Suggestions

[size=4][b]Edit:[/b][/size] This is a very shortened version of a suggestion that brings up a couple of important points. [b]This suggestion is for more expanded Custom Skins for Ancient breeds that will allow artists to go outside of the dragon's silhouette and not overlay the dragon's shadows/lines on top of their artwork. The artwork would have to match FR's art style. [u]This is no way will slow down the creation of new Ancient breeds, as the proposed Custom Apparel will be created by players after the breed is released, just like the Custom Skins.[/u] [u]This does not contradict the original premise of Ancient breeds.[/u] The decision to make Ancients un-dressable was made as a compromise so site artists wouldn't have to work for literal years while catching up with the site's huge apparel database. This proposal adds [u]no[/u] extra work on site's apparel/breed artists, except for one-two moderators who will be reviewing the Custom Apparel post any given breed's release. [/b] ----- I know official apparel for ancients won't happen, and rightfully so: they simply will stop functioning as a relatively "easy" to produce breed that staff can release once a year or so to keep the players interested. However, I'm proposing a new type of item blueprint, which will allow players to create apparel for ancients that will function similarly to custom skin blueprints. [b]Custom Apparel[/b] item will allow players to create line-breaking accessories for ancient breeds, meaning the apparel will be able to go outside the dragon's silhouette, as well as won't need to have an overlay of a dragon's shadows and lines on top. It will function exactly as a custom skin, in the same way that it will only be fitted for one breed and pose. So an artist wouldn't have to draw the same set of clothes for all ancient breeds to create just one Custom Apparel item. [b]Some potential rules to consider: [/b] [indent]- An ancient dragon will have only one slot for a skin/accent and one slot for Custom Apparel. This will prevent users from creating multiple apparel pieces that, when overlayed together, will become rule-breaking (for example, will spell a swear word). - Custom Apparel artwork must have stricter art style rules than custom skins. I think it's fair to say that all Custom Apparel must have fine lines, flat colors, and cell shading to align with the site's style. - Perhaps all Custom Apparel must stay within the 350x350px image, without any parts of it clipping with the border. - Custom Apparel may not fully cover the dragon, leaving it unrecognizable. (E.g. a big drawing of a cat, that takes up almost the whole image and covers 100% of the dragon). However, I'm not sure if that MUST be a rule, but I have a feeling the staff might want to introduce something like this to preserve art style integrity. - Obviously, Custom Apparel must follow all rating & content rules FR has regarding violence/substance depictions, etc. - I can see the blueprints for Custom Apparel costing twice as much as skin blueprints, but it's really not up to me to decide. On top of that, perhaps the Blueprints can be devided into "Accessories" and "Apparel", with the former being cheaper and having lower-coverage. Exactly like Accents and Skins! - Perhaps it should have a different name, to separate it from regular apparel more. Otherwise, people might think it can be used to make Custom Apparel for modern breeds*. Maybe "Custom Artifacts" or "Custom Ancient Adornments/Apparel"? [/indent] [color=grey]*I don't think adding Custom Apparel for modern breeds is required, mostly because excluding them would lighten the load for moderators that will be approving Custom Apparel. I also don't think it's truly necessary for modern breeds with the size of the apparel database we already have. However, I'm not upposed to it. It's really just up to staff to decide.[/color] [b]Potential drawbacks:[/b] [indent]- The most obvious issue I see is the load on the current Custom Skin moderators. I think it's fair to say that this system will require a separate team to review the submissions, which may be a strain on FR's budget. (I have no clue how well FR is doing financially, this is a guess.) However, I hope that the novelty of Custom Apparel will be a good revenue stream to support a new moderating team. [/indent] [b]Will this work?[/b] [indent]- I think it will! Two sister pet sites LD & WD use a system called Custom Decors, which basically allows players to make any custom accessories they want, as long as they fit the game's visual style (black lines, semi-realism, realistic-ish shading). These sites even allows players to layer up to 20(?) Custom Decors on one pet, but I can see why FR wouldn't want that. [/indent] I wanted to use an example image of WD's custom decor, but realized the official wolf artwork might cause copyright issues. So, here's my mockup using FR's apparel assets! [center][img]https://i.ibb.co/C7Jny8H/Oz-Mockup.png[/img][/center]

To be honest I never minded the "no-apparel-for-Ancients" tradeoff until Aberrations were introduced (mainly because I wasn't particularly attached to any of the Ancient breeds until they came into the picture). I completely understand the necessity of it but I wish so desperately to dress my Abbies because they're my favorite breed now and I don't have the funds to buy nice skins. I'd love for something like this to be a thing just so I can give them something but I feel like there may be a lack of support for the idea since it might add the workload the developers have been trying to mitigate no matter how it's implemented...

