Why is artwork exempt from real world trading rules?

It's good that you actually brought in comparison such as you coming up with a scroll probability calculator. Now, we all can agree that it takes actual skills, brains and programming to come up with something like that. Not any tom dick harry can do that so I'm sure anybody who uses it will greatly appreciate the calculator. However, the difference is that when you come up and released a finished or finalized calculator like that, subsequently anybody who uses it just need to input their variables and this calculator will automatically churn out a figure (unless I'm wrong, I can't be sure). Which in fact, doesn't require you to sit behind your desk and manually calculate or input the variables whenever people asks for it. On the other hand, traditionally artwork has been around for a long time in this server and it has been part of our culture for artists to share their artworks. Artists offer their service by drawing people's individual maplelegends character, and this artwork uniquely belongs to the person who requested for it. As a token of appreciation for artists' hard work and time, we pay them with mesos. Not anybody is born with creativity juice or are aesthetically inclined. Drawing takes time and effort, each art piece takes hours to perfect it and it is not an easy skillset. The least artists can ask for is mesos in return for their time and effort they put in, since they can't ask for real world currency, that would be breaching of clause 1.2.

I can't think of other examples for comparison but you don't see street artists drawing a portrait of someone for free, you have to pay them cash. Right here, if we don't pay artists with mesos, what else can we pay them with? I doubt we can find anyone who is willing to draw 100 different pieces of people's character for free.

 

personally i dont agree with that. mesos should only be used in the game. to take it out side take something away from the game.
for me the forums or the social media is not part of the game. though i know alot of information and advantage comes from those.
also it kind of gives advantage to those art creative ppl. would like to see them do it for free to promote the server...

edit: i also dont see the difference.

 

Actually, I forgot to add in another point. In fact if you were to charge someone for using your program with in-game mesos, by all means go ahead, since honestly I feel that you should be rewarded for something that you took time to create. However I'm not sure how feasible this idea is gonna be if let's say, I purchase it from you, what makes you so sure that I wouldn't take your program to share it with others? - saying this because I am not very sure how the scroll calculator works.

The difference is that artists here draw art pieces of people's Maplelegends characters, and not an actual portrait of themselves. People use their drawn art pieces of as their display pictures especially on our forums because it feels personalized and we can relate. Therefore it makes only sense to pay them with mesos instead of real world currency. Like I said, each time someone request an art, it takes hours to draw and create. If an artist open his commission indefinitely and received 50 requests, it takes weeks and months to complete them all. To compensate for their time and effort, the only way is to charge people with mesos. Our server is a not a platform for any artists to come here and draw pieces of art and sell it for real world currency.

If you are not aware, Bronze has been creating art content prior to joining the team. Our existing banners, Maplelegends icons, FaceBook and Twitter banners (profile pictures as well), discord icon are all created by him for free, never once ask anything in return. Just today he took almost half a day to design something for the server without any complain. This goes the same to our previous designers as well. So this statement is rather unfair.

 

I completely agree with no reservations except that I'd hate to see such a nice thing taken away.

 

the banners or chairs events staff did was great example to how its done right. the winners got nx which doesnt effect the game on our server.(maybe only on hp washing)
if there was other way to pay them which doesnt effect the game i wont have any problem. for example if nx was tradable or if there were forum points to give...

 

I totally understand where OP is coming from though. While I definitely am not asking artists to draw for free, what sets drawings apart? Wouldn't having artistic ability simply allow someone to make millions of mesos without having actually played the game? And it's not like anyone can mysteriously gain the ability to draw and do the same thing.
Don't get me wrong, I love that we're able to pay for artwork (i paid mesos for my dp to be drawn lmao), but doesn't this give certain people an unfair in-game advantage based on their real world skills (which they can get paid real world money for)? Not trying to pose a solution cos I wouldn't know where to start, but... yeah.

