Sup BDO community

As you can guess from the title I will talk here about changes that I and other creators that I know, have been wishing for for a long time.

This will be a long read. Take your time. If it does not concern you - move on.

First, to why I propose these:
I'm Yasogami, a very active member of the small (mostly EU) creator community for character presets/templates for about one and a half years. Why I have been doing this? It's fun. That's it. I do it to relax and because frankly spoken: It makes me happy to help others find a preset suitable for them that they enjoy playing with.
What keeps me going are the people.

I'm not here to talk about my templates, so keep your constructive criticism related to this thread. Thank you.

There are issues. Smaller and bigger ones.
And honestly.. it just gets worse..
Here's why:

1) Modifications
If you create a character preset and want to upload it to album it will be set to non-modifiable by default.
A lot of creators during contest and people who do not use album frequently will not even know what this means. It means another downloader cannot ever change your template.

Personally I have no idea why you would not want to have people adjust your template to their likings. I have been told that this was implemented to keep people from stealing your work.
As far as I am concerned - it does not help in the slightest. And even for this there are ways to work around it.
All that it does is frustrate people when they like something but they cannot adjust even the tiniest of imperfections. Why wouldn't you want to see people happy and satisfied with their character?

The original creator's name is always mentioned when you edit it, downloads will count for the original creator, that seems very fine to me.
And IF there are people who really do not like people to make changes to what they created then it should be optional. IT DOES NOT PREVENT STEALING.
Please change non-modifiable from default to self-selected.

2) Template thieves
You might already see the next issue: Template thieves.
While I do not want to mention in forum the ways of the template thieves, I can pretty much tell how they do it. There are at least two ways to do so.
It is disheartening to say the least. You work two hours on a template and someone else reuploads it, with one or two things changed but with THEIR creator name under it - how can that not be infuriating?
People complimenting someone else for all that YOU did? That does not feel nice. It's plain unfair.

I am not talking about templates that seemingly look alike or are inspired by others. This WILL happen a lot of times because creator options are limited and this is bound to happen.
I speak about those who are obviously using the template you made.

How to prevent it?
Reporting does nothing. It just continues. It does not get deleted nor is it made unpublic. The feeling the creator community has is that PA does not care about them.

Please do something about it when people already report it with evidence.
By making it unpublic, deleting it OR putting a temporary album-only ban on this person's uploads.
Alternatively you could choose a moderator by PA to check album regularly. It does not take that long.

3) Unrelated content
It's the Beauty Album for a reason. If you want to upload your horse, the indoors of your house, the flooring, a seagull ... it does not belong here.
Why is it a problem? Yes your horse can be beautiful too but it's not the horse that you will get from downloading.
It flushes people's content to the next pages. Lazy players will not browse that far.
It is also clickbait. People want to know what character you are actually playing so they have to download it. To me the same goes for pictures with 99% hair.
And the same goes for lewd pictures. It is fine to upload a nice body that people can use as a base but it is entirely another thing if you take lewd shots for clickbait.
Little effort to mention a few rules somewhere in the UI.
Edit: this should also include spam or flooding the album with the same templates with little to no changes.

Please have someone look over it occasionally to take these out.
I do not really see any other option to do so. If you can propose another method, I'm open to hear it.
If you want to upload these images: There is a screenshot album as well.

4) Creator options, album interface and bugs
It had been an option to make your own poses in creator mode.
There are normal poses that you could use to take a picture with or make your own.
While making your own was absolutely buggy and could not be used if you didn't trick the screenshot tool it would be a very nice gimmick to re-add properly.
It was the most fun thing that got completely taken out by a bug-fix last year that was supposed to prevent creator mode from crashing when taking screenshots. Which honestly I never even had issues with.
Let us take shots again with poses.

The same goes for changing your clothes for the second picture. You were able to switch them to other selectible ones after taking one shot but now it just closes the whole album and you have to start all over again.

The album itself is too small now.
The size got decreased A LOT. I'm not sure why. Do people have such tiny computer screens? I have a medium sized screen and don't sit too close but my eyesight is not the best and I'm close to considering using my glasses.
Please make the album size individually changeable.

The option to search for a template title is gone.
Re-implement the title-search.

5) Male characters
I know that the interest men have when it comes to male character creation is not the biggest but the options to create male characters are extremely limited in comparison to a female character.
Hairstyles are pretty much all not editable and the face shapes cannot be properly edited, no matter how hard I pull on the sliders.
You can't even buy that many outfits where it would cause a drastic loss in income on these classes if you gave people more options to change their character to their liking.
Personally I do not like creating male chars and that is for exactly this reason. They are horrible to edit.

6) Tattoos
Why exactly do they consist of one large pixel? No one will ever know.
Please make Tattoos HD when you switch to highest textures.
I will just assume here that your pc can handle this then.

7) Creator ranking
For a while it did not work at all.
Now it is back and it shows creators in alphabetical order. But only 50 of them.
So where am I? Nowhere. Where's Y? Gone. Just like most of us.
If you don't have a name with A or Ab you will not show up. There is one person who defies the laws of physics and manages to be #1 in one of the rankeds with a name starting with B even though there were people with A. No idea how that happened but anyways, it's a mess. It's buggy.
And most importantly: It's not a ranking if you order names alphabetically.
I don't necessarily support the "download madness" but it was better than this.
Please give the old ranking back.  Edit: The old ranking is now back since patch 28/04

Alternatively you could implement a search by most likes, it might give a better view on what is actually good.
People have been telling me that downloads mean that their character is well liked?
Uhm, no.
Depending on your picture you cannot see any imperfections or ... maybe you don't even see the character on the picture (see #3 above).
Problem: You get likes because it's a lewd picture, so that has to come after applying a fix for #3.

