I should probably preface this by saying I am not currently interested in creating CA, for both time reasons (I have many art projects of my own) and monetary reasons (I have to pay the site to make apparel for use on it, and am not guaranteed to be able to make that cost back even in just site currency). I do not have a horse in this race, but it was an idea that came to mind after seeing some people mention a few things about how CAs work and their approval process.

The 1st Problem: Entry Cost

Custom Apparel costs money to submit- specifically, each CA Token costs 100 Moonstones. That's about $10USD of real-world money, or (presuming one A: Maximizes profession shard gains & B: Gains no bonus shards, for a baseline number) or ~40 days of FTP grinding for maximum shards at 25/day to craft 1MS per 10 shards. So, your choices for getting one without being sponsored or otherwise winning a free/mostly-free one is to spend 10 dollars a piece, or spend roughly one and a quarter months, per token.

The 2nd Problem: Clarity Vs Discouragement

So, we've already established that you have to invest a degree of money or time to make any one CA, on top of the potential workload of making the art itself and finding interested buyers if you're looking to profit rather than break even or accept a loss in exchange for a specific look. However, the issues aren't as simple as those from what I've observed.

The lack of clarity and perceived strictness of the approval process has made some users outspokenly discouraged and frustrated with the entire process; to me, this says that guidelines and approval mods need to not only have better clarity, but the guide itself should feature examples of passable work AND unacceptable work, to ensure users have some baseline visuals for their own art. Quiche's text guide is simple to understand and informative, but mostly covers the process as a whole of buying and going through with an approved design, not the art requirements or guidelines.

While you do get refunded your stones and tokens when your design is rejected with feedback, there's still a waiting queue on that investment and it can be extremely frustrating to spend time on art for a specific purpose only to be told it isn't good enough or breaks some kind of rule. Doubly so when users may perceive other, approved custom apparel as similar to their own and not understand why theirs isn't making it in when that one did.

Solutions?

My first suggestion is a larger, potentially harder one. My initial suggestion is to allow users to temporarily "dedicate" 100 Moonstones, without necessarily sending them outright to access the design approval feature. This should add the custom apparel proposal to a pre-approval queue. When the design has gone through the approval system, it gets stamped with either an approval, at which point the user's design is "Greenlit" and can be immediately finished uploading with Moonstones unless voluntarily cancelled (at which point, the dedicated Token will be released back to the user's inventory, but the greenlit design will lose its approval and need to be resubmitted).

If the design is rejected for any reason, it would come with the feedback and a rejection stamp that would prevent users from uploading the apparel but still allowing them to reclaim their dedicated Token to try again. Feedback should be stored for a time period or within a message to avoid users accidentally skipping past the rejection reasons.

What makes dedication different from the current system? Well, primarily imo, splitting the moonstone purchase and token purchase timelines apart. This would allow users who are tentative about spending the money on a token to still see if the process and outcomes are right for them, while still preventing spam and design slot hoarding / clutter by requiring users to at least have the potential to buy a token via verified possession of the 100 Moonstones they cost. That way, users who get burnt out or decide they do not want to make the changes are still able to back out from the idea without having already spent their Moonstones on a Token, allowing them to instead spend their stones elsewhere.

tldr; brief version:
1. Users "Dedicate" 100 Moonstones to enter CA proposals into a pre-approval queue; the cost is 100 MS so that users basically pre-verify that they *can* buy a Token at this time.
2. CA Mods either:
- 2.a."Greenlight", or approve, a design; your Moonstones are refunded. Approved designs can now be submitted with a Token to the final approval queue, which is pretty much just a checkmark system ideally, as designs are already pre-approved at this stage.
- 2.b. Rejected designs receive feedback; your Moonstones are refunded, but the design will not be stored in the queue for final approval.
- 2.c. In either case, designs can be voluntarily rescinded by the user, automatically refunding their Moonstones and removing them from the queue.
3. Done! Approved apparel has been uploaded, moonstones have moved out of or back into the right hands, etcetera. Hopefully, there is less user frustration and no added moderator frustration.

