Firn
Illustrator
Joined: Apr 14th, '07, 00:58
Posts: 5861
Hugs: 385814
Mood: [¬º-°]¬
Location: Utsusemi
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I have to admit, I am not entirely sure what the connection between my quote, the context of the conversation (which was "6 item Sakura MT remake as TT set") and what you replied to it is.
Wren_Fritsche wrote: And customers in the end may not always show the most common sense, but they are always right.
But, either way - users are not always right.
First of all, you are calling them "customers", which I refuse to do. If every single one of you started paying me and my work, then we can talk about customers and you will get EVERYTHING you want. That is what you do for customers. They ask, you deliver, they pay.
This site gets voluntary (!) donations (!) to pay for server costs, advertisement costs, occasional art commissions by other artists, working material like regular new nibs etc and most of the time, they don't even cover that.
Customer: "An individual or business that purchases the goods or services produced by a business." You are not customers.
A while back me and starkad did a webpage for a band and I did the design. They did not like what I came up with and requested us to change it into something which I found ugly. But they were customers, they paid us to do something for them, something where our sole gain was to earn money, so we changed it to what they wanted it to look like. That's a huge difference from what I am doing here.
So, users are always right? I had plenty of occasions to see that this is not the case. There is a huge gab between what users state they believe to be accurate ( for example what they believe was a popular color, what they believe was a popular MT or TT set, what shop updates were popular and what not, what they believe to be a good set to win in a contest, etc.) and what the facts show when I look up sale statistics of sets, items, colors, etc. It is a very arrogant assumption to believe that one party (the users, which includes you) is always right and one party (me) is always wrong. Sometimes I am right, sometimes I am wrong. I have made some poor choices in the past. The same goes for users. And the users aren't one mass with one mind. Just because one user, or a handful of users, suggests something, does not mean that it is what ALL of the community wants.
I always try to listen to what users say (no matter how often you state I would not), but this does not mean I always implement what they suggest, because unlike the userbase, I can actually see what effect putting a certain item/set/color/gender type item/ etc. has. So, if someone suggests something and I can see that similar actions in the past were not a good idea, then I will hardly make the same mistake twice. Of course there are always things that are a "first", something we never had before, both from my own ideas and from user suggestions. Then you just have to take the risk and try it out to see how it works. But if you already had similar or comparable things in the past, you can look back at it and see what effect it had and learn from that. And if something did not work well in the past, it is unlikely I will do the same thing again.
Believe me, the feeling of not feeling appreciated is mutual with you and me and since your feedback doesn't have anything to do with the current topic - which is the major recolors of almost complete MTs (which one user here suggested. On another occasion I saw a user complain about the recolors and say it made her old MTs of less value and that she would not donate to this site anymore because of that. So how can "The users" be right as a unit? Something one user wants isn't necessarily what another one wants. You do something half of the users want and chances are it will upset the other half of the users.) - I will not continue this discussion here any further.
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The main reason why we are doing so horrible financially, even much worse than other avatar sites, that are having way less user activity than we right now, is because here, when you purchase something with $-currency, you get a full set of multiple items, while on other avatar sites that gives you One item with multiple poses, and if people want to put on 4 or 5 poses at the same time, they have to buy 4 or 5 of the same item. That we decided to do it differently was meant to be generous. "Hey, you are getting 3/4/5/8 items here, where other sites only give you one!". But people don't even see it that way and seeing as it puts us in a really big financially disadvantage over other sites, I regret to have made that decision to begin with.
