Forums » Bugs & Suggestions
Improving the custom skins market with 1 change
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The custom skins market is really good, from a technical standpoint. Getting the assets you need to make skins is easy. Uploading edited textures is easy. Browsing skins is easy, if you know how to filter (protip, "u:UserName" and "w:WeaponName"). It works really well as a system, but it's somewhat ruined by one thing: People don't know how to edit skins, or don't care enough to do so.
This is an example of a well made skin. The creator clearly understands how to get the graphic they want onto the section of the weapon they want it to appear on.
This is an example of a low-effort skin. It appears to be an image taken from another website and uploaded as a skin with no editing. While some users may appreciate the overall tone of the skin, it doesn't appear to have taken any effort to produce.
Clearly, manual approval and deletion of skins is not a development priority, which makes sense. Constantly reviewing a queue of skins would take a lot of time. While the system will deactivate skins that don't sell enough within a period of time, I think it would be preferrable not to have low-effort skins enter the market to begin with.
So I suggest the following change to mitigate this issue: When a user uploads a custom skin, check the resolution of the image to make sure it matches the resolution of the original image. If the uploaded image does not match, display an error message saying "This image has an incorrect resolution. Make sure it matches the original weapon texture size." This would almost completely eliminate "Google Image" skins from the market, because very few of them are a 1024x square texture. It would not affect anyone who makes skins properly, by editing the template that can be downloaded from the game. It would be fully autonomous, no need for any action from a moderator or similar position. I think this solution is fair, it rewards creators who put effort into their skins by making their skins more prominent without digging through low-effort skins. It also raises the overall quality of the market, which is better for players who want to purchase quality skins.
Thanks for reading. -
Interesting, I had this exact idea a while ago, which I had implemented since.
But let's see how it goes since the secret is now "revealed".
I do have an additional idea on how make it 100% Google Image proof (even if the image has the right resolution). Time will show if it's needed. -
And here I thought I was being clever, happy to see you beat me to it. I think your error message is vague enough that people won't guess what "valid" means (which is good), so hopefully your additional idea isn't needed.
I know this is a more complex issue, but custom maps have a similar issue in terms of quality. Many maps have grown on me as I play them (DieRise, ModernCity), but others are just terrible. The only idea I had was making a minimum map file size requirement, but that feels... like it's not the best answer. Do you have ideas in mind for improving that situation? -
Custom maps may have a quality issue, but there is no spam issue.
Whenever the new map is submitted (which does not happen often) there is plenty of time to review it.
I know that there are some low quality maps that have been approved, but that wasn't an accident, it's because they were submitted during the early days and I was letting any map in at that time plus the community wasn't as picky, but I'm considering to clean the map list a bit (there are some good candidates: low quality + rarely played on). -
There are several maps, I am taking "Jets Arena" as an example. That are super buggy and not made that well. A lot of the time players will say "Please rate my map", which means players usually just rate it as 5 stars, without investigating it closley, meaning very low quality maps are being verified and put onto the Custom Maps List.