Prime Logistics Newsletter | Q1 2024

Read this article for a recap of everything that happened between January and March in Prime!

Banner image taken by L4CHT4N

Meet the Team - Media Team

Starting this quarter, we’re introducing a brand new section into our Newsletters, Meet the Team! In this section, we’ll dive into 1 team in the VTC each quarter, providing further insights into our operations and the various members of our Staff Team!

This quarter, we’re diving into the Media Team, looking at photography! We interviewed L4CHT4N from the Photography Division and you can find his responses below.

To start, could you introduce yourself?

“My name is L4CHT4N, I’m an 18 year old boy from the Czech republic in the heart of europe. I’ve been in the Media Team since February 2023, so around a year. I’m passionate for ETS2 but also for other games of similar type such as Farming Simulator, My Summer Car or even Counter-Strike 2 and sometimes GTA! My hobbies are quite simple, I love taking photos, doesn’t really matter if it’s in game or in real life! In real life photography, I prefer taking pictures of cars and trucks. I’m currently studying at a law focussed school and I hope that one day I will be a police officer in my beautiful country.”

What’s your main responsibilities in the Media Team?

“My main responsibility is to take pictures of trucks at our Prime Weekly Convoys, then process and edit them, and finally post them in our #prime-media channel on our Discord Server !”

What’s the usual process you go through after taking a photo in game to creating the finished image?

“I usually take so many pictures that I find it really hard to choose the best ones! However, I usually choose depending on the angle, lighting and how the trucks look. So, if you have a really nice looking truck, there’s a really nice chance of being in some of my photos!

I end up choosing around 5-6 pictures from all the ones taken. I start editing them using Adobe Photoshop 2023. Basically, the editing process is about changing the sky, cutting out the truck, and blurring the background. After that, I play with the picture using the “Camera Raw” filter in Photoshop, which allows me to do some colour-grading, adjusting the shadows, etc. When I’m happy with my result, I move on to the next picture and when finished with them all I post them to #prime-media.”

Could you show us one of your favourite photos you’ve taken?

“It’s really hard to choose just one! I chose this one because it's one of my most favourite!”

We hope you enjoyed this new addition to our Newsletter! In the next Newsletter, we’ll deep dive into another one of our Teams.

Picture of the Month

January

January’s competition was themed around Valentine’s, and HDLight_CZE won with this photo of a Scania and Kenworth truck underneath a tree of hearts!

February

February’s competition had a rural theme, and Bogdan25 won with this photo of 2 trucks surrounded by mountains in a rural town!

March

March’s competition was themed around Easter, and Rossco won with this photo of 2 Prime trucks and a bunch of Easter-themed decorations!

Department Updates

With an extensive staff team, Prime’s operations run smoothly. We’ll give you further updates from some of our departments below!

Management

What a start to the year it has been!

Management has been focused on re-prioritising and completing our to-do backlog alongside going through all suggestions to get the ball rolling with some ideas! In this quarter, we held an internal survey for the staff team to identify ways that Management can improve to ensure Prime can be the best it can be. We have been working on handling internal changes and improving our activity within Management alongside new targets for us to aim for, following the results of our internal survey.

We had our first Management change in over a year in February where, sadly, Branko departed the Management team and VTC, due to lack of time. We thank Branko for his 2+ years of service in Management and who has been in the VTC since December 2018! Following Branko's departure, we began internal processes to fill the vacancy of Chief Marketing Officer. After receiving numerous interest and going through interview stages, we had a difficult decision to make as there were many great candidates but chose to proceed with Rider, our new Chief Marketing Officer since March 19th! We are grateful to have someone passionate and dedicated to Prime Logistics and can’t wait to see what she does.

That's about it for what we can share this quarter! We have some big projects internally that we are still cooking up which we hope to give you some insight in soon!

Driver Updates

In Q1 2024, we saw a decrease in our driver count from 876 at the end of Q4 2023 to 830 at the end of Q1 2024. This is due to our Human Resources Team carrying out activity checks on our drivers after the quota-break we had at the end of the year.

Our drivers took 90 Leave of Absences (LOAs) in Q1 2024, for various personal reasons. This works out to around 3.5% of our drivers taking an LOA each month.

On the Recruitment side, we received 379 applications, of which 240 were accepted, resulting in an acceptance rate of 63.3%. Compared to Q4, this is a decrease in the rate by 2.4%. These numbers are in line with what we expect when compared to prior years.

Events Team

In Q1 2024, we started the year strong with our New Year's Event. Then, on the 15th of January, we restarted our Weekly Convoys. Our average driver attendance at Prime hosted events rose, and at public events remained fairly consistent with Q4 2023.

We had a total of 26 days without a convoy this quarter. This is in part due to the break at the start of the year, and also that our Events Team has been incredibly busy this quarter.

Because of how busy the Events Team has been, we have accepted far fewer invitations to events this quarter than in prior quarters. This has worked out as around 20% compared to around 35% in prior quarters. We hope that in Q2 2024, we will have fewer days without events!

Development Team

After the successful launch of the new Drivers Hub "v1.0.0" in October, to start the year off, we were targeting this quarter to release v1.1.0. We’re happy to report that we completed this on time!

In January, we released v1.1.0 of the Drivers Hub, which consisted of migrating staff modules from the legacy Drivers Hub. With having many staff modules to assist our team with their duties, this took a good amount of time! Alongside the staff module migration, we refactored our pop-up notification system on the Drivers Hub in addition to some user interface changes of our buttons across the Drivers Hub. The importance of this update is that it is an enabler to future projects and modules on the Drivers Hub as we needed to migrate from the legacy hub to be able to implement new and exciting tasks from our backlog which we hope you will see throughout 2024.

