What's that, Furcadia?

In an attempt to get closer to the community, Emerald Flame’s Daughter, (and current Intern at DEP) announced a few months ago that she was working on a DEP Sekrit Projekt that would be announced closer to the end of the summer.
With about 27 days left to go, (see the timer to the right,) Felorin dropped some information today about what that particular project is going to be.
In an attempt to draw the community in a bit more, creating some closer ties amongst people, Pouncer Kitty is currently working on creating a Furcadia Social Networking Ring.
This ‘Ring’ will include popular Social Networking Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, deviantART, and YouTube. There’re rumours flying around that there will be contests involved that will allow you to possibly win prizes if you help them promote the game on these sites, but there’s no final word on that at this point.
What is clear is that DEP is trying desperately to get some more information out to the public in places where it won’t have a direct, negative impact on the community. Bickering and infighting are becoming more and more prevalent on the forums and people are starting to avoid them because of the negative attitudes of a few people who constantly seem interested only in bickering and harassing the DEP camp.
These are the same people who would follow DEP Twitter Accounts, YouTube Accounts, and other media outlets to vent their ‘frustration’ at other players and-or at the company itself.
While this is not a primary focus of these new social media outlets, it is an undeniable consequence of such actions. Whether this will help improve the community by taking away the initial brunt of angry users from the forums, or cast a shadow over their marketing is anyone’s guess at this point.
As a marketing aspect, this is a fantastic move for the company. Facebook, Myspace, deviantART and other Social Networking Sites are great exposure for small companies and it should show huge returns for Furcadia, coupled with the release of the iPhone App, hopefully released before the end of the summer. As of yet, there are no specific release dates given or even information about when the ‘final product’ will ship to Apple.

For those of you who don’t understand exactly what went on with the recent ‘alt rollback’, here’s some of the specific information about what went on.

I do warn you, however, that the details could prove boring to those not interested in the world of alt trading.

Special thanks to the FAM/FAZ staff members who helped make sure the information was accurate.

February 7, 2009 – Dragon’s Eye Productions fixes a ‘bug’ in the ‘expiration’ for characters that have been inactive for a specified period of time.

February 11, 2009 – Dragon’s Eye Productions issues a rollback on over 200,000 alts that were incorrectly removed in the rollback.

You may have noticed the new influx of ‘information’ about the alt rollback that Dragon’s Eye Productions performed on February 7^th. Over 230,000 alts were removed from the Character Database at that time.

Since that time, over 200,000 of those characters were returned to their original owners. Still, from that number over 30,000 characters were cleared from the list appropriately.

The alt-trading community was in an uproar when this information was made public. The reason for this is twofold.

First, a lot of people lost alts without an e-mail warning them that the alt was about to expire. These were names that were ‘special’ to the owners and they wanted to keep them. This group makes up the majority of the 200,000 alts that were returned. Some of these people lost alts that should not have expired, and some of them had been long-standing, (active) characters that were active within a week before the expiration.

Dragon’s Eye Productions is chalking this particular issue up to a bug, and those particular alts were returned to their owners with an apology from Felorin posted publicly on the Furcadia Forums.

Alts that should have normally expired were allowed to remain expired. That means some 30,000 alts that were supposed to expire, but hadn’t, were allowed to expire, and remained expired.

Over 100 alts that had Digos recently purchased on them were not returned to their original owners; Dragon’s Eye Productions allowed the new owners to keep their Digos and their alts.

The part that made the situation tricky was that several alts that were not supposed to expire did, and were claimed by new owners who had wanted them for quite some time. These new owners were upset because the previous owners had not logged on for several months, but were still within the six month expiration limit.

These new owners stated that because the alts were never used by their original owners, they should not get their alts back. The new owners said that they grabbed these alts specifically to use them, in effect pulling them out of the mothballs and making use of names.

DEP seemed inclined to listen to these requests and, (for one time only) reset the expiration date for the older alts to 3 months of complete inactivity.

Some people rankled at this, but overall it seems to have appeased most of the people involved with this situation.

Furcadia’s doin’ a lot of stuff. Most of it is so horrendous that I’ll leave you to discover it yourself. (That, or I’m too lazy to write about it. Your choice.)

I will, however, tell you about this new service Furcadia tossed up a little while back while I was missing. (I’m still missing, btw.)

It’s all about controlling your Desctags. Non-Standard desctags can be turned on and off in this area. (Regular desctags still use the normal commands.)

