsuto to our offices in January to meet with us at OVERKILL. We will fly them here, provide hotel and work together with them for a day ensuring we understand what support they need for the modding community of PAYDAY 2.

I’ve arranged a meeting with PeaseMaker, one of our most active Russian players. I will be meeting him during my stay in Moscow in December. We’ll discuss many things, among those what we can do to improve the game for the Russian community, his feedback on the game and more.

I’ve spoken to I am not a spy, one of the most known and respected modders within the community, who lives in California. The next time I visit our office in Los Angeles, I will make sure to contact him before hand and arrange a meeting to discuss what we can do to improve PAYDAY 2.

We will let you know more information as discussions continue regarding many of the issues we intend to improve on. We will be reading our public steam forums closely for feedback and we will be engaging in community discussions as much as we possibly can. The coming weeks we will finish this year's last updates, including this year's annual free Christmas heist.

Have a good weekend.

Almir
OVERKILL - a Starbreeze Studio.