I've been noticing recently that many of the new pet traits have some issues. Some with layering, some with overall quality, and occasionally both. As a few examples:

- Fairy wings on bulbs layers under the tail, and is almost completely covered by fox tail. Also, the angle of attachment doesn't match where the spine would be, which makes it look off uncovered, particularly on the male.

- Tail jewelry on vul arcane wayfarer's garb layers under the tail.

- Dryad tail on faes layers under vine flowers & fae dust.

- On zols, the farther head fin on the mermaid myrmidon garb looks to be at the wrong angle.

- The blocky part of wind serpent wings on aeris is noticeably flat, color allocations differ between sexes on the headpiece, and the wings layer over the regalia oddly on the male.

- On the close wing, the "arm" part of vul feathered crystal wings is strikingly thin, and doesn't seem to attach properly to the "wrist".

- The shading on the large middle flower in bulb flower tail makes the petals appear convex and fake, and the shading on the fur makes it look somewhat flat

- Shamrock warden's ears on the female luffs are bent strangely backwards, especially considering the male's relatively straight ones


This isn't an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

Issues like the ones above hold the traits back, and it seems like there just isn't enough time dedicated to polishing & implementing trait art. Layering issues only really happen because of lack of time or just not noticing. And as far as the art itself, I know Fimbry is an incredible artist, and many of these issues stick out specifically because they don't fit the usual style or quality.

I would prefer a shorter deadline for player trait submissions & fewer new traits if it meant that the ones that do get added get more care, especially if fixes are either years away or never planned. The image megathread is already filled with issues, and every new trait that gets rushed can add to the pile. I'd like to be able to use fairy wings with fox tail, but apparently it'll never be fixed until the entire species is revamped.

I also peeked at some new traits, which is what prompted me to post this, but I didn't show/talk about them here because spoilers.

i support this.

even outside of the art mistakes, i always thought it was a little strange to extend the deadline for design submissions. themes i can understand because colors can easily be adjusted (or ignored, if enough good submissions are there and you can just pick something that looks better) but the time for avatar items and new traits (i feel) should be much less flexible on our end so you guys dont have to rush to get things done.

Artwork moves as quickly as we can with as much care as we can afford. The complexity of not only new Traits, but also the pets themselves, is extremely high. A single new Restricted Trait set in total can be like 100 new individual images excluding Genes. That, coupled with how pets already are dozens of unique layers stacked on top of each other with dozens of Traits across multiple slots... it's extremely challenging sometimes to make everything work.

Believe me, we spend an enormous amount of time and effort to do the best job that we can. Pet artwork is what pays the bills. I, myself, and the artists, spend hundreds of hours for every Festival just on artwork alone.

If something is missed, it was not from being rushed or from a careless job. It's just a very complicated process with a hundred+ things to keep track of. We are sadly human, so we do sometimes miss things.

Regarding your examples for Bulbori and Faelora, they have yet to be revamped. Their layering is virtually non existent. There is no way to accomplish proper layering. It has nothing to do with rushing. These issues will obviously be fixed during their revamp process.

Regarding the Vulnyx, that may just be a coding issue that was overlooked. Again, it's a very complicated process. Things happen. Sometimes things change after the fact that break things added into the game at an earlier time. Etc, etc. Literally, could been one of a hundred reasons why it is that way. I will take a look at the Vulnyx tail and see what's going on with that.

Regarding the Zolnixi, I am not really seeing what you're referring to.

Regarding the Aeridini, the coloring issue is an easy fix. I will look into it.

And regarding some of your other examples, it just seems to be that you don't like how the Trait was drawn.


In summation, I do not feel that saying our Trait artwork is rushed is at all a fair assessment. Our art team is always working 100% of the time on new artwork. There is never downtime. We currently have 3 artists dedicated to working on pet artwork. I cannot afford to add anymore artists to the team at this time. Annually, Sylestia's artwork is our biggest expense and over the years has totaled a very large number of dollars and thousands and thousands of work hours for both myself and the artists.

We are doing the absolute best that we can. Whenever artwork is completed, it goes through many revisions as we request many adjustments and changes in trying to get it as good as we can. However, we cannot spend an infinite amount of time on each individual piece. Every adjustment costs time and money - both are finite resources.

Myself and the entire team does the best that we all can to produce the highest quantity of work in the highest quality that we can within the time frames available to us.

For basic mistakes that are long overlooked, I always tell people to just PM me or harass me in chat to get something fixed. I always have a to do list that is a thousand items long. I try and find time every so often to fix various artwork mistakes, but it isn't always easy. If something can be corrected, continually poking me about it is the best way for me to remember to fix it.

The deadlines for player submitted threads have no effect on the art team's schedule.

