Hello, everyone! Today we would like to announce a couple of updates regarding custom orders. These updates primarily focus on providing better organization and more clarification - there have been no pricing changes implemented with this update.

We have reorganized and updated the custom order form to ensure all relevant information is included and sorted appropriately. This will generally help to streamline the custom order process a bit more on the artists’ side, and will be useful in determining if their schedule allows them to accept an order or not once it reaches the front of the queue.

Customers who were already in the custom queue before this change will still see their orders under the old format. They will be switched over to the new format upon editing the order. This may require you to reorganize your information slightly, but you will not lose any information that was contained in your form previously.

The first change you will notice with our updated custom order form is the ability to select between a ‘regular’ and ‘artistic freedom/prompt-based’ order type. The details of these different order types are expanded upon in the Custom Order Guidelines.

The appearance of your custom order form will differ depending on which of these options you select:

• Regular: Three different fields will appear for you to fill in with your order details.
  • Aesthetic Description (required): This field is for an aesthetic description of the character or custom you have in mind. This is where you should provide details on any requested edits, colors, markings, and the like.
  • Character Details (optional): This field allows you to provide some more in-depth character details such as personality traits and flaws, which may help provide the artist with a clearer vision of the character you have in mind.
  • Mock-Up (optional): This field is where you can link to a mock-up of your desired custom, if you have one.
• Artistic Freedom/Prompt-based: Two different fields will appear for you to fill in with your order details.
  • Prompt: This is where you should put the information that you’d like the artist to work from.
  • Paw Print Limit: Select the total number of Paw Prints you would like to spend on the order. This will allow the artist to ensure that their artistic vision meets your price point appropriately.

Upon creating your custom order, you can now select which level of involvement you would like to have with the order. Your selection does not affect the price of your custom or alter how much information you can give the artists in the form itself, but will impact the overall custom process depending on which level of involvement is selected.  We have included these options so that artists can more easily schedule their work hours and determine which orders are the most compatible with their current schedule and work style.

These different levels of involvement and the reason behind offering the different selections are explained in detail in the updated Custom Order Guidelines, but can be summarized as follows:

• Normal: This is similar to what is currently in place; you are shown and can request certain changes to the sketch, the lineart, and base color stages. 
  • Potential Pros: Higher level of interaction with the artist, good for players who want to have a lot of input during the custom’s creation
  • Potential Cons: Harder for artists to schedule, generally takes longer to complete, heavily dependent on rate of communication
• Minimal: You are shown and can request certain changes to the sketch stage and the finished product.
  • Potential Pros: Easier for a larger number of artists to accommodate with their schedules, more likely to get a non-green artist, faster, good for players who want some input during the custom’s creation
  • Potential Cons: Lower level of input during custom’s creation, lower level of interaction with the artist
• Hands-Off: Once your order is paid for and any questions your artist has regarding the order have been answered, the artist begins their work. This workflow option involves no further back-and-forthbetween you and your artist, and they will return to you with the completed final product. If you would like any changes made to your custom (besides the fixing of any art errors), you will need to go through the edit queue.
  • Potential Pros: Easier for a larger number of artists to accommodate with their schedules, more likely to get a non-green artist, faster, good for players who would rather not give artistic input along the way, or who may not have a clear idea of the custom they want.
  • Potential Cons: No input during custom’s creation, lower level of interaction with artist, no changes can be requested after the artist has begun

Our custom and edit order forms support the use of BBCode! Utilizing this feature can help to make your order look much more organized and can transform what was previously a jumble of URLs into a neat list of links that is much easier for your artist to navigate through. If you are unfamiliar with how to use Mycena Cave’s BBCode, we have a guide available here!

This is something we’ve been working on for a while now! We have updated the Custom Order Guidelines to be much friendlier and clearer to newer players who may not be familiar with the custom process, and to reflect the updates that have been made to the custom order form.

Specific changes include:

• Overall organizational/layout update
• Several minor changes to the wording of various sections (price estimate, custom etiquette, and helpful tips)
• An update to the custom process to include and detail the levels of customer involvement for both regular and artistic freedom orders found in the new order form
• An adjustment to the shading stage of the normal custom workflow to be more flexible for artist work style

We encourage everyone who is currently in the queue or intends to purchase a custom Mycenian to look over the updated guide.  If you have any further suggestions on how to make it even better, please echo Myla with your thoughts!

If you have ever completed any kind of order (custom, edit, sprout), this does not apply to you.

We have been dealing with many instances in the last few months where a new player will create an (often empty) custom order and then leave it to move through the queue without the intention of actually purchasing it, often never even returning to Mycena Cave. While we understand these instances are not typically malicious, they throw off our estimated queue wait times, and also require staff to go through and manually cancel them once they reach the front of the queue and we find that the player has either left the site or is generally unresponsive to staff’s attempts to contact them.

In order to help keep these ‘spurious’ orders from entering the queue, we will be requiring a 1 gem deposit to be made on all newly created custom orders coming from players who have never purchased anything from any of the queues.  This gem is returned once the order is completed or cancelled. This deposit only applies to the custom queue and does not apply to the edit or sprout queue. Once you have seen an order of any kind to completion, this deposit will no longer be required for your future orders.