Happy about the batch/slotting requirement going away. One of the reasons, why I don't release a ton of items. Thanks for the update.

I'm a buyer, not a maker or releaser (as of now, at least), but this really makes me happy! More items for me to eventually get PLUS an easier way to get items on site. There's a chance I'll release now, thank you and bug for all your hard work on this!

This sounds really interesting! As I live outside US/EU, it's much harder for me to afford getting my items on site without the help of other users. I might be checking back my files to finish up for those crazy ideas only I seem to enjoy haha

Thanks for the update! Hopefully everything works out smoothly and you guys can figure out a date soon :)

perfect! thank you for confirming!

NO MORE SLOTTING!!! YES, SO MUCH YES THERE'S NO A WAY TO MEASURE IT! <3

I'm in the minority but I'm really going to miss slotting. I really liked interacting with users when I released things.

Does this mean the cw forum will be shutting down and forum groups dedicated to releases will be deleted? Or can we still slot/make our items available on forums if we wanted to regardless of the change? Just wanting to clarify as I don't like advertising through my cw shop or having copies in there forever. I also like doing birthday releases so to not be able to do that anymore would honestly suck. Thanks for your time!

Thank you for the update and the hard work behind the scenes! :)

I am also sad about slotting going away, though happy that costs will apparently be low enough to make this feasible. Really excited for that aspect of it, and making the experience easier for everyone (and ESPECIALLY newbies!) For my part, though, I don't submit items just for my own enjoyment or to use for TCs, I submit things to be a part of the CW community. Submitting direct to shop is so impersonal, and since there's no record of buyers for each item in the shop, unless I sell each item via invite there's no way to know who's supporting my shop and likes my items. Maybe it feels like a trifle to some, but community interaction is already way down and I like knowing that there are users that give a fig hahaha.

I will probably still end up releasing items on my forum thread anyway, assuming those don't go away. It will just add a little extra work for me to have to send out invites to each individual buyer, instead of submitting in groups of five and letting people pay in a batch. But that's no biggie and if the majority of users are happy with this switch, then I will happily play along too. :)

I don't know if this is something that has considered changing for CW shops, but maybe if I at least had a buyer list to look at for my CW shop, the process would feel less impersonal. Full disclosure, I posted a thread in suggestions about this a while ago and the response was honestly mostly negative. I don't want to make people uncomfortable, but I don't understand how seeing buyers for my CWs is any different than seeing buyers in my sp shop. If a user doesn't want a CW to be openly available to anyone to buy, they can easily keep the item locked or hidden, anyway. /shrug

Personally I feel like being able to see my buyers would go a long way toward making me feel like my art was being appreciated instead of just consumed to make an HA pretty, if that makes sense.

Ooh, great news I am so happy :D Happy to know that when the changes are made I won't have to fill slots myself and get extra copies that just sit there or pay so much to DTS. I have recolors just waiting, so Maybe I'll just wait a bit longer then lol Good to know such progress is being made, I can't wait!!

Omg thanks so much for explaining everything! I feel a lot better about the change now :)

I'm definitely happy about slotting going away since I'm one of those that almost always seem to struggle to fill the 1st batches of items. But I do have something I'd like clarified though. I'm guessing that with the new system we will have to buy an extra copy ourselves if we need to send out an artist's copy of an item?

No more slotting... are you serious! OMG that's awesome!

It also means the 90% of my items are going to end up as one copy only but slotting has always been a pain. God I can't wait for this to go live :D :D :D

Hmm, I have some mixed feelings about this. At the same time I'm extremely happy to hear about these changes but slotting going away complete does make a little bit miffed. For me community is the biggest reason why I'm here and why I release CWs. But I do absolutely appreciate the reach and ease of the CW shop as well. Over the time that I've been releasing here I've diversified my releases a lot so I've been able to experiment with different styles of releasing and ways of reaching different people. From my experience forums are the best for immediate interaction and sales while CW shops are amazing for ease of purchase, low entry level and sales over a long period of time which while unpredictable are usually a pretty steady trickle income. I'm over the moon for the fact that we'll be getting a cheap submission option! I've been able to shove 20+ items into the queue with slotting so I'm sorry in advance for the future me who will be dropping stupid amounts of items into the queue in one go. I know I'm gonna love it and have a lot of fun with it. But from the management point of view I have my gripes with the shops.

The shops are amazing for accessibility but horrible for engagement. And they are a huge logistic nightmare to manage. I'm currently holding onto some of my older event releases and such so I can occasionally bring them back if someone missed it the first time around. But usually when I do there's little to none sales. I also haven't retired any of my older items that still have a few copies left so these items are just hanging out in my shop despite no one having touched them in many moons - if ever. All of this has turned my shop management page into three pages of unorganized mess because there is 0 management options. You either retire or you don't. I really really really would like to some category tabs and sorting options for the management page (unpriced, unlimited, no copies in shop, etc.). I can understand the want and need to push the CW shops more and this update will definitely do that but as much as I love it as well, for me as a releaser, it's a horrible experience to try to manage it. And I'm sure there's plenty of users who have even more items in their shop than I do. Basically I feel like I'm being torn apart by going insane over the mess that is the management page and wanting to retire all my old items but at the same time I do want to have those items easily and readily available. I hope you are considering implementing some management options for the CW shops. It'd be also really cool to have some sort of new engagement options in the CW shop - both as a seller and a buyer. (ie. the option to have proper independent sales sometimes, the ability to comment directly in the shop, ability to like an item, etc.) I'm a huge data nerd so I'd love to see some statistics as well but that probably isn't very feasible. xD

Are behind the scenes sale logs for CW shops a new implementation? I've previously made a ticket about a sale I wanted to refund but I was informed that there were no logs and I was unable to issue the refund I wanted to make. (Item was incorrectly priced and the user who bought it paid 200CSC more than they should've. I wanted to give them back the difference.)

