Tarot I totally see what you mean about that. The all-or-nothing nature is absolutely punishing for some players. I think this is the toss-up the site is using to make up for the issue of the CC shop always being closed. If they take the cap off, they need a way to take PP out of the system (that works better/faster than people paying for customs). From this POV, and the goal to discourage hoarding “purposeless” PP or entering the queue without the means, AND trying to balance the economy so the entire site doesn’t just turn on it’s head and center around CC sale, it makes sense.

Maybe it’s out of place, but this is similar to the problem I had with the Scholarcrow event. The system makes no distinction between people with 24/25 PP than those with 0/25PP. But the person with 0/25 doesn’t “lose” anything, while the person with 24/25 PP “loses” at least 24 gems (since they probably traded 120 gems “worth” of stuff and now are getting only 96 gems back). Putting the queue + time limits on it means you’re asking users to take a gamble, and making failure more damaging the harder a user tries.

Personally it doesn’t affect me at this time, but I absolutely see where you’re coming from.

I think I’m a bit confused, so I’m going to come up with a hypothetical situation and maybe someone can tell me if my understanding is correct?

I want a custom.
I can’t accumulate Paws or whatever for that custom until I put in an order.
An order has a max time limit of 3 months.
I can’t afford to buy Paws with USD.
I make an order for said custom.
I can’t get enough Paws to cover the price of a basic custom.
Order can’t be completed, so Paws turn into gems at a decreased rate.
My $25 in paws now turns into 20 gems.

Is that correct?

Sandhill: As a reminder it’s 3 months hold + length of queue (which you can get PP in the duration of).

Additionally the 3 month hold is arbitrary decided and if needed can be subjected to change.

(Edit: Anyone who has not received a reply, there is a staff member currently working on it. Some questions are easier and quicker to reply than others.)

Then I guess I don’t see how this is better at all?

As someone who plays extremely casually, it’s now impossible for me to get a custom. There’s now way I could accumulate enough Paws or whatever in the 3 month time frame, just because I’m not on that often. Under the old system at least I could slowly gather what I needed, but now I feel like I’m being punished because I don’t play often enough, and I don’t have anything valuable enough to sell for enough CC to get a custom.

[@Deddo] (and Jacq); Ah! I’m sorry for misunderstanding. The name of Custom Credit is being changed to Paw Prints. By the EU laws purchasing PP directly would be the same as purchasing the retired CC, which is not allowed; this means that you would have to contact glitch to receive a Paypal invoice to purchase the PP required to pay the balance of your order.

While we do not mean to exclude any players or make things harder on those of you that live in regions where direct purchases for PP are done manually, we believe that the way the current system will work will be in the best interests of keeping things uniform as a whole.

That being said, we are awaiting admin confirmation of whether or not straight USD purchases will be available for orders where the users are paying 100% with their own money—where no PP from other users is involved!

Plasma

Thank you Plasma, that addressed my concerns well! uvu

i think all of these concerns are valid, esp. cause i am currently very close in the queue and may not have enough CC for what i want to get.

the solution i’m implementing, which i would like to suggest to other players, is that as far as i understand the system, you can basically go “make as much of this custom as i can get for the amount of money i have.” so, say you have $70 (going by dollars instead of PP cause my brain can’t process the conversion rn). but your custom would cost $90. well, for the $70, you can have them do the base coat color, and $30 of edits. then you can go through the edit queue to get the rest of the edits when you have more money. it does mean your custom won’t look perfect right out of the box, but if this situation comes up, that is a possible solution.

now that said i may not be correct in thinking this is a solution that will work with the system, it’d be good for staff to verify this >>

Dove

What about people who don’t make enough for the coat as a whole? Like let’s say they get 45/50 bucks. They just lose all that PP for gems, right?

Sandhill
You also have the option to “save” up your nuggets and items before entering the queue at all.
Instead of slowly accumulating PP/CC, you slowly accumulate stuff. Once you have enough “stuff” (items, nuggets, gems), THEN you enter the queue and trade for the PP you need.
This has the added bonus of bank interest (for nuggets), and retired items increasing in value over time.

Dove

awesome :)

that said it still does not address the issue of people building up PP slowly. you have to get to at least $50 or your money is wasted.

also, part of the problem with this is it may cause unnecessary work for the artists. say for example you want tail edits or swapping. but you can’t pay for that first time around. well, the artist has to go through the work of coloring that even though it’s going to be edited to be completely different later.

i really would like a way to put an order on hold at any point, so that if you’re close but don’t have quite enough, you don’t have to make the artist do extra work that’s going to be undone later.

Sandhill Right now, that is how the system works, yes. If you are concerned about finding yourself in such a situation, my recommendation would be to save the nuggets / gems / currency to trade for PP before even opening an order. For example, if the going rate of PP for nuggets is currently 1:4000, collect how many nuggets you will need for the base coat first. Once you have enough saved to cover at least the base, seek out a seller, make a deal, and then open your order for them to send payment. Then you can move straight to queue if you only want the base custom, or stay in holding if you’d like to save a little more for edits!

Oops Jacq ninja’d me. 8(

Jacq Dove

Maybe I’m still confused. I thought we couldn’t get Paws unless we already had an order open? How are we supposed to start getting Paws before that order is open? Aside from the fact that sellers of Paws are not guaranteed at all, and it may be as difficult to find them in the future as it is to find CC sellers now. I may have to make deals with multiple people selling Paws even if I do find them, and then we come back to the same problem as the CC queue before with a lot of unfilled deals while we wait.