Following our January update, we also released v1.2.0 which introduced some staff modules which are vital to our operations. This included a custom Twitter API handler following changes made to TweetDeck (Now known as X Pro, thanks Elon!). We have also been releasing plenty of bug fixes to ensure the Drivers Hub works as expected!

We can also announce the introduction of a new person in the Development Team! Codeize has joined us on a trial basis to help out with a new version of the Discord bot and, in the future, Drivers Hub features! We can't wait to see what he implements and hope to share his developments soon. We look forward to share information about our new version of the Discord bot soon. 👀

That's it for this quarter! Keep up to date with the latest developments on Discord and through all our Social Media Pages to see what we’re working on next. Make sure to join Prime Plus to get early access to the features we’re working on! Click here to join!

Public Relations Team

Q1 2024 performed as expected. Due to our heavy marketing during the final quarter of the year for our anniversary, we saw decreased performance across X (Formerly Twitter) and Instagram. However, surprisingly, Facebook saw increased performance compared to all prior quarters. We hope this is a sign that our Facebook page is starting to pick up and become a more mainstream platform for the community to source information regarding Prime from.

In the Verified Streamer Programme, we saw a near identical number of applications compared to Q4 2023, but we accepted far fewer. This may be as a result of our new requirements being enforced, so we will continually review the requirements to ensure they are fair.

In Q1 2024, we also released a major overhaul to the Verified Streamer Programme. We introduced the ability for our drivers to stream on YouTube as well as Twitch! If you’re interested in becoming a part of the programme and you stream regularly, why not apply on our Discord Server !

Behind the scenes in the Public Relations Team, we have another exciting project on the horizon. We can’t wait to share further details soon!

Driver Leaderboards

We’ve summed up the leaderboards between January and March. Congratulations to these 2 people who got to the top!

OPTIMUS_PRIME

Congratulations on completing the longest job this quarter, totalling 15,064km! Amazing work!

Sander EE

A huge congratulations goes to Sander EE this quarter. They earned the most points (315,025), drove the most kilometres (257,518km), attended the most events (39), and completed the most jobs (252). Absolutely amazing work, we appreciate the dedication you put into the game and into Prime as a whole!

Key Statistics

In Q1, our statistics remained mostly the same, but saw 1 key change!

Most delivered cargo

This quarter, Medical Vaccines were the most delivered cargo, totalling 1468 jobs!

Favourite departure city

Calais remained the most popular departure city, totalling 2364 jobs!

Favourite destination city

Calais remained the most popular destination city, totalling 2725 jobs!

Favourite departure company

LKW remained the most popular departure company, totalling 2194 jobs!

Favourite destination city

LKW remained the most popular destination company, totalling 2365 jobs!

VTC Statistics

Starting from this quarter, we’re introducing VTC Statistics! These statistics will show you how Prime performed overall in the quarter.

Total Distance Driven

Over Q1, our drivers drove a total of 16,214,180km! That’s the same as driving around the circumference of the earth 400 times!

Total Jobs

Over Q1, our drivers completed a total of 25,462 jobs! The most popular cargo on these jobs was Medical Vaccines, making up around 5.8% of the jobs!

Total Points Earned

Over Q1, our drivers earned a total of 17,288,906 points, from completing jobs, attending events and completing exams!

Total Drivers Attending Events

In Q1, 214 different drivers in the VTC attended at least 1 event!

Total New Drivers

In Q1, we welcomed 229 new drivers into the VTC. We hope all our new drivers are enjoying their time with us!

Team Changes

[Human Resources + Public Relations Team] Cal leaves Public Relations Team due to lack of time while remaining as Human Resources. [Human Resources + Examination Team] RagtagBoss leaves the Examination Team whilst remaining in Human Resources. [Director of Human Resources + Convoy Control Team] ChocoNoodles leaves the Convoy Control Team whilst remaining as Director of Human Resources. [Recruitment Team + Event Team] goshkata58 has left the Event Team, but will remain within the Recruitment Team.

[Examinations Team] Filip steps down to driver due to a lack of time. [Media Team] ThatDev_ steps down to driver due to lack of time.

[Media Team Member] Refloix has left the VTC due to wanting to search new adventures. [Chief Marketing Officer] Branko leaves the VTC after almost 5 years of service due to lack of time. [Recruitment Team] goshkata58 has left the Staff Team and VTC due to lack of time. [Examinations Team] rmtc has left the Staff Team due to lack of time.

[Media Team] Jorjito39 has been removed from the VTC due to inactivity.

[Director of Media + Recruitment Team] Rider has been promoted to Chief Marketing Officer.

[Retired Staff Member] George has rejoined the Public Relations Team. [Human Resources] Ragtag has rejoined the Convoy Control Team, while remaining in Human Resources. [Human Resources] Cal has joined the Examination Team, while remaining in Human Resources. [Driver] Honey Badger has joined the Convoy Control Team. [Driver] FrostLeaf has joined the Convoy Control Team. [Driver] rogevis has joined the Convoy Control Team. [Driver] JxstNPC has joined the Convoy Control Team. [Driver] Lightray has joined the Convoy Control Team. [Driver] Richard has joined the Convoy Control Team.

[Retired Staff Member] DarkLady96 has rejoined the Media Team.

Conclusion

2024 is going to be a great year for Prime, we can’t wait for you to see what we have in store throughout the rest of the year! We’ll see you in the next edition of the Newsletter.

-Prime Logistics Public Relations Team