Lots of things have been happening! Probably the most noticeable in the last few days was the opening of the Custom Shop :)

We’re also hard at work planning the Spring event :D So stay tuned! (We expect it to start somewhere around the 20th maybe, but don’t hold us to that exact date, there’s still lots of work to be done :D) It will be less focused on RP and writing and more focused on minigames.

Hm, well, at least the cat ineki is priced $10 less than a standard Digi custom.
I still feel like cat = $30, dog = $40 and fox = $50 and drasil = $70 would be more reasonable, personally.
I’m actually surprised and quite happy drasils are included. I think to bridge the gap, another species should be put in between the rarity of a fox ineki and drasil, though!
The additional line art is at an expected price.

I can’t wait to get the new OotS ineki!

And the mention of a Spring Event seems neat! I can’t wait. Though I’d be lying if I wasn’t wanting a V-day event.
Considering the site is new, could there potentially be a V-day event and a Spring Event in upcoming years?

While I can’t afford these prices by a long shot, I do think the artists spend more than 3 hours (at a bare minimum wage of $10 an hour) on a custom :) Yes, it’s ‘just’ a recolour, but.. Yeah :P -shrug- They’re flying off the shelves, so I can only consider them reasonable.

I especially appreciate the hair edits being so ‘cheap’, relatively.

What makes you feel they should be cheaper, Lycan?

I personally don’t know how much an artist spends per pet, but I would gather that it takes longer to do the line art of an item, hair etc. I was estimating the coloring/creating the patterns would be around 3 hours ($10 per hour, like you said), but the additional upgrades would consume a lot of time making it over 3 hours, which is paid by complexity.

I know it was previously mentioned that since the heads/tails are interchangeable and that hair templates etc could be saved it would make them cheaper than Digi customs.

At a personal level, which I think a good amount of users are students that make around minimum wage: It’s still difficult for me to find a job even with an Associates degree. I would be lucky to find something more than minimum wage ($7.95 in Ohio), let alone full time. If I was buying something recreational and given I pay some bills and buy meals, I don’t like to buy anything past about $30 a month. A t-shirt for $20 and a movie at $10 is all I would really would allow myself to buy a month. Granted, life isn’t very merciful on people who can barely afford something that can make you happy once a month, and sometimes you have to spend that money you save up for recreational use on a broken down car or an illness (which if you aren’t full time or still dependent on your parents, you have no health insurance). I’m thinking the majority of consumers on MC fall into this category. I could be wrong and would be very interested in seeing the results of the age and occupation in the survey, though I’m not sure if that breaches some code.

I’m not saying that this site should strictly cater to these individuals, but given that an artist (hopefully) gets at least min wage+ for the hour she spends on a custom and that a typical buyer probably wants more than a cat ineki base with no edits, I think it would be a bit more reasonable.

I’d like to judge the supply and demand at a later date, since customs just opened and I’m sure there are quite a few people that were waiting for it to open. I’d like to see if it fills up the same like this a year from now.

Note: I do not mean any disrespect to the artists for wanting a smaller price or the user base for thinking some people are in similar situations. I’m just trying to give the reasoning behind my ideas. It’s also based on my knowledge of someone living in the United States. 

I’m not going to touch the topic on prices because I’m not getting into until I’ve bought a piece future wise. What I can say though is that an arose should be paid reasonably for their handy work based upon how long it takes and such.

I’m surprised that there won’t be a valentine event since most sites love going for it. I do however prefer the idea of a spring event instead it sounds amazing and why no celebrate seasons more than a money grabbing day for cards and chocolate?

I am a bit sad at the implied lack of a Valentines thing. >.> But my love for Valentines events IS a little biased, since my birthday is on Feb 12th. X3 Valentines events make me feel warm and fuzzy with the delusion of a “Yay, love and birthdays!” thing. rofl. X3

However a spring event? :o Yes, please! I can’t wait to see what games you guys come up with! :D
Less focus on RP/writing makes me sad, though. v.v Those are my strong points that I adore.
But hopefully the games will be fun! <3

And… >.> ... Hopefully, uhmm… <.<;; Not games like the “22 hours a day of clicking the same button for a week” game types I’m familiar with? *excitable bounce* Something perhaps like the last event’s minigames, and a clicky thing akin to the fishing game would be awesome!!!

I actually am excited for the “less forum based mini games”. Not because I hate RP/writing, because I love them to death, but just because I feel as if there’s not much to do outside of the forums. But I shouldn’t and wouldn’t complain, because it seems like y’all are steadfast in introducing new, “solo"ish things to do.

I’m looking forward to this. Thanks a bunch. c:

Hooray! *showers Prose with millions of hugs*. You should go check it out :D

Akira:
I also expect you are correct: i think customs will sell very quickly to begin with, and then slow down significantly. Also, I can’t share data from the survey since it was described as private. However, I do understand your position of not having a lot of disposable income for websites (and you are definitely not alone with it on Mycena Cave). A little perspective though might help you understand where we’re coming from. Some customs are faster than others to make, but they take hours at the minimum and can stretch to more than a week if they go through a lot of revisions. They really aren’t a “commodity” that we sell, they’re a special thing where one of our artists takes time away from what she was doing to focus exclusively on a unique thing for you.

