We've received messages from workshop artists concerned about fairness in the upcoming Collectors Cache, specifically that some item sets were over the polygon limits allotted by our workshop tools. We agree that this provides an unfair advantage and have removed them from the selection pool. Periodically we contract workshop artists that we've had a good experience with to create customized content. As part of that process, we need to tag their accounts so they can submit the raw files for a variety of types of content, privately, through the workshop. This system was intended to be used only for contract work, and not as a way to gain an advantage in general workshop submissions, which have their own guidelines, such as for the Collectors Cache. We should have been more vigilant in monitoring submissions, as weve discovered several artists have submitted over-budget content in the past as well. We will be changing the submission process for contract work to prevent this from happening in the future.

Upon reviewing the community's top selections to construct the treasure list, we found two of the selections to be over the stated budgets. They will be replaced by the next two most highly-voted sets.

There was also a question as to why some sets had references to particles prior to the voting. This is a regular development process that we have for workshop items in general. If a Valve artist wants to do something different in between tasks, or has some availability and an idea to enhance a specific item from the workshop, they are encouraged to explore it. The reason for that is because it can be released at a later date in another treasure if it doesn't make it in the community-driven portion of the Collector's Cache. A similar scenario happened last year, where we had enough extra resources to be able to create a second Cache using some older popular items and some newer ones. For this year we aren't sure if we will release a second Cache, or instead use items we found interesting for a future treasure. That depends entirely on how the production schedule plays out, and if some things take longer or shorter than expected.

A couple notes for clarity: 1) polygon limits are the limits for what contributors should submit, and not the limit for what content is in the game necessarily, as there are often adjustments and changes that are done after a set is accepted. 2) None of the internal particles were part of the in-game display for voting

Finally, per feedback we've gotten from workshop artists, we will be reviewing the existing polygon limits for workshop submissions and evaluate doing an across-the-board increase to the limits.