I’ve heard rumours of a raffle in the future, too…

Stay tuned.

Por favor; your attention please. This is a public service announcement aimed at those vile, disrespecting citizens who ran The Muskrat.

Filthy lies! That’s what I’m here to spread about them, so for those of you who aren’t them, please enjoy the following mockery of an interview and watch as I twist and rip their words to shreds in a way that only Barbara Walters could find joy in.

For those citizens of Furcadia involved with The Muskrat… tough luck?

Lets begin.

Act 1; Scene 1:

Enter El Borracho, (EB) and his Compatriot in spreading the proliferation of compassionate conservatism, The Other Guy, (TOG).

Lets talk about you.

EB: Thank you very much, Dromedary. I am El Borracho, your friendly neighborhood drunken aristocrat.
TOG: There’s not much to say about me. I was never given a personality. (This is merely an excuse for me to not have to suddenly be good at roleplaying.)

Are there plans to start The Muskrat again anytime soon?
TOG: No, El Borracho has mostly lost interest in Furcadia and I don’t often have motivation to write things. We may do a one-time anniversary issue, but that is only conceptual at this point. I sound pretentious.
EB: Too much laziness on my part, and too much disenchantment with Furcadia. Also, certain famous Furcadians didn’t understand that part of being famous means enduring a bit of lampooning, which lead to self-censorship. Left a bitter taste in my mouth, much like the beer I’m currently consuming at an alarming rate.

Why did you start The Muskrat?
TOG: I had been reading a collection of stories from The Onion, which used to be a lot funnier. I had also come across an article about Furcadia on a website called Uncyclopedia, which is sort of a parody of Wikipedia. These two things combined in my head, and El Borracho thought this would be a good idea for something to do. Somehow “muskrat” seemed like the closest mammal to an onion; I don’t know why I thought that and I soon forgot my reasoning. We decided to start doing this. Mostly I came up with vague ideas and Elbow filled them in, providing the majority of content. A lot of this revolved around his knowledge of the personalities (or at least public personas) of Furcadia’s various important people.
EB: I was beginning to get really annoyed with the sense of humor that was starting to become prevalent at the time (trolling and fun at the expense of others). When The Other Guy casually suggested the newspaper idea to me, I realized this could be a way to show Furcadians that you don’t have to be completely cruel and profane to be funny. Just slightly cruel and profane. Also, I loved Randomism. I still don’t think we rose to their level.

Which of you two wrote most of the stories?
TOG: Overall, I think El Borracho was responsible for about two-thirds of the content. Some issues I did maybe half, others less than a fourth. I don’t know … what I was going to type after “I don’t know”.
EB: Now you know why I didn’t let him write much. However, to tell the truth, I didn’t write that much. About a third of our content came from submissions that random readers sent in, for better or worse.

Did you have lots of creative differences?
TOG: Not really, we mostly stepped over ourselves to agree with the other person.
EB: And with The Other Guy, that was pretty difficult. He’s… he’s a large man.

What’re your thoughts on What’s That, Furcadia?
TOG: I think it’s great to have an unofficial news source.
EB: Unless it just becomes an unofficial official news source. But uh, yeah, it’s great. ¡Continúe, por favor!

Do you spend much time hanging around on Furcadia these days?
TOG: Yes.
EB: No.

How’s the weather?
EB: Balmy.

What are your real thoughts on the similar sites that were alive during The Muskrat’s day, but never actually took off?
TOG: I think it would have been great to have competition, as long as it didn’t try to copy us too closely. It was too bad they didn’t stick around. Also, they tended to be full of grammar errors and those caused our brains to crawl out through our noses and strangle kittens. We tended to not like that.
EB: Yeah, the kitten thing… that was unfortunate. Anyway, thanks for the interview, and for the payment in alcohol!

I think the facts speak for themselves. Oh, and by the way, I’m totally biased.

I was going to try and make this slanderous, but I couldn’t get a decent mixture of humor and crass into the article; sorry. I’ll consider re-visiting this at a later date.

If you’d like to see a “The Muskrat” resurgence, (AKA Anniversary Edition) please submit all inquiries to The Muskrat at the linked address. Replace [at] with @ and [dot] with . … Or something. That’s what I’d do. Maybe they’ll listen, but knowing them, (Which I pretend to do in my spare time while not wearing dresses and making cakes like Mrs. Brady,) they’ll never listen. (They made up their own questions for this interview!)

