Personal/Custom Avatars

Just to give legitimacy to Sladow's claim, I am indeed not satisfied with how that particular avatar, which is the FAF Veteran avatar, was handled.

When creating it, I envisioned it to be given out to direct contributors to the FAF project, who are ready to pass on their duties and "retire". My trigger was Rowey, yes, but just like anyone else, it wasn't a personal avatar for him - but for any members who contributed to the community directly (and yes, Rowey turned out to be a special case, given he returned back to 'active duty'). I wouldn't really mind if it were given out to the active 'monsters' that keep this amazing project going (Jip, Brutus, Sheikah, BlackYps, Balthazar - only to name a few), but I think the team avatars are much more appropriate for that (and they were quite some work as well). The avatar was not meant for members that play a lot, or participated in many tournaments (a.k.a. 'regular' members, despite how active they may be).

As with all my work, I give all the use rights to FAF, and as such I probably don't have a direct say what a particular avatar will be used for, but I do feel like this is in poor taste.

That being said, I'm not here to admonish people and turn this into a witch hunt, so I propose we do come up with a fitting avatar that can be cool in it's own way, that could be used as a reward for those who either refuse monetary rewards, or are unable to collect their rewards for any reason. We could even make two, one for each of those situations. I hope that with that, we can keep the "FAF Veteran" avatar assigned to appropriate people (and this would entail taking it away from those that aren't), but also make sure everyone feels good. With that, I hope I soon get a request over at the discord #promo-projects for this exact cause.

It is weird because the rule isn't ironed out. I guess me putting 30 hours a week into FAF when I was actively doing things just wasn't enough time! It should have been given conditions that were made transparent before it was given out, especially with it being given out to several dudes.

The Pepsi thing translates to just being able to buy avatars, which should also be a transparent condition.

Pepsi received this avatar. As it was decided when the Board refused to compromise on being able to pay russians or them being able to send their winnings to a person of their choice in the tourney. That as compensation he could receive one.

The veteran FAF was never made clear as to its purpose.

So it got treated as a played/participated in FAF or FA for many years.

Hence why Mize and VIP have it as they are from GPG era

So the board voted on whether or not giving him the custom avatar?

The board did not vote on any avatars. Tournament avatars are awarded at the discretion of the tournament director.

Okay, because then Noc's message sounds like a really strong bias honestly as the decision about the sanctions was explained in a different forum post. Acting on the own when it comes to things such as custom avatars is something I definitely don't support and the reason I'm asking for a clarification of the conditions.

@sladow-noob

Pepsi requested compensation as he could not get prize money due to the sanctions.

For no other reason than he requested as the board refused to pay him.

@sheikah Would not that mean they should only be permitted to assign avatars specific to the tournament - doesn't make sense their 'pallet' is all the avatars ever.
@NOC not trying to fry you here, just asking. ^^

Whatever the case, I don't mind working on special avatars for these odd cases, but they will for sure not be personal - they'd have to be based on the actual tournament avatars imo, or as I proposed earlier, we can make an avatar for everyone who ends up in this situation.

There has never been a strict policy on avatars, the tournament team and moderator team historically worked together to assign avatars from tournaments with whatever policy they saw fit.

in the discussion between the board, NOC and espi about the russian sanctions, espi requested a personal avatar as an alternative. I said that the board didn't talk about avatars, but that avatars are possible in principle, because they have no monetary value.
The discussion was maybe a bit unclear, because the terms "personal avatar" and "custom avatar" were both used without clarification what exactly everyone means.
As we can see the end result is that espi now has a personal avatar, but that was a decision of NOC, as the tournament team lead he has the permission to give out avatars. There also was no follow up to ask the board once the avatar was made to greenlight the avatar. As I explained, NOC doesn't have to do that, so no issue here, I am just mentioning this to make it clear that the board did not make any decisions about avatars as Sheikah already mentioned.

If there are no rules for avatar lets see what we had... Avatar Guidelines. Is it deprecated? It is not marked as deprecated. Since there were no new rules I think this one can be applied.

I think it is quite a shame that player receives ”high tier" avatar for having a prized place on a tournament. Such avatars, in my humble opinion, must be given to ones that did significant contributions into FAF project. I dont remember any for Espiranto.

@zer0d4y said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

If there are no rules for avatar lets see what we had... Avatar Guidelines. Is it deprecated? It is not marked as deprecated. Since there were no new rules I think this one can be applied.

Those were the rules that FtXCommando used when he was Player Councilor and was in charge of tournaments. They are not binding.

If these rules are not applied, then there are no rules cor avas, right? Everyone can have therse? Or I miss a part where someone made up new ones and didn't share? I don't get this approach.

At the moment it is mostly just driven by what has traditionally been done in the past.

That sucks though honestly. Speaking from my / our perspective (as I spoke with others via DMs) it literally just feels like a middlefinger we get thrown at us. We know we're not getting paid but getting told custom avatars are not a thing just to see a basically random person walking around with it the next day is insanely frustrating and irritating. If there are rules aka. if we can see why certain actions happen, there's no problem. But if some players have the permission to get such a status while the other contributors do not, then that's simply not a thing I support and get insanely annoyed about. Like unironically my/our motivation for the current projects just dropped quite a bit because of this.

@sheikah said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

At the moment it is mostly just driven by what has traditionally been done in the past.

What has traditionally been done in the past has been no personal avatars. The "no personal avatars" rule preexisted me being PC.

The issue is there is no oversight. Its not clear who has access to issue avatars and its not logged (anywhere I can see) who issued/uploaded them. It caused problems last year when someone decided to do a purge, created a discussion about who should control issuing of avatars and resulted in nothing happening.

As the espi avatar was related to tournaments it shouldn't be a personal avatar but a tournament one issuable to anyone who has turned down (voluntarily or not) prize winnings. Though it becomes more complicated with Gieb greenlighting it to some degree.

I have no idea about the 'FAF veteran' one because I wasn't even aware it existed, or where/who was responsible for giving it out. But as its not related to tournaments it is by definition only issuable by the mod team.