 

I honestly thought long and hard before deciding to reply to this. Obviously having read through this thread thus far and having seen the arguments from both sides, I’d have to say that everyone’s points are valid. However, as an artist/designer myself, I’m inclined towards having artwork being exempted from RWT.

Artworks/drawings being sold has been a thing in our server for a very long time now. Likewise, as Kimmy has mentioned, the other two top servers that disallow RWT, also allow artworks to be sold. As someone who has drawn art myself, I’ve found it personally gratifying when someone appreciates something that I’ve drawn for them. Of course earning mesos is a positive for me, but there have been many many instances that I’ve been perfectly fine drawing it free for others as well.

Though OP’s points are valid, what doesn’t sit right with me is how the efforts of artists are being trivialised, especially for us who have put in so much time and effort into drawing artwork here. Similar to how players put in hours and hours into a game, the same artist doing art puts in many hours to come up with an artwork. Surely, the artist doesn’t log in to earn their mesos, but that doesn’t discount them from not putting in effort to earn those mesos outside of the game.

Yes, guides do take time and effort and many hours to be researched/written up. Despite that, in no way do I feel that it can be directly compared to drawing artworks. Tell me, how is a person who writes a guide going to charge their “customers”? For every page view? Do you personally find that fair in comparison to how artwork is being charged here?

A guide is written once, and perhaps amended to make changes later or whenever needed. Artworks on the other hand require lots of thinking prior, and countless sketches. To add on, different customers sometimes come up with various requests for artist to incorporate into their design which makes individual designs unique. Yes, you may argue that players that write guides can also amend their guides according to feedback which may in return make the guide unique to those individual feedback, but we both know that guides just don’t work the same way as it is with artworks. To add on, artworks are catered towards unique individuals whereas guides are catered towards a general audience.

Personally, I’d hate to see the trade of art being against the server rules, especially since I don’t really see it as a threat against the community/economy of this server. I don’t think any artist has earned a crazy amount of mesos that broke the server or made them extremely OP. Also, seeing how many threads have been opened before, and the many many requests that people have sent in for drawings, I believe that there’s still a substantial pool of people who are for the idea of art trade, and would personally enjoy having a drawing of them that can be purchased with mesos.

Additionally, in comparison to RWT where individuals conveniently have money on hand for instant mesos, artists do not have drawings that they can immediately sell for mesos.

 

I'm not taking any sides as I like artwork but I get the thread starter's concern.
In game items should be traded with mesos, not real money.
Likewise, real life items should be traded in real money and not mesos.
Using real life items to trade for mesos is just like using money to trade for mesos.
Therefore, if a person want to have a nice portrait of him/herself, the person should engage an artist and pay him money to do it.

To an artist, an artwork takes hours of work and effort.
To some people, money also takes hours of work and effort.
If artwork can exchange for mesos then so can money. (Or other stuffs such as programs/guides, which like the artworks are also beneficial to the Maple community)
Thus, the viewpoints from these 2 different groups can never be agreed upon,
and this topic is going to come up again and again over time.

 

I am just going to point out that being able to draw is hardly an advantage (in terms of earning mesos). If you really wanted to make money, there are plenty of in game methods that consistently more time efficient in terms of generating meso.

 

i support the art and think it should be part of the things we do here as community. but explain to me how a lvl 10 artist can make few draws, sell it for 10m each, and buy the best int gear. while most will have those items only at level 100. and its not pay to win.?

i know its not easy to implement new system to pay for those kind of services. but if you want to be 100% fair you should..

 

I think OP brought up great points. It does seem unfair that artists get to earn mesos while other people don't.

Most of my points are in line with FeroxAnima's. and I don't think I can explain better than his wall of text, so my response will be more oriented toward other points made throughout this thread.

