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.
