Custom Digo, And more... Options

[Kisses]

Hi there! I was wondering, and I think I've thought about it before....What if there was an option on Digo market that allowed you to buy a 'space' to upload a person/custom made avatar, like a portrait space but with avatars...It would work better if you submitted it for approval and it had to be approved. Anyway, another thing....The prices of digo market are super high, I mean, I understand Furcadia needs the money but people like me who can't afford practically anything off digo market in a blue moon... Anyway, maybe just lower them by a little bit and get some more buyers?

Thanks for reading and I hope you guys keep a mind open to my ideas!!

[super villain]

Use the search function.

Do you really think in the 10+ years furc has been around no one has suggested this?

[Kisses]

Please don't be rude. >>

[Shinichi Kudo]

Villain was rude, but he has a point x)

Anyways: The reason why this doesn't work is that you can only see custom-ports when you click a person. That's when the port is loading, however, you can always see avatars. This means that, if you, for example, went to FurN, and everyone there had a custom-avatar, loading all of those avatars would take forever. It's like loading 100 portraits at the same time. 

Lower digo prices: I never spent money on the digomarket either because of the same reason, but there are contests you can enter to win some GD. If you want digos without having to pay, then you have to work for them x) Excuses like "I can't draw/make dreams/write" don't count. If you don't try, you'll never win. 

[Rew]

You can do this in dreams. Hehe. Just make your own avvie and slip it on into your patches and viola! You can have any avatar you want!

Personally, I would NOT like to see a giant avvie with wings and arms that take up my screen if it was accepted upon submission and review. I would cry and run for my life.

[Kamose]

What if there was an option on Digo market that allowed you to buy a 'space' to upload a person/custom made avatar, like a portrait space but with avatars...It would work better if you submitted it for approval and it had to be approved.

This popular suggestion has been rejected on the grounds that it would create massive lag and would give players too much control over the appearance of main maps. See Frequently Suggested Avatars for other threads that discuss this.

In 2004, Talzhemir wrote an excellent explanation of why we won't see custom avatars. Although it's an old post, most of her points are still relevant.

2. FURREALITY

I'm against patching individuals' avatars in Furcadia because that gives more main-map control away than I want to. Furcadia is, first and foremost... furries. I've got nothing against walking teapots or stormclouds, but we're advertising ourselves as a "furry" place, and, by Mickey, that's what patrons are gonna get.

I'm grateful that Furcadia players tend to upload mostly furry animal portraits. Every so often, though, there are some non-furry ones. As long as they're not R-rated, we just smile, and say Thank you VERY much.

Having custom walkabouts on the main maps would be much more disruptive, though. I say this because the games I've seen that permitted it (for example, http://www.thepalace.com/) were chaotic and "twinky." By that, I mean, the avatars that people tended to choose were as extremely god-like as they could find, and sometimes they weren't a character, they were just a big picture of a
face.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with an anything-goes kind of game like that but if done on Furcadia, it would have severely hurt the potential for Strict RP.

(While they're an almost tiny minority, Strict RPers tend to also be the furres who give the most of themselves. I strongly want to give them something back if we can.)

3. DOWNLOADS: THE DREADED N-SQUARED OVERHEAD PROBLEM

Bear in mind that Furcadia runs on ONE machine. Every portrait being viewed for the first time is being spewed out the same byte spiggot. A portrait is 10K. A small avatar such as the bunny is about 82K.

Viewing a portrait doesn't affect what you see when you move around the little scenery window. It takes a fast machine just a blink but a player on a slower connection (say dial-up) would be frozen for around 4 seconds each time a new walkabout was downloaded.

Now imagine what would happen to them if they walked into a Dream where 5 furres with custom walkabouts are standing there.

Bear in mind that, as this furre had to get 5 new downloads, at some point, all of those 5 also got sent copies of each other.

(If the number of furres is 5, then the number of downloads total is 5 to the second power, or, 25. N to the second power, or N-Squared. This is the dreaded N-Squared Overhead problem, where the resources needed for things you trade this way can skyrocket out of control fairly fast!)

When you buy a Port, you're partly paying for some DEP person to peek at it and okay it. But a bit of your moolah also went to defray the future bandwidth sapped by every time someone had to download it to look at it.

4. MUTUALNESS

For those who had limited bandwidth, I didn't think toggling Custom Walkabouts to "OFF" was a good idea. It solves the freezing problem but Furcadia is meant to have "mutualness", meaning, we all see the same thing. You could patch all your avatars to be fruits with big eyes and big feet but you have to go fairly out of your way to accomplish it.

Knowing that we are seeing the same thing brings a sense of unity with others in our virtual space. Experiencing different things drives us apart like a wall or wedge.

I wouldn't favor letting furres see the custom avatars but letting others turn them off. It kicks mutualness in the 'nads. Some furres seeing furres, and others seeing a giant talking apple, is confusing.

When someone turns their Music or Sound FX off, Mutuality has just been kicked in the shins. We didn't like adding it but we did see the point and we added the buttons.

