Personal/Custom Avatars

As most of you know, personal avatars are not a thing anymore and only a relict from the past. At least that's what you hear when asking about them.
In reality the story is a bit different. There are tourney avatars, but they're decided before the tournament actually happens, so you can't really say they're custom avatars. However there have been some exceptions currently.

Personal avatar 1 is the "FAF Veteran" avatar which Rowey got after deciding to leave FAF. Even though it's an exception to the rule of "no personal avatars anymore", I can fully see why this happened as his contributions to the FAF community had a large impact and he indeed invested a lot of time into FAF and I was happy to see he got something special.
The same avatar was also given to VIP and Mize though. I don't have anything against them so I don't mind that, but it's weird that such as "special" avatar just gets given out with a reason I fail to see.
Personal avatar 2 is the one Pepsi got. And this is something I can't understand at all. He couldn't receive the tourney money from the last tourney because of the sanctions and apparently that is the reason why he got the avatar. But I fail to see why that gives him the exclusive rights to receive a custom avatar. He did not contribute to FAF at all (afaik) nor did he actually get the first place in the tournament. I'd not mind giving away a normal avatar or two as compensation.
(If there are more recently given custom avatars I've missed, feel free to let me know)

Please note that this is not a personal rant against him. It's only about the avatar and does not refer to the player.
I want to ask what the exact criterias are for getting a personal avatar. Apparently they're still a thing but the "we don't hand them out anymore. Except for A, B, C, ..." is something I'm quite annoyed about. After the 3v3 tourney a while back, we spoke with Fichom and the TD as we were not happy with the initial design of the avatar. We suggested something completely different and got hit with the "Nope, too close to a custom avatar. Can't do that." (Thanks again Fichom for taking your time and changing the design a little). Grimplex didn't accept tourney money in the past, does it mean he gets another avatar? Does it mean every person who fails to receive tourney money due to sanctions gets a custom avatar now? Cuz otherwise it'd clearly be unfair towards the others even though they didn't achieve the first place in a tourney.

This whole thing seems more and more like a middlefinger into my face and the others putting in a lot of work into FAF. I can fully see someone going like "dude, they're just 20x60 pixels, who cares", which reminds me a lot of I see car people (they're just vehicles for travelling from point A to point B.). Avatars are more than that, they're a status, something you have to deserve and don't just get by asking. Which is what kinda happened here though. I want to quickly note that even Fichom is not a fan of giving away the FAF veteran avatar like they did, because he put in quite some effort. With more people having it, it immediately lost quite some meaning.

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.