+1, I've on multiple occasions found this to be something I could use!
Hi all,
I would like to be able to keep track of characters I owned even after they've passed hands. I understand it's not for everyone but just throwing it out there if anyone feels the same way. :) It's nice to see if a character goes to a good home.
Currently, we can just favorite them or save their links and revisit. I don't know. It could be interesting to have a record somewhere of all the characters we once had on toyhouse!
If not possible then no worries. Thank you for reading. ^^
+1, I think this is a fantastic way to keep track of characters. It would be an extremely helpful feature.
I'd also like to add that lately I've been rather forgetful.. Sometimes, I can't remember if I've already given away a character OR I just haven't uploaded them yet which could lead to potential ownership issues or the deletion of character files unnecessarily. A personal record feature would greatly assist. Additionally, what if an artist comes back to the original owner and asks who the new owner is? It's happened. It would require a huge effort to track down the current new owner (especially with forum gifting games where a character can pass hands quickly) if the artist was not a Toyhouse member with the ability to dig through their design listing.
Personally, I love this idea! Would be great to keep track of your designs like that or see where a beloved design went ;A;
However i think it might be hard to do so/not work for everyone as often characters are being deleted and then re-created by the new owner... ;;
+1 : I am an indecisive bean who sometimes want old characters back and it would be cool to be able to find where my old OCs have gone off to (Which is cool even when i don't want them back!)
Thanks for the suggestion! Actually this was part of the reason we built the trade system & gave people the ability to view the character's ownership history. However since the beginning of the site, we've noticed that people tend to like deleteing characters they've recieved & remaking - in which case it'd be impossible to track the character's ownership history given that its being recreated every time it passes hands. I understand the desire to see where your characters have gone, and I think it's a good way to check that the character is being traded legitmately for creators & potential traders/buyers but the deleting and recreating thing gets in the way of this.
Which is all to say: I hear you all, but I have no idea how such a feature might even begin to take shape. What do you guys think?
minsu Hi! Thank you for the information. I really appreciate you dropping by and hearing what we have to say. I wasn't sure if I should respond by tagging you so I hope you don't mind. Otherwise, I will just respond normally in this forum next time.
I had noticed the deletion and remaking of characters but I didn't know this is still happening now after the transfer of ownership bug(?) was fixed to allow transfer even if the designer/creator hasn't updated their transfer rules.
Before even looking into how this feature can become a reality, I think it would be best to dig deeper into the problem raised about the difficulty of tracking and address that concern so that it is reduced and the feature becomes more useful if it is implemented.
Since I'm not one of the people who do that, I can't be sure of their reasons but I am going to go off some assumptions.
1. Order by oldest characters to newest or vice versa: It is not updated to the current owner but is stuck to track from the date it was uploaded. Users may want this updated to when they themselves owned their OCs.
2. Quick Cleanup: Users may find it tedious to hide their characters that they aren't sure about or just want a clean slate.
3. Hiding transfer record: I only say this from experience but it is a bad reason.. let's say if I were to give a freebie and marked it as that on the transfer but the person wanted to trade or make a profit from it.
I don't think it is appropriate to expect or make a rule that prohibits the remaking of characters but there could be an incentive to encourage it? Especially as checking legitimacy is so important when it comes to trading in the community. It certainly feels safer to be able to see a transfer log with the details than blanks.
minsu The thing with remaking the characters is definitely a vestige of before the site recode! I think the biggest problem was that once creator rights were transferred, if you hadn't set your transfer permissions correctly then you were unable to transfer characters at all, without bothering the creator, so everyone had to delete and reupload. I think a lot of the reason that still happens now is that people don't realize that that's no longer the case. The other problem being, like said above, that people like to upload characters fresh just because.
I think the best way to curb this would be:
- Allow users to change the transfer permissions, even if they aren't the creator. I don't think this would be abused so much as used to fix mistakes in creation (anyone who wanted to game the system could easily do so either way); or at least make it clear to people that characters can still be transferred, even if the permission boxes don't say so.
- Feature to let users alert when a profile has been updated to their subscribers (as has been suggested elsewhere), so that they don't have to recreate the character just to share them.
And, to address the issue in this thread, perhaps just keeping and allowing users to view a log of their past transfers (outgoing at least)? That way, if the profile of the character they transferred still exists, they can simply click on that character link, and it will show up, whoever it happens to reside with now, without worry about where it's gone in-between.
Just my ideas on this, anyhow! Not sure what all is most feasible.