#aywas customs

[casixtonpetsites]

look at this new fun lil guy :)

adding this on here too bc why not:

apparently this is just a holiday masterpost now lol

i said WINTER CHIROS and by golly. ive done this.

[nevros-fr]

Introduction Welcome to my UMA musings. If you have no idea what a UMA is, it stands for user made accents that are directly sold by users to other users instead of being distributed by the site, I did a look at UMA acronym history here (Nevros, 2023). I wanted to look at how the uma sales decisions changed over time since I saw words like premades to refer to the current way artists would sell skins, that is having a design and collecting names of people who are interested in buying it, as opposed to customs, which would be making species designs for each person. I was also curious about when preorders started. I really like this honour system that helps artists fund their uma without having to pay a large portion by themselves to bring the skin to market. The current market consists of artists who want to sell their skin, set up a shop with prices around 500g for an accent and 750g for a skin that includes the cost of buying a blueprint and then they run preorders. They also usually ping GASP, the general accent and skin pinglist to see if there are any interested buyers. Methods I went through each thread individually from the skins and accents thread for the June to August 2013 of FR to get a gist of it, then started cherry picking months to look through for the general trends because 500 pages of threads is a lot to look through one at a time! I also think a massive caveat is that the older threads are the ones that may not have been as successful because threads get bumped up as more people post so the threads get found based on their last post rather than their first post.

Results I went all the way back to the start of June 2013 and tracked how things may have changed. For one, this was the unknown frontier, so there was no established or efficient way to sell skins yet. As I mentioned before, premades are the most common way to market a skin that an artist would like to sell, with customs being an available option, but not necessarily popular. People were bringing this terminology from previous sites they’ve played, such as Aywas or Wajas. Prices for these premades ranged wildly from 50k to 200k in treasure or 700g to 5000g for a single copy of a skin without a blueprint (Morau, 2013). Otherwise, they would state a price for the skin plus the blueprint or the cost equivalent in gems. I saw a few artists who would have liked to sell the psd of skins to users so they may print skins at their own discretion (Balu, 2013). With these prices in mind, I think it’s clear that skins were pretty inaccessible to the wider public unless people bought gems with real money. Despite the fact of people marketing skins by selling the psd file, I haven’t noticed any skins showing up multiple times in the game database due to this practice. Either none of them were made, or possibly they were reorganized to reduce confusion since the credits on every skin usually go to the person that printed it. Rules such as “one payment equals to only one use of the skin” was popular, presumably since the user would be given a psd file for them to print. There was also a common rule to not sell premade skins for more than you bought it for. It did not take long for people to consider selling multiple copies for premades at once. Remember, a single blueprint is 1000g for accents and 2000g for skins, but multicopy packs are considerably cheaper at 2500g for 10 accents and double that for skins (Custom Skins, 2013). The earliest person that I saw to consider selling multiples of one accent was Xaishi but never actually set up a show (Xaishi, 2013). All these developments happened in June!

What does July bring? People who accidentally submitted the wrong skin and have no idea what to do :> Before the establishment of the Skin and Accent Problems, users would need to message mods or admin to see if they can get those errors fixed. I found the intent to sell premades using multipacks with a thread dating back to July 1 (Pathojay, 2013). I also saw people selling multiprints for the very first time as a 5 print run where the artist paid for the blueprint pack first (AkaPanuka, 2013). With these early threads, more people were selling skins in the range we see now at 800g which includes the blueprint price now. There were still many people selling skins with single print prices and multiprint options. It also seems like preorders to fund blueprints were also rising in popularity (Dactyl, 2013).

I can also see the topics change as time goes on. In June/July 2013, people were offering designs only as interest checks. In August/September 2013, people were requesting constructive criticism and help with designs. September showed that the markets settled people into two big models, supply your own blueprints to the artist or join preorder runs (Magyr, 2013). It was clear to me that the people who used preorders and standardized their prices ended up doing better than the people who sold umas without blueprints (Violet, 2013; Incarnation, 2013; Grimgram, 2013)

By the early 2014 in April/May, preorder runs became the standard and prices reflected what we see nowadays (Kanamine, 2014). Though, there were people selling skins at dynamic costs, where prices would decrease if more people joined the run (Kenjinthala, 2014). Skin retirements also happened more often in 2014 where the artist wanted to stop printing a certain uma because they wanted to move on to newer designs. This is similar to what happened around 2018 up until 2020 ish. It’s taxing to keep an active catalogue instead of retiring some to make pinglists more manageable. I think the time between standardized, and thus cheaper prices, and my rising interest in skins during this time was probably no accident. I would bet a lot of people also joined because of the reasonable prices and clearer organization.

Many interesting things happened in 2014. An event I came across was from the Mistral Jamboree event where people designed skins and had the chance to win a 10 print blueprint pack (Amphitere, 2014)! Selling UMAs to a secondary market started around this time where people were only selling a handful of UMAs (Dabble, 2014). I also want to state that the [accent=skin id] tooltip didn’t exist yet so everyone was using the png image of the tooltip. Moreover, if people had skin/accent problems, there was a thread to post to now (Aequorin, 2014)! No more pming mods, admins or sending in help tickets!

