As I'm sure many of you have noticed, we recently added upload tokens on Era. There has been some confusion about the system so I will try to clear it up.

Upload tokens work like gralats, except they can only be used to purchase custom graphics uploads, such as heads, bodies, or shields. Refunding uploads now gives you upload tokens instead of gralats. If you purchase an upload, it will take upload tokens before it takes gralats. If you have no upload tokens, the upload system will work the same as usual, and take the full cost in gralats. If you have enough upload tokens to cover the full cost of the upload, it will only take upload tokens. If you have some upload tokens, but not enough to fully pay for the upload, it will remove all of your upload tokens and then take gralats to make up the difference. For example, if you want to upload a head, and you have 0 upload tokens, it will cost 20k gralats. If you have 20k upload tokens, the head will be paid for entirely with upload tokens and not cost any gralats. If you have 10k upload tokens, the head will be paid for with all 10k upload tokens, and then 10k gralats to make up the difference.

Unfortunately, we had to switch to this system due to a serious exploit that was allowing some players to abuse the refund system to gain gralats for nothing. It was an issue we tried to fix in other ways first, but the problem exists in server code that we do not have access to, so this was the best solution available to us. If you have any questions about the system, feel free to post them here.