I purchased not 1 but 2 copies of a CA that was forced to be updated due to the copyright issues

the update however no longer fits my wolves the way I would like which leaves me having to awkwardly DM the artist to ask for a solution which they are under no obligation to give

if a CA undergoes a major art update (I am not talking about tiny error corrections!), previous buyers should be NOTIFIED and given the option to sell the item back to LW to restock (or the artist should be required to refund but tbh there shouldnt be forced potentially negative interactions)

Copy right is a slippery slope; I don't think the site is under obligation to provide refunds if the artist submitted something that wasn't their own design, and was of copy right content. The artist should be liable to figuring out refunds or trade-ins or etc because they are the seller, the creator, the party at fault (for submitting copyright material) though I do think the site should have more effective ways to identify copy right (reverse image searching) or they will fall into issues as time goes on.

The artist has technically broken a rule, rules we as users agree to, so they are the ones liable for issues, and I say this as a CA artist myself.

@Cealygosa agreed! it was poorly worded but I did mean it would ultimately be the artist refunding, but rather it would be a thing going through LW vs requiring user interactions which could potentially cause more negative issues between players

I think by having a bigger team for approvals will help catch copyright issue more efficiently but I do think they should be handled differently (IMO once the issue was discovered, the items should have been removed from the site & anyone who purchased them refunded. the artist could then submit a whole new CA and resell it once approved. it feels sketchy on LW's part to suddenly notice a CA has been changed -even though it was expected for something to happen- without any sort of notification or option. users bought the CA as one thing and now it is another. also, this isnt in any way a negative reflection on the new artwork, it just no longer fits my wolves personally with the new update)

I ran into this issue myself today. Here's my thread where I asked what was going on.

Like @lissajo, I would have liked to at least be notified.

Support, I think at the very least a message should be sent to affected users to prevent confusion.

While being notified would be great? I'm not sure the site has a way to keep track of EVERY one who has bought the CA. It's unreasonable to expect the site to send out what could be 50+ some individual messages about an item.
I would be in favor of a thread that lists changes for users to subscribe to if they want to know. This way it's not on the site to contact every individual person who has bought that CA. With how they credit items, it also might be a bit of a call out though, so that might not be a good way of going about it either, on the other hand.

While I have no idea about the coding behind Lorwolf, as a web developer myself, transactions and/or ownership of items like this are usually stored within a database, which the site itself should be able to access. If the message or whatever system they would implement for these situations will be handled automatically by the site (as opposed to manually by the artist, an admin, or any other human individual), then it should realistically not be an issue to determine everyone that purchased and/or owns the CA.

100% support for this!

@trashgaylie I think the biggest issue with that would be if a user gifted the CA to a person, would the user who purchased it get a refund, or would the person who got it free, as a gift?

There’s just a lot of logistics and hypothetical situations to be thought about here.

Another situation would be what if the artist didn’t have the funds to refund the item? How would that be handled? At that point it sort of heads into Moderator and rules territory.

I think you'd probably have to build some new systems, but this could likely be accomplished decently well considering the framework we already have in place.

1. Have the site identify anyone with the affected CA currently on their account.
2. Send them an automated message
3. The message includes the option to initiate a trade back to the site, refunding the CA at whatever the current list price is in the system.
4. Refunded CA copies are then relisted for other players to purchase, but the money from the sale of these copies does NOT go to the artist. It goes poof into the site.

This essentially makes it the same as an affected player reselling the CA to another player, only the site now acts as a middleman. You could potentially also make listings of refunded copies take priority over artist copies, so artists can't make more money off a changed CA until all the refunds have resold. That might help discourage intentional copying and somewhat indirectly makes artists responsible for refunds, but it prevents negative player-to-player interactions and doesn't require the artist to have the money on hand.