Personal/Custom Avatars

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.

I think custom avatars should not be allowed for anyone. I also think if we have a faf veteran one it should have a clear criteria for getting it. Maybe u can get it if u have had a faf account for x years.

Only upon reading this did I even find out Rowey got a (semi?) custom avatar.

As a board member:

We have not discussed avatars in any capacity. If this you guys think this is an important issue then we can add it to our discussion topics for this month's meeting, but that would require some more detailed explanations of problems and proposed solutions.

As a moderator:

Avatars are something most moderators don't really want to deal with. We have enough to do without keeping track of who has what avatar and for what reason. Typically someone requests an avatar be give, we get some additional information to make sure they actually won the tournament or whatever, and then we grant it. At that point our work is done, we never want to think about this avatar again.

We have had an issue the past few months where avatars have disappeared from some users. We don't really know why. Could be a bug, could be some rogue moderators messing with us. We have no logging so there's no way to tell. Anyway this has resulted in the moderation team hating avatars even more so.

As a player:

The reason I haven't kept up with this discussion is because I personally don't care about avatars. I acknowledge they're important to a lot of the player base, but they're completely irrelevant to me. The only reason I even have a moderator avatar equipped is because moderators don't always show up in #aeolus and I've had at least one awkward interaction where I tried to give someone a formal warning and they were like "bro are you even a moderator?"

I would like to reiterate I never asked for the avatar I was given it out of the blue .

I think going forward Thier need to be some proper guidelines on the avatars that all have to follow other wise this will keep happing. Like how it was done for maps and mods bing up .

@deribus said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

Only upon reading this did I even find out Rowey got a (semi?) custom avatar.

I don't think anyone has an issue with this. Rowey wanted to retire and did put a lot, and I mean a lot of work into FAF. I can fully understand why he got such a valuable avatar and I do not request nor support to remove that one.

As a board member:

We have not discussed avatars in any capacity. If this you guys think this is an important issue then we can add it to our discussion topics for this month's meeting, but that would require some more detailed explanations of problems and proposed solutions.

For me the problem is quite simple:
No criterias about how to get such an avatar and the fact basically only two people (TD + Mod) have the permission to give out any avatar.

As a moderator:

Avatars are something most moderators don't really want to deal with

As discussed in the avatar on the discord thread, this is something the promotions team could take care of or like a small "circle" of people who know what's happening in the background of FAF. Can be board members, team leads, mods or people who simply get a lot of background information.

As a player:

The reason I haven't kept up with this discussion is because I personally don't care about avatars. I acknowledge they're important to a lot of the player base, but they're completely irrelevent to me.

I can fully understand this PoV and won't argue against it. Only thing I want is that the topic is taken serious by the ones adding to it as it is important to me and others.

Okay as I have basically been asked to defend my actions

Some backstory to make you understand.

Between 3 days to 1 week after LOTS where players under sanctions had been told we would hold their funds.

The Board refused to do this.

They said we wont hold it and their money will just go back into the prize pool for tournies.

Effectively a "up yours" to any Russian tournament player.

As you can imagine this was not very well likely after players won a few hundred dollars and spend time and effort in tournament.

A work around was proposed where they could opt to give their funds to a player of their choosing from the tournament NOT under sanctions.

The Board then decided to ask for legal council but never heard back so refused to compromise at all. Because heaven forbid if they paid Turbo2 Pepsi's winnings he "could" find a way to send them to Pepsi.

As the Board unanimously decided not to reward the Russian players their winnings from LOTS and any future tournament.

Pepsi asked for some form of compensation and one of those forms is if he could get a personal avatar.

Now considering I personally strongly disagree with the Board and view their actions as attempting to kill the Tournament scene.

I saw no issue with Pepsi's request.

Historically only Mods could give out Avatars.

I was granted permissions to upload avatars, grant them to players etc as Swkoll is no longer around who use to do it and instead of my having to spam Mods for it. Brutus and Gieb both agreed it was suitable.

Note there are 3 types of Avatars (in my mind).

Tournament avatars - those created and issued to people who won certain tournaments and events.
Staff avatars - those created and issued to members of the community who help out. For example the moderator avatar or the Team leaders avatars.
Personal avatars - these granted based on what I would call certain conditions. Such as mods who have their own personal, staff who want something unique, or granted to players because "they have been fucked over" I would call it.

In this case. Pepsi's personal avatars falls under the "I have been fucked over" category.

I told Pepsi if he created an avatar himself and it was suitable then I would have no issue granting him this as compensation for the Board fucking him over.

Note the "suitable" comment, by this I mean PG12 basically.

He created it himself.
It is suitable.
It is compensation for the Boards actions.

As said by Sheikah the board has fuck all to do with avatars.
Tournament ones are dealt with by the TD (myself in this case) or the Mod team to issue them.

It was granted Giebmasse's approval as head of the Mod team that Pepsi could have this avatar.

In each case of Personal Avatars, I will still double check with Gieb based on the reasoning for it.

I am not handing them out like Free Pens.

To be honest I am half surprised that the Board did not argue this considering how much they refused to compromise on other matters.

That is the reasoning for Pepsi's avatar.
It is not because he is special or treated differently.
It is because the Board fucked him over.

If the other Russians from LOTS who cannot receive their prize wish for a personal avatar of sorts, I see no issue with it.

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Moving on to part 2:

FAF Veteran Avatar:

I was not aware of the reasons it was made, I did not issue this avatar.

It is listed as FAF Veteran as the ID nothing else.

It was believed this was for players who had played for a long ass time or at least that was my interpretation.

If it was listed as "Rowey Thanks Avatar" then obviously it would only be issued to Rowey.

This I would put down to whoever adding it giving a bad naming convention.

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I believe this has successfully defended my actions.

Rowan XDDDDD