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For the longest time, I thought that custom avatars should be included as a reward for getting and maintaining a certain trust rating. I thought it would give people even more incentive to behave, and think before they posted, else they could lose their avatar due to being banned.
I don't think this would work anymore. The "trust rating" isn't really working IMO. While we can't really see how trust is tabulated, we can see how its rewarded. The titles are the only real indication as to how its dispensed, and I at least don't think that being "Legendary" or "mythic" actually warrants any more trust than any other titles. I see plenty of Mythic, Legendary, Heroic, who don't contribute at all. I see plenty of regular untiteled members who contribute a lot. That's not saying that mythics etc don't contribute, its just saying that the titles clearly don't indicate real trust.
So, because titles really don't mean anything, I don't think it would be a good idea to use that system to hand out potentially tangible rewards.
I don't think Ninjas should have the ability to hand out custom avatars either. We can gauge threads and posts on whether they follow the rules, but we have no business, need, or reason to further build the legion of sycophants who want some perk. There's already a lot of griping from the peanut gallery criticizing pretty much everything the ninjas do. The Septagon would be further replete with requests for custom avatars and accusations of corruption if Ninjas had control over something so noticeable. We're not qualified, nor do I believed should be trusted/burdened with such an obvious problem inducing feature. We're here to enforce the rules, not to be the Community's Internet version of a Letter to Santa Claus.
Instead, I think that if custom avatars are ever implemented, they should be wholly controlled and given out by Bungie. Perhaps as rewards for contests, similar to the Webcam MVP title. Perhaps similar to how Recon Armor was dolled out in the past. If you did something Bungie liked and noticed, you could get some pretty little hat in recognition. Perhaps if you stuck with Bungie during this dark period, you've shown you're a true fan, and custom avatars could be added for some/most/all of us here right now in recognition. Also, I think that there should be a definite limit as to how often avatars could be changed. Once every 6 months or something, so people can't abuse the perk, and so they have to maintain some sense of permanence, so we're not inundated with crap ala Coup.
There are a lot of potential methods of distributing custom avatars, that would actually be a reward for something good that was done, instead of being part of some ambiguous system. We all know Achronos has said that custom avatars will never be a reality here, but if handled correctly, they could work, and be much less problematic than just letting anyone upload whatever they want. We know that if given the opportunity to even sort of make custom Halo 3 avatars, loooooots of people used the grenade emblem and some trickery to make genitalia-ish silhouettes. I certainly remember that, even if seemingly none of you do (probably because I had to ban like a thousand people for it). Though that problem was there, and proves an earlier post about the sudden freedom thing correct, there are ways around it. Its not a problem anymore, because Bungie figured it out, and the mods banned for it. Even with universal general custom avatars for everyone, we'd go through an initial shock of bad things, but it would settle down eventually.
Or, we could not change anything, and continue the status quo. Which has worked fine thus far. Or we could allow universal and general custom avatars for everyone, and let the chips fall where they may. I honestly don't care. I don't pay attention to avatars much anyway. I just wanted to post my reasoning and some ideas for the future.
Though I have been wondering what will happen to all the Halo avatars when Bungie drops its new IP. Will we still have them? Will they be removed? Only time will tell, but its worth mentioning in this kind of thread.