It’s easy to see “large” chunks of money coming in because they’re visible (who wouldn’t brag about an $80 custom, and when people have a lot of gems you notice) but it’s also easy not to see the work that goes on behind the scenes. If I cashed out entirely right now, a generous estimate of my “hourly wage” for working on Mycena Cave (actually working on code, not just piddling around on the forums) would be about 70 cents per hour, before taxes. I know Myla works as hard as I do. We tried to drop custom prices as much as we could — they’re significantly below old Digis prices, and we did what we could to drop them further from our original announcement of “$50 and up”. We understand not everybody will be able to afford them, and that’s a shame, but it’s it is what it is. There’s still the possibility of getting one through a raffle though :)

Alice, Skye:
We thought about when to do our Spring event, and starting on Valentine’s day did come up. However, we ultimately decided to push it back a few days to not be huge jerks to people who may actually have plans on Valentine’s day ;) Also I have plans on Valentine’s day (...........new season of House of Cards, anyone?)

Skye:
well maybe not the same button…
>_>
<_<
<_>
>_<

I am excited at the implication of multiple buttons *w* I like buttons. Also I would love an event that started 1-3 days after Valentines :D I have Valentines plans, but otherwise would love to participate.

The customs are currently outside my pay grade, but should I get more disposable income I would like one. The option of a Drasilis is what excites me :D Cute fluff dragon butts.

The story seems cute, so far :o

glitch;

Fair enough. I know you guys are doing as much as you can for everything to be best on both sides, and I know it’s an issue that artists don’t get paid enough elsewhere on the internet versus the time they put into a piece. Honestly, I put money into this site on occasion because I absolutely want to see that money get passed on to people who work here for income and for the site to grow.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I do appreciate the price of $40 is $10 cheaper than what was originally mention on Facebook. And honestly, those hair edits are much more reasonable than on Digis. To add, I am very thankful that I was able to bring my two customs on here for such a low price as well, and I don’t want to undermine the hard work that went into those, which was more or less a gift to us!

I suppose I just wanted to offer thoughts since it may always be useful to consider some outside comments (which I know you guys usually look over.) I also know that they offered for raffles, but chancing on that is slim. I’m planning on having a couple more of my characters into customs, but I suppose I’ll have to save for a couple of years for that to be a reality — or hopefully find a job that pays decently, which I would pray comes first.

———-

On another note, I just read Chapter 1, and Prose did a exquisite job. It was very well written, but I wouldn’t expect anything less :)

Love Chapter 1! <3 It was great to read.
I’m also looking forward to the event! It sounds interesting…

I’m really excited orders are open now and am looking forward to all our new customs :D

As for the story — I’d like to thank everyone who participated in the Halloween event. You guys all had some really great ideas <3 I unfortunately couldn’t incorporate everything into the story, but I pulled what I could and hopefully did your entries justice. I especially want to thank the people who introduced the idea of the Espíritita as guiding lights and of Ineki who carve on Halloween out of spite, and also everyone who ran with the idea of the bone monster being more active on Halloween. Same to the users who made their entries tributes to the Lost; they were my primary inspiration and the entries I referred back to the most while I was writing up this chapter :)

I was obviously a huge inspiration; you used one of my nicknames (Tam) in the story! 8D *brick’d*

..I’ll shut up now.~ x u x

Anyway, yeah.~ Just finished reading it. I loved it. ^^ Made me tear up a little bit at the end, too. ; u ; <3 Can’t wait for the next chapter!

Concerning the prices, I was happy to see some of them below $50 (along with the edits that are priced lower as well). I was a little confused why the ineki prices would be different, but I assume it’s because of their rarity or something? Like Lycan, I don’t have much disposable income right now. I’m a student, I sacrifice wages for education. Having a month break was nice, working all the time does make a difference.

At any rate, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to offer gems, items, or what have you in exchange for customs from other users?

Looking forward to reading the first chapter.

The customs are really exciting, a little bit pricey but I have plans for one major one as soon as they open up again (major as in it’s going to cost me close to $130 most likely) and then after that it will depend, I doubt I’ll be getting a lot after the first, though.

Also the spring event sounds great, happy to hear there won’t be much to do with writing this time, simply because I don’t have a lot of time to write something. Can’t wait for the event though!

Yessss, it’s glitch’s voice. ;D

It’stotallyswoonworthy.

Nine: glitch kind of…just randomly did it. XD (You should hear his blooper reel!)

My first podfic! 8D

Really, though, I’m glad we have an audio option now, although I don’t know that it really saved any time to record the whole story instead of summarizing it, haha. It sounds great though!