8) Edits
People edit characters. That's perfectly fine.
Me and a few other creators would love to see what some have made out of our templates. Purely out of curiosity. But since one of last year's fixes we can only find edits for the classes we currently are playing on.
So what if I want to see uploaded edits for a zerker that I made? I do not play one.
So I have to go back to character selection, select a zerker, click my own name on a random template just to see if there are other zerker uploads that have been made from my originals. I want to know what people liked better so I can make templates more to your tastes.
This is annoying as heeeeeell.
Please let us check uploaded edits more easily.

9) Contests
I don't know how PA will handle template contests if they even choose to make any but the last ones were just unfair and I'm saying that even though I won multiple times.
As a person working full-time how am I supposed to make it in time to even get into the category "most downloaded"?
People don't realize that as soon as you are the first one to upload then everyone after you who creates a character and clicks the "apply most popular" button will apply those first templates.
It does say nothing about the actual quality of the character. You just have to be first. How is this a good way to choose winners? No wonder people complain about #1 places being so "default".

I ended up only making characters for the "unique" category because it is not possible for me after a long day of work to apply for most downloaded. It's insane and I don't see how it's possible without clickbait, that I do not support, to get in there soon enough.
Even after a week you barely even get into the top 50 anymore.

I would personally wish to have PA choose templates from multiple categories instead , such as "Good Looks", "Unique" and "Ugly"
Yes. I love ugly characters. Please make it a thing. I will even play it in game if it makes me laugh.

However, these are the biggest issues that creators, not just me, have with Character Creation.
I want it to be fair and fun. If you think it is a joke compared to "real" game issues then I'm telling you ... everything here is for the player's entertainment and it is not inferior to your grinding or fishing. Please respect that.

Thank you for reading.
Constructive criticism is welcome.

I agree with and support everything on this list! 

It feels like nobody at PA is in charge of even glancing at the beauty album and doing that alone would likely lead to multiple other improvements. 

As it stands, things are currently a mess and we really need some help.

Hey,

i also agree with everything on that list.

thanks for bringing it up yaso! 

Hey Gami,

thank you for taking the time and effort to write this list. I support and agree all points on this list and hope PA will consider and implement these suggestions.

Beautiful and cool templates are an important part of the game.

Much luv

1. Agree
2. It happens really often. Also i was victim of 'nickname stealing'. One person made similar nickname by changing i and L to make his uploads higher by using 'my' Family Name. Thankfully it looked like Kakao quickly made a move after some tickets. But be aware of it.. And i will use nickname here: Schwanenstolz (because it was public in album anyway).
3. For this we got Photo Gallery. Thats right.
4. It was kinda great. I was using this to show 2 pictures of charater that I made. One with Pearl Accesory and Second without anything - raw face that mostly player will get after download.
5. I will add here also new characters at all. We can easily see it with Nova as example. Her editing was a bit boring and she has not so many options to edit her - especially with eyes section.
6. I got no comment on that xD
7. It feels like some data was refreshed. I wrote a ticket about bugs with website - switching pages on EU from 1 to another will makes u to go on NA every time. I see its fixed now, but Ranking issue is a bit sad for people who spent time on templates.
8. True that.
9. I will add here also here no Sage Customization contest. Please dont take away content that was used for some time. I was honestly looking forward to it with new character release.

Im happy that Yasogami wrote post about it here.
I will also add from me it would be kind to get some special tittle - here is a ranking. It is not too easy to get there. Especially looking at tittles for some 'Baking contest' or Amabassador things or even Stormtropper where you gotta get frags.

ps. Cheers girls! You are all awesome creators ♥

Hey Gami,

i agree with your statements and PA has to do something about it.
Thank you for putting in that amount of Time and effort to Support our Creator Community!
Keep it going guys!

I agree with all especially with 1#

I always forget to add modify because i am dumb... but when i want to modify the temp i registered, it would be cool if i could enable it later too.

Also if the character or family name is changed, it should be changed in beauty album too. (but that's my opinion)

Awesome ideas!

I'm also super annoyed that your templates will just disappear off the beauty album if you change your family name.

I used to have a sorc template in TOP 10 and when I switched my family name it just went poof. 

I'm kinda annoyed by that bug.

Would be awesome if the beautyalbum got some changes in the future and the custom options too. 💕(✿◡‿◡)

I really appreciate the feedback.
Just found another stolen template of mine. Sometimes I keep asking myself why I even provide people with free templates when they just want to claim it as their own after having changed the colors on it.

For others: I'm sick and tired of it and I will point you out for stealing if you do it. And yes, I do also check NA templates.

I would also love to see a "All Time" in the Periods we can choose from. Why stop at 1 Year?
If I look at my old Shai Temp that I edited from another Creator it has more downloads than the 1th Shai from 1Year Period, cause I uploaded it over a Year ago. All the good Temps from over a year ago get buried If they don't beat all others every year... 
So another Time period to see the "All-time-Favs" would be awesome to look further back. 

Otherwise, I love all the suggestions from above. Not sure tho how Creations get stolen. On my old Temp is the Creator Tag of the original maker and then mine in the title. I did not know that you could go around that.