I was wondering if there's some way that players could order avatar items that were available previously for customization yet wouldn't be too burdensome on the staff. I wanted to suggest this as there's times a person may not have been on the site at the time, there wasn't enough funds when the item was available, or there's that time when you might just have a regret.

I was reading Krin's response to a suggestion regarding customizable holiday avatar items and wanted to make this suggestion keeping in mind the concerns mentioned there. You can read that thread here, and I'll quote Krin's post below as well.

I wonder if this might be something easier to do if polls become available for the forums. But if we were to not overburden Krin and Fai perhaps there can be the very occasional vote for a previous handheld avatar item that was customizable before (maybe two or three). There would have to be enough interest in the avatar items voted on for them to be made available again. There would be a price increase. Something to help make the time spent on this worthwhile. The price increase could also be an encouragement for people to make customs when they're first available instead of waiting as well.


Krin's post from the mentioned thread -

"While nice in theory, there's a few issues that concern us with this.

First, is art theft. It's not something we think any of you would do, of course, but it does happen and it's happened to us a few times over the year with our pets. This is the main reason we don't put the entire Monthly Sets in the PSD file that you can download. Held items and occasional wings are one thing, but the outfits are much more valuable (they're also a lot more complicated, layer wise). So we're not too comfortable just having a bunch of PSD files floating around with expensive artwork that we've paid for.

Second, is the extra time required to maintain this. When we first released customs, we would have dozens of orders every month. Now it's usually less than 10. It's not too hard just to stick the monthlies into a PSD file and upload it, but if we did it for everything (or even just everything from a festival), it would be a lot of time and a lot of organizing. With the demand that there is for customs, I'm not sure if it'd be worth the investment of time on our part for just a handful of orders.

And lastly, is like it was said, the rarity. Especially the legendary stuff, they're meant to be rare and valuable. While I still think they would be rare and valuable, it would just slightly deflate their worth because players willing to pay millions of gold for them will probably instead just use or buy diamonds and create their own.

So overall, I don't think this is something that we'll do anytime soon. As an alternative, we try to offer a wide range of the pre-colored versions so that hopefully every player can at least aspire to use one of the set, if not all of the set."

This is something I would like to see, I know I'd take advantage of it. I can think of 2 or 3 items I'd want customs of off the top of my head! I didn't realize how awesome they were to have, until now.

I can absolutely understand the reason for not doing this for legendary items or outfits, I admit, I'd buy and custom what I didn't get in game. I prefer color-adjustable outfits anyway, so I can tweak the colors if I want to. And I bet the art theft would be ridiculous.

But if we could get customs on monthly held items we missed for one reason or another, that would be brilliant.

Maybe extend the custom time to 2-3 months?
Or possibly do a yearly custom retrospective once a year like you give people a once a year chance to rebuy what they didn't get the first time around?
Or, as Savynn suggested; a poll with the option of a few items, and people can vote for which one they'd like released as a retro custom in the next month? That way it wouldn't be everything, just one additional item per month, and you'd have a guess how many people were interested. This also might serve as a reminder/advertisement for the option, and get people more involved since they had a say in which item was going to be released?
Possibly also make it more expensive to do a past month item- it would be motivation for getting a custom when the item is released, and the price increase should make it worth your while to do them in months following. maybe up it to 150 extra, or even 200?

I like the yearly retrospective idea. It's keeps the availability constrained, allows for users to catch up on missed customs, and doesn't leave it open year 'round.