[Kamose]

Anyway, another thing....The prices of digo market are super high, I mean, I understand Furcadia needs the money but people like me who can't afford practically anything off digo market in a blue moon... Anyway, maybe just lower them by a little bit and get some more buyers?

Here are some good discussions of Digo prices and how the money is used:

Talzhemir on the costs of running Furcadia

1. Bandwidth. When people log in to Furcadia, they are making use of the Internet. Although the Internet was a free service largely covered by government funding, that isn't true today anymore. Every big game has to pay a lot of moolah for "bandwidth". The more players we get, the bigger our bills grow. The same business that provides us with bandwidth also does our co-location.

2. Co-location. That just means, a business that houses and maintains the servers. We used to keep a machine right in Felorin's apartment, but we outgrew that a long time ago. The Furcadia hard drives run so fast, they're always 130F degrees. Servers need to be kept in a DFE (dust free environment) CC (climate-controlled) chamber, that is, extra-good air conditioning and an auxiliary power supply in case of power outage. Our IP co-location service keeps the computers running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They charge *us* money because it means staffing the office even during the night there.

3. Non-Furcadia-Client-or-Server Coding. Much more time than I ever anticipated is devoted to making things that most furres never even see. There's a lot of database and web interfacing stuff. The design, engineering, and changeover to the email-verification Accounts system took a while to accomplish.

Whenever a furre takes a Beekin course, it's recorded, so a Teacher can check who's taken which class. We're required to keep detailed records of Digos, and that goes into a database too. If DEP provides personal web pages (and we're seriously hoping we can), that will require a UCCI (User Content Creation Interface). While those look simple (for example, GeoCities), they're notoriously difficult to create. Before we go into that, there's going to be web pages for Groups.

4. Art. That new graphics system means I am going to re-do the interface. YOU don't; everything you have will still work JUST FINE. Furcadia also needs new things from time to time, such as new species and new Digos.

5. Design. This probably doesn't sound like real work, and we do our very best to make it not feel like real work, but it is. We spend significant time debating with each other. We spend time researching so that we have something accurate upon which to base our cases, and we spend time considering the conclusions. Design includes amiable debate. Anytime you've seen me cite some logical fallacy or other in the Forums, you've seen me utilize the tools of the design trade.

"Should we charge a fee for being able to upload Dreams?" "Should we employ a marketing director and sell advertising space on the Furcadia screen?" These are a few examples of stuff we went over early on. We also re-visit old decisions. "Should we have a 'Follow' command?" "Should we have a separate avatar for each gender?" "Should we sell coded weapons that would only work in combat-enabled Dreams?"

Buddy list, anybody...? In-game messaging? How about something that lets you opt-in to listing what other online games you're playing, which Servers, which Sides, what your alt's names are? In order to better understand the latest games, we need to play games such as World of Warcraft and City of Heroes. One of the things I've seen that maybe Furcadia should have is CoH's option for "global" aliases. If you're playing Alt X, you can tell somebody your Global Alias (if you want to). Then, if they message the Global Alias when you're playing Alt Y, you still see the message but you don't have to reveal your alt. "Should we have global aliases?"

6. Client/Server Coding. We spend a lot of time on design because, unlike companies with big budget, we know coder time is at a premium. We don't have the flexibility to redo something later. Design is real work and Client/Server coding is the Even More Real work. It's normal for a computer game company to have 4-6 full time coders on staff, plus 4-5 contractors. We have 2, plus up to 2 contractors (it varies).

The next client has more HTML, and a new graphics system that will allow 256 colors per Object, instead of forcing everyone to use the same palette for the whole Dream. This is probably going to eventually necessitate a rewrite of the FSHeditor. We, the staff, all still love the game; we all sort of "live" in it, and we want new features at least as much, if not more, than you might.

7. Customer Service. This can't be done by volunteers. Some matters can be addressed with a form letter but others require a unique letter that typically takes half an hour to an hour to write. Sometimes there's a question of a rule being broken and someone needs to research who plays which alt via the database. Sometimes someone has to investigate something on a web site.

8. Insurance. In-office DEP employees receive pay and they also receive full health insurance coverage. That runs about $600/month ($7200 a year) per person. One of us was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid; it was frightening but we at least had some peace of mind knowing our insurance covered it. (and, in case you were wondering, the cancer was successfully treated and she's on the slow but assured trail to recovery.)

9. Advertisement. Furcadia pays for ads, notably, on Google.

10. Contractors. Some things done for Dragon's Eye, such as some bits of the art, and work on the web site, are done for-pay.

11. Conventions. We haven't been able to send any official representatives recently, but we've managed to get the team out to Further Confusion, Mephit Fur Meet, and Anthrocon. To save money, we may travel by rented trailer and drive in shifts, but that still adds up to expense in the thousands. We don't have infinite time, and travel by plane is preferable. Plane tickets have become more expensive over the years. Despite special convention rates, so have hotel rooms.