1) Suppose a person is programmer who made a calculator, can they put the program behind a mesowall?
- The way I interpret ToS, this would be a violation because access to the calculator is external service. The thing is, it kind of makes sense, for the same excuse for art, to allow this kind of transaction. Calculator is about the game, meso is game currency, calculator benefits community, etc. The thing is we can't exclude everything otherwise it'd be open for a loophole. If we want to take away art exclusion, like others explained, would be detrimental to the server. So I feel like we're at a stalemate, and I'd like to see if anyone else can come up with a revision that addresses the issues above.

2) Why can't the server reward artists with other means instead of meso trading?
- These arts are individual purchases and therefore I see no reason for the server to provide payments for that. Even if we did, it still favors artists and similar post to this will come up again. If we're excluding individual arts, that's a bit off-topic since OP is mainly talking about RWT issue between individual players and artists.

3) Why can't artists do it for free?
- Art is a profession. If someone wants to volunteer and donate their skills, that's a generous and amazing offer from them. But I think it's really disrespectful if we ask them to do it for free. Artists already suffer from "You do it for fun, so it should be free for me, right?" and "Why is it so expensive, it's just drawing," and "I can find this online and print it instead, you're overcharging it," and blah blah blah. Let's not do that on here. Appreciate if someone does it free for you, but don't nag them.

4) Effort taken to art
- I think this is a rather unnecessary metric for this discussion because not only it's hard to measure this, but other skills (guide writing, programming, etc.) also take effort. Then there is long-term effort (school, certification, tutorials, etc.) and short-term effort (designing, drawing, coloring).

You can't really decide which one should be allowed and how much they should cost objectively based on effort.

 

At this point we can only agree to disagree. I can only reiterate that the selling of drawings for mesos has been a practice here on ML (as well as other fan servers) for a very long time. It will be sadder to watch it go, than have it stay and be detrimental to our server, in which case I don't see it at all.

It also worth seeing it in the eyes of a buyer's viewpoint. Being able to purchase an artwork for mesos is a plus point in several ways. Not only are you using a currency (that you worked hard for online) to pay for a drawn memory of yourself, it is also a safer way than say, having to link your credit card/wiring your money to an individual that you don't even know on the internet.

Conclusively, I'd just like to say that I really do see everybody's viewpoint as being valid for this discussion. However, this discussion can just go and on, just like how it was brought up in the past.

 

I don't think anyone can simply just say "yo I can draw, pay me 10m I make you beautiful" and use the funds to get the best int gears. I don't know your extend of "best int gears" but considering that each art pieces charged by artists don't break the bank (5mil to 20mil on the average), I don't see how people can use the funds they earned via drawing to simply purchase best int gears, or having great advantage in-game. True enough yes, perhaps start off by getting sufficient funds for pots. Till date you don't see any veterans opening commissions for months and years and using this method to get sufficient funds for best gears. It is not realistic, time consuming, and an unfair judgment. I could go on and on but I think you get my point.

At the end of the day, there are many views from both sides. I purchased many arts from several people before because I truly appreciate the pieces and they made me happy. Parting a small bit of mesos for something that represents my characters permanently cannot be measured by RWT imo. The truth is, there is simply no solution to this. Considering that this art culture not only existed in our server since the beginning of the time and existed in other popular servers as well, there is no reason to change something so good and positive. If ever this rule is changed where we forced artists to produce art for free, this culture will cease to exist and nobody will draw anything anymore. I am not willing to see something so good to go away.

 

If nothing can be done to fix it i think its better to leave it this way. But why do you think nothing can be made?

Example for point system: in the same way fame works players will be able to get "community points".
Player who want to buy art will have to get points by vote or complete a quest every day to get enough. Then trade them for the art.
Like fame the points are only valid when you get them from someone else.
Once the artist get enough points he can trade them for a reward.
I think cool reward can be to show their art on the main maplelegends webpage. Another reward can be cool unique nx item.

If the mesos reward is not that great as you said than this rewards will be enough for the artists as well.

And while it is one on one trade i think its still contribution to the community. It make our social medias look better and more unique.