“Looking for x accent” or “accent wanted” threads became popular in 2014, which meant it clogged up the board for artists looking to sell their umas. This heralded the rise of GASP version 1 in early 2015 where google sheets made its big debut into the skin and accents board (GASP, 2015). Artists also started using google sheets to contain their pinglists to make life easier instead of checking pings to see who needed to be added (SarcasticSketch, 2015). This allowed better coordination to allow artists to monitor many different skins and the status of multiple runs.

By 2015 to 2016, skin shops had stronger branding with different banners and personal archives of what skins they have made (YusukeKitagawa, 2016). Since shops were also gaining stability and popularity, there was also a stronger desire to limit runs or else be stuck in administrative purgatory. It takes a lot of work to keep all skins active between taking preorder payments, then trying to send them out to everyone with crossroads or private messages. This did introduce the subtle distinction where accents artists were interested in running again are called “reprint” runs, when the umas can return for sales weeks after the initial print.

Third party skin previewers also popped up around this time so that people can conveniently overlay their dragons with skins and imagine what it would look like. There was a crack down on those tools for data scraping but other go-arounds such as requesting the user to save all necessary photos locally to upload them on the previewing website instead of pulling them from FR.

Hold on to your hats, early 2017 ushered in a new way to distribute skins with the fancy pantsy new private auction system (FR News, 2017a)! This meant a way to streamline the selling process since the interface is friendlier for massive order processing. Traditional preorders can still work with the PA system if patrons send gems to the artist and that meant the artists could list the umas for 1 treasure. For artists that could afford it, names were taken down for preorders but they could list umas privately to the buyer for the full price and eliminate the hassle of organizing payments upfront. The Dressing Room also came out in 2017 where people can now preview printed skins on their dragons and scries (FR News, 2017b)!

I feel like from 2018 onwards, the uma market reached an equilibrium with what we more or less see today. There have been a few noteworthy updates. With the rise of limited skins and popular artists, resales and the secondary accent market became quite popular. GASP conducted a survey around how they could deal with the overflowing reselling ping issue (GASP, 2018).

The one part that I feel is different, is that there are more artists who are keeping shelved catalogues. It was normal in the past, but it seems like artists are actively combating the steep price increases that come from reselling limited umas. It is more hassle for the artists but the users who buy are surely happy with the shift from limited to shelved.

Conclusions The start of uma shop culture and multi-prints preorder runs started as early as July 2013. I thought this finding was funny because it's the reverse of what I found with UMA acronym history, where that started much later than I thought. Thanks for reading!! Stay tuned, the next installment might be me going through all the player skins in the database and looks at trends

[salt-volk]

the customs system on aywas killed it too lol. its just not a sustainable system for a pet site.

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[kaiartz]

finally got around to designing an anthro look for probably my favourite aywas custom, Vilthen >u< (who is now up on art fight)

[hapalopus]

Fascinating lineage I found on Aywas

Virtual pet breeding, when all pets are customs drawn by artists, is,, interesting

[answrs]

“how can i most effectively distract myself from the personal irl drama going on today? i know, drive myself batshit insane and try to fit shay onto the canid base i made!”

thirteen layers just of all the line edits I’d have to do asdfhjkl

i think it was aywas? that had the ‘the custom upload price is based on what percentage of pixels are different to the base’. and im pretty sure this would overclock their system lmao

[pixelfirefly]

Some more Aywas customs

The last three are some of my favorites. One I stayed up all night in a bidding war to get, the other I bred and waited months for the artist to complete, the last I made!

[aysaltmine]

In some ways is kinda sad to see Aywas slowly dying. Came back to my account after 5 years and just nothing. It's been years since a new jewelled crystal base they still are looking for artist. Even metal custom take way longer to come in. Almost no entries for event pets. Sad indeed. I mean it also makes sense so much has happened on the site over the years and drama. I want to get back into it but i am not sure if it's even worth it cuz the site is probably on it's last few years. One day people will stop logging in and the money will be gone. Interested to see how the next mayday exotic sale will go.

🎏

[managodess]

Hello Aytag!

I just received these adorable PBC babies and am not 100% sure who the artist is (bc I legit forgot which artists I asked for >.<) I’d love to properly credit whoever made these though, so it’d be great if either the artist could give a quick hello or someone can let me know if they recognize the style!

[xerxestexastoast]

back at it again with Aywas customs

[customappreciation]

Artist and Colorist: Vixen #66196 Owner: Lacia #25044 Custom Siluri link: http://www.aywas.com/pp/view/11902941/ What a gorgeous Siluri! The colors and edits are so beautifully done. Vixen really out did herself here!

[shaddeh-purgatory]

New premades for sale!

[salt-volk]

anji being in closed species doesn’t tell us anything that her being an aywas custom artist didn’t already lol

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[mowulf]

[aberrance-of-aywas]

A bunch of ‘firsts’ here, though they are older now. ;u;  These are the earliest custom pets that I submitted to Aywas. The last 3 are my pets, the orbkin was for someone else, and the ryba was a site pet submission.

[21034glyndasaywas]

Love this Melo Design.