Other practical reason for shop logs would be keeping track of CW shop invites. Sometimes it's really hard to remember if someone has claimed their invite or if it has expired or if I even remembered to send out the invites in the first place. There's no record for sent invites and even less for the claimed ones. I try to pretty diligently keep records for myself but I am only human and mistakes are bound to happen both in my book keeping and in my efforts to cross reference between the forum, my records and the invites page. Would you consider CW shop records at least for the invites?

There's also been several times over the past year where the invites just straight up don't work. (They either don't send at all or can't be claimed.) In that case I usually end up holding stuff hostage under a password in shop so I can make sure people who claimed it on the forums actually do get the item. In a few cases this has been for several days.

Personally I'm forever going to be in favor of the shop logs and it does feel a bit weird that CW shops are currently the odd one out. I was very active on the discussion thread over the topic a while back and I understand that it's a tough cookie to crack. There's no pleasing everyone and people are going to be displeased on both sides. But, at the same time big portion of the posts against shop logs are very emotionally charged and are painting a picture of very unlikely worst case scenarios. I hope you reconsider this in the future because ultimate I think it could do more good than harm. Sorry if this is a bit disjointed. I wrote many a wall of text about this before and I don't want to keep beating a dead horse for too long here.

The one timeline related question I'd like to make, is whether or not these changes could possible drop before Black Friday? I feel like it's going to be a bit of a dry sale if everyone is anticipating CW price changes and we don't know if the current sale price is actually good, or if the regular price is going to cheaper after the sale when the proper price changes are live. I doubt I would be buying many CWs during the sale if I'm still uncertain about the future developments.

ANYWAY! Thank you so much for all your hard work on this topic! I'm really looking forward to the future changes! I know this turned into a quite long post and I didn't quite include all the thoughts I had for the sake of not dragging this out too much, but I'm more than happy to discuss any of the related topics more in the future!

I'm back here to second Bunshroom on these points:

Please, please add some management options into the shop - even just letting us separate them into the categories we already have (as in, choose to only see whats in the "dresses" category if you have that in your shop) , much like we have in user shops/galleries. once you get over a certain amount of items, finding the one you're trying to manage (change price, change copies of, unlock) is a nightmare.

I also am SUPER in favor of logs, and also have been told there were no logs whatsoever (same thing happened, mispriced cw that i wanted to refund the difference for). if that's now possible at least, that's great - i'd still like to see who's bought copies and who hasn't yet, on the event of people who have slotted on it but forgot to pick it up, etc

other than that: i'm super happy with all the changes. submitting just one copy is a dream come true to a lot of people, i'm sure - and i know everyone's beyond excited for the new rules and prices! thank you to the staff involved for your hard work on making cws more accessible ♥

Thank you for the clarification, I'm sure I'll get along just fine in the end and all will be worth it to see more people able to use and enjoy the CW system easily. ^_^

I do think and make great points about the usability, organization, and metrics side of using CW shops, but since I know those are actively being reworked right now, I will hold off on any additional comments in that direction! I do hope that a sales log might one day be reconsidered - while I acknowledge that some users have stirred up drama in the CW community, a few bad apples have really ruined it for the rest of us in many respects and I'm a bit salty that the rest of the CW community has to walk on eggshells to make up for past sins, so to speak. LOL that sounds super melodramatic, I'm sorry. Keeping the peace and making the majority of users happy is important, and I get it!

ANYHOO I hate sounding like a negative nancy so I'll end it here, but I am so excited to see what's to come and I know that you and other staff are doing your best to balance everyone's wishlist. :P

I hope you're prepared for a flood of submissions when this all opens back up. I'm confident I'm not the only person sitting on tons of files, and if this ends up as easy as you're suggesting to submit things... Welp, I'm sorry for adding to the pile (but also not sorry, because it's been SO long since I've been able to submit things lmao.)

I also fall into the group of people a little concerned about community and interaction. I cannot say I'll miss slotting (it stresses me out so much) but I can say that when I tried to go the route of directly submitting items and just letting people buy the copies out of my shop... there was nearly no interaction from people. They just grabbed and went (which I do understand is so much easier, so I'm not mad about it lol) but it often times left my forum unmoved / me uncertain of actual opinion and interest / etc.

I guess the community itself just needs to brainstorm how to work past this change, and that's not really entirely on staff or anything. At this moment though I'm just not sure what that looks like or what would be a good way to encourage this lmao.

Last thing I'mma say is that if I don't have to worry about slotters, I'm likely going to be offering a lot more copies of things since I'll feel so much less inclined to have to force an incentive for people to support the item's submission ToT

As always, thank you very much for the updates. I'm trying to hold back on commenting too much since we cannot see final results / things could always change / etc etc.

I'm so sorry for pinging you again, but just in case you've already read my comment above I wanted to make sure you saw this one too, since I just had some thoughts that are unrelated to the log stuff! I hope this isn't overwhelming!

Some users will be using the lower prices/ease of DTS as a way to produce unique items for TCs. It seems a waste of time, money, and wardrobe space (anyone browsing by All will have to wade through these unobtainable items) to have to have an overlay attached. This might also alleviate some of the potential outcry from users who are mad about not being able to buy every CW they want for HA use. Have you considered allowing custom items that don't have an overlay/aren't wearable? There was a very interesting thread suggesting this here. It would be a cool idea to consider, even if it's implemented in the future/after these initial updates.

If you’re going to add more to organization for the CW shops can I please beg for a search function? I have.... a massive shop and trying to find one specific item takes forever. I would love love love a search feature.