Alt Version:

The above is pretty much an overhaul of the current system, so I understand why it may be unpopular with other users or with staff, especially with more pressing problems and a dev roadmap revealed. A much simpler version of this would simply be to have a pre-approval forum thread that the approval mods would be asked to check in on once in a while. Users would post WIPs there for brief review by mods at some point, creating a public backlog of design elements, artwork, and coloring that has been deemed a no-go or good to go (and as a forum thread, it would still allow for users to see if any of those things have changed over time, too).

Pros: Similar boost in user-staff transparency and communication as the above wrt CA processes, reduce confusion and resentment among userbase over perceived imbalance in what art is "accepted" and "rejected" by staff

Cons: More work on the CA mods, could easily be prone to spam or flooding unless restrictions were put in place (ie, only one post per user per [[timeframe]] or something), could cause worse tension if one mod says something is fine without checking thoroughly enough with other mods and leading to a design to get rejected after being called acceptable in the thread

Bonus Mini-Suggestions:

Create a visually-aided official forum guide using existing custom apparel- I imagine some folks would gladly volunteer to have theirs used for this purpose- to demonstrate a basic creative process and show examples of acceptable and unacceptable apparel art.

Good notes to hit would be:

• tips on using alpha layers, transparency lock, and a few suggestions on paid and free art programs (ie, Photoshop (Subscription) vs Sai (Paid) vs Krita (Free) ).
• visual examples of % coverage, minimal vs maximum sizes of different elements
• visual examples of "acceptable" and "unacceptable" versions of the same design element- if someone makes wings, what might make those wings unacceptable? If someone makes a marking-like CA, what would make the difference between an OK and a bad one?
• clarity on whether and to what degree shading or art style is required to resemble on-site art; is it fine to have flat colors? Would "painted" apparel be fine, or should they all have clear lineart? Should lineart be a certain thickness- does that change if it's a small or large thing? The already approved CA show a wide variance, but it would be nice to have some idea of the extremes/limits.
  
• reminder / brief tutorial on saving an image as a png, psd or other layered file type, etc.
• brief tutorial on making a 200x200 icon; tips on choosing how to shrink & crop your art for this or make a new smaller art piece in the same style that communicates the same visual idea (as seen with Quiche's guide linked above)

I think it would also be good to enforce consistency on the CA icons. I've spotted one with a white square around it from losing its transparency, one with a white block outline around the box and brush mini-icon in the corner, and another that is grey instead of pink like the rest. It isn't a pressing issue at all, but it would make the custom apparel inventory look a lot cleaner and more well-kept in my opinion. It's up to staff whether they would want to enforce this retroactively, which would require either contact and cooperation with now-out-of-line CA creators or for the art team to do the tweaks themselves, or only enforce it going forward.

I will say, as someone who has had to deal with a few reworks on a custom apparel piece, its not that frustrating since its not the only thing im waiting on. Also for grinding ms, ive found that buying ms for pebbles is a whole lot quicker than grinding ms shards. Its still not easy but it takes about 3 days and i think it adds to the reward of making your apparel (and to be fair to add to your point of it being an investment, it isnt one for all of the artists making apparel, some just want to make a specific piece they like).

Yes it is a bit of a clunky process, but I at least was expecting it since they will always have to make sure it is up to standard and appropriate (and the ms cost feels a lot less then the cost to make skins in flight rising which is nice).

I do very much agree with the icon consistency, i think that the icons that did go through that are different were probably just missed though as one of my reworks was to do with the icon being too pixelated.

(Also i think the better forum guide would be very much welcome as it took a while to puzzle some stuff out)

Edit: just to add on i think that the dedicate system seems good its just unlikely to happen and im sure if someone didnt want to use their custom apparel token someone would buy it for full price or at a small discount so the moonstones wouldnt be lost if the ca got rejected (its just more indirect and certain than the system you suggested)

The pre-approval process you are suggesting sounds like a whole lot of clunky extra work to me.. if a user is concerned about their design or art style . You can post on the CAST thread and ask currently for free

If someone is concerned about getting ms, you can do a presale to cover your CAT (a popular option brought over from FR where pretty much nobody submits skins without preorders)

Addressing the consistency issues for the icons, I was actually asked to provide an alternate one to match with the rest. Idk when they're gonna change it, but that's just a note on my end that I was asked to not give a white outline and to provide a version without the stroke.