Link: https://www.sylestia.com/forums/?thread=103394&page=1#3 Author: Krinadon Time Posted: 8/10/2022 at 12:35 AM Artwork moves as quickly as we can with as much care as we can afford. The complexity of not only new Traits, but also the pets themselves, is extremely high. A single new Restricted Trait set in total can be like 100 new individual images excluding Genes. That, coupled with how pets already are dozens of unique layers stacked on top of each other with dozens of Traits across multiple slots... it's extremely challenging sometimes to make everything work. Believe me, we spend an enormous amount of time and effort to do the best job that we can. Pet artwork is what pays the bills. I, myself, and the artists, spend hundreds of hours for every Festival just on artwork alone. If something is missed, it was not from being rushed or from a careless job. It's just a very complicated process with a hundred+ things to keep track of. We are sadly human, so we do sometimes miss things. Regarding your examples for Bulbori and Faelora, they have yet to be revamped. Their layering is virtually non existent. There is no way to accomplish proper layering. It has nothing to do with rushing. These issues will obviously be fixed during their revamp process. Regarding the Vulnyx, that may just be a coding issue that was overlooked. Again, it's a very complicated process. Things happen. Sometimes things change after the fact that break things added into the game at an earlier time. Etc, etc. Literally, could been one of a hundred reasons why it is that way. I will take a look at the Vulnyx tail and see what's going on with that. Regarding the Zolnixi, I am not really seeing what you're referring to. Regarding the Aeridini, the coloring issue is an easy fix. I will look into it. And regarding some of your other examples, it just seems to be that you don't like how the Trait was drawn. In summation, I do not feel that saying our Trait artwork is rushed is at all a fair assessment. Our art team is always working 100% of the time on new artwork. There is never downtime. We currently have 3 artists dedicated to working on pet artwork. I cannot afford to add anymore artists to the team at this time. Annually, Sylestia's artwork is our biggest expense and over the years has totaled a very large number of dollars and thousands and thousands of work hours for both myself and the artists. We are doing the absolute best that we can. Whenever artwork is completed, it goes through many revisions as we request many adjustments and changes in trying to get it as good as we can. However, we cannot spend an infinite amount of time on each individual piece. Every adjustment costs time and money - both are finite resources. Myself and the entire team does the best that we all can to produce the highest quantity of work in the highest quality that we can within the time frames available to us. For basic mistakes that are long overlooked, I always tell people to just PM me or harass me in chat to get something fixed. I always have a to do list that is a thousand items long. I try and find time every so often to fix various artwork mistakes, but it isn't always easy. If something can be corrected, continually poking me about it is the best way for me to remember to fix it. The deadlines for player submitted threads have no effect on the art team's schedule.

thank you for responding, Krin. I didn't realize there were so many moving parts to the way the traits worked (although I should have guessed). I appreciate the hard work you guys put into the site, and thank you for giving us a more detailed explanation, sometimes it can be a little frustrating when we don't have a full idea of how things work. >.<

Edited to correct some spelling mistakes.

I didn't mean to imply that you don't care about the traits, sorry about that ^^;

The fact that the submission deadlines don't affect the schedule does make things harder than I originally thought.

Putting the artwork itself aside for now, it does sound like slowing down the addition of new traits could help with implementation. Not because you're not already putting a lot of work in, but because it's just less stuff that you need to keep track of at once, and means you can dedicate more time to individual traits because you're dividing it less. With the current pace there are still issues cropping up semi-frequently. I was under the impression that being able to iron things out when traits are first being put in might slow the growth of the already huge pile of stuff you've got to deal with. This is on top of it just being nice for traits to work properly without needing tweaks later down the line.

For the art, yes, it's my opinion. But that would be the case with any critique, and many are opinions I've seen echoed by other people. I think that the art is quite beautiful overall. I don't have an issue with the art style or the concepts. But, for example, animal ears just don't bend backwards like they do in the shamrock warden's ears unless wind's blowing them back. For flower tail, light just doesn't fall that way on something round and fluffy, and shadows on petals just don't look like that. And again, this isn't to say that the artists don't put in effort. They put in a lot of work, and it shows. I still like flower tail overall, but it just feels kind of like "this could've been even better with more refinement". And likewise with implementation, doing fewer traits per fest could allow for more time on each trait since the same total time is divided less.

Hiring more artists never even crossed my mind originally, and since you said you can't do it anyway, I've got nothing to add about that.

Basically, just slow down a little if possible so everyone has a bit more time and things go a bit smoother.

That being said, I don't know how feasible this would be if the quantity is really that important to the site's revenue, or if it puts too much burden on you in terms of cost. If there's really nothing that can be realistically changed about the process, I can live with traits being a little odd sometimes.

Also, made an edit so you can see what I mean about the head fin:

Regarding the Zolnixi, I'll share with the art team and see what they think.