@Yamuerte
I see where you're coming from! From my understanding, the main workload Ancients are mitigating is catching up with the ENORMOUS official Apparel catalogue with every releasing breed. This suggestion, in my eyes, would add passive worlkoad for a completely independant team that only works on approving/rejecting Custom Apparel. In a perfect world, I think Custom Apparel blueprints would completely cover the wages of the new people moderating the queue.

It's honestly really hard thing to discuss from a player's perspective, as I think only the staff can realistically measure how managable this is in terms of workload and finances.

This does add workload, but the main difference is that it's workload AFTER the breed has been released, which means it wont delay ancient releases, just like custom skins dont delay new breeds.

I support, though my main fear is that I don't know how many artists could accuratedly copy the art style of fr to pass through moderation

Don't agree with it being super expensive though. It's a skin that gets to line break, having it be 1kg more expensive than skins seems fair enough

@bakugames I agree with you that making them super expensive is not a great idea. I feel like it would only make the Custom Apparel feel... elitist, almost? It might also limit the number of submissions so severely, that they won't be able to pay the moderator's bills, so to speak. Regarding the art style, it is an issue, but I feel like WD/LD manages to handle it pretty well. Those sites, in my opinion, have a harder style to mimic. (Example of my Custom Decors that were approved below; again only my artwork w/o the wolf to avoid copyright issues). [center][img]https://i.ibb.co/Y2h9d7k/wd-skull-headdresses.png[/img][/center] Their solution was to include an extensive style guide + make the lead artist's Photoshop brushes be publically available, making the style pipeline easier to follow. I feel like a guide like this would be even easier to make in FR's case, as you can limit it to a hard brush for lines and shadows, plus a soft basic airbrush to make some gradients. FR can also introduce a guideline that all lines has to be approximately X pixels wide, has to be black, and so on. Yes, you'll pretty much always be able to differentiate usermade artwork from official artwork, but I feel like FR's apparel has enough style variation as is. Anyways, sorry for a bit of a ramble. I don't mean this as a sort of targeted rant at you specifically, mostly just trying to wrap my head around the issue myself.

This is actually a super interesting idea, and just the sort of thing to give Ancients that little extra boost in popularity that they're missing out on on account of not being able to wear cool hats.

Support!

[quote name="NightGaze" date="2022-05-24 12:26:51" ] I'd say tentative support. I feel like even double the single skin blueprint is a little cheap. It would probably be better off at around the five skin blueprint bundle price, at around 8000. The whole point of ancients is that they don't wear apparel, but if people wanted to dress them in it, then I feel like this would be the perfect idea as a huge gem sink. [/quote] Exactly this- so tentative support.

No support from player "accessibility" side.

The problem is that this will be (especially with that price tag) extremely skewed towards the ultra-rich players. Compare skins, which is suggestions does multiple times - there are fully custom skins, there are "mass produced" custom skins and there are site skins which are fairly cheap, from coli ones with only time investment or festival's 35kt. So skins, in one way or another, are accessible to all players. Ironically, custom apparel for moderns would be more similar to skins because you'd have the custom apparel and the many options of site apparel, also making 'apparel for moderns' as a concept basically as accessible as ever. This suggestion is not accessible at all because there would be no alternatives and so it introduces a pretty steeply pay-walled customization option.

No support because apparel should be within the site's art style and done by the artists to match the other art on site and having the artists make apparel for ancients just makes the point of ancients moot so it just goes in a circle. When we got ancients it was clearly laid out exactly what we were getting. The users know that and should accept that that's just what ancients are.

I also can't support because I'd rather not see a repeat of skins. The skin system already has several flaws and we don't need to build another feature on top of it. As well as the fact that flight rising has almost entirely phased out retiring apparel and I really don't want to it come back by way of custom apparel. Where only some are created and that's it, or if the user disappears, it'll never be available again. It's one of the things I heavily dislike about the skin system and custom apparel systems on other sites. If custom apparel were ever to become a thing, it would have to become a part of the site and always be around.