Personal/Custom Avatars

@yew said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

Tell me, how would custom avatars for everyone be a bad thing?

I was not involved in the decision to put a halt to personal avatars, but I presume it has to do with the difficulties associated with managing avatars. The tools we have make it very difficult to deal with many avatars. If we had better tools it might be worth a new discussion but there's many things before that in need of dev time.

@yew said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

Why does that bother you so much so you have to create a big post on the forums.

Sladow validly pointed out that there are some inconsistencies with how avatars are managed, and we should have some more straightforward rules and transparency concerning them.

@yew said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

you as a mod

Sladow is not and never has been a moderator.

Maybe he was thinking of me. Comparing playing the game everyday to actively contributing to sustaining it seems a bit clown to me.

@spikeynoob said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

Maybe he was thinking of me. Comparing playing the game everyday to actively contributing to sustaining it seems a bit clown to me.

Quote me where I make this comparison. You misunderstand what I am saying as a response to that particular comment that was made.

You also somehow fail to see that merely the act of playing the game via FAF is indeed, albeit a small way, contributing to sustaining the game. If there were no people wanting to play Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, there would be no Forged Alliance Forever.

Calling players clowns is not exactly promoting FAF is it, nor is it in anyway useful or nice. And you as an actual moderator should know better than to call a participant of such a niche community a clown.

You're a naïve, ego-driven schoolboy experiencing a minor power trip. I get it.

The first two sentences in your first message were good, the rest just drastically feel beyond negative IQ level so I'm not even sure if you wrote it or if you told ChatGPT to write the most troll and Bullshit thing in existence :4head:

Time to lock this thread

@reckless_charger locking / restricting a single user on here is enough to keep it more human.

@sladow-noob said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

The first two sentences in your first message were good, the rest just drastically feel beyond negative IQ level so I'm not even sure if you wrote it or if you told ChatGPT to write the most troll and Bullshit thing in existence :4head:

One thing my masters degree taught me was how to write. I'll take it as a compliment though that you think I used ChatGPT

Apparently you're not following the ChatGPT trolling on Discord. This was definitely not a compliment.

Now please stop posting on this thread. We now know your opinion, that's enough, leave this thread up for more important updates etc. Thank you.

@deribus
Not sure how important it is in particular RN, but I'd list "Veteran FAFer" under "Contributor" - it's original purpose was to honor direct FAF contributors (members of any team) that stopped participating in FAF (the project, not game) in their further life pursuits.

My view (omg a personal experience!) on avatars had always been that they are a type of 'badge of honor' rewarded to the few for exceptional success (note this can be interpreted in many ways).

Thus, the idea of "personal avatars" doesn't really sit well with me. I wouldn't, however, be against a 'Profile image' idea.
So you could have a profile image you can upload and have visible when someone opens your profile sheet in the client, and it would function like any other profile picture in any service ever. Ofc, this would require client and backend work, which we obviously are lacking people for as it already is, so I'd sooner place it on the back burner of "things we'd like to have but aren't high priority".

That being said, I'd still keep avatars as a way of marking those with special contributions and achievements. And not as a way of personalizing one's profile on an "everyone" basis.

It seems to me that we should not only have a list of avatars, but a specific description for each, what the requirements are that this avatar gets given out to a person.
This way the system is more transparent, not prone to errors because of confusing names and actually reduces the amount of effort for moderators when giving them out, because if a person is elegible to get the avatar is easier to determine when all the reasons are aggregated in a table in one place.
This will make avatar handling more consistent (hopefully).

I also thought about Rowey's avatar and I must say that it seems like a not very well thought out thing to do.
When you give an avatar to people, they are basically displayed when that person is online in the client and it is only viewable in the client.
When you give them to someone that retires, he won't show up anymore and the gift is basically useless.
The next problem is, how do you determine who gets an avatar because of his outstanding contributions to the community? It's pretty uncontroversial that Rowey qualifies, but where do you draw the line? What about people that contributed only a bit. Or people that contributed a lot, but you don't like them or their contributions?
It's just too vague and will inevitably lead to fights why one gets it but not the other.

I can understand the desire to give people some sort of parting gift, but can't we find something better than an avatar? Maybe a kind of digital gift card, an image with "signatures" of some sort, of people that worked together with that person or regular people that just want to thank them? It would probably be fun to creatively create something like this together that is personalized and that the person can keep even if they leave the community for good. It has no monetary expenses either, so it avoids the question of who would pay for it.

I lost brain cells reading this

@blackyps You can have an ex member retire from contributing, but still keep playing the game tho.

But yeah, there is a ambiguity to my idea, which wasn't helped by Rowey unretiring himself a month or 2 after "retiring". We should define it better, for sure. Maybe the definition could be "avatar is granted to previous FAF Team leads", or in addition, have a "time" variable also required, say "for at least 1 (or more) years".

I don't dislike the idea of "some other way" either.

Its time to give a definite answer or a solution to this discussion. A lot of points and a few solutions were stated above, its been a while now since the lots itself, so whats the definite answer to this problem? As far as I understand it would be a board meeting anyways, regarding Pepsi's case you can just have a vote amongst board or community as a total, but then you need a strong position about what happens to the rest of the players who didnt recieve any compensation after the Lots.

@SpikeyNoob has been working on a proposal, I don't know how far along it is

Had to stop for a bit due to school work. My goal is amend it tonight.

The last time Spikey needed 'a little time due to being busy with school' the afk time lasted 5 months Kappa

@sladow-noob said in Personal/Custom Avatars:

The last time Spikey needed 'a little time due to being busy with school' the afk time lasted 5 months Kappa

I will ban you.