They're not just entertainment to us, though. Conventions bring together ideas and creative energy that inspire us to do more. For me, as an artist, seeing the things Furry artists create is an overwhelming and wonderful experience.

As a bonus, conventions also spread a lot of "buzz" about Furcadia. When we do manage to get to one, we're assured of hundreds of new furres joining us. So conventions do ultimately give alot back in the way of publicity, too.

12. Order Fulfilment. We have more Digo stuff than we can handle, so we work with Infire. Oy!

13. Legal Fees. This is kinda obscure and we seldom actually need it. When Dragon's Eye Productions was first set up, it cost over $500 to pay for "Incorporation". We're considering selling something that might be like gift certificates and might be like in-game currency, and we'll need legal advice.

14. Movies. Sometimes "we have movie sign!" and the Austin/Pflugerville/Round Rock DEP furres get taken to the movies on the company tab. That happens a few times a year maybe.

15. Products. The T-shirts aren't cheap, they're five-color printing and cost us approximately $8 each. We eventually make alot of that back, but in order to do a "run" of printing, we have to commit to making at least 100 shirts, which means, we're handing over at least $800, plus silk screen set-up ("burn") fees. Although they may appear simple or cheap, the Pawtograph books that the Silver Sponsors receive the first time they sign up are not. Because they're miniature sketch books, they're made of heavier archival-quality paper stock. They're designed to take quite a bit of punishment and to last for many convention visits, and they do. It cost several thousand dollars to get a batch made up. We print the color prints and certificates ourselves, on pretty nice paper. Again, it's simple but high quality.

Whether or not a Digo is "expensive" to somebody varies a LOT! For some furres, $10 is far more than they can afford. For some furres, $10 is next to nothing. Either way, I hope that when you see somebody with wings or a dragon or some other special item walk by, that you'll keep this in mind: Furcadia is actually expensive to run, and, by buying those special items, they're helping to keep it free for everybody else, plus, they're making it possible for Furcadia to improve.

Emerald Flame on the costs of running Furcadia

Computer Mouse, I notice that in one post you complain about the price of Digo items and in the next you insist that Furcadia needs all these new features. I'm sure you are not aware of the realities of running a business, so I'll inform you a bit. I think this is pretty common among our players.

Dragon's Eye Productions is the company that makes Furcadia. We are what they call in the game industry an Indipendant. This means that we are privately owned and we have no investors or bigger company backing us. We chose to stay that way because investors like to tell you how to run your game and they'd have never agreed to "Forever Free" or volunteers or many of the other thigns we like to do. By choosing to stay that way though, we make sacrafices too. Most big online games that you see out there like WoW and Everquest and even smaller ones, had investment money to produce their games. We are talking about 10s of millions of dollars to produce their games. They have teams between 40 and 200 to just make the game and add new features and a whole other group of that many called the "live team" that actually runs the game day to day.

At DEP, we have Felorin, Talzhemir, Myself, Sanctimonious, Cironir, Gar and Leah, full time and we have a couple of part timers. That's to both make new features and to run a community of 60,000 people. This is really not possible, but we do it anyway and none of us are paid anywhere near what we'd get doing the job for another company. The DEP "offices" are in my spare room. We do this for the love of Furcadia and the belief in producing a non-violent, imaginative, free online game where people from all over the world can meet. Suggestions are nice and we like to hear them, but honestly, we have a good ten years of things already planned for the game.

We do all this work totally off the sales of Digo Market items. How many wings and portrait spaces does it take to do something like, say, pay the lease on our house, pay doctor bills or even go grocery shopping? How about the cost of bandwidth or server machines? You should be very grateful to all those players out there who do buy Digo items, because they are what keeps Furcadia alive. A year ago, we almost lost the company because our players, mainly kids, would buy Digo items without their parents' permission and the parents would charge them back. Paypal only allows for 1% chargebacks and they froze our account right before Christmas, our most important season. The two things that saved us was going with IBV to process orders and the fact that Felorin's parents had pssed away recently and left him some money that he could use to make payrole and pay for the servers for a few months. Our sales have still not fully recovered from that and with the new servers, our expenses go up. Think of going to dinner with your parents for one evening, that usually costs at least 60 dollars or a computer game that you only play a few weeks costs 40. Furcadia Digos are not so expensive.

You might see here why when one thing is going on, say, new forums or a new server, development on the update stops. There is only one set of people to do all of these things, each person is vital to making it all run, and when something major happens, like my getting cancer this year, development slows considerably. You might also think the solution is volunteers. As much as we appreciate our wonderful volunteers and all the help they are, any actual development has to be done or at least supervised by DEP. The programming has to meet quality standards and all work together; the art all has to look good and go together. New dreams have a very complex system they must go through to fit into our vision of the Furcadia world. You can ask an employee to make 20 changes but volunteers are not professionals and they don't take it as well.

So next time you get the urge to complain about things not happening fast enough, or how much Digos cost, or you make a suggestion for yet another feature, think about some of this.