Here are a few tips and ideas to help artists get fair compensation. These are steps to be taken with careful consideration, of course. If webspace is required to implement some of these, then it will be provided free of charge. These won’t work for everyone, and they require some hard work on the part of the artist, but if you’ve got an artist friend who is down about how much they’re getting for commissions or their art, point them here.

It might help.

• The top tip is to have manners. Saying “Please” and “Thank you”, and in general just being courteous will get you a lot of repeat business. Remember, you’re offering a service. “The customer is always right” is one of the best mottoes you could have, so long as you’re not being walked on.
• Get a paypal account. This is the best/fastest/safest way for you to get money. Accepting snail mail is fine, but if you can, get them to use paypal. There’s less of a chance for a mixup. (Or a scam.)
• Do some freebie work. Not commission-grade material, mind you, but definitely put up, say, a free item or two, or maybe a canine or feline male/female/unspecified port set for use in different dreams. Why? Because people will view your content more if there’s free stuff for them to have. (It happens.) and the more they visit your site, the more likely they are to buy something from you, (if they’re the type that buys things,) or drive other people to your site. Just remember to state explicitly whether or not you allow changes, and that you require credit. A good way to get credit easier is to include this with every freebie:

(0:9) When a furre arrives in the dream, (5:200) emit message {Say !credits to see a list of the artists who allowed their artwork to be included.} to the triggering furre. (0:31) When a furre says {!credits}, (5:200) emit message {<Your name here + whatever patches/ports you did.>} to the triggering furre.

Obviously you’ll be replacing <Your name Here + whatever patches/ports you did> with your name and the patches/ports that are being downloaded, with copyright date and such.

• Don’t be afraid to cancel a commission if someone is being a jerk to you. If they fronted you part of the money, refund it to them and be done with them. You don’t need, or deserve, to be harassed just because someone is paying you. Have some pride.
• Don’t be afraid to auction off your art. Set a starting price, and an auto-buy price, and let people go at it. Be prepared for the port not to sell if you set the price too high. The idea here is to start low, (Way less than standard commission prices,) and go up. (Buyout price being above normal commission price.).
• When pricing your artwork, put your pride on the back shelf. It’s good to be proud of your work, but sometimes it blinds people to reality. (Especially artists; no offense.) Get a wide sampling of how people think of your work, and what it’s worth. Remember, other artists might be telling you to ‘price it high’ because they want commissions too, so look at the people who get commissions a lot for an estimation of how much it’s worth to them. You’re in a competitive field, so you probably won’t get minimum wage for the hours you put into work. As always, be respectful.
• Have a portfolio showing a wide array of what you can do. People who can show that they have experience, (and a lot of it at that,) are more likely to get a commission. They show that the artist can handle a big job and will be a professional about it.
• Watermark anything you show to other people on the Internet. If you don’t, it will get stolen. A watermark should be subtle, but visible. (Think translucent so that it’s harder to pull out.) and across a good part of the image, (like the shoulder or body, or across a good portion of the item) and not over the background so that it is harder for them to steal it.
  • Put up items that are pay-to-download. Using paypal, this is simple. Here are some directions:
  • Log into Paypal.
  • Click “Products And Services”.
  • Click “Website Payments Standard” on the right-hand column.
  • Click the “Accept Contributions” link under the “Donate” button.
  • Read through what it says, and then click “Get Donation Buttons”.
  • Fill out the form with information about what you’re getting a donation for. (IE which artwork.)
  • Put a minimum amount you want for the item. (I suggest $.50 cents to $1.00 for an item pack, and $3.00 to $5.00 for a 3 character portrait set.)
  • Pick a button. (Or make your own.)
  • Choose whether or not you want it to be encrypted.
  • Press the “Add more options”
  • Fill in the website with a link to a page that tells people how to download the patch files. (Or how they’ll get them, if you want to e-mail.) Remember to follow PayPal’s rules about this.
  • Press the “Create Button Now” button.

You’ll get some code that you’ll need to put into a website; I suggest doing so beneath the item you’re trying to sell. It gives them the option to ‘buy now’, as it were.

You can use this website template for your website/portfolio. (Pre-setup for use with ports/items/freebies and commission slots, including mouse-over links to larger preview images.)

Remember, these are just guidelines. They’re not concrete, they won’t work for everyone. If you have any feedback, or other tips that you might find of interest to artists.

I would rather this not turn into a discussion about “How artists are unappreciated” or something. This is specifically to make life for artists easier.