We actually have slowed down considerably over the past couple of years. If you go back to like, I don't know lol, 5 years ago(?), you can see that we would release multiple Restricted Trait Sets with each Festival, a plethora of non Restricted Traits, and 3-4 new Avatar Sets. We have greatly reduced that amount since. However, what we do produce now is much more detailed and intricate. That was the tradeoff.

As I tried to emphasize in my first post, there are only so many dollars I can spend and only so much time the artists have. All of our artists are just part-time contractors - they all have other life obligations/jobs and all that fun adult stuff. This also means that we have to deal with people getting sick/catching Covid, vacations, issues with loved ones, technology issues like broken devices, issues with children, issues with their other jobs, and just random real life issues in general. There pretty much is never any point in time throughout a year where someone on the team isn't having to deal with extenuating outside forces. We can schedule and plan the best we can, but at the end of the day, there are always unexpected hurdles that we have to jump over.

With Covid, like pretty much everywhere else, we have also had to adjust total work hours. Things just aren't the same anymore. So in light of that, we have greatly reduced project expectations. But that doesn't mean we are putting out inferior work; quite the contrary. We are always trying to produce better and better work - constantly trying to improve upon the small details. But, again, it's not always perfect. Sometimes something unexpected happens and an artist loses a week or two of time mid-project. That's unfortunately just how life goes. We adjust and mitigate as best as we humanly can. Sometimes we have to pass a project off to another artist mid-way through. Etc, etc.

And, at the end of the day, edits, changes, and adjustments take time and time cost money. An Avatar Set or a Trait Set only brings in so much revenue. So I am always having to do cost benefit analysis on how I am wanting the artists to devote their time. And more time spent on post-project edits means not only reduced revenue, but then even less available time for the upcoming projects.

The Faelora Revamp is a prime example. I had wanted that project completed many many months ago. However, due to us having to constantly adjust project scheduling due to miscellaneous life happenings, we've had to move artist responsibilities around to meet certain minimum deadlines - otherwise we would have had Events, or even the Spring Festival, with very few or no new pet artwork at all. Which then means greatly reduced revenue for the site, which then means very increased personal financial difficulties for me lol.

The TLDR of it is that I'm just trying to provide some insight on the complexities of everything. I would love if things were just simply "Okay, we'll spend 40 work hours on this Trait Set to have it be 98% quality standard and move onto the next one. You can work x hours for y days and be done!" It absolutely, never ever, not even close works that smoothly lol. For anyone who has ever been a project manager, I am sure that they can relate.

But I assure you, we are absolutely doing the best that we can and everyone on the team works extremely hard to keep the Sylestia content train chugging on. All of the concerns you brought up are things we are constantly keeping in mind as we work through projects and scheduling. There are just a lot of reasons that I'm not going to get into that make things much more complicated than it may seem on the surface.

And, as I said, you guys can always bring artwork issues to my attention if something is really bothersome. If it's something fixable, I'll do what I can to fix it. I just always have a thousand things on my "to do list" and it's basically impossible to try and keep track of every tiny thing - so sometimes I do just need constant reminders of "the tail is colored outside of the line" to finally be like "Okay, yea, I'll fix that real quick."

If they're going to take the same amount of time, I genuinely much prefer quantity over quality for several reasons:

- accessibility. Restricted traits/majestic themes are expensive. I might come across a non-restricted trait, but I likely won't ever use the majority of traits in a set.
- species variation. Usually one species gets a majestic set, rather than several getting a new trait or two. Many players only collect certain species, and it'd be nice for everyone to have a chance at something new they'd appreciate.
- extreme complexity doesn't match current existing art (the shading on Lighira Gazebra Wings, for example, is so vastly different from the base art that I find it jarring)
- traits are very specific to their set. I don't see myself using the Mermaid Myrmidon traits anytime soon. The iridescent layer looks out of place in many other designs.

I agree with Skor's points, but I want to put it out there that it's less "quantity over quality", but more "quantity over intricacy". Traits with fewer details aren't inherently lower quality, and shouldn't be seen that way. Lower intricacy isn't a bad thing at all, and as Skor said, generally fits with the bases and existing traits better.

I also think that, to an extent, having new traits look like they fit with the rest of the art on that species is an essential part of quality. If, for example, flower tail on bulbs had 100% photorealistic fur and petals, it would be to its detriment as a bulb mutation, because it would look extremely out of place on the simple, cartoony base. It wouldn't look like cohesive art of a single fantasy creature, but instead like a collage of different parts cut and pasted from different sources. Having the line weight and lighting/shading intensity & style match the base makes this issue far less likely.

Lower intricacy also means less to draw & keep track of for individual traits without necessarily reducing trait quantity, although you have said that you deliberately went for that tradeoff to some extent, so I'm not sure how willing you'd be to change that.

I don't want to harp on this too much, since I assume you take some of this into account already, but I do think lower trait intricacy could be something to consider.