While the suggestion of giving out two copies instead of one copy to people who release DTS would certainly make DTS less onerous, and seems to be down with it...

last night I did some math.

The problem with DTS is very simple.

Even with 2 copies per submission, DTS would still mean that each copy costs up to 800 CSC depending on the item tier.

The best ways to do DTS in my opinion would be:

1. to offer one copy at base slot price

OR

2. make DTS free, but you do not get any free copies, but you only pay base price.

(These are effectively the same, but with the first one the site isn't risking that the submitter won't buy their own item.)

This would not eliminate the ability of people who draw their own items to get 4 slotters and get their item for free.

It would also not eliminate the ability of people who commission items or buy designs to get 3 slotters and get their copy and the artist's copy for significantly less than base price. (I normally charge 600 to slot on my animals. I usually fill the batch, meaning that 3 people contribute 1800 toward the 2500 submission cost, and also meaning that my copy and the artist's copy cost me a total of 700, or 350 each.)

But what it would do is remove the penalty for submitting DTS.

At the 2500 level, DTS costs 1600 + 500 for the artist's copy, meaning it's 2100 CSC. Submitting a batch for 2500 you get your copy and the artist's copy, and a minimum of 750 CSC back if you pawn the extras, making your total submission cost 1750 CSC max.

If you can get other people to buy your batch extras for 500-700, you can get even more of your submission cost back; it just takes a lot of time sometimes.

DTS with two copies is slightly better at 1600 CSC, but if you get even one slotter, you're at 1900 - 500 (1400 CSC) if you pawn the two extras, and less if you manage to sell any.

So there is still an incentive to take slots. However, for many people, taking slots is onerous--people with heavy job, family, academic responsibilities, people with social anxiety, and brand new submitters who do their own art, so that they can't attract forum buyers with the name of a popular artist even though nobody knows who they are. Anyone who thinks they might not be able to get slotters at all, or that getting slotters would be so much effort that it's worth it to pay base price instead of taking a chance on getting a lower price, will still be willing to DTS. Because slotting is work.

And since most people can't afford DTS right now, I don't think the potential of actually getting more CSC out of people that way by charging submitters significantly more than the base price is going to do the site much good.

Of course... there's nothing stopping people from slotting a first batch and then putting the item in their shop for the public to buy. I do that. A lot of people do that.

But many people limit batches to slotters, or do not put items in the CW shops, because they believe that people are either more willing to buy items they feel are exclusive and/or more willing to make impulse purchases of limited items due to FOMO.

I'm not touching whether or not that's actually true because I do not want to have that argument again. Some people are very sure that this is true for them. I'm very sure it's not true for me, and I think that there must be other factors that affect how this works--for instance, most but not all of the people who have told me this make modern-day clothing items, which are very popular, but the market is also saturated.

But I will say that one way to stop DIS-incentivizing public, unlimited releases would be to fix the bug where unlimited items do not seem to show up in the CW feed.

I understand that a lot of people seem to think that people don't buy unlimited releases because they think people will put the purchase off indefinitely. That probably is true sometimes.

But I think the fact that these items do not get promoted is also a really big problem.