http://doomrising.tumblr.com/post/138463671857/dramarising-as-much-as-i-love-supporting-the
You do realize that FR has moved to an automated system for rendering genes, right? They announced this a while back. So instead of making every single gene by hand like they used to (which is infeasible for any breeding site, the poor artists) they now only have to make a template and can have it batch produced, with the exception of irishim and it’s weird gradient. So it literally has nothing to do with feeding the artists, which I fully support by the way – this is literally the Staff making the laziest thing they POSSIBLY could and trying to make a HUMONGOUS profit off of it because likely, it didn’t even require the input of one of the artists to produce this. It’s a single fill layer at like 15% opacity.
But like, here, humor me – even if you did make every one of these by hand (why do you hate your Staff if you did this,) it wouldn’t take very long to make these images, frankly. You could go about it several ways but the way i would do it, is make the gradient filter for each color, save it, and then apply each color as a new layer over the dragon, resulting in a single file with 117 layers that can be read and accessed for the dragon as the site needed. It’s a lot faster than making the….. 9204? Images you need. (dragon breeds x gender templates x offspring templates x old and new colors.) You have noticed that, if you open-image-in-new-tab on a dragon in the scryshop, it presents the information as breed1sex2color3, etc, right? This is how a lot of sites do it. Basically you take the time to make 117 gradients for each color required (and that would take like, maybe half an hour, an hour if your computer’s slower at the most,) then apply to each dragon template. Eyecolors are loaded separately; accent and skin artists know that already. The whole thing is read from the server and the dragon you own is spat out at the end, likely as some kind of fixed value so you can’t manipulate them via the url. (Not that you could make those changes stick from your side anyway.)
But let’s say that I’m wrong and they actually made every single fucking image by hand, one image per color, because they hate their wrists and love carpal tunnel syndrome. Even if that’s what they did, it STILL wouldn’t take that long. I’ve done basic shit like that before and it’s murder on your joints but beyond the tedium, once you hit a rhythm you can probably do two per minute if your computer can keep up. I’d say I doubt someone would waste their manpower that severely, but given what I’ve seen from FR so far…
My point is this – there is no justification for the price of this gene, not even feeding the artists. FR turns a pretty damn solid profit even after cost of operations (which includes staff payroll!) Nothing huge, nothing like a Blizzard MMO or something, but it is a very healthy return. They’re far from struggling, given that they can afford to pay their staff at all. You’ll find that’s a rarity in the petsite world lmao.
You wanna see a site that’s struggling to pay people and stay afloat, there’s plenty of them out there. Big one with “v” in the name is in danger due to being funded by a single user, for example. Big one starting with “a”, meanwhile, made 30k on Black Friday alone, and FR’s doing better than they are consistently from month to month. They didn’t need to do this. This is what a dying site does. This is what a site in the throes of death does to survive. And FR isn’t just surviving, it’s thriving.
There is no excuse for the price of this gene no matter how you try to defend it. Yeah, it’s got it’s use and it’s pretty. But it’s still 12 USD, even more for a lot of people outside that country, for something ANYONE could do, for less, as a skin, even if they had never used Photoshop before.
Support artists, yeah, but don’t defend shitty business practices just because you like a site. It’s hurting you, too.
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