Sandhill: You can start saving up to buy PP before making your order. Additionally I think finding sellers for PP will become easier as the shop is always open rather than with CC when it was only open at intervals with a cap.

Repeating: Anyone who has not received a reply, there is a staff member currently working on it. Some questions are easier and quicker to reply than others.

Jacq basically stated my concerns, and Sandhill did as well. This new system is going to be extremely hard on poorer users. For those of us who don’t play as much or don’t have the means to obtain currency as easily, we’re going to spend a lot of time either trying to scrape together what we can or stressing out over doing so. I absolutely understand the need to keep amounts on site manageable, but the limit does seem extremely punishing.

I know that we could have up to 6 months to gather currency, assuming that we’re doing a custom and not a sprout, but to put things into perspective, after almost a year here on MC, I’ve only got 15 CC to my name. To get together enough for a sprout or custom in the time frame seems basically impossible.

baekhesten Part of the artist’s job is to do whatever you want to do with the funds available to you; if someone can’t afford to get a tail edit at first, we will be more than willing to do the custom without the edit first and then do the edit once the user has the funds to purchase it, through the edit queue. I can guarantee that it will not cause unnecessary work for us if that is something the user wants to do. :) On a related subject, with users that will be questing after customs that have large, overlaying items attached (such as a cape or a major hair edit), artists are required to make sure the base coat of the custom is also complete in the event that a layering system is put into effect.

(Also, it is very sweet to worry about us, but trust me, we got this! :D We will do everything we can to help users at any time!)

The three month hold was a pretty arbitrarily chosen length of time, as was mentioned in the original post. Since there seems to be a fair amount of concern regarding three months being long enough for players to save up the required PP, we have no issue with extending the hold period to six months instead. I’ll make sure this change is edited into the first post.

Sandhill
Let’s say you want a $100 (20PP) custom, and you want to trade nuggets for PP. There’s two options (assuming there’s always people selling PP)
1. Enter the queue, and start selling your daily nuggets for 1PP every 5 days. in three months you have 18PP. You get kicked out of the queue because you can’t pay, and are given 72 gems for your trouble (though you “paid” 90 gems worth for it).
2. DON’T enter the queue, and start saving your nuggets up. After 100 days, you enter the queue, and sell your 300k nuggets for 20PP. You now have to wait until your order comes up, but you have enough to pay for the custom (PLUS you’ve made daily interest on all those nuggets).

You’re right that the system relies heavily on there always being users willing to buy PP for people. This isn’t really something Mycena can control directly

This also doesn’t work for users that trade the less, uh, tangible items for PP. I haven’t seen that addressed directly yet, but it means people who want to trade PP for stuff like art or adoptables are now given two (equally crappy) options:
1. Clear your schedule and hope you can draw like a machine to make up all that PP in 3 months.
2. Continue to make unsupported IOU deals and risk working for “free”
(but they can always trade art for nuggets/gems and convert to PP later, as above)

(in regards to the artists…. maybe I am callous, but the edit queue is often more expensive than getting those edits on the first go-around. In most cases I think the artists make “more” dosh that way.)

Okey to make sure I got this…. we get custom stuff with Paw Prints (omg cute!) now. Not USD. To get Paw Prints, you buy them with USD so it’s…

$$ —> Paw Prints (srsly so cute!) —-> custom related goodies!

Right? :o

Dove Woo! That’s pretty simple and I dig it!
And thanks for a quick confirmation! :D

Crow, whoohoo! Glad to see that change!
Overall I’m very happy with this system, and that cleared up my main concern. It seems like it will work a lot better than CC and I’m excited to see how the market pans out once PP is implemented!
Big thanks to the staff for putting in all the effort to come up with this. <3

Tarot We will not be changing the conversion rate of 1 PP to 4 Gems, for reasons stated previously about keeping our economy balanced:

Why are my extra Paw Prints coming back to me at a 1 Paw Print to 4 gem rate?
Paw Prints are meant to be used on a custom, sprout or edit order, and this is the only reason a player should want to trade for or purchase Paw Prints. If Paw Prints could be exchanged for gems at an equal rate (i.e. $5 USD spent on 1 PP could be converted to 5 gems, just as $5 USD spent on gems results in 5 gems), a player spending USD would by default always be better off purchasing Paw Prints. To prevent Paw Prints from going down the same path as CC and becoming the only desirable currency, the 1 PP to 4 gem conversion balance was struck!First Post

It is the user’s responsibility to see to ensuring that they have enough funds to cover their custom beforehand, whether this be an overage or shortage, via the edit pricing guide or by echoing an artist for a Price Estimate. (For an accurate estimate, users should echo one of the artists.) If a player ends up with an excess of PP they are always free to add edits to their order to make up for that excess before they have paid. Once they have paid they will not be allowed to add edits to their order and remaining PP will convert.

I’m okay with this, but it means “artistic freedom” customs are sort of limited to users who pay out-of-pocket, right?

I assume artists would feel bad to “waste” someone’s PP (or overcharge), so they wouldn’t want to make LESS edits than the max listed - which isn’t really artistic freedom at all.