I love how noobs (yes Aeo, you're one as well apparently) have no clue how the avatars system used to work. Let me enlighten you (Burns already pointed things out).
- avatars used to be indeed RARE (golden were hmm...gold at that time) and artists (Glordamar, Valy and others) used to send avatars to Mur, Mur would prepare them and upload them - check Anns and you'll see there are some with "avatars have been uploaded" or even teasers with "avatars will be uploaded blabla"
- Mur decided to create the "upload yourself the avatar of your dreams" and created the current system: you upload any piece of crap and someone at the other end approves it (or denies it). For a while Mur was the only one approving avatars (surprisingly 2 days ago he didn't delete those he first approved although they are AWFUL but heh...he might not have seen them + the avatars interface sometimes had a will of its own). I asked him back then"why on Earth are you approving every piece of crap?" He gave me several reasons:
- we need avatars
- I like to encourage players to draw (this is how some of the lowest avatars appeared)
- bad avys will trigger shuffling
- when we will have enough, I will delete the bad ones
Pretty cool and reasonable reasons, right? I thought so as well
- I get the job to approve avatars. I was reminded the above arguments and given few more rules:
- alpha transparent
- MD style (pencil drawn and no colors)
- should represent a thing/a person and should not have background (meaning I could not accept a girl in a garden for example...you get the point)
In time, when the number of avatars grew enough, I asked the Council (they were my "contact person") to remove the bad ones ( I personally wouldn't want to do it because I don't consider my art sense to be that sharp). They always said they will. They never did. Then the avatar managers appeared and from there there's their story BUT from what I have seen, the quality of the uploaded avatars increased greatly. It's HIGHLY visible where avatars were approved just for the sake of it and where they were quality checked.
Now, we do have avatar managers. Mur has already started the clean-up. I guess they can continue. They don't even need to delete them, just remove them from the shop. But that's their job and I am not going to tell them how to do it cause imo they are great at what they are doing.
Oh one last thing: you don't like it, you don't buy it. And even if you buy it, you still don't own it if you go inactive (they will be returned